J.D. Moyer

science fiction author, beatmaker, against fascism

Category: Music Business Page 2 of 3

Disruptive Distribution – a Shareable.net Interview with Michel Bauwens and Neal Gorenflo

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On February 4

In Alternative Economics, Culture Rants/Shares, Music Business, Utopian Speculations

I met Michel Bauwens over at Marvin Brown‘s place when Michel was in town giving a talk on The Future of Peer Production. Talking with Michel (and reading some of his work) was part of the inspiration for my recent post “Watching Open Source Destroy Capitalism.” I forwarded the post to Marvin, who sent it on to Michel, which eventually resulted in the following interview with Michel and shareable.net co-founder Neal Gorenflo. The original can be found here.

Civilized comments from any point of view are welcome as always.

Michel Bauwens: You are a music entrepreneur, and reportedly doing quite well. Can you explain the basis of your success and whether you use music that can be shared, for example based on Creative Commons Licensing?

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Watching Open Source Destroy Capitalism

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On January 15

In Alternative Economics, Culture Rants/Shares, Music Business, Utopian Speculations

Theft, or post-capitalism?

About twenty years ago one of my college housemates, Jerry, had an idea.

“What if you could send music over the internet?”

This was the age of 2400 baud modems that made crazy high pitched noised while they tried to connect to the internet. My 20 megabyte external hard drive for my MacPlus computer had set my parents back about five hundred bucks. High quality digital audio files were about the same size as they are now (about ten megabytes per minute of audio). In other words, I couldn’t even fit a single digital audio track on my expensive hard drive — I worked exclusively in MIDI.

So I forgive myself for my lack of vision at the time. I thought Jerry’s idea was ridiculous, and I let him know. Digital audio files were way too big, bandwidth was way too narrow. It would never happen.

Jerry persisted. What if a music file could be compressed? What if bandwidth increased? He pointed out that it would change everything about the way music was distributed, maybe even the way it was made.

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Are You Excluding Yourself From Top-Tier Success in Your Field? Why Exactly?

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On June 13

In Creative Work/Career, Life Purpose & Goals, Metaprogramming, Music Business

Claude VonStroke (aka Barclay Crenshaw) -- founder of the dirtybird label and a guy who has done a few things right.

Becoming massively successful in your field is never as easy as just doing x, y, and z.  There are no fail-safe formulas for success.  Luck, timing, connections, and things outside of our control play a big role.

However …

1) A good part of luck, timing, and connections actually aren’t outside of our control.  They’re just outside of our comfort zone.

2) If we notice that all the top players in our field are doing x, y, and z, and we’re not doing those things, we may be excluding ourselves from top-tier success by choice.

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I Could Never Have Predicted This (100th release on Loöq)

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On March 2

In Creative Work/Career, Electronic Music, Music Business

Sometimes life just pulls you into things, and you’re happy to go there.

A raver offering up her boobies to John Digweed.


In 1994, when I was just a 24-year-old fool, I was invited to join an electronic music collective operating under the alias Trip ‘n Spin.  The “initiation,” as I remember it, consisted of me playing a few self-produced dance tracks (recorded on cassette) to Sam Urton (alias Novabass), Greg Lindberg (alias The G), and Stephen Kay (alias DJ Special K or Spesh).

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Why Do Record Labels Still Exist? (Horse Poop and Easy Street)

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On February 18

In Creative Work/Career, Money/Personal Finance, Music Business

These days you can sell the stuff.

Imagine that you are an entrepreneur in New York City in the early 1900’s.  Your company offers a single service — cleaning up horse poop.

Business is gangbusters.  There is no shortage of horse poop.  Every buggy needs a horse (or multiple horses) to drag it, and every horse poops multiple times a day.  You can’t hire horse poop shovelers fast enough to keep up with demand.  In fact, despite your best efforts, the entire city is covered in horse poop.  New York City’s 100,000 horses are producing 2.5 million pounds of poop every day.

One day, you notice a weird-looking contraption in the street.  It’s buggy, but it has no horse.  It’s a horseless-f*cking-carriage!

It’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen in your life.  It will never catch on.  You go back to counting your poop-shoveling money.

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