GrindEFX

Brian Mazzaferri, lead singer of independent rock back I Fight Dragons, has made a post on We Are Listening about how he and his band made $10,000 in 48 hours by selling ‘Lifetime Membership USB Drives’.

The band, which is only 9 months old, has focused on building a fanbase and giving their fans lots of free music through their mailing list. When they reached the point where they were starting to think how they could monetize off their music, instead of going the traditional (and outdated) route of recording an album and selling it, they came up with an idea that would not only give their fans a lot more, but them also.

The idea they came up with was to sell ‘Lifetime Membership USB Drives’ which were basically USB drives preloaded with all of the music they’ve ever released and they guarantee the owner a free digital copy of anything they ever release, as well as free admission to any live show of ours now and forever. And there were only 100 made.

Needless to say, they all went quickly, but the question is; why?

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Donald Passman’s seventh edition of his book “All You Need to Know About the Music Business” is available in bookstores today.

Along with the material from the previous editions – the music industry structure, building a team, understanding copyright and publishing, and literally everything else you need to know about the music business – this new edition adds the latest developments from the rapidly changing music business, including:

* The new 360 model of record deals, wherein record companies share in nonrecord revenue

* The Copyright Royalty Board’s latest decisions regarding online transmissions

* The developing customs on new technologies such as streaming on demand, ringtones, and digital downloads

* Updates on recording and publishing deals, as well as film music

I don’t know what else to say about this book that hasn’t already been said. If you’re even thinking about pursuing music as more than just a hobby, you need this book. If you only get one book about the music business, this is the book to get.

Rather than writing a review, I think it suffices to list the thesaurus entries for “definitive.” This book is: absolute, authoritative, clear-cut, complete, conclusive, exhaustive, precise, and reliable.

To kick off our “re-launch”, here’s a humorous (but very true) article from Bob Baker in which he gives musicians a 7 step plan to ruin their music career. I’ve written out the 7 steps below, but head over to Music Think Tank to read the full article.

1. Give away your personal power.
2. Turn marketing, promotion and sales into a huge burden.
3. Be fearful of being perceived as a greedy, capitalist pig.
4. Use a lack of time, money and connections as your biggest excuse.
5. Market yourself to the faceless masses using traditional big media.
6. Promote yourself sporadically and only when it’s urgent.
7. Know that everyone owes you something simply because you exist.

GrindEFX is back, w00t! Over at Techdirt, Michael Masnick highlights an interesting development in machine-generated music: a company claims to have created software that can recreate musical performances by famous musicians, living or dead.

As described on the blog, “Zenph Studio’s approach is to work out how the musician and the instrument acts and responds, then get a computer to play that track again as a real-time, real-life performance, which in turn can be recorded using modern techniques.”

It’s essentially MIDI on steroids. Zenph claims that through its software process, it can capture the nuances of any performer’s style and translate that into an algorithm to generate new recordings of old songs – or make entirely new songs that sound like they were performed by a famous musician.

Leaving aside whether this is a good idea in the first place – how long before we have Kurt Cobain hawking deodorant? - Masnick concludes with what I can only describe as an excellent law school final exam question -

So, now, take this software that supposedly can perfectly mimic a certain musician’s playing, and have it record a song. Say it’s a new song. Who owns the copyright? What if it’s adding John Lennon to a Rolling Stone’s song? Who owns the copyright? What if it’s an old song, updated in some slight way? Who owns the copyright? What if it’s just the same song but “remastered”? Who owns the copyright? The legal questions raised by this kind of software are going to keep copyright lawyers busy for a long, long time.

Being the slightly sadomasochistic law student I am, I couldn’t resist analyzing the issues raised in this situation. I am not a lawyer, and this article is only for general informational purposes; nothing here constitutes legal advice.

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You’ve probably noticed some strange activity here at GrindEFX over the past few weeks, this was due to an attack on our server. It has taken a while, but we are back up and running now and ready to pick up where we left off. If you received any warnings about malware or viruses on the site, don’t worry, we have given it a thorough check and it is now clean as a whistle.

Apologies for the lack of communication throughout all of this, we’ve now moved the site to a new server and are hopeful this will not happen again. Thanks for your patience!