TorrentFreak

This year, several established bands have decided to give away their music for free, while giving fans the option to donate whatever they seem fit. For Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails it was a great success since they made more money from the donation model than they would have otherwise. However, it seems that this doesn’t hold for less established artists.

The music industry is changing. While the record labels are desperately trying to protect the revenue stream from album sales, a new generation of artists is starting to realize that they are better off when they give away their music for free. By now, we’re all familiar with the industry’s view, but what drives these artists?

TinySong is an easy to use website where users can search for music and share tracks with friends via a direct link. The website is linked to Grooveshark, a P2P powered music service, that allows users to manage and store their entire music library “in the cloud”.

The IFPI and mediocre artists around the world are rubbing their hands in glee, after a proposal to extend copyright in the EU for another 45 years. The proposal, intended to ‘benefit musicians’, comes up for a vote on Wednesday. On the plus side, at the same time collecting societies are going to have their practices scrutinized.

For every blank CDr bought, a few cents “pirate tax” are added to compensate artists for loss of revenue when people share their albums. However, not every artist agrees that sharing is wrong so as a statement, the Swedish artist Mr.Suitcase has used his “pirate tax” income to make a pirate album.

When Nine Inch Nails decided to give away their latest album for free, the news soon spread all over the Internet. However, NiN was not the first, nor will they be the last. Tens and thousands of artists share their music on Demonoid, The Pirate Bay, Mininova and other BitTorrent sites. We got in touch with one of them to find out why.

While the RIAA sues its customers, and blames filesharing for the decrease in record sales, a coalition of seven independent Swedish record labels explores alternatives that make use of the Internet and filesharing technology.