In late 2006, Justin Vernon, a musician in Eau Claire, Wis., recorded nine songs while staying at his parents' hunting cabin in northern Wisconsin after a breakup with a girlfriend and his long-time band. He used just a desktop computer with recording software, a three-piece drum set and a guitar.

As I said in my 2008 sum-up, people tend to overestimate the amount of change that will happen in one year–which means my best bet for 2009 would be to simply reiterate my almost-there predictions from 2008, like the death of DRM and the decline of the concert industry.

Charles Darwin might suggest that the credit crunch is just another unfavourable condition, among many others, for the biosphere of the music industry. It is all about survival of the fittest now.

Sales of recorded music fell sharply in 2008, as consumers continued to migrate away from the CD format, large retailers reduced floor space for music and the recession dampened consumer spending during the critical year-end holiday shopping period.

Link baiting is a technique used to generate inbound links to your website. When done properly, this style of content will get you more links, better keyword relevance, improved online visibility, greater authority, and more trust from the search engines.

This is a tutorial documenting the steps I’ve been working through over the past week to integrate WPMu, BuddyPress, and bbPress. All of the applications versions I am currently using are either in beta, alpha, or taken from the trunk.

Songs getting the most attention on The Hype Machine MP3 blog aggregator.

Band Metrics helps musicians and bands analyze and measure the success of their music.

Twitter can be a great way to help you get yourself and your art out there. Plus it's also a great way to market your website.

In what could provide another small piece of the indie music income puzzle, YouTube has partnered with Rumblefish, the indie branding and music licensing agency, to provide users with access to 25,000 licensed songs from Rumblefish's catalog.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will become the second mass-market retail chain to start selling Apple Inc.’s iPhone, with two store representatives saying the world’s largest retailer will carry two models of the Web-surfing handset this month.

Interested in starting your own clothing line? Or maybe you just want to get an edge on some of the other designers on the major social t-shirt sites. Either way, there is a world of resources to be discovered that can help you do both.

Digital is the future, but analog is the present. Which is why CD sales remain the biggest revenue driver for the music business. But big-box retailers, who sell almost all of the industry’s discs, are determined to change that, by relentlessly cutting back on the amount of floorspace they allocate to CDs.

We were really pleased to hear that lots of people found our post on download stores useful, so we’ve gone away, done some more research, and doubled the number of stores covered. We’ve put together a round-up of the features, file formats, prices and percentages that 14 different stores offer, for anyone who’s looking at where to sell their music.

Although piracy is undeniably bad for the music industry, there are plenty of ways around it. The sue-em-all solution hasn't worked, so what else can record companies do to slow the problem down? In this instalment, I'll share some of my ideas on how the industry can be creative in tackling the pirates. Hint: It's all about carrots.

Could this be the first serious threat to iTunes Store’s retail dominance? Seven other online music sellers have formed an alliance to promote their unique selling point - DRM-free MP3.

Keen to push its new MP3 kitemark, the Entertainment Retailers Association released figures today trumpeting the format in grand terms: “Never in the history of the music business have we seen a format take off like this before. There is now no doubt that MP3 is the fastest-growing music format of all time, faster than vinyl, cassette or CD,” said chairman Russel Coultart.

US digital music sales will grow by 17 percent per year on average over the next five years, to make up 41 percent of sales by 2013, Forrester’s latest Jupiterresearch forecast says.

2007 person-to-person music downloads were worth a staggering $69 billion, and movie/television piracy continues to grow, says a new study.

I had a request recently on how to write a music business plan. Here’s the format I recommend my clients to follow. Call it a template.

Music distributor Tunecore fill you in on what you need to know about digital distribution.