The New Music Industry: An Appeal to Independent Artists

I stumbled upon a very intelligent manifesto by Ben Johnson, the creator of indietorrent.com, a small but promising website that offers free digital music distribution service for independant artists. His manifesto is truly brilliant, and inspiring.

https://indietorrent.org/v1/docs/manifesto.php

In particular, i'd like to cite this interesting insight into social networking, because, my Facebook so-called "friends" might have noticed, I'm quite questioning the social media phenomenum since a little while:

While it may be difficult to prove, many "community" websites, like MySpace and Facebook, are not meant to serve the community at all. In fact, many such "social networking" sites exist only as façades for the massive effort to construct databases full of information about Americans (and foreigners), their interests, preferences, personal details, attitudes towards particular subjects, reactions to contrived events (which are peddled as "news" through the mainstream media), etc. Facebook and MySpace are the very simply the polling arms of questionable (if not sinister) organizations and their sole function is to determine how many people are buying the "movie version" of events, and to what extent. The fact that MySpace and other data-mining operations sell the amassed data and use the profit to fund the further manipulation of this vicious systems' unwitting participants (who happen to be you and me) is entirely secondary to what's going on under the covers. We would do well to note that most (but not all) "free services" are offered only to divert attention from an underlying (and often nefarious) data-mining agenda.

By the way, I hate the new (is it new? I guess not) WYSIWYG editor of Blogger. I know, I'm a geek. If it's not plain text, it's bad.

How I Got There (Like If You Ever Cared) :

1. Was encoding Peter Peter's tunes for digital distribution in MP3, OGG and FLAC (a lossless audio coded).
2. Was making a "badge" icon for , and wanted to make sure what FLAC stands for.
3. Googled "FLAC", ended up on the FLAC sourceforge website, learning that it simply means "Free Lossless Audio Codec", as well as it is a very interesting and successful codec.
4. Among other very surprising headlines, this one got my attention: A new site called indietorrent.org is up and running. indietorrent.org is a digital music store which "enables independent musicians to sell their own music while keeping all profits." FLAC is one of the available formats.