If you were trying to make a career in music, would you participate in a popularity contest that forced you to stop using your own personal Facebook, Twitter and MySpace accounts? Seems a bit defeating, doesn’t it?
Evidently, this season’s round of American Idol contestants have been forced to give up their use of social media, [...]

Damian Kulash has really taken it to the mattresses with EMI.
You may remember about a month ago, the frontman of virally famous OK Go posted an open letter to the band’s forum complaining about how its label, EMI, had quashed their recent attempts to get the word out about their new album and tour via [...]

Sometimes old dogs can learn new tricks.
In fact, you don’t have to be a fan of that old Schnauzer the Recording Academy to be completely blown away by the elegant and compelling social media campaign it’s created in the run-up to the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards — it’s a virtual doggy ballet, in fact.
Rather than [...]

Invented in the early ’90s and pushed into the mainstream a decade later through platforms like iTunes, the MP3 revolutionized music.
By digitizing and compressing audio files into smaller units that could be downloaded and shared without losing sound quality, the MP3’s creators, whether meaning to or not, swept the rug out from under the [...]

Four words music bloggers dread: Embedding disabled by request.
When a band puts a video on YouTube, and the band’s label (usually a major one) decides it doesn’t want fans sharing that video on their own web pages, the label will ask YouTube to remove the strip of code that allows users to embed. Through a [...]

Free blogs, inexpensive hosting, DIY website building, social networking, free online retail …
Today, the sky’s the limit when it comes to building up your own website, blog, business or online media channel on the cheap and making it profitable.
Cory Doctorow would know. With inspiration and lots of hard work, the journalist and sci-fi author built [...]

Need extras for your band’s new video, but lack the budget for the pizza and Amstel Light? Why not source it to the crowd?
That’s exactly what Dutch electro-pop quartet C-Mon & Kypski did with its latest video. Redefining the term “casting call,” the group created a dedicated web page, OneFrameOfFame.com, with a built-in program to [...]

Or so one could infer from Last.fm’s amazing stream charts that show, month-by-month, which artists got the most listens in New York and London vs. the world (click the links to download full-size PDFs).

Working with the Newspaper Club, a group that helps people print their own newspapers (how cool is that!?), the folks at the [...]

This year, the band who brought you Christmas on Mars in 2007 found some ingenious ways of stuffing fans’ stockings outside the usual, gift-wrapped box.
With CD sales continuing to plummet and die death upon fiery death, bands must find ways of producing and selling content outside of the traditional one-album-every-few-years concept.
And few bands do [...]

It was hilarious, inspiring and profane all at once.
This past weekend in England, the mainstream music machine got its arse handed to it by a social media campaign that began as a joke.
About a month ago, 35-year-old regular bloke Jon Morter of Essex, got a wild notion to try and usurp Simon Cowell’s domination [...]