If you're new here, you might wanna check our FAQ. The surefire way to stay up to date is to subscribe to our RSS feed, or get the latest updates from the Lab in your Email. Thanks for visiting Burst Labs!

If you listen closely, you can hear the muffled screams of entitled assholes everywhere.

For those of you that were not aware, OiNK was an invite-only illegal file-sharing website with 180,000 users, who retained membership by either maintaining an equal upload-to-download ratio or by using PayPal to send “donations.” The OiNK music library was arguably the most extensive ever collected, and was notorious for having pre-releases of albums months ahead of time. It was also a watering hole for arrogant music snobs who sniffed at the idea of paying for anything, ever.

The apartment of the owner in Middlesbrough, England was raided Tuesday morning, and a foreboding message was posted on the homepage.

Bill Wyman absolutely nails it with his Moby Quotient - The Art of Selling Out.

Using the criteria Disconnect, Sacredness, Origins, Reputation, Wealth and Time he offers a definitive formula for determining if an artist has, indeed, sold out.

Of course, I still maintain :

It’s easy to say you’ll never sell out when no one’s making any offers.

And we’re on record with an opinion of Moby’s recent offerings.

Full story at the Washington Post. Thanks, Hypebot. [dh]

After finally solving the existential inner crisis of how much to pay for Radiohead’s new album, “In Rainbows” (I settled on $5), I received the download link at about 3 o’clock this morning. As expected, the server was molasses-slow, but I finally got the album.

I’m not going to launch into a deep track-by-track analysis of “In Rainbows” because, frankly, a lot of people do it better, and the internet should flooded with them by the end of today. My initial evaluation of the album, however, is that I could not be happier with what I paid for. “In Rainbows” isn’t going to convert anyone, but for someone who is at least a marginal fan, like myself, it is a pretty great Radiohead album. They seem to have gotten the hard-core avante-garde leanings out of their system, content now to temper droning atmospherics with melody and lyric. Equally dystopian and celebratory, the album moves across an emotional spectrum not fully realized on some of their previous albums. And yes, those that just wish Radiohead would keep releasing The Bends over and over get their fix with “Bodysnatchers”.

Overall, the fidelity of the 160-bitrate MP3s doesn’t seem to take anything away from the music. But, this is coming from someone that will listen to to a 96k MP3 of a song he really likes with no real complaints.

To me, Radiohead jumped the tallest hurdle in front of them by releasing a quality album. That will be what drives every other venture they hope to spin off of “In Rainbows”, be it deluxe box sets, multiple formats, or albums delivered by carrier pigeon. It’s also the surest stumbling block for any large-scale implementation of a “listener-determined” pricing structure. If you don’t give the people at least what they paid for, it won’t work. Luckily for Radiohead, they delivered. [ms]

What constitutes a ‘public performance’ of music?

guest commentary by Nick Pipitone

Just what is ‘public performance’ when it comes to music? It may not be what you think.

A word of warning to all you music geeks out there: be careful where you listen to your music. You might find yourself stuck in the middle of a lawsuit.

Such is the case for a car repair firm in the UK, Kwik-fit. The technology blog Techdirt is reporting that the Performing Rights Society (PRS) in the UK is suing Kwik-fit because, as they are claiming, when their mechanics listen to the radio while working on cars in the shop it constitutes public performance.

This case really pushes the limits of the definition of public performance and could be a precedent setting case if the PRS gets their way. So what is ‘public performance’? Techdirt astutely asks :

“What if you live in an apartment building with thin walls?”

“What about when you’re driving with the radio on and the windows open?”

“What if you’re in your cubicle and the folks in the cubicles around you can hear the music?”

I like listening to my music at work. It keeps me motivated and I get to choose what I want to hear. I am not pretending to be an expert on public performance, but it’s cases like these that send the music business further into the abyss.

If the music industry really wants to sue someone over public performance, why not sue a cover band? You just know they’re not paying for the right to play Proud Mary.

If the PRS wins this public performance case, expect headphone companies to cash in big. [np]

Apologies to Dylan on the post title, but we are definitely attempting to navigate some fast moving waters these days.

Trent Reznor & NIN are the latest to bolt the music industry as we know it, joining Radiohead on the front lines of the assault on Business As Usual in the music industry.

From the NIN homepage today :

Hello everyone. I’ve waited a long time to be able to make the following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008. Exciting times, indeed.

We’ve previously posted the Burst Labs take on Radiohead’s experiment, and today’s news from NIN is part of the same Indie Artist Hype Machine with almost no relevance to your up and coming band or artist. Without major label machinery over the past two decades helping both NIN and Radiohead get to the pinnacle of success (at least where a rabid fan base is concerned), they wouldn’t be able to embark on this brave new venture.

You have to applaud creative thinking in the music business wherever you can find it, if for no other reason than to support genuine creativity in an industry so devoid of it in recent years. I’m fully aware of the depths to which a label can go to destroy a band’s art and credibility, and to milk every last cent out of their recoupable expense accounts, but for an artist who has clearly reaped the benefits of being signed as a major label recording artist you have to wonder if Mr. Reznor had thought through the possible alternate meanings of his lyric “Will you bite the hand that feeds?” [dh]

According to AdWeek, Sony BMG has put together a single-sponsor package for the advertising on their Music Box video portal.

While it’s great to see a major company making an investment in any part of the dying music industry, you have to wonder where their $500k to $1M (according to sources) could have been spent. Instead of actually helping create an experience that people would want to tell others about, they’re resorting to old-school interrupt advertising.

Here’s the general idea :

We here at Honda agree with the focus groups and corporate consensus of the Sony BMG Label Conglomerate on what is NEW and FRESH and are happy to present it to you right after we waste 15 seconds of your life with this commercial we’re going to force you to sit through before you get to the Cool-By-Committee Hot New Band Video Production.

I suppose you can’t blame them for just going with what they know - tack the Honda brand and logo onto what the big(gest) record label tells you is Neat and Nifty and The Next Big Thing - and you can make an argument that it’s a million well spent according to Business As Usual.

I just wish there were more creativity on this project, at both the advertising agency level and at the record label level. Seems like a million dollars is being dropped on the promotional equivalent of throwing a “Brought to you by Honda” sticker on some jewel cases… a Now That’s What I Call Music / This Is Next for the viral video set.

Wait a sec… viral?!

According to Amy Carney, president of advertiser sales, Sony Pictures Television, which is responsible for selling sponsorships in the Music Box service, the player is designed to encourage viral distribution of both the music and the Honda ads. “They are transportable,” she said. “They can be downloaded and pasted onto MySpace home pages” and other social networking sites and blogs, she added.

May I humbly point out (with a nod to my Burst cohort Matt)… advertising something as ‘viral’ does not necessarily make it so. In fact, you could make a pretty strong case that it will be exactly NOT that, due to the nature of a self-perpetuating Virus versus a Corporate Behemoth’s schemes.

Just my $0.02. Drop a comment below and join in. [dh]

In the wake of the Radiohead announcement that they would leave it up to the consumer to decide how much to pay for their new album, “In Rainbows,” I went to their website to pre-order it.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I am a semi-fan of Radiohead. I think they’ve made some great albums (The Bends, OK Computer), as well as some criminally overrated albums (Kid A, Hail to the Thief). I buy a lot of music, both from physical retailers and online. I have not, as of yet, heard any of the tracks that have leaked.

As I navigated through their website and added “In Rainbows” to my cart, I was presented with the choice.

How much did I want to pay for the album?

The website uses Euros as its currency, but for simplicity’s sake, I’ll use American Dollars. There was an immediate instinct to type “0.01,” as I am a cheap bastard (though, in reality, there is a 93 cent surcharge added to your purchase). Then, I thought, “well, it would cost me 10 bucks on iTunes.” Of course, on iTunes, the majority of the profits from that sale would go to the label. Radiohead being without a label, I cut it in half. $5 of cold, hard profit in exchange for an album’s worth of music. I couldn’t help but think that sounded like too little to pay for the results of months of creative and physical labor.

It led me to the question, and the brilliantly executed point that Radiohead has made… What is music worth?

It’s a pretty relevant and salient question to ask in the industry Burst Labs makes its farthings in. When someone will throw a few GarageBand loops together, call it a music bed, and find someone to unload it on at a bargain-basement price, doesn’t it devalue the work of those of us that are staring through our jeweler’s loops, trying to make our work as legitimate and genuine as we can?

When Moby can empty the trash folder on his PowerBook onto a website and call it a “free production music catalog”, how do you compete? Because, I mean, it’s Moby… basically saying “this music has no value to me.”

So now, I sit in front of my monitor wondering how much of money I should give to Thom Yorke & Co. The thing that mystifies me is that the decision is so hard. Record prices are arbitrary, conjured up by what the market will bear, and in this case, the market has the ability to say “I want to pay next to nothing for your hard work,” which would be a travesty.

I have no answers, and I still haven’t decided how much to pay.

Feel free to discuss below. [ms]