While my friend Antonella from the San Diego based band AntiQuark is trying to figure out whether she will put out her next record herself or though a record label, she sent me some very very interesting links she stumbled on while doing her homework.

These are articles that talk about the future of the music business and of music consumption as we know it. They say things I have been repeating to people who ask me for advice and some of these things I keep hearing at music conferences and panels. So I want to post these links for everyone’s reading (and listening, you’ll see why!) pleasure and I am glad that more authoritative figures such as David Byrne, Thom Yorke, Brian Eno, Robert Levine spoke at length and in a very clever and organized way about this topics.

So here we go:

David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastar
This article is just great, it says it all, tells you about your options and offers six different scenarios of how to go about making your music available to the public.

The Death of High Fidelity
The one other problem nobody (sadly) seems to talk about (enough) nowadays is the way the loudness wars and MP3’s have ruined music, and I am NOT talking about file sharing thing but about the QUALITY of music today. Luckily Levine attacks this subject and exposes the differences with actual audio examples for everyone to hear.

Throughout the pages of these two articles I have also found at least four other extremely interesting links that I’ll be checking out myself before saying anything about them here (you know, check your sources first!).

However, as the ‘part 1 of 999’ bit in the title makes clear, I plan on writing more about this subject. Chances are I’ll be doing so after I finish “The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution“, a book I’ve heard good things about and that I have already bought as a present for people even before buying my own copy (which I just did). I also found out that the author of this book, Dave Kusek, runs a blog about the subject that I encourage you to check out at www.futureofmusicbook.com