Across the country, college-town record shops are biting the dust (Chicago Sun-Times)
MS: A few years ago on just one block of Chapel Hill’s Franklin Street, the main drag in what’s been called America’s ideal college town, four or five such places catered both to locals and University of North Carolina students.
But with the demise of Schoolkids Records, the last one is gone. Schoolkids had planned to gut it out through March, but couldn’t even make through its final week and shut down Saturday. It’s just the latest victim in an industry hit by rising college-town rents, big-box retailers, high CD prices, and — most importantly — a new generation of college students for whom music has become an entirely online, intangible hobby they often don’t have to pay for.
Indie pop genius Jens Lekman makes it up as he goes along (SFBG.com)
MS: I love Wikipedia! That's so funny. Every time I come into the US and i cross customs or border control, they always check my passport and I have a work permit now for the first time - I never had it before and I always had to sneak in before - and they check me and say. "Oh, you're an artist." There's always a guy behind the guy saying, "Check him on Wikipedia."
That's so funny that the American authorities would use Wikipedia as a trustworthy source! Anyone can change anything. A friend of mine usually goes into my Wikipedia and writes all this bullshit, just changes things. I think the last thing she wrote was that I was the son of a bear trapper.
Name That Tune-In: Who Will Emerge as The Future of Radio? (Washington Post)
MS: As in other areas of media, the music industry is finally starting to come around to the difficult truth that we now live in a world in which consumers expect information and entertainment to be free. Efforts to sell music by subscription have mainly failed. (Yahoo recently gave up on its Music Unlimited subscription service and sent its customers to Rhapsody, another struggling music provider.) But traditional radio's offer of free music surrounded by audio advertising is also being rejected by a generation that resents undesirable interruptions.
"They want to be the program director and they insist that the program be free," says Jerry Del Colliano, a professor of music industry at the University of Southern California and a former executive at Top 40 WIBG in Philadelphia. "Young consumers don't have that need that we older folks have to have someone knowledgeable about the music tell them what's new. They have their social network to tell them what's cool."
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