Whether conscious or compulsive, whether musical or otherwise, the counting seems likely to continue. We will go on quantifying everything from our garbage to our daydreams, calculating what can’t be separated, let alone captured and kept. But we are also beginning to acknowledge measurement’s externalized costs. Music reminds us to redirect resources beyond the confines of measure. Not because the measurements don’t matter, but because we have yet to account for the movements between.

Pamplamoose's much-publicized "failure" isn't about money, but what happens when a band is bad at managing their own expectations, argues Old Man Gloom drummer Santos Montano.

“Isn’t it just so great that you can do everything yourself!” say people who don’t live the reality of having to do everything themselves.

We’ve placed the entire onus of changing-with-the-times on musicians, but why can’t the educational, cultural and governmental institutions that support the arts adapt as well, extending the same opportunities to those whose music provides the soundtrack to our lives? If they don’t, Darwinism will probably ensure that only the musical entrepreneurs survive. I can’t say if the world of music will be better or worse off if that happens, but it will certainly be a lot louder.

Here is what you need to meditate on before we deal with the rest of the issues: Standing up for your interests is going to destabilize your band status quo, but you cannot let the potential fallout or confrontations deter your course of action.

There are all kinds of files. A song is just a file, as is a book, and so is a movie. People have been pointing this out for years, usually to explain piracy. For a long time, folks were gnashing their teeth and wailing that no one would pay for anything on the Internet ever; it was just too easy to steal. They went from renting their garments to renting out music. As solutions emerge, and marketplaces for licenses emerge, you have to wonder if new kinds of media will remain part of the free, “remix” culture of the Internet, or if they’ll want to participate in a for-pay market. Maybe the reason so much great creative work on the Internet is free is that it’s been too hard to charge. A Pandora, but for podcasts! A Spotify for funny animal videos! Once the framework is in place, the pitches will come. Then the licensing can start. After all, they’re just files.

Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi breaks down the meager royalties currently being paid out to bands by streaming services and explains what the music business' headlong quest for capital means for artists today.

So then I looked to see about downloading it from Amazon, and they are selling downloads for $9.49. This is an album recorded 60 years ago. Most likely, everyone involved with it has been dead for a long time. Billie Holiday has been dead for 53 years. It was recorded live, cheaply. If the total cost of recording it was $200 I’d be amazed. And here we are 60 years later and I’m expected to pay $9.49 for digital files.

On one basic level, what happened in 1969 with Wonder—and what happens every day with mp3 leaks—illuminates a very basic economic fact: Official markets will always lead to unsanctioned ones that feed off of the legit products—and often operate much more efficiently. Consumer desire has never automatically limited itself to strictly legal operations, particularly when fans can convince themselves (often rightly) that they’re doing no harm to the artists.

Successful, but how successful, and to whom, and what does that mean in terms of getting along in the world?

In his new book, Mp3: The Meaning of a Format, McGill University professor Jonathan Sterne exhaustively and eloquently traces the history of the mp3 from the initial hearing model developed in Bell Labs to the current debates about piracy. As the author argues, each time we rip a CD to our hard drives, we're not only saving space in our living rooms or ensuring we have the appropriate gym soundtrack, but also reaffirming a fundamental idea about the limits of human perception.

I interviewed Jonathan Sterne for Pitchfork about his new book. While conducting the interview, I thought Pitchfork readers would like to know about how AT&T’s capitalistic policies in the 1910s and 1920s laid the groundwork for those compressed bits of data currently clogging their hard drives, and other gentle, science-laden facts about the mp3’s history. I was wrong. But not to worry! Here are the cut bits.

The flood comes and it doesn't matter if the water is right or wrong - you get in the boat, you stack sandbags, you climb on the roof and wait for a helicopter, and sometime later the water is calm and the world looks different.

No one is innocent, but neither is anyone explicitly guilty. So much of the circular dialog here is about choosing a perceived side (pro-artist, anti-commerce) and assigning blame. I use this quote perhaps more often than I should, but, “When you make yourself out to be the victim, it is easy to feel righteous,” and that goes both ways, because you’re simultaneously vilifying someone else. If we’re going to prolong this ceaseless future-of-music debate, we must ensure it sticks to music culture, and reject the culture of victimization.

So while all these independent artists argue thievery, do you know who’s winning? Major labels. This week, of the top 100 tracks on Spotify, only 6% are on independent labels. Major labels have figured out that the game is about exposure and awareness, two things that they are actually quite good at. It’s not about royalty rates, thievery, or even quality of music.

"Much of the power of Beach House's music lies in the way it forgoes simple, this-means-this storytelling in favor of communicating indescribable emotions," wrote Lindsay Zoladz in her Pitchfork review of their latest album, Bloom. Switch a few words around, and this perfect evocation could have emanated from DDB's pitch meeting to Volkswagen. Which is not to belittle Zoladz's criticism, nor to build up ad-speak as any more than means-to-an-end capitalist labor. Instead, this connection highlights the idea that critics and marketers often seek the same positive criteria in art.

Thoughts and collected quotations on Bandcamp's change of plans.

"The most immediate revelation, of course, is that at some point next year revenues from gigs payable to artists will for the first time overtake revenues accrued by labels from sales of recorded music."

This is absolutely 100% true and if you don't realize it, you are dumb.

Everything is going to be okay.

Sifting through HRO's sorta-haughty satire is worth it for the occasion post like this, where whoever Carles is gets tired of mocking teenagers and writes something true and intriguing about the state of the music industry and popular music culture (at least for the indie set).

Worth consideration. "SXSW is an extraordinary and well-run event. I simply wish that it would give something back to the artists who have made its existence possible." On the other hand, shouldn't artists have to fight tooth-and-nail for attention and acclaim among thousands of others, be poor and go back to the drawing board sometimes? Getting to the point where one can play at SXSW is a feat in itself; shouldn't it be enough of a reward? But then, shouldn't SXSW help these bands as much as it can, as much as it claims to want to?

Eric Harvey on point as usual: "Access to technology ≠ access to actual creative skill that people want to watch, not which is just dumb enough to drive people to iTunes."

Where friend Tom Wironen works (or used to, apparently). Manage The National and Nicole Atkins.

Always intended to release a physical "artifact." "We didn't want it to be a big announcement about 'everything's over except the internet, the internet's the future', 'cause that's utter rubbish." Yorke still won't comment on figures.

Trent was an Oink user and regrets its disappearance. The Reznor-Williams collaboration, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust!, a mind-boggling fusion of genres," will be released for free on the internet. "Ghetto gothic?"

Micropayments as an example for a new model for the music business. "Think small!"

"If you insist on ignoring this reality, you share some responsibility for the way our culture warps." A letter to the music industry explaining why he "steals" music.

"Comcast turned over the names and addresses of some of its customers to the RIAA, without being required to do so by a court order and without notifying the customers."

The New York Public Library and WIRED present a talk with Jeff Tweedy, Lawrence Lessig, and Steven Johson. Very interesting.