A Must-Read For All Indie Artists and Label Owners

Posted on December 5, 2009 by Chris Faraone

On an unheralded fall weekend right before Thanksgiving, a roomful of amateur hackers and Web rock stars gathered in East Cambridge for a historic convention that could dramatically reshape the way we get our music. At stake in this laptop orgy on the quiet end of Memorial Drive, appropriately held at Microsoft’s New England Research & Development (NERD) Center: how you and everyone you know will discover your next favorite band, and how artists will reach audiences in an age when the media and music industries are in steep decline.

The collaborative powwow, dubbed Music Hack Day, was the first-ever such event held in the US (earlier iterations took place this year in Berlin, Amsterdam, and London). But while such recognized brands as NPR, Apple, and Yahoo! were astute enough to show up, the confab was more populated by non-household-name Web sites, from Boston’s own tourfilter.com to CBS-owned last.fm, which, generally speaking, share an aesthetic that is anathema to the record industry: they want to make music — and virtually everything related to music — available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Most radically, they want to do that all for free, and claim that such a model could benefit consumers and performers.

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