Techdirt explains why even major label musicians rarely make money from album sales.

What happens when the Sugababes sing Adina Howard’s Freak Like Me over Gary Numan’s Are Friends Electric?

David Guetta and Usura sample directly from two tracks from the Simple Minds album from 1982: New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84).

In 1976 Max Romeo and Lee “Scratch” Perry write the song I Chase the Devil, which in 1992 is sampled by The Prodigy in Out of Space.

Music Machinery is conducting a study to see whether a human DJ is better than a random playlist or an algorithm that picks the songs. So far, the algorithm is winning.

A clone song mimics the original song, without being the same song. Save my Soul by Superglue totally sounds like Radiohead’s Karma Police, but isn’t the same song.

Diego Stocco takes apart a piano and guitar and makes an interesting, imperfect instrument, but a perfect song.

Gloria Jones records a song Tainted love which gets popularized by Soft Cell and eventually gets covered by Marilyn Manson and sampled for a Riihanna track.

The Staple singers get covered by The Rolling Stones. The Rolling Stones get covered by Andrew Oldham (and The Who). Andrew Oldham gets sampled by The Verve (who end up getting sued). The Verve gets sampled by Mark van Dalen. Irony?

A lot of clever websites help you as a musician increase your reach to fans. But there’s also a site that will promise to fraud your way to the top or at least make you very poor. Meet Chartfixer.com.  A website currently being trialled in Australia “before being unleashed upon the world“. It takes something […]