And should it? Well, I think so, but I'm an independent musician. The money I want to make for my music is largely a result of the money I spent putting out a product. And mp3's cost nearly nothing as a product (BitTorrents would cost even less, but it's too nerdy as a distribution model at this point). So maybe I'm a radical when it comes to these things, but I can't help but be encouraged by some of the recent developments in music.

THE GOOD:
Most recently, iTunes decided to drop the price of their "Plus" (Non-DRM'ed, higher quality tracks) to 99 cents. Fan-freaking-tastic. Paying more to make your already-purchased songs into ringtones is rude, but slapping (admittedly fairly easy-breaking) DRM on your poor-quality files is sad from an industry leader.

Why this is great: Well... Apple rule the roost still, at least for the moment. They'll drive things with their power, even as some labels jump ship.

THE GREAT:
I'm guessing the whole move is largely in response to Amazon's mp3 store, which is where some labels have bolted to. I recently patronized Amazon just to show them how awesome I think it is. $7.99 got me the Minutemen's first two albums on one "CD" at a high bitrate (yes, VBR, but average 256).

Why this is great: Amazon finally offered something that it shouldn't have taken a sales giant with their own spaceship to do: A web-based download of good quality non-DRM mp3's with no subscription, and both per-album and per-track options. And they got the Big Guy in digital music, Captain Turtleneck, to follow suit.

THE AWESOME:
I went to the record store the other day and found something brewing that I think is really neat. Tons of indie labels seem to be including one-time-use download coupons for unprotected mp3's in the packaging of their vinyl records.

Why that's great: You can now take your Bob Pollard records with you, but more importantly there's an inherent acknowledgment that the media is irrelevant to your owning of the music. It's sort of like a cheaper way of including a cassette to dub your record onto so you can play it in your car.

THE HOLY EFF THE MAN, BATMAN:
The logical conclusion of this for some artists is probably the most exciting thing of all. You can understand the significance of Radiohead, Trent Reznor, and Madonna all deciding to distribute their own albums within the space of two weeks.

And Radiohead have shocked the world with an optional price tag on their newest record. At first I thought hey, I'll give 'em money because I think they're doing a great thing. Then I decided to support their decision by paying nothing. Is this odd logic? Eh, maybe. But it makes sense in an odd way, and I think they're going to make good. I'll let bigger Radiohead fans (there are plenty) spend £40 on the 2xLP plus bonus CD box set of the album. It will probably sell very well.

Why this is great: Should be obvious. One of the reasons artists "need" the RIAA is because the record labels take piles of money and leave them with the spare change. Once musicians realize they can have their cake and eat it too, it'll be "so long" to that Lars Ulrich mentality. Artists will make more while consumers pay less. For that month before artists get greedy it'll be rad!

And to top it off, the RIAA is bleeding money in their P2P lawsuits!

As a bonus for reading this overly-long blog post filled with unbridled optimism, here's a video of Weird Al's ode to piracy, "Don't Download This Song."

Sometime yesterday, I started seeing this floating around MySpace:

Ian Mackaye, lead singer of influential hardcore band Minor Threat as well as Fugazi passed away today in a Baltimore hospital room. Outside a Fugazi show in New Jersey last night, the singer was struck by a car passing by the front of the Ventura Theatre. Brunswick police say that the driver allegedly stopped, but then fled the scene. There is now a police investigation underway.

Mackeye was rushed to St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, where he was pronounced dead this morning at 6am. This is a tragedy for the underground music as a whole and we need to stand together at this time of loss.

A tragedy indeed: Ian Mackaye is pretty much the originator of both DC hardcore and emo, a constant proponent of DIY, and well-known for continuing to sell his label's records at $10 postage paid (vinyl or CD). It's a true loss.

Also, it's not a true story.

The Baltimore Sun:

"I am happy to report that I am not dead," says MacKaye.

Not sure where the hell this came from. It's almost as weird as the MySpace story of Don Bolles from the recently-regrouped Germs arrested on GHB charges for having Dr. Bronner's soap (or the ironic version, "Germ arrested for soap"), from a few months back. Except that turned out to be true. But rest assured, DIY's leading man will continue to be around in order to do swell things like this.

After all, we still need someone other than Rollins to be in every punk documentary ever made.

We all knew that. Have a look at Digg sometime if your IQ can handle it. And I'm not going to sit here and say that I really think that someone is planning to kill Kathy Sierra. I'm a card-carrying Something Awful member. But I also know that "all in good fun" can become "all in bad fun" real fast, and from there occasionally reach "are we even having fun at all anymore?" If these guys are joking around, where's the joke? What's the catch? They should be ashamed, and I might be the only one to say this, but they probably already are.

Robert Scoble, C.K., et. al seem to agree that we have a "culture" issue to fix. Am I overly cynical to think that's being overly optimistic? Sounds to me like we have a group of idiots inexplicably connected to A-listers doing dumb (and hurtful) stuff that takes the cake over other dumb stuff you see in the blogosphere. I think if there's a "cultural" issue it's the implication that we even have a culture. What do we have?

• A bunch of people behind a wall of perceived anonymity interacting too closely with other people behind other walls, and they think they're invincible and beyond their meatspace morals.
• A bunch of people in geographically disparate areas and who are not alike, converging on certain places for shared superficial reasons (say, programming) and clashing.
  

These are two fundamentals of the internet, especially where web intersects free speech.

So what do we do to "fix the culture?" Nothing. There is no meta-solution, no bud to nip it in. We let Kathy Sierra fix her issue, which crossed over from Comment-Deletion-land into Legal-Issue-ville. And we continue to delete our crap comments, ignore trolls, and give this whole fire as little oxygen as possible.

But I do hope that Kathy Sierra recovers from the totally undeserved pain she's been caused. This is the bad side of the internet coin for sure -- but the happy side is that we get to interact with people like her, people whose books populate our shelves and who had influence on us. I hope that she doesn't forget about that part.