Alex Maiolo has worked with The Future of Music Coalition for almost nine years, primarily focusing on the health insurance crisis as it relates to the working musician. In addition, Alex plays in various bands, including the psych-pop outfit Violet Vector & The Lovely Lovelies and ambient/clo-core staple Hi Fi Sky. He is a partner with an insurance agency in the Carrboro/Chapel Hill area of North Carolina. Insurance as it relates to the artist, studio owner and musician is all part of a typical day’s tasks.

[Cross-posted at KnowtheMusicBiz.com]

You don’t have to be a news junkie to know that the health care debate has been heating up in recent months. With all of this back-and-forth, it’s easy to forget that this is about getting more people covered. And musicians are one portion of the American public that could definitely use some help.

My name is Alex Maiolo, and I’m the project manager for Future of Music Coalition’s Health Insurance Navigation Tool (or HINT, for short). I’m also a musician. Like everyone at FMC, I’ve seen too many of my peers have to deal with unforeseen health calamities without the benefit of insurance. read more

Today’s post is by FMC intern Peter Haugen, who has a penetrating mind for all manner of speculative musical phenomenon!

It’s Friday! Can’t think of a better time to speculate on the future of… you guessed it.

While flying cars and jetpacks have yet to become a practical reality (but let’s not give up hope!), a recent YouTube video serves as a reminder that, musically speaking, the future is closer than we think. If you haven’t seen this video yet, try listening to the first two minutes with your eyes closed.

OK, from an sonic standpoint there is nothing particularly revolutionary about it: a piano with some violin accompaniment. Then you open your eyes to see there is no one sitting behind the piano! Duped! Of course, player pianos date back to the late 19th century, but no one would ever confuse a piano roll with actual playing by Rachmaninoff. That is, until Zenph Sound Innovations came along and found a technological way to mimic the performance dynamics of this late maestro.

You gotta wonder far can this technology be taken. read more

Intro by Michael Bracy, Policy Director, Future of Music Coalition

Image credit: Nancy Palmieri

Those who have followed FMC’s work over the past decade know that we’ve been strong supporters of establishing a public performance right for terrestrial radio. Why? Because compensating performing artists directly for the use of their work is simply the right thing to do. (Check out our Public Performance Right fact sheet to learn more.)

On March 3, I spent a couple of hours on Capitol Hill with one of our favorite artists, the wonderful and talented Erin McKeown. As luck had it, we were able to attend a news conference hosted by the MusicFIRST Coalition that featured Dionne Warwick and top leaders from the civil rights community, all of whom endorsed legislation for a public performance right.

We thought it would be great if Erin could weigh in on how she views the issue as a working musician. Take it away, Erin! read more

It’s hard to believe that its been eight years since FMC’s original survey on musicians and health insurance. That oft-cited study, published in 2002, showed that 44 percent of working musicians did not have insurance. One of the barriers, besides cost, was that the topic is difficult to wrap your mind around. To help demystify the issue, we created the Health Insurance Navigation Tool (HINT) — a free program that offers jargon-free information to musicians seeking to learn more about their health insurance options.

Fast-forward to 2010: health care is now a matter of serious debate across the country. FMC has advocated for reform, and we’re still very much committed to arming musicians with information so they can make smart choices.

But we also want to know if anything has changed since our initial report. Which is why we’ve just relaunched the survey. read more

We’re currently in the midst of another “Snowpocalypse” here in Washington, DC, but we figured a blog post would give us a nice break from all that shoveling.

Today, reports emerged about Warner Music backing off of “free” music streaming. As digital entrepreneurs and rights holders continue to explore ways to get fully-licensed music to the masses via the internet and mobile, issues in licensing and revenue generation continue to bedevil players on all sides. read more

The path to success in the music industry is difficult for anyone, and the late-singer songwriter Vic Chesnutt had a harder road than most.

Vic, who passed away in 2009 on Christmas Day, had written songs since childhood. At the age of eighteen, a car accident took away his ability to walk and gave him just “limited use” of his hands. A gifted guitar player, Vic could now play only simple chords. This is something that every musician out there who uses their hands to create has likely contemplated, if just for a moment, but for Vic, it was a day-to-day reality.

Now, Vic’s many friends and admirers are holding a pair of concerts in his memory at Athens, Georgia’s 40 Watt Club. read more