It's hard to know where begin with this incredible rant from Tim Quirk — member of Too Much Joy and current Vice President of Music Programming for Rhapsody America. (Full disclosure: Tim is also on FMC's advisory board.)

Back in the early 1990s, Too Much Joy signed with Warner Brothers Records and released a few discs on then-WB subsidiary, Giant. While TMJ had (and still has) a rabid cult following, they were hardly one of Warner's superstar acts. Which means, according to conventional major-label math, that they never "recouped." In fact, TMJ currently has a negative balance of $395,277.18.

Tim's post has nothing to do with the fact that his band never made money for the label (although he does provide an illuminating footnote that explains how WB likely broke even on TMJ, despite their lack of recoupment). No, Tim is more annoyed at the fact that the label does not seem to be accounting for digital royalties for records they produced for Warner. Although he's not naive enough to expect a royalty check anytime soon, he does have the sense that TMJ's recoupables should be decreasing somewhat due to TMJ's albums being available on digital services like Rhapsody, for whom he works. Remember, we're not talking about a band that never had any fans. read more

If you've been paying any attention to music biz news this week, you've no doubt stumbled across an item (or ten) about Google OneBox — the web search company's bold foray into the world of on-demand music. While many of the reports focus on what this new service means for fans hungry to hear tunes with one-click, they don't often drill down into what this might mean for artists and songwriters.

OneBox has already launched, so you could just go try it out right now. Or, you could read what our vigorous research revealed about the new venture. OK, it wasn't really that vigorous — we simply entered a band into the Google search bar to see what happened next.

Being that it's so close to Halloween, we figured we'd search for Slayer's classic thrash album, Reign in Blood. Lo and behold, a handful of track titles popped up, with a little "play" icon next to each. We clicked on the title track and were instantly slammed by axe aggression. Neat! read more

If you follow new technologies for the digital distribution and access of music, you've undoubtedly come across the name Spotify. In recent months, the Sweden-based service — which offers a deep catalog of high quality streaming audio via a rock-solid and intuitive desktop client — has racked up the press mentions on both sides of the Atlantic. Spotify's Daniel Ek will be presenting at the Future of Music Policy Summit 2009 (Georgetown University, Washington, DC, Oct. 4-6). Reserve your spot now! read more