posted on October 12th, 2007 in Music, News, The Machine 

we are living in a material world

The recent Madonna news, while intriguing as a tale of industry tumult, has next to nothing to do with undependence. She has signed up to receive $120 million from one of the largest (and oft reviled) music companies on the planet. In addition, she may yet see traditional distribution via a music label. See this Forbes article for great context and analysis.

It turns out that Madonona wants maximum money and doesn’t care about Undies, which is of course quite fine. She’s just, err, expressing herself.

Live Nation, formerly of Clear Channel, is about as far away from undependent friendly as you can get. They are co-Dependent central.

For more info on Live Nation / Clear Channel, please see:

• The Wikipedia entry on Clear Channel;
• This profile of Live Nation;
• The documentary, Before the Music Dies (buy it);
• These Salon articles.

Undies can now thrive in all kinds of exciting ways. As always, new opportunities present new challenges. We will continue to discuss trends, developments, industry structure and economics, and related topics of interest to Undependents. The seismic shifts in music reveal lots of cool stuff; Madonna, though, lives in another world.

  by Macon on Oct. 12th, 2007

Agreed: Madonna isn’t an example of an Undie, regardless of how often she dances in hers. But, the transformation of the music space is interesting to me because the turmoil in the music industry is caused by the same forces that enable Undies.

The loss of monopoly power by the traditionally formed Label is the same loss experienced by Comic Syndicates, Print Publishing houses, Mainstream Media. That monopoly power was the power to deliver the audience to a creator/author/artist.

That’s how I see this related. fwiw!

  by Joel on Oct. 12th, 2007

Yep. Agreed. Cool. It’s an “and” instead of a “but.”

That’s how I see it as well and that’s why I included a link to the Madonna news in this post:
http://undependent.com/blog/2007/10/12/hey-music-industry-i-can-see-your-undies/

Everyone who cares about undependence has to stay on top of  stuff like this:
http://undependent.com/blog/2007/10/12/if-the-boys-can-do-it/

I hope we also talk about newspapers, movies, gaming, books, comics, software, and even stuff outside of “content.”   It’s all quite intriguing and intertwined even though Madonna doesn’t go for Undies.

Huge.