…and this is no exception. “The Fame Formula” — some marketing dude says you don’t need to practice or record because he’s got the “New System.” This is worth reading because it’s well-written, slickly-packaged material that still manages to be total bullshit. Train your immune system to reject this kind of poison.

I don’t agree with this much, but it’s well-written and thus I include it here as food for thought. I will be writing a long-overdue article as a rebuttal to this and similar arguments because I disagree with both flavors of The Narrative about record sales being down.

Do I actually care about “selling out” — of course not. This is a welcome landmark: Forbes has been encouraging materialism in hip hop for years now by publishing an annual list of the rappers with the biggest income. This year, Common was on that list, and when you see how much he’s been involved in, it’s impressive. For 2011, let’s get Mos Def and Brother Ali up on that list, too.

Very interesting material here, a lot of food for thought. There’s a wide range of genres and budgets covered here — something for every mammal.

This comment was longer than most blog posts — his clarifications are more than technical quibbles, they’re all pretty interesting and important points. Personally, I don’t give much of a fuck about ANY of this material because there’s small handful of white men who are running the show and I won’t insult my own intelligence by playing along with the “Democracy” pantomime. The powerful will do whatever they can get away with — the rest of us will adapt and keep it moving.

Definitely some must-read material here. Great business advice, deep and global cultural insight, and moral clarity — Cedric is on point pretty much 100% of the time. This was a great piece.

There’s a ton of great details here for producers and indie business heads. El-P always gives good interviews, but this was an especially good one.

NY closes September 4th, LA closes September 18th. They’re obviously shutting down with a bang, throwing parties and huge sales, but still…it’s a bummer. Very unwelcome sign of the times.

Very, very important antidote to the iPhone hype. They don’t mention it here, but it’s also a good antidote to the “Crowd-Sourcing” hype, too. Handy Rule of Thumb: once anything is getting major press coverage and being hailed as The Future, it’s already over with.

It was pretty interesting. It starts off by pointing out that most song lyrics, on paper, are retard-level babble. That might be because of who they’re interviewing, of course…but from a business angle, this was a great read.

This is anything but obvious. Fact is, 99% of the artists who contact me actually don’t know…how to make an mp3. They can technically render an mp3 file, sure, but that’s actually only the first step of the process. This article lays it out visually. Great stuff…unless you already know this shit.

A summary of what our entire roster has been up to…well, almost. There’s going to be a small flood of new music, announcement and artists getting rolled out before September. “Too much is always better than not enough.”

Some great food for thought here from Hypebot’s Kyle Bylin. Nice to see him taking a break from the more academic/theoretical material and focusing on what really matters to actual musicians, too!!

This is more for comic relief than anything else. Sticking up for Lily Allen is cute, and blaming bloggers for his problems is even cuter. The future smiles with sharp teeth…

For those of you into the weirder, more mathematical end of the music spectrum…enjoy. One of my side project is an Algorhythms blog expanding on the concepts in the songs themselves. I really look forward to getting my Thesis finished, one post at a time…