For years now, the Recording Industry Association of America has been battling with music fans over illegal distribution and royalties. A few of my friends from Drexel were sued in 2005 over illegal downloading. I’m sure at some point in your life you’ve heard about how evil these assholes are.

Last week, the Washington Post ran a story about Pandora Radio and how increasing royalty fees might force the service to shutdown. Basically, conventional FM radio stations pay no royalties at all per song due to the fact that they are owned by giant corporations who own rights to the songs anyway. XM/Sirius radio pays about 6% of their revenues to SoundExchange (the RIAA’s copyright royalty arm) and Internet radio pays an exorbitantly higher amount per song, per listener. Why do webcasts pay so much more? It’s politics.

Both FM radio stations and XM/Sirius pay lobbyists to pull weight around in D.C. Currently SoundExchange is fighting to charge royalties to traditional radio and increase those paid by satellite. Pandora’s founder Tim Westergren not only strongly disagrees with the fees charge but admits that the company just won’t survive as rates increase.

If the news about Pandora wasn’t hard hitting enough, another favorite site of music enthusiasts, Muxtape was recently shutdown by the RIAA this week. I wrote about Muxtape when the site first launched, but the basic gist is a service that lets users upload MP3s and arrange them as a web 2.0 mixtape to share with friends. Controversy started to surround the site the site when a developer released a Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox that allowed you to download songs from anyone’s Muxtape - music piracy at it’s finest. The RIAA obviously wasn’t happy and currently the site has been shutdown with the message: “Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.”

As expected, fans aren’t taking this without a fight. Just launched today, Opentape is a self-hosted verison of Muxtape. Simply download the files, upload to your webserver with your MP3s and you’re ready to go. You can check out a completely random sampling of music I’ve recently downloaded in my mixtape here. Another site, I <3 Pandora has created a widget to place on your site or blog to get the word out and unite people to help out the service.

With the current state of the industry it seems that issues surrounding music rights, distribution and piracy will be a controversial and debated topic for a long time to come. I clearly believe that artists deserve royalties and acknowledgment for their work, but the RIAA and SoundExchange are simply asking too much. Music is a fundamental part of life, it inspires and moves us, and most importantly it brings us together. Raising restrictions, removing DRM and allowing people to enjoy their music instead of fighting them over it will make legal purchasing and downloading that much more appealing.

Just updated my Muxtape with tracks I’ve been listening to recently. Notable tracks are “Pity and Fear” off the new Death Cab for Cutie album and “Echoplex” from Nine Inch Nail’s latest free album The Spin which was released last night. Also sprinkled in a few tracks from Ghostly Swim which I wrote about recently.

The full tracklist:

• Nine Inch Nails - “Echoplex”
• Michna - “Triple Chrome Dipped”
• Death Cab for Cutie - “Pity and Fear”
• The Beta Band - “Number 15″
• Santogold - “Lights Out”
• MSTRKRFT - “Easy Love”
• The Roots - Criminal
• Ben Benjamin - “Squirmy Sign Language”
• Mux Cool - “Night Court”
• Cut Copy - “Nobody Lost, Nobody Found”
• MGMT - “Kids”
• Vampire Weekend - “Exit Music (For a Film)”

This eclectic release from Adult Swim and Ghostly International has seen some heavy rotation on my iPod in the past few days and I wanted to share. If you don’t know Ghostly, they are part record label, part art gallery with an emphasis on digital forms of creation and distribution. Here’s what they have to say about the compilation:

A genre-busting 19-song collection, stretching the entire Ghostly International galaxy, Ghostly Swim explores the Avant-Pop style that the Ann Arbor/New York City label has been been championing for the past 9 years. Ghostly Swim features artists like Matthew Dear, Dabrye, Tycho and Aeroc and features new signings like UK cult band The Chap and NYC producer Michna.

I highly recommend giving this thing a listen, it has introduced me to some great artists and a new approach to music in general.

Check it out »

Photo Credit: Phawker

Where else would one expect the hipster-funk dance party quintet of Hot Chip to play in Philadelphia besides the Starlight Ballroom? An inevitable traffic jam of road bikes inundated N. 9th Street but we breezed right inside the sold out show with a little friendly name dropping and made a beeline to the bar. The scene was every bit as one would expect and the venue as always was ablaze with pent up excitement. A few minutes and several beers later, the band casually walked on stage, picked up their instruments and got right down to it. We were there to dance, and Hot Chip brought the party.

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Muxtape is a simple, easy to use, social way to share your mixtape with friends. I found out about it a few minutes ago from Jakob Lodwick’s tumblr. Muxtape’s creator Justin Oullette writes, “My goal is nothing short of changing the way we consume, distribute, and discover music.”

You can upload 12 MP3s (which is a surprisingly fast process) then organize them by dragging and dropping. The interface for playing tracks looks like it plays nice on the iPhone and other mobile devices too. I threw together a quick Muxtape of songs I’ve been listening to recently. Check it out.

For some reason I can’t stop putting this album on and loving every minute of it. Battles is considered ‘math rock‘ and is not my usual style of music but there’s some really fun and inventive stuff going on here with great rhythms.

Check out the track Race: In

As soon as I finished my post last night about the Duo show, I some how stumbled across Marco Benevento’s new solo album. The group on the album features Reed Mathis (Jacob Fred Jazzy Odyssey) on bass and both Matt Chamberlain (Tori Amos) and Andrew Barr (The Slip) on drums. I’ve only given the album one or two listens and haven’t put it up to the real test (the drive and listen) but so far it sounds incredible. Marco really has a talent of using his keys as his voice, his interludes are stunningly vocal. The album strives and succeeds to be a fun albeit loungey jazz piece, with some of that distorted, signature Duo sound thrown in.

Marco really tears it up on the piano, organs, clavs and even his speak and spell. It’s available right now in on iTunes in DRM free, plus format and goes on sale in stores February 12th. I highly recommend it.

Headed out to the TLA on South Street this past weekend, (mind you it has been renamed ‘The Fillmore’ which I will never, ever accept) to see three great bands: MJ Project, Grimace Federation and The Benevento/Russo Duo. Just to get it off my chest, when I hear ‘Fillmore’ the only thing that comes to mind is Bill Graham’s magical auditorium that was home to the greatest bands of the 1960’s.

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An interesting new year indeed. Still haven’t gotten to the resolutions yet. I’ll do that soon. For now, enjoy this amazing Radiohead webcast from their studio last night: