and read Bruce Sterling’s Information Wants to Be Worthless, his sort-of preview of the upcoming SXSW Interactive Festival. Now. Go.

working, travelling on business, and having lots of fun last weekend with some out of town guests, it seems that the music industry is finally starting to implode. High-profile columnist Steven Levy has weighed in with “The Customer is Always Wrong” in Newsweek, and a bunch of stars of yesteryear held a big show to protest record company contracts. What was the old line? You shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth? Well, if the gift horse is massive direct distribution via Napster you probably shouldn’t. Maybe the stuff that Albini and Love started hammering on a while back is finally going to stick.

on the MP3 format: “Five years of the record industry ignoring the problem, then trying to stifle and silence it, and it is easily the most popular method of listening to music on a computer. Five years of combating piracy by the RIAA and the ‘virus’ has spread to everyone and everything.” An excellent thought prompted by the recent NYT article.

that the record companies were just fighting for the downtrodden musician when they took Napster to court: Record Labels’ Answer to Napster Still Has Artists Feeling Bypassed. Like I said at the time, record companies could make a lot more money using Napster than fighting it. But alas, we shall never know, I don’t think.

reviving Shift Mag, The Top 25 Web Personalities. Or, as they write, “these are the rock stars of the web. If you hadn’t already heard of them, you have now.” I don’t know about rock stars, but their descriptions are pretty funny. The list includes Justin Hall, Matt Haughey, Kottke and Meg Hourihan, and more.