The Beastie Boys taught me that music didn’t have to be boxed off into definable genres, that any source was fair game for inspiration whether that’s a flute loop from a jazz track, punk and hardcore, funk, rap or even, a Tibetan monk chant, which was inspired by Yauch’s conversion to Buddhism. The band took these sources and formed their own identity that was completely unique to them.

It was the band’s 1989 classic album Paul’s Boutique that best exemplifies the “good artists borrow, great artists steal” sentiment. The album supposedly features anything between 100 and 300 different samples. The record is so littered with them that there’s a website, paulsboutique.info, dedicated to the album’s samples and its myriad of pop culture references.

Contrary to popular belief, the Beastie Boys actually cleared the majority of the samples on the album. According to Mario Caldato Jr., the band’s producer, they spent around $250,000 on sample clearances.

Nowadays, restrictive and expensive copyright licensing laws mean that a record like Paul’s Boutique would costs something in the region of $20 million to clear (according to bit.ly/beastiebreakdown) making the album impossible to release and subsequently influence so many people it has done in the last 23 years. The Beastie Boys were pioneers. Rest in peace Adam Yauch.

Her latest crowdfunding project which aims to pay for a new studio album, an art book and a tour isn’t even over yet but it’s already surpassed the $100,000 target and is well over $700,000 at time of writing with a full 13 days to go. Over 9,000 people have put down money to help fund what Palmer has dubbed The Grand Theft Kickstarter Project. The incentives for funding include regular once-off vinyl mail packages, local art gallery shows in six international cities and an initiative known as The Loanspark Collective, where a fan can offer Palmer an interest-free loan that will be paid back after the album along private charity performances or art.

It’s easy to see why Palmer has had success. She has over 550,000 Twitter followers and has formed an affable relationship with them. She communicates with fans on a one to one level, no ego, just human connections being made every day. Much like Lady Gaga. As the most followed Twitter user on the planet (23 million plus), Gaga isn’t letting her major label do all the work. Along with her manager Troy Carter she has developed a social community platform called Backplane which powers her community site Littlemonsters.com which she will use to sell direct to fans and roll out to other artist communities in future.

Meanwhile, the company has made significant inroads into becoming the defacto streaming music site of choice. Its recently launched Spotify Play Button means that embedded tracks from Spotify can now appear anywhere on the web.

In an effort to accelerate launches in other terroritories, Spotify has formed a partnership with Coca Cola. The news was revealed at a press briefing last week in New York with Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek saying “Coca-Cola is partnering with us to bring free music to the world.”

That’s a big vision and shows just where Ek wants Spotify to be. If other streaming services teamed with a major brand like this, the partnership be considered incongruous but for Spotify, battling outmoded terroritorial licensing laws that inhibit the platform from launching in every country of the world, the partnership makes sense. Coca Cola can underwrite Spotify’s expansion in countries it could not previously afford to launch in, setting it on its way to becoming the defacto global subscription service as well as gaining visibility in world events like the Olympics.

In return, Coca Cola will harness Spotify APIs in all of their apps, sites and social network sites citing that the partnership is “the opportunity to create a truly global music network.” The company will also be working with other major brands like Intel, McDonalds and Reebok on branded apps.

Spotify’s big gamble is to integrate itself into every fabric of life where music can exist. The service is attempting to make itself indispensable and everywhere. If it can do that then future partnerships will mean the company will be able to turn a profit while covering the costs of streaming royalties for the entire world of music makers.

Doing that kind of work in the past required dedication, travel and a lot of recording tape. Which is exactly why field-recordist Alan Lomax is so revered and important to the history of music. For most of his lifetime, Lomax travelled around the US to the UK, Ireland, the Caribbean and mainland Europe archiving and recording folk music of the world. He was the first man to capture Lead Belly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie to tape. When he died in 2002, he left 5000 hours of audio recordings behind (along with 3000 videotape and 5000 photographs) and a trail of invaluable ethnomusicology.

In February, 17,400 songs from the Alan Lomax archive were published online for all to hear at research.culturalequity.org. Every false start, every interview, ambient recording, mic checks and abandoned performance is available. Dating from 1946 up to the ’90s, there’s a lifetime of exploration. Chicago blues man Big Bill Bronzy performing in Paris, calypso concerts captured in New York, West Indies folk, English children’s lullabies, chain gang songs recorded in Mississippi State Penitentiary, New Orleans jazz, Soviet wedding songs, Transylvanian funeral laments and Moroccan courtship music.

Of particular interest to Irish listeners is the collection of music recorded here in 1951 and 1953. Made in co-operation with the BBC, Radió Éireann and the Irish Folklore Commission, it includes performances captured in Donegal, Galway, Kerry, Cork, Dublin as well as renditions of songs from Seamus Ennis, singer Margaret Barry and Brendan Behan in London. The world is now an instant global jukebox but Lomax was the originator.

Sure, the constant infostream of Twitter or the geo-tour guide of Foursquare are cool but there’s always been a gap between the fabricated reality of social networks and actual real life. The latest apps at SXSW in 2012 addressed this issue. This year’s buzzwords were “social discovery” and “ambient location”. Most people have used social networks have had that awkward moment where “someone they know from the internet” has introduced themselves in the flesh. You know who the person is but they look different to their online picture or avatar.

Highlight is an “ambient location” app for iPhone that will prepare you for such situations. Bridging the gap between networking application and conversation enabler, Highlight sits on the background of your phone and alerts you when you’re in the near vicinity of a friend of yours on Twitter or a person with likeminded interests from Facebook. It’s a conversation starter, an excuse for new genuine, real-life friendships or conversations.

After installing Highlight on my iPhone a few weeks before SXSW, I promptly forgot about it. When I was in Austin, my phone buzzed a few times with a message telling me that a blogger I had long admired was in my immediate vicinity and the shared interests we had. Perfect. We finally said hello after a few years of Twitter talk and it wasn’t weird at all.

Highlight isn’t the only hot new location-aware connection app, there’s also Sonar, Banjo, Gauss, Glancee and of course, Grindr, the geolocating app for gay men that was ahead of the curve in 2009. It looks like 2012 may be the year of “ambient location”, a next generation of apps, ones that are location-aware, people-aware and socially-aware.

A good place to start as ever is the American radio network NPR and their always excellent home for music on the web. Their SXSW microsite (npr.org/sxsw) features a handpicked list of 100 of the best bands playing the festival playing as a continuous 7 hour mix that you can tune into at any time. It features tracks from Alabama Shakes, Cults, Hospitality, The Men, Young Prisms and more. 71 of the songs are available for free download too. Not only that but NPR’s own showcases featuring Sharon Van Etten, Dan Deacon, Magnetic Fields and Andrew Bird are being webcast for a limited time. It’s expected that Fiona Apple’s return to live music as a headliner will be available too, as long as Ms. Apple is happy with it. What a diva.

If volume is what you want SxswTorrent.com is back with BitTorrent files featuring a whopping 1,219 song downloads taken from each official band playing the festival from the SXSW website.

The long standing Stereogum blog keeps it trimmed to 25 songs from bands who they’ve championed in the past including Candy Walls from the Austra side-project TRUST and the Whigfield-sounding I’ll Never Know bounce pop from Londoner Charli XCX.

Highly recommended from the newly formed Portals Music blog collective is their SXSW 2012 sampler available for free from Bandcamp featuring some of the smaller, more underground names at the festival from the skittery dreaminess of Florida’s Hundred Waters to the catchy acoustic folk pop of You Won’t. More from SXSW 2012 next week.

The five-piece band, signed to revered indie label Rough Trade are already doing quite well in the UK thanks to the blessing of NME. They’ve garnered comparisons to The Strokes and have been hailed as the latest saviours of guitar music (snore). Back home however, it’s a different story for Howler and to increase their visibility in the US they have enlisted the services of Mono, an advertising and branding company from their hometown to help them make an impact in the lead up to SXSW. Mono have worked on campaigns for Apple, MSNBC, NBA and Sesame Street. So how are they approaching advertising a rock ‘n’ roll band?

Rather than spending money on one big budget video, the band, or specifically their North American independent label Beggars Group spent the money on a campaign based on the title of the band’s debut album – ‘America Give Up’.

The americagiveup.com campaign features an elderly black man passing commentary on all things that could be attributed to the decline of American civilization from canned cheese to the Kardashians to social networks. The hope is that enough chatter will be created around the campaign that it will work positively for the band going into the festival but it’s hard to see how the an elderly man will appeal to kids looking for some genuine rebellion or energy.

Of course, lots of bands using marketing or branding to stand out these days so this is really nothing new. If anything, authentic indie artists need only look at the reaction to Lana Del Rey to see how manufactured authenticity can backfire. We’ll know post-SXSW, just how successful this campaign was.

The collection which numbers 40,000 vinyl singles and 25,000 vinyl albums will be archived from May. The collection will include some of his personal notes, stories from contributors along with video interviews with family and those musicians that were close to him. You will be able to browse the artwork for 2,500 of those albums, at the rate of 100 per week, from May to October, though due to copyright limitations, only the BBC Peel Sessions archives have been confirmed for listening at this point. Watch the brilliant 2005 documentary John Peel’s Record Box for a taster of what to expect from the hero’s collection come May from thespace.org

So what are the results? Out of 45 million internet users in France, 822,000 people were sent first round warning letters about their infringements. That number drops to 68,000 people for second round repeat offenders. The number of people who received a third letter of warning? 165. That’s a significant drop that suggests the three-strikes policy is more useful than litigation or site blocking. Discuss…

As of February 29th, the site moving to a different format away from .torrent files and to Magnet files. The site also moved to a Swedish domain to stop any potential seizure from US authorities.

These latest moves angered the Recording Industry Association of America whose Vice President Mitch Glazier went on the offensive. “It is, in a phrase, one of the worst of the worst,” Glazier wrote. He went on to call on responsible leaders in the tech community to come up with constructive ideas to address these “foreign rogue sites that steal American jobs.”

The Pirate Bay, ever ready to snark back responded in an article on the TorrentFreak website. “The recording industry is like a kid screaming for candy. The problem is that the kid has diabetes.”

But perhaps the grandest idea that The Pirate Bay has come up with has yet to be unleashed. Forget digital files, the site is now talking about “Physibles”. With 3D printing on its way to mass-market, TPB is predicting that the next big thing will be downloadable models for constructing 3D physical objects that will allow you to print your vehicle spare parts or sneakers, for example.

“No more shipping huge amount of products around the world…No more child labour. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal.”

The Pirate Bay’s battleground has shifted to a more difficult and open terrain – the real world.

He found Asha Sarella, a virtual assistant and sent her the song Smoke And Mirrors. Sarella came up with the concept and the pair talked on emails and the phone a few times. Sarella produced and choreographed the dancing in the video. Three weeks later, it hit Youtube and racked up 160,000 views in three days.

Loads of views is great on the surface but there was one problem. The resulting video (above) while nicely shot has no connection with the song. Smith’s clip attracted those views for the slightly gimmicky reasons behind the video not the actual content. Smith can’t live off Youtube views and while he should be commended for doing something different, I hope the Bollywood-style video won him some actual listeners that can help him make a living from his music.

Speaking of fans fueling art, the proliferation of crowdfunding sites has led to people pre-paying for artistic content but there’s always the danger of putting yourself out there and there won’t be enough interest in what you have to offer. A real ego bruiser. No such problem for Double Fine Productions, a video game development studio who wanted to finance their next game and develop it in the public eye. The plan was to run a campaign to raise $400,000 over a month but they hit 100% funding it in 8 hours. Three days in and the campaign raised $1.68 million dollars from over 47,000 people (currently at $1.92 million from 56,864 people) The whole reason they started the campaign in the first place was to find if there was a demand for classic adventure games after publishers told them there wasn’t. I think we know the answer now.

A potential solution that caught my eye came from Topspin’s Ian Rogers who proposed “a content registry where copyright holders can express the rules governing the use of their content”. So if a band released a track, it would be uploaded to this one central place that would govern how the song could be used. The band or their label would set the price per download, whether streaming was allowed, creative commons was enabled, subscription services were allowed to use it and myriad of other factors.

The benefit of such a registry is that new music services would no longer have to negotiate with individual labels or be asked for upfront payments for usage. This means that if you had a great idea for a music platform and signed up to the content registry then you wouldn’t need mountains of investor cash over four or five years to keep yourself sustainable before you got the chance to be profitable as Spotify’s current situation appears to be. Removing that financial gauntlet would encourage innovation and realistic solutions to the piracy problem.

Such a system also has benefits for the ordinary internet user, the kind who frequently uploads copyrighted material to sites thinking that a “I don’t own the copyright to this” disclaimer makes it OK. If they upload a song that has a free download rule in the registry to Soundcloud for example, it will be allowed to exist as a download. If not, it’s rejected as per the copyright owner’s rules in the registry.

Youtube already has an audio fingerprinting system that does most of this work so it’s definitely possible. Sure there are questions about who would run it exactly and how unregistered content would be dealt with but a proactive solution is better than a blocking one.