Portia Sabin: I think labels are caught in a cultural bind: No one really wants to know what a label does; it’s like the sausage factory. Even long-established bands have a hard time talking about what labels do.
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Mac McCaughan: I don’t know. I think that bands are into labels because bands — at least most [...]

Nancy Baym, a professor at the University of Kansas, the author of these books, this blog and one of the leading scholars thinking about the relationships between music and fans, (not to mention an old-school R.E.M. fan) attended two recent-ish conferences that approached that issue in very different ways. The “Futures of Entertainment” conference, hosted [...]