Technology continues to put cracks in the dyke of corporate music. As the industry plays "the Little Dutch Boy" progressive thinking bands continues to put more pressure on the traditional way of doing business in the music industry.

One leaky spot in the corporate wall is a new video from Pearl Jam called "Life Wasted". You can read the press release at http://creativecommons.org/.

The amazing thing about this video is its limited free release, which is available until May 24th, under the creative commons license. This idea is the first of its kind from a large label (Sony BMG). Could this be a turning point for the industry? One can only hope. It did take a mammoth uber-band like Pearl Jam to pull it off, but it should give hope to all the fans and independent artists out there.

Pearl Jam is providing a great lesson for the indie musician by using the Creative Commons. Now, I know some of you will say Pearl Jam has made their millions and can afford to giveaway stuff. Well, I believe, as independent musicians, you can't afford not to start embracing many of these techniques.

It is amazing to see what the potential of almost four minutes of video can do. A quick Google search turns up almost 150,000 results on the first day this was announced. That's not too bad for generated some buzz. Now, if you haven't watched the video do so now. http://snipurl.com/qt2r.

Looking at the video you might think, "I could do that". You are probably right. You can get a couple of $300 DV cameras, use iMovie on a Macintosh, invite some friends over, pay for some pizza and beer and come up with some weird ideas that would be visually interesting. Voilà! You have a video for release. If a picture says a thousand words you will be able to speak volumes with a video. Services like Google Video and YouTube make distributing your video so easy. The technology is truly democratizing the music industry. Before you would have to be on a major label, spend a million dollars and only get the video shown on one station, MTV. Now you can make the video yourself and post it at several locations and have millions of people get access to it 24 hours a day seven days a week. That's powerful!

Go out there and get started. Don't waste your life, create the next "Life Wasted" and make sure to send me the link!