Kickstarter is a crowd-funding site where creative people ask for money to complete projects. Creators state a funding goal, and come up with enticements for potential backers. If, and only if, the goal is reached, Kickstarter turns over the money and its involvement ends ...

Amanda Palmer knows how to use the internet. She was the first musician to raise over a million dollars on Kickstarter last year to record and release Theatre Is Evil, which debuted in the top 10 on the Billboard chart with no music industry backing.

Pop music's not what it used to be. That’s what every generation of grown-ups says about what the kids are listening to, but fogey cliches aren’t necessarily wrong. A recent study in the Journal of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts tracked the mood of pop ...

Graphic: How pop has become sadder since the 1960s

At the Rethink Music conference in Boston last month, programmers, developers, and tinkerers showed up for a 24-hour coding frenzy — a hackathon — at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development (NERD) Center, vying to make the coolest app that could transform music. ...

This weekend the country formerly known as Burma is holding democratic elections — the country’s first legitimate elections in decades — ending the 50-year isolation of the country. Everyone there has something at stake — including a trio of punk rockers called Side Effect ...

Bonus Tracks: "Evenings Under the Influence" and "Desperate"