We’re all familiar with the monopoly that is Ticketmaster and the vice-like grip that they have on your balls when it comes to buying tickets. However, good news! No longer connected to their parent company IAC (InterActive Corp), the newly-independent TicketMaster is celebrating it’s freedom by being a whopping $750 million in debt.

What does this mean for you? Well, it primarily means that, along with their recent loss of exclusivity with LiveNation, they no longer have access to provide ticket services to most major performance venues in the United States.

Read more after the jump.

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On June 12th, the Canadian Minister on Industry Jim Prentice introduced the passing of Bill C-61, a law that makes it illegal in Canada to break “digital locks” (DRM, aka Digital Rights Management, technology) on copywritten material.  C-61 is being compared to the American DMCA (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), a law passed in 1998 that allows for legal action to be taken at the discretion of copyright holders against those who’d use copywritten material without consent.

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CNN.com is reporting, interestingly, that at various music retailers, big and small, that vinyl sales are increasing while CD sales continue to fall. It’s interesting to note that an essentially non-practical medium like vinyl might re-find an audience outside of a mostly-specialty niche, like punk rock.

With the proliferation of digital media in this day and age (with around 45 million CDs sold in the US last year versus just 1 million vinyl records), we’re still a long way off from vinyl making that kind of comeback. But as the article notes, there’s a definite draw to vinyl that rivals and to some, even beats out, CDs.

A recent article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper reveals that up to 95% of people in that “golden age group” that the record industry craves (hell, that EVERY consumerist industry craves), the 18 to 24-year old’s, actively copy and swap music.

It’s interesting to note that The Guardian is also mentioning the continued presence of offline music sharing. Remember making mix tapes and mix CD’s for that girl in your class who couldn’t give two shits as to whether or not you existed but you were sure that one Pixies song would sway her when she found the tape stuffed into her backpack by your dumb stalker ass?

It’s always interesting to see the mainstream industry react to news like this with either some sort of “groundbreaking” deal a mainstream band who can afford it makes or by deciding to “bow to popular demand” and disable what amount to booby traps in legally-released mp3′s that will melt your computer if you try to put them on an iPod.

Word on the street is that major label group EMI is planning to cut its connections to both the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) as well as record-industry mainstay the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) over what it’s seeing as nothing more than a massive drain of money in a loosing battle against downloading and music piracy.

The IFPI and RIAA are, for those of you who don’t know, essentially the enforcing arm of the Big 4 in the recording industry (such as EMI) though they both officially claim to be representing the music industry in the US in general. Both groups receive about $130 million apiece a year from the labels in funding, and of course, that gets us results like the RIAA suing children, comatose patients, and the elderly who let their kids use their computers.

It’s an interesting industry event because it represents, among other things, an admission in the total fuckup-ery (yes, that is a real word…at least for now) of the state of the music industry by EMI, who incidentally were recently the first label to release music digitally through iTunes without DRM (Digital Rights Management, software and other lovelies built into the music file to prevent it being shared once you download it, or being transferred somewhere else like onto a blank CD-R).

So what exactly does this all mean? Well, it’s a step. You have to wonder what the face of buying music in the US (and frankly, the world in general thanks to the internet) is now going to look like. The issues over the RIAA suing people for up to $1,000 a downloaded song and people simply not buying music because of the effects that new DRM software will have on their computers at home are now far more flexible than they were four or five years ago when the RIAA began its legal crusade against individual users. Reuters is pointing out that the answer is plain and simple.

Money. FAT CASH! Besides the obvious public relations nightmares that these sorts of individual cases bring onto the major-label record industry, they quite frankly, are literally not worth it. Jennifer Pariser, Sony BMG’s head of litigation recently admitted during a court case (Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas) going on in Duluth, Minnesota that these sorts of suits cost the industry money because lawsuits are not income. They are not meant to reap literal repayment, but rather serve as punitive damage to the person sued.

Which basically means that it’s the RIAA trying to hurt you rather than get back what it “lost. ” Classy, right? I know, I can  barely contain my admiration either, its’ just overflowing here.

Thanks to Reuters, Punknews.org, and ARS Technica.