The curious thing, which I mentioned on the radio, is that CIS has significant assets both physical and virtual and could very easily sell the business to another provider or allow someone to come in and run the business for a fee. None of it makes much rational sense. But then everyone kind of knew that Bob always did things for his own reasons.

Here are your options:

• If you are an individual subscriber to CIS with just cis.net e-mail on the line
• I advise you to get with Iowa Telecom, Qwest or Mediacom and get on with your life. Unless CIS comes back up for some period that will allow customers to make an orderly transition, there is no way to access e-mails, address books or web pages on those servers.
• If you like webmail, get a Yahoo or Gmail account and get on with your life. Hopefully, you have a local copy of frequently used e-mail addresses and you can send a message to friends and customers that your address has changed.
• If you have web pages that you don’t have a local backup for, check the Internet Archive for a recent copy of your web page. You should be able to suck down most of the content from there.
• Business customers. CIS registered its own and its customers’ domains with Network Solutions LLC one of the major domain registrars. Get a copy of a billing statement from CIS that specifically states that you were charged X for registering and/or hosting your domain.
• Call Network Solutions at 1-800-333-7680 and explain what has happened and that you would like the administrative records for your domain transferred to your control
• Be patient and work the process. Network Solutions has had its own problems with customer service in the past.
• If you still run into a brick wall or you feel like going after CIS for loss of business, call a lawyer that has familiarity with Internet and intellectual property law. I have been using Des Moines attorney, Brett Trout as my resource on this issue. He gave a presentation at Ignite IT in Ames a couple of years ago and I was quite impressed.

Riverfront Technology is partnering with a Quad Cities-based web hosting and web development company to offer migration assistance and new virtual digs for homeless CIS domains. My advice here is that if you have a business that relies on the web and e-mail for day-to-day transactions don’t wait for Network Solutions, register a new domain now, get your web site back up and running. When you finally get your old domain back, it can be merged with the temporary one so that it will appear to be transparent to the user regardless of whether they use olddomain.com or newdomain.com.

His latest project is a collaboration with alternative dalrings, Sparklehorse, and featuredsa Who’s Who of guest artists: The Flaming Lips, Iggy Pop The Shins, and the Pixies’ Frank Black. The album is entitled Dark Night of the Soul,. It ships in a delixue case with a 50 page booklet of photos by filmmaker, David Lynch, of Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and my personal favorite, Wild At Heart.

The record is amazing. It’s not really my cup of tea style-wise. A bit too broody and slow for my taste. I’m mostly an up-tempo kind of guy. Despite that though I can recognize great songwriting and producing when I hear it. And “Dark Night of the Soul” brings the goods.

So here is the technology transformation bit: An as-yet unspecified “contractual dispute” with his label, EMI has led to the label refusing to release the album commercially.

Danger Mouse’s solution? Set up a site where fans can purchase the David Lynch booklet, CD cover and a blank, recordable CD for $50. Then tell fans to go find the music on the Internet any way they can. Hint: Bit Torrent and Pirate Bay.

There are two epigrams that date from the Early Days of the Internet (say, 1998). One is: Information wants to be free. The other is: The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it. You don’t hear people talk like that anymore. but that doesn’t mean that those things aren’t true.

The Recording Industry As We Know It™, and its twin sister Commercial Radio™ have about three to five years left to live. As soon as broadband wireless service (e.g. WiFi, 3G/4G cellular, WiMAX) becomes more or less ubiquitous, their customers are going to scatter like a school of fish chased by dolphins.

Why would anyone listen to the latest dreck from Christina Aguilera or to Boston for the billionth time when they could just listen to whatever they wanted streamed from their own music collection, or to a niche Internet based “radio” station that serves up the kind of music they like, or to Internet stations recommended by a friend on Facebook?

The large record labels are becoming increasingly irrelevant to many musicians as their reason for being amounts to a way to ship lots of bit of shiny, silver plastic. But digital downloads are steadily eating the market for CDs. Sales of CD’s have been down for years. Purchased digital downloads are largely replacing them. The problem is, you can’t mark up a digital download 80% like you can a bit of shiny, silver plastic. The margins on downloads are minuscule, like 2 percent. Two percent times several million is still money. It’s just not hot-and-cold running cocaine and hookers kind of money, if you know what I mean.

More and more band make their money on the road, doing the hard work of touring. This fact is seen in the increasingly consolidated ownership of large music venues and the possible merger between the world’s largest ticket broker, TicketMaster and the world’s largest venue and tour management company, Live Nation. Can you say anti-trust?

But, as Danger Mouse shows, there are a million ways to skin a buck from a market in fragments. None of them have anything to do with the Recording Industry As We Know It™.