Featured Artists' Coalition and the wayback machine

OK, so I just wrote about the Featured Artists Coalition like it was something new.

Turns out it's been around for a while. Ian Youngs of the BBC wrote about them back in October 2008.

British pop and rock stars including Radiohead, Robbie Williams, David Gilmour and Kate Nash have signed up to a new body to fight for musicians to have more control over their work.

It is almost exactly a year ago that Radiohead made their latest album available on their own website.

It was a simple act - but it was like an incendiary bomb in the music industry.

Radiohead were one of Britain's biggest bands, but their major label deal had expired and they proved that big names no longer needed the big labels.

While acknowledging that most bands don't have the power of Radiohead, the Featured Artists' Coalition still decided to pursue its goals.

Many will always need labels to build their careers and market their music. But artists do not need labels as much as they used to.

It is against this backdrop that the Featured Artists' Coalition has been launched, with the aim of wrestling more control for the musicians.

That includes keeping ownership of their recordings - currently, the rights are usually kept by the labels.

But this is just Britain. What about the U.S.?