Flaming Lips At 30: How The Music Business Has Changed

Wayne Coyne: Inside the bubble, outside the box.

When the Flaming Lips first formed as a band in 1983, Michael Jackson‘s Thrillerwas the top-selling album of the year, Toby Keith was still working in an Oklahoma oil field and Lady Gaga hadn’t even been born.

Even as Record Store Day brings on a new wave of nostalgia for decades past, the differences in the music industry itself are also stark. In the early 1980s, cassettes were just starting to overtake vinyl records as the medium of choice for...