A Whole Lotta Nothing

Weird ringtones

I've noticed over the past few months at least three instances of someone's phone going off and playing a really odd song, something completely unexpected. In no particular order, they are:

• ~60 year old male. He was a carpenter measuring for bookshelves, suddenly the chorus from Michael Jackson's Billie Jean starts playing. 
• late 30s male, construction worker, building a house. Phone goes off with a jazz classic I've heard millions of times but can't name. Take the A train perhaps?
• mid-60s woman at a restaurant with her husband having dinner in the next booth. Silence was broken by Who Let The Dogs Out. Let me repeat that. The silence was broken in a restaurant when someone's grandmother (possibly great-grandmother) had their phone play Who Let The Dogs Out very loudly.

In every case I'm left with the obvious questions of What the hell? Why that song out of every song ever recorded? and Do people even buy ringtones anymore? 

Scarring Party west coast tour

Over on MetaFilter Music, I've fallen for a band doing sort of old timey pirate shanty stuff called The Scarring Party. They recently threw a Kickstarter fund drive for their upcoming west coast tour, and I went so far as to donate at the level where they had to write a song about me.

Here are their upcoming tour dates:

• April 22 at Empty Sea Studios (All Ages) with Erin Jorgensen in Seattle, WA
• April 23 at Alberta Street Pub in Portland, OR
• April 24 at Sam Bond’s Garage in Eugene, OR
• April 25 at Rainshadow (All Ages) with Deadly Gallows and Stabracadabra in Reno, NV
• April 26 at Disco Volante in Oakland, CA
• April 27 at Viracocha with Eliza Rickman in San Francisco, CA
• April 28 at The Crepe Place in Santa Cruz, CA
• April 29 at a yet to be determined space or residence in the Greater Los Angeles Area
• April 30 at Park Gallery with Martian Horses and Birds Ate My Face in San Diego, CA

Even though I only go out about once every six months to a concert/event, I actually have tickets to Donald Glover doing comedy the same night as their Portland date so I'll sadly be missing them in town (though I might try to catch them before/after), but if you get the chance do check them out.

Here's my song, Head Full of Birds they wrote for me:

03 Head Full of Birds

Re: Hip Hop

...It's his fifth album, and he's 27. It's interesting that hip-hop, because of its perenially underground nature, encourages very young people to keep trying, perhaps succeeding and perhaps failing, but keep trying until they can get good. And if/when they get good, they have a good decade on everyone else.

That's from an email Mike Kuniavsky wrote reviewing Black Milk's new album (which has both the ballsy/arrogant but also totally apt title "Album of the Year"), quoted with his permission. It's just so spot-on, I had to write it down somewhere so I could refer back to it someday.

Also, given the amazing new album, if Black Milk decided to start a batshit insane twitter feed, I bet he'd be as big as Kanye in about six months.

La Blogotheque takeaway shows

I'm a late comer to La Blogotheque's Takeaway shows (Andy turned me onto them six months ago). From what I gather, the site is like a French Pitchfork, and when musicians come visit, a video director and sound guy throw some instruments at the musicians and they play wherever they can. Buses, street corners, and hotel rooms are the norm, and the videos (and music in them) are simply amazing.

There's some magic combo of improvisation with nervous musicians using borrowed guitars, standing in a French street where few people recognize them, while a shaky hand camera captures the unamplified sounds. There's something incredible about how it all comes together and you're instantly transported onto the street as a nervous onlooker, instead of an idle observer at a computer. It feels like if a tripod was used, the whole thing would come off as fake like U2 playing a rooftop show, or if the band seemed too rehearsed or comfortable, you couldn't pick up on the energy of the moment.

They're all great, but these are my favorites:

I'd never heard Phoenix before but I enjoyed the videos so much that I bought two of their albums off iTunes. Much to my surprise, the sound on their records is smoothed over and diluted, with none of the raw charisma seen in the live taping. I almost want to rip mp3s from these videos and replace the album tracks.

On the plus side, this means they'll be great live and hopefully next month I'll see them in Portland.

Hodgman, Coulton, and Roderick

The highlight of the Live Wire/Wordstock event I attended a week ago was this:

By listening to this you acknowledge you are: Brian Davidson

I've been getting some annoying robot phonecalls recently on a daily basis. They always give me menu options to hear more, but never an option to tell them they got the wrong number (or some guy put down the wrong number). The robot leaves messages with half of their recorded message so when I was deleting a slew of them today I noticed one sounded very different from the rest, so I took a quick recording of it.

There's something almost melodic in how the robot says the name and the message is pretty amusing in the way it reads like the worst EULA ever and that part of it sounds like the Miranda Rights being read to you.

Here it is, enjoy:
[audio:http://images.metafilter.com/BrianDavidson.mp3|titles=Brian Davidson|artists=Brian Davidson]

Anyone that wants to download it and put some beats or throw it into a mix is welcome to this direct link to the file.

Globalization is freaking awesome

Chinese Hammer fucking rules, originally uploaded by mathowie.

I stumbled across Chinese Hammer tonight and fell in love with it for a thousand reasons. Just the thought of someone halfway around the world mimicking a video from 1989 in a move-for-move remake. Also, the mom on the couch crocheting, oblivious to the awesome dancing. Then I posted it to MetaFilter only to find there's a such thing as YouTube Doubler to play them side by side.



I captured the best bits in a short movie here. About 30 seconds in, things start matching up and it just keeps staying awesome for another minute or so.

update: cool, the dude has a ton of other videos (Thriller, more MC Hammer, etc)

The Future of the Music Business

In the age of the mp3, label musicians and the labels themselves are fighting for survival. As the cost of music is driven down to near zero, they're doing everything they can to reverse that trend -- and yet, the trend continues. I've been thinking about music costing effectively nothing and the future of the business and my musician friends for the past few weeks, and some half-assed ideas popped into my head.

Classical Music. Classical music is our future so take some time to consider it.

1. People rarely spend money on classical music itself. I bought a Bach or Mozart CD once when I was 19 when I needed background sound while studying. For the last few years, whenever I want to hear some classical, I just put on the one radio station that plays it or I pick any random classical listing in iTunes' streaming music area and let it play. It's basically free and plentiful.

2. Old classical music has no copyright, anyone can cover anything by Beethoven and not owe anyone a cut. You can remix sheetmusic from the 1700s all you want and call it your own. If you've got access to an orchestra and a recording device you can go nuts making music and never need a lawyer for any of it. Everything before 1923 is in the public domain: it's like a Creative Commons wet dream.

3. Classical music fans are tech savvy and embrace the internet. The majority of them rip music, and a sizable chunk own iPods and pay for downloads.

Despite these doomsday notions, classical music remains an industry and there are tens of thousands of professional classical musicians worldwide that make a living from it. It's not all glitz and glamor, but there are classical music labels that are doing alright and plenty of live events generate a decent amount of revenue even in modest-sized cities. There may not be crazy millionaire Kanye West platinum sellers (aside from maybe Yo Yo Ma?) in the classical set, but they're not all starving artists.

The popular music industry of the future isn't going to be anything like it is today, but if you're an indie rocker in 2007 worried about what the future might bring, don't listen to what the labels are saying, think more about the 2nd chair clarinet in the Berlin orchestra.

update: Andy was kind enough to send more evidence along: NYTimes, NPR, and The New Yorker all on how despite being plentiful and free like I mentioned, classical was the fastest growing segment of music sales last year, thanks in part to the tech savvy listeners paying for downloaded music.

Premixed

This is pretty cool, Colin Mutchler has released an album of his songs remixed by the CCMixter community.

CCMixter is pretty amazing stuff, but I don't think I got the UI right when we launched it. Here's Colin's history on CCMixter and you can see all the remixers that picked up his samples and tracks by following the links in gray boxes off to the right.

Subscription vs. piecemeal pricing of music

This week I actually suggested to someone that they avoid an iPod and instead buy something from Creative or iRiver. I know, I was shocked to hear myself say "well if you want unlimited music, no version of an iPod will work with that."

Here's the weird part -- at first I only suggested avoiding the iPod because they wanted to use Rhapsody, but the more I think about it, choosing to go with an unlimited music service seems like a smarter choice. I was glad to see Chris Anderson, editor of WIRED, talk about this last week as well.

For me and my maladjusted alpha geek friends, the idea of nearly unlimited music for the iPod is totally doable in the age of bittorrent, mp3 blogs, mp3 groups on usenet, and iTunes hacks like Ourtunes. We get almost all the music we want for free, and buy a few on the iTunes Music Store (and we go to rock shows and buy shirts and find other ways to repay the band) when we're not spending time ripping our large CD collections to high bitrate mp3 and swapping that with each other.

But for regular people that just use the internet for web information and email, locating tons of free music is a difficult task. When Yahoo or Napster or Rhapsody offers 1+ million songs for ~$10 a month, the iPod and iTunes Music Store starts to look like a ripoff in the long run.

This could be the undoing of Apple's cornering of the mp3 player market -- for a long time people have advocated a compulsory music license, where you pay $50 a year and you get all the music you want for free. The thinking behind it is that $50 x millions of broadband subscribers = more money than the music industry gets in album sales. And that's basically what these unlimited music services offer. Sure, you're merely "leasing" music because when you stop your membership, the music disappears, but all-you-can-download is what napster used to be back in the day, only this time it's crippled with DRM and there's a monthly fee. But it's still all the music you want, all the time, like napster used to be.

It seems like the music labels are always at war with Apple over pricing and I think I can see why. They prefer the subscription model where no one "owns" anything and files only work as long as you pay into it. Apple insists on letting people download copies (crippled with DRM yes, but you still get to keep the files and play them long after you pay for them) but you have to buy them ala carte, which can quickly get expensive for any music fan. And I think I see why the music industry wants to move to a subscription model -- selling albums or song downloads requires constantly coming up with new music to keep sales up. Sales are unpredictable without a constant stream of new stuff to buy, but if you get every listener on a subscription plan, that's money in the bank you can count on every month, regardless of whether or not Sting or Coldplay or 50 Cent ever do another album. Heck, most subscribers would still be paying ten bucks a month to hear old Steve Miller band tracks, as the back catalog would be the main draw in a subscription-based music business instead of the newest stuff.

Maybe I'm finally realizing that if I had to legitimately pay piecemeal for all the mp3s I've ever owned, I'd be spending thousands of dollars a year instead of the couple hundred I spend at the iTMS. Having unlimited downloads of over a million songs starts to sound pretty attractive at only ten bucks a month.

(totally weird sidenote: in my recollection, the big proponents of compulsory music licenses come mostly from the copyfight world but everyone I know from there uses an iPod)

Acts of Volition Radio comes to iTunes

(Acts of Volition on iTunes, originally uploaded by mathowie)

Thanks to the new podcasting features of iTunes, I get to enjoy my favorite audio program automatically, in iTunes. I found it under "Audio Blogs" in the podcasting directory.

iTunes Feature wish: podcast this artist

With the news that podcasting is coming to the next version of iTunes, I had an idea for how podcasting could be used to benefit both users looking for music and the iTunes store for selling music.

I got this idea when I realized how much I enjoyed a Grant Lee Phillips album in my music mix and what an outlier he is in my collection. I love folk music and this guy straddles the line between folk and country (and I'm not much of a fan of country). Anyway, I realized when I was hearing a track that I really need to track down his other stuff. That got me to thinking how I only hear about iTunes albums I should buy from friends that recommend them. I wondered why can't I tell iTunes to email me when he releases a new album?

Taking that further, I wondered if there was a way I could tell iTunes to buy a specific artist's new albums the moment they come out, automatically. Of course, then I realized it could be problematic if artists were releasing re-issues or greatest hits packages I might not be as interested in. Then it hit me: podcasting.

Podcasting is a great thing for amateur DJs and amateur broadcasting, but there are certainly useful aspects that companies could use to improve their business.

My hope is that iTunes 4.9 lets me subscribe to artists, and creates a podcast whenever they offer a free track off their new albums. This feature would be something like "auto-download any new Ben Folds track that is given away free" in a checkbox. Or heck, Apple could even just auto-subscribe me to download freebies for all the artists I've ever purchased off the iTunes Music Store.

As it stands now, I have to load up the main iTunes Music Store page to find the freebies and I only remember to go back once in a blue moon for new ones. Once in a while I find a new band there. It'd be great if I could get a podcast of the main iTunes freebies as well. If there's a free track in iTunes every time I start it up and I start hearing stuff I love I will most certainly buy more albums. Extra points if I can subscribe to all freebies by genre if I want to avoid uninteresting (to me) music. Granted, iTunes would have to loosen their one-freebie-a-week limit to every major artist with a new release.

The coolest aspect of podcasting to me is the nature of its automatic push-pull technology that fetches stuff for me. Just like my TiVo records shows it thinks I might like, I'd love it if my iTunes library had surprises in it every few days. Of course, the ultimate would be if iTunes could offer me free tracks from artists I have never heard of but would enjoy. iTMS knows what I own and iTunes knows what else I listen to ripped from CDs (they could be audioscrobbler if they wanted to). If there's a new album from some artist very closely aligned or contained in my library, grab their free track this week and have it waiting for me.

I guarantee I'll buy more music if my iTunes library suddenly becomes a tool to help me with new music discovery.

I'll miss you, OBJ

RIP: OBJ

He was my favorite jazz performer. I've seen lots of the greats before they died but his shows were always something special.

MLP: music

Doug egged me into this music meme that is spreading. I saw it first yesterday and thought it was kind of dumb, but in the past 24 hours I've found dozens more from folks I read and admire, and I've changed my tune -- it's turned out to be kind of cool. So here goes:

Total volume of music on my computer:
11.1Gb (2119 songs). It's mostly limited by my 40Gb hard drive on my powerbook. I regularly delete downloaded mp3s I don't like or don't listen to much anymore. About once a month I probably prune a few hundred songs, which get replaced as I collect more. My music library size might also be an artifact of having a 10Gb iPod for two years. Even though my current one is 20Gb, I always seem to hover between 9 and 11Gb in music.

The last CD I bought:
I don't buy CDs much anymore, opting for the iTMS or finding them online, but I actually bought The Dan Band off an ad on BoingBoing because I'm a sucker for silly covers and I loved the Total Eclipse bit that showed up in Old School. I read BoingBoing through a browser instead of RSS and I must admit I click on almost all their ads and this CD wasn't the first thing I've bought via them. Some people say BoingBoing looks like the side of a NASCAR but I find the ads useful.

Song playing right now:
I find and play a lot of random stuff and right now I am enjoying the Spamalot broadway recording. I wish I were in NYC and could see it live.

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
The Gold Finch and Red Oak Tree by Ted Leo & the Pharmacists (I have no idea what this song means but it sounds very pretty and I never tire of it)

Scared Straight by The Long Winters (the live KEXP version is my fave)

Frug by Rilo Kiley (off their first EP not on iTMS, but all their stuff is great)

Staten Island Ferry by Clyde Federal (I love unknown bands I find online that are great and deserve a bigger following)

Your Own Dot Org by Shannon Campbell (rediscovered this recently and fell in love with it all over again, everything about this is perfect)

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:
Kathryn Yu
Andy Baio
Lia Bulaong
Leonard Lin
Luke Seeman

Like a random royale with cheese

I have an aux input on my car stereo (thanks to Honda for putting one in at the factory -- I love my Element) so I've been using an iPod in it since I drove it off the dealer's lot. I noticed recently however, I prefer using my iPod shuffle over my 20Gb iPod.

I know it's less music and even less information about that music, but the shuffle mode beats the standard iPod shuffle mode. When I autofill my shuffle randomly from iTunes, I have it pick high rated songs more often, so when it plays, it's not a completely random sampling of my gigs of music like the full sized iPod, it's actually random music plus a bunch of songs I love. This means when I'm driving around 1 in every 4 songs or so are my absolute favorites (I'm miserly with my 5-star ratings) and makes for enjoyable driving. Now I just use the full sized iPod for long trips when I want to go from audiobooks to music or pick specific new albums, otherwise it's all shuffle all the time.

While I'm talking about my shuffle and iPod use, I heartily recommend Matt Webb's thoughts on his shuffle. Like him, I too wish the "next" button was the largest one on the device and I also feel much of the attraction of the blind shuffle playback is in the rediscovery of your own music.

Chaos with a side of order

Today I finally figured out how to use a shuffle in both predictable and unpredictable ways. A couple weeks ago I took a flight and I wanted to listen to 10 tracks that made up a short audiobook, but then load up the rest of my shuffle with 150 songs to listen to during other parts of the trip. The problem was, I couldn't figure out how to load certain tracks at the beginning, and play just those in order, while still being able to switch to random and fast forwarding through the occasional audiobook track amid the music mix. It's not that hard to accomplish, but there are a few sticking points I figured I'd share.

- Create a new playlist with your audiobook tracks, then add a bunch of songs and albums you want to hear to fill out the remainder of your shuffle.

- Fill your shuffle from that playlist. You must order the songs so that the audiobook tracks are first in the list. If you can't get this sort by clicking on any column headers, highlight the first column with numbers and drag the tracks one by one into the first slots in the list -- that's the only way to arbitrarily order tracks in iTunes. This is one "feature" I didn't learn until recently and seems to be lacking from playlists (even though every other software mp3 player lets you arbitrarily reorder tracks in playlists). It might be a royal pain to do this one by one, through hundreds of tracks. Be sure to update when you've got the order done before removing the shuffle.

- Now, if you want to jam to music, go to shuffle mode and enjoy. When you want to listen to your audiobook, switch to ordered mode (non-shuffle, first click on the switch) and hit the play button three times to go to the start of the playlist.

Sometimes you want order and chaos in the same package and that's how to do it. Even when I don't have an audio book on my shuffle, I like to find my favorite song of the moment and keep it as the first track, so at any point I can switch to ordered mode, hit play three times, then switch back to shuffle and hear it.

This week's best thing ever

Kelly Clarkson, the first American Idol winner, has a breakout hit called "Since U Been Gone" that you've probably heard. It's totally addictive and I think may just be this year's Hey Ya. Even my indie rock friends all adore the track (even Mike Doughty of Soul Coughing fame puts it in his top three favorites).

So when word got out that indie rock legend Ted Leo covered it, we searched and searched and a bounty was even offered. Eventually, it was found, at UGO.com. Worlds colliding!

I ripped the audio from the streaming video file on their site and here's the song: Ted Leo doing a cover of "Since U Been Gone" (192kbps, MP3)

It was worth the search and the wait.

Wrens promo out

I was happy to see Kathryn's documentary project just released a preview.

Merlin turned me onto The Wrens a year or so ago (and it looks like he'll be opening for them next month), and I've grown to love their music. The preview gives a good insight into the band and really does start to tell the story that basically boils down to "The Hoop Dreams of indie rock."

Congrats to the crew on getting this out.

Was the iPod even in Cambodia during xmas?

I can't help but notice that Napster's iPod attack ads bear an uncanny resemblance to political attack ads. The Napster ads don't tell you that their music files are loaded with DRM that won't let you really "own" the songs at all and they ignore that many folks rip their CD collection to their iPod for free.

They just shout from the highest mountaintops how their service is amazingly better (omitting all the obvious drawbacks) and the opponent device is the worst decision you could ever make. And like political opponents that have to face attack ads, if Apple does nothing, the Swift Napster Vets might actually gain traction and marketshare from the iPod. If Apple does come out with a response, they have to sink down to Napster's level and it doesn't jibe with ther type of advertising at all.

Hopefully all the folks that own iPods can educate their friends as to why the Napster ads are complete garbage and why it's an inferior format and device choice. But I have a strong feeling that like political ads, not everyone does their homework and looks for background on the merits and drawbacks of both choices, instead accepting ads on their face value.

I'm an iPod owner and I approve this message.

Shuffling confusion

Steven Levy over at Newsweek has a great article on the iPod's seemingly non-random random function. See I wasn't crazy when I wrote about the rock block, but I do recall a couple people wrote me explaining much of the same thing Levy heard. I took a few courses on statistics and understand how these things can happen, though they seemed to happen with such frequency that it seemed uncanny. Of course, like Ev, I remember when the Pyra music server seemed to play Cake incessantly, even though there were hundreds of other artists on the drive.

Random really is random, and it's human nature to make sense of it all, looking for patterns wherever you see them and doing your best to make order from the chaos. It's what humans do well and what I notice myself doing everyday.

My 2000+ song libary still constantly surprises me by playing

Steal it before it goes away

There no better news than hearing there's a new release from the Kleptones.

I haven't heard it yet, but just started the torrent downloading.

Update: It took hours to come down via BT (bittrickle). I've only gotten through three tracks, but it's amazing so far, tons of classic samples. And Andy's on it for a fast direct download. Highly recommended bit of illegal art.

Audioscrobbler - like an iPod shuffle for computers

I've been logging every song I listen to over on my audioscrobbler account for almost two years now, and I discovered a really cool random feature.

There's a feature called "Personal Radio" that lets you stream songs from a user's profile (you have to be logged in to see it, and you might need to donate to them to get it -- I donate $5 a month to Last.fm). Last night I was playing music from my own profile, on a computer that doesn't have any of my music collection locally. I expected to hear my current collection streaming back at me, but what I was heard was a randomized collection of all the music I've heard in the last six years of mp3 use.

I didn't realize it, but Audioscrobbler has a record of every song I've ever listened to, which currently numbers about 5400 songs. My current iTunes collection only contains 1800 songs, because I do a monthly delete of songs I no longer care for as I add new ones. I completely forgot about my 1999 era music archives I heard on two other computers in the past two years, but no longer listen to.

What's cool about this is that I can log into Audioscrobbler from any computer on earth and start streaming my entire all-time music collection without having anything more than a player that understands music streams.

Best of the net music for 2004

I want to spare you from reading another indie-heavy best of 2004 music list, so instead of recounting my absolute favorite albums this year, I decided to highlight all the little guys I enjoyed this year. These are my favorite unsigned or small label bands that started out as a person in their apartment with a PC and a website. The real indies, if you will.

Citizens Here and Abroad - Their debut is so consistent that I still spin this in my daily mix, and I love their video. They also do a great high energy show.

Goh Nakamura - A guy with a PC and a guitar (and a boatload of effects pedals I hear) making delightful music. It's like coffee spot folk music, but with a sense of humor and an undercurrent of romance. Lots of catchy little love songs on his debut.

Say Hi To Your Mom - I bought his first album via paypal on his site last year, and now he's on a little label and I picked up the new one at the iTunes Music Store. The new release is even better than the first and I'm happy to hear he's on a small label and doing east coast tours.

Fredo Viola - I found out about this guy from this incredible music video he shot for his Sad Song. He used the 15 second animated-gif function of a cheap nikon digital camera to shoot the entire thing and it's a clever use of simple tech to produce something that looks fantastic. It was good enough to get me to buy the album, which is great. It's got an ephemeral sound, sorta like a male Enya or something with tons of vocal layering. Fantastic driving music, I find.

Dealership - The dealership kids finally got their third album out on a small label and toured the country with it. It's fantastic and also has a great video for my favorite track on the disc.

Magnatune - not an album or band, but an internet label that offers downloadable samples and a sliding pay scale. Discs I enjoyed in 2004 from this small outfit included Cargo Cult, Emma's Mini, and the Magnatune Remixed disc. If you're ever at a conference they're at, try out their genre sampler CDs, or just listen to their entire catalog stream.

Worth a mention: I discovered Brad Sucks last fall so it can't make it into this 2004 list, but I still hear his songs everyday in my monster mix and enjoy them all. It's still a wonder his music hasn't caught on like wildfire with a label.

Bands that put sites between themselves and fans

Merlin's post about the Five Mistakes Band & Label Sites Make is incredibly spot on and mirrors my own problems finding samples from new bands to listen to, finding tour dates in my town, and trying to find tickets to shows.

The only bands I can think of that do it right are The Long Winters, Dealership, Citizens Here and Abroad, and Sloan.

You can easily and quickly find MP3s to download, show dates including location maps and 21+/all-ages info, and Sloan even offers RSS feeds of their tour dates, so you can set the subscription in your reader and forget about it until they tour again.

That all four band sites were built by folks connected closely to blogging probably has something to do with their extreme utility and good balance between usability and artistic design.

Rock Block!

Every once in a while, iTunes seems to start playing two tracks from the same album in a row, even though I've got it on a global shuffle, going through 1600 tracks. It seems to happen periodically, and I wonder if somewhere in the darkest reaches of the iTunes codebase they've written a "Twofer Tuesday" routine to give me this kind of non-randomness once a week.

It can't just be me

Am I the only one that hears U2's new song, where Bono starts it off chanting "uno dos tres catorce!!!" and instantly thinks he sounds like an idiot?

Maybe to an irishman that doesn't speak spanish the way the words kind of rhyme sounds good, but when I hear it, I translate it, and any song that starts "One... Two... Three... Fourteen!!!" sounds really dumb.

Get Your Folk On

If you're in Seattle, Portland, or the Bay Area, do yourself a favor and catch Scott Andrew's mini West Coast Tour that starts tonight and runs through the middle of next week.

If you've never heard his stuff, he offers it all for download and streaming (under a CC license too) so give it a listen. He's giving away a new CD at shows too.

Where are they now?

American born, Venezula raised, Cuban influenced Nil Lara's self-titled debut was my favorite CD in 1997. I played it several thousand times that year after I saw him open for Rusted Root and it's been critically acclaimed since its release. I was reminded by him today and figured he must have released a few more albums by now, but amazon still only lists his one label disc from '96.

Finally I stumbled upon his new site. From the looks of it, he lost his recording contract and is doing a new "indie" album only via postal mail in small quantites, starting this month. That's unfortunate, but I'll be sending my $16 in.

It's weird, he had a broad fanbase way back when and I bet he could draw in all sorts of american and latin american audiences, but here he is selling small runs from someone's apartment in 2004. Maybe he had the worst management in music or the label didn't know what to do with him.

Woop!

I just heard that Dealership's third album (that's been in the can for about a year) is coming out this summer on Turn Records, with a tour to follow.

Best news I've heard all week.

I get more hits in a week than you get all year

I've joked with friends about someday doing hip-hop style boasting songs related to blogging, for shits and giggles but this joke dis song is hilarious. "Calling out" another blogger with all the pomp and shit-talking of classic hip-hop battles. "Watch your trackback" is the best line ever.

dead, dead, dead

Wow, they really did kill MP3.com. So much of the net's history gone in a flash, I do hope they create some mechanism (that isn't laden with DRM) to bring back music hosting for anyone that can record a song at home on their PC.

I bet GarageBand.com takes off in the absence of MP3.com, they were like a better version, though they require users and musicians to actively participate for it to work.

Free Culture!

I helped put together the new Creative Commons CD featuring all sorts of great licensed music, and it's all available for download.

Now that the pool of CC-licensed music has grown, we had a great deal of choices and as a result there are all sorts of songs in the mix. I've been listening to these songs for months and it's hard to pick favorites, they've all got some strengths. Don't miss the bonus remixes too, the creativity there was amazing.

Back when MTV still played music

I'm buying all three of these DVDs the day they come out. The Gondry clip is unbelievable.

Shannon on the new porn/guitar ads

She's a porn star, for crying out loud - she's good with fingers AND can take direction. And seriously - get that girl a pick. Porn stars are also good with props. She can handle a pick.

-- Shannon Campbell

Brad Sucks (not in the least)

A couple months ago I picked up the Brad Sucks CD based on Scott's recommendation, before I heard a single note.

It sat around for a few weeks until one day I decided to rip the disc into iTunes and toss it into the random work mix. It spun for a week and it wasn't until I looked for the songs today that I realized what I've been enjoying all week. I have a few John Vanderslice and Folk Implosion albums in my library and I assumed the songs I heard and liked were one of those bands, but it was all Brad. "Making Me Nervous" is my current favorite song on earth. It sounds like the best of Folk Implosion and the rest of the Brad Sucks disc is really good too.

It's well worth the five bucks, and once again I'm amazed at the full sound a record-at-home musician can create. The days of multi-million dollar recording studios and thousands of dollars per hour rental fees are dead. Now it's just a cheap PC, a little equipment, a little software, and some expertise to make music.

Cozying up to JT

For me personally, one mark of a good writer is their ability to describe a world I know nothing about, and do so in a way that is so interesting I want to find out more. Susan Orlean springs to mind as an expert at doing this, and many writers at Harpers and The New Yorker can do similar things.

I've never heard a single Justin Timberlake song (perhaps as background music in a store -- maybe) and had no interest in changing that. He's a boyband superstar that sings mindless pap, right? But after reading Anil's review of his recent NYC show I seeked it out and gave it a listen.

JT's stuff isn't bad at all, in fact I'm amazed how much it sounds like honest to goodness R&B and nothing like what I thought it would sound like. Thanks Anil, I never would have given this a listen otherwise.

eMusic a better Apple Music Store?

While I've heard about eMusic for ages, I never signed up due to the small selection back in the day. With these two reviews, I'm thinking it's almost time to consider signing up for it. I had no idea they had so many independent label artists, and every song downloaded is a 192kbps MP3s, without any DRM baked in.

Those crazy dealerkids, at it again

Last week, I got an IM from Scott saying "dealership is on the radio, now!" After seeing them play the previous week, I was happy to hear a couple of the new songs again.

I noticed on dealership's bulletin board that someone captured the whole show as mp3s and posted them here. In case that person's bandwidth is a problem, I mirrored the files on my own server, and also wanted to give archive.org's new Freecache service a test run.

Freecache is supposed to be an opensource/free Akamai-style caching service. It should also help with local and peer mirroring like bittorrent, but doesn't require any client software or registering with any central authority. It looks pretty freaking cool.

Oh, and Dealership's 80s-style cover of their own song Jungle Gym is to die for.

VW does mp3

VW just sent me a post card annoucing their new "PhatNoise Digital Car Audio System" is available at dealers. Looks like an interesting system that acts like a CD changer you store in the trunk with "cartridges" that must be hot swappable hard drives. The prices look pretty steep for just 20Gb of music, and there's not much in the way of details. I wonder if it plays plain old MP3s or if it requires a DRM-laden format.

I also wonder how they kept this under the radar. I've never heard of these (unfortunately named) "Phatnoise" systems until today.

Another bump in profits?

I wonder if the music industry's embrace of the Apple Music store was due to them realizing MP3s could be another lucrative (to them) format shift for customers. Music fans have gone from LPs to 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs, and now to MP3. Electronically-distributed music is semi-permanent at best (what do you do when a hard drive fails? Will you be able to play the tracks three years from now?) and there is plenty of past precedence to show how much the movie and music industry love selling easily destructible formats to consumers, who often have to re-purchase the music later on.

24 hours with the iPod

After a 1400 mile trip with the iPod setup in the Jetta, I had mostly positive reactions.

I heard a lot of bad reviews of various FM transmitter products for the iPod, and decided to go with the Belkin Tunecast after hearing a couple positive reviews. It transmits your iPod audio on one of four FM stations, 88.1, 88.3, 88.5, and 88.7. That was enough of a range where only in Berkeley, CA did I find trouble getting one of those bands entirely clear (there are a lot of university, non-profit, and religious radio stations at that end of the dial). It wasn't too difficult to jump to 88.7 if I was using 88.1 and got taken over by Jesus talk, though I'd usually wait for a straight, open piece of road to fumble with the buttons. I also picked up an auto charger from belkin that worked flawlessly.

While the FM spectrum does cut off some of the high and low end sound, the bigger obvious problem was the occasional interference and hiss sound if the radio volume was up high while the iPod was lower. I would definitely prefer to connect the headphone port directly into an auxillary input on my car's stereo, if there was one. The other big problem was holding the iPod in place, where I could still see it while I was driving. I heard this Radio Shack cell phone holder worked well, but the stock Jetta cup holders did a fairly good job. The biggest problem seemed to be the smooth chrome case, which slipped around in the cupholders as road vibrations shook it slightly.

I'm actually surprised at that last point. Apple is selling lots of iPods, and as people integrate them into their lives, they'll need lots of products that I can't seem to find. I know there are tons of cases and holders for iPods, but in search after search at Google, I can't find a decent neoprene pack to run with my iPod, I can't find an easy way to integrate it with my home stereo (beyond a mini-headphone-to-rca cable), and I can't find a kit to add an aux-in to my Jetta's stock stereo system (and a nice in-car holder). I know there's a cottage industry of iPod-related products, but I can't seem to find any good ones.

update: a couple people emailed to mention the VWvortex forums, and this post in particular. It mentions some great mounts and CD Changer inputs.

iPod, uPod, we allPod

Last night I finally broke down and bought my first iPod. The reasons were necessity, as I've got a string of 10+ hour roadtrips ahead of me and need some serious music storage in the car.

In the 12 hours that I've owned and used it, I've come to appreciate all the features people have written about in the past. I didn't know I owned that much music and figured the 10gig model was plenty (it's over 3 days of music, afterall), but I find myself scavenging any song I can to put on the device. When I hear a new song I want it on the iPod immediately, and in a matter of hours I only had a couple gigs left on it. The interface is amazing, and actually scales pretty well when you have 1700 songs on it. It's not too difficult to find a single album or set the entire collection on random (how I normally listen to music). The iTunes integration is incredible. You pull the iPod out of the package, plug it into your firewire port and it does everything automatically after that, finding the iPod and loading all your music into it.

I hope Apple has a healthy markup on this device because while I was in the Palo Alto store buying one, three people ahead of me were doing the same thing (and we all had to wait for them to pull more iPods "from the back" since the shelves were bare). While I waited in line for five minutes, I saw about $2,000 change hands as people picked up their new devices to jog with, to give away as graduation presents, and to upgrade from older models.

Rockit

If you like hip-hop, you won't believe how fucking good Scratch is. It's a comprehensive history of DJing, from the early 70's in Brooklyn to the current day west coast. I'm kicking myself for missing so much of it going on in my backyard of San Francisco.

Someone finally gets it

I'm ecstatic to see Apple launch its music service. It may be too early to say, but from looking at the apple site (can't get onto the service right now -- too busy) the service appears to comply with almost every request I laid out last year in a music article. Ideally, it'd be nice if the songs were 50 cents each, but a buck isn't bad, and I can't wait to enjoy the convenience of hearing about a new artist or album, going onto the service, and having my own copies of the songs in a few minutes for a reasonable price (even if CDs will cost as much as physical media, which they clearly should not).

Kudos apple for sticking your neck out and getting the ball rolling on changing a dying industry.

update: Crap, it uses a DRM-loaded AAC format instead of mp3 so I can't share it with my PC player. Even though winamp does read AAC files, it appears that both version 2 and 3 of winamp can't play a song bought on this service. Attempts to play a song in iTunes 4 that a friend bought required that I know his apple store login to play it as well.

Swap Meet

After reading about the MetaFilter CD Swap in this New York Times article a couple months back, I decided to finally take part. I put together a list of songs for the past week, and tonight I sat down to rip five copies of it, I printed up inserts and put it all together. The final bit was writing linear notes to go with the URL I put in the inserts. Here's my contribution for the Spring swap.

Tomorrow's the shipping deadline and I've already gotten two great CDs in the mail from my group's five members. If you're a member of MetaFilter and love music, give it a try.

Chilling vision of the future

The other day, Anil mentioned to me a Public Enemy B-side release from 1994 that should have been a single release or at least on a major album. He sent me a copy of it, and after looking around online for info on the track, I couldn't find much. I was so amazed by this track that tonight I decided to pop open BBEdit and transcribe it myself. If you can find a copy of this track on any P2P network, check it out. Harry Allen and Chuck D had the industry totally figured out in 1994, but unfortunately no one did anything to stop it. Transcript ahead:

Harry Allen's Interactive Superhighway Phone Call To Chuck D
(added emphasis where I heard it)

"Chuck, Hi, it's Harry Allen here. I just got your message regarding the Musician articles, and I'm glad you read it, and I'm glad you get it.

There's just a couple of things. I think one, these are issues that are increasingly pertinent. It's kind of like a situation where the technology is changing; the way people use information is changing, how they get information... all the options available to you.

...And the music industry is shoring up, that is to say, the people like [can't make it out]... who has probably been the most vocal about these issues... they're making sure they are ahead of the technological and legal curve so that by the time anyone in the general public, whether it be Q-tip, yourself, Bruce Springsteen, George Michael knows what is going on, and sees how the whole process is going towards decentralization.

That is to say: you don't have monopolies on this anymore because the equipment to do it will be available to anybody, just the same way the equipment to make a hip-hop record is available to anybody and a hit can come from any direction.

I think what the music companies are trying to do is make sure that legally, and financially, and in terms of information... that they own, or are ahead of the curve so that by the time that everyone else catches on, they'll already own enough to make sure that you still have to play their game.

And so, these are things I'm really interested in... and I'm interested in seeing you know what... if part of what is interesting is keeping ahead of the situation.

Of course, a lot of technology you read about doesn't exist yet, or is in crude form, but much of it is starting to. And the whole thing is -- again -- I mean at one time CDs were expensive to make and CD players were expensive, but you know, as things go on, the costs come down. And what we're talking about ultimately is you know, a shift in the way this music is distributed.

So I'm glad you got these things and I'm glad you read it, and it's something I'm going to be talking about a lot more... trying to band artists together, and I hope that you'll study these issues... and that you'll be able to talk about them eloquently, as you do everything else, 'cause this is as important as contracts... um, (laugh) black power... among everything else.

Also... the book, I'll get that going, and I look forward to speaking with you soon. Sorry I'm taking up all your answering machine time on your voicemail and your beeper, but I don't have the number for you, because I don't know how to work your home phone.

Ok, Harry Allen... out. Give me a call when you're ready."

Community Rawkin'

The other day on MetaFilter, someone created, recorded, and posted a song they wrote in response to something they read on the site. I was impressed and figured there were probably more musically-inclined people on the site than I thought, so I floated the idea of a place to hold their songs.

It's up now at music.metafilter.com, and I gotta say, there are some talented motherfuckers here.

Go MTU

I'm impressed by the Michigan Tech University President and his response to the recording industry. I never thought I'd see a college president going to bat for a single rogue student running a filesharing network, but it sure looks like the proper procedures were already in place (based on suggestions of the RIAA), but the RIAA chose to ignore them to make their point.

MP3 killed the hidden track

In the early 90's, it seemed like every CD's last track included either a wacky cover song, improvisational acoustic number, or musician shenanigans recorded in the studio, hidden after minutes of dead time. While it went out of favor a few years later, it still pops up every now and then.

Today I found myself listening to a mp3 that featured 8 minutes of dead silence before a half-finished song popped up and I realized it's probably one of the only mp3s I own that features such a thing. It makes no sense to have 5 minutes of music (total) take up 15 megabytes (mostly of silence) due to the hidden nature of the last segment. I'm curious if the advent of mp3 did anything to speed up the death of the hidden music track or if I just fell out of favor naturally.

Karaoke trainwreck

Thanks to Andy, I can't stop watching, listening, and winching at the NOLA.com Karaoke cam.

It's only 5pm in New Orleans right now, but there have been enough drunken singers to make it worth keeping open in a background window for the past hour or so. It's fun to IM with friends occasionally that are also listening ("dude, check out the wifebeater singing dead or alive!"). The site would be great if they offered live chat with others watching it, and maybe a "rate this singer" hot-or-not system integrated.

It's a million times worse than American Idol, but lots of fun to watch. And remember: when you can't sing the right notes, just sing them as loud as possible.