Singer launches career on eBay - "A young Indian singer has managed to raise enough money to release his debut album by selling shares in his future royalties on the internet site eBay."

Cringely Podcasting and Blogging - interesting column by Cringely about the market demand for (video) podcasting and blogging and how it's changing his gig.

Crimewire is Louise W. Klinker's proposed Limewire skin that reorganizes the P2P app into a different light. For instance instead of there being a "Library" of what you've downloaded, it's called your "Criminal record". Crimewire would track how much you owe each band and record label and you have a Justification Profile:

The last new function is the "Justification Profile". This section is the most fictional part of CrimeWire and based upon a point system. When you input your salary, number of records in collection, amount of vinyl in collection, number of concerts you go to per year etc. it returns the amount of money it is fair for you to "steal" for per day.

I like it, it's pretty funny. I'd also like to see aggregated stats of how much all downloads on the service are costing individual artists and labels, damage you're doing to the economy, the amount you would be fined for the material you've uploaded and maybe how much you're hurting Coldplay's feelings.

Stay Free! has a great interview with Amy Sewell, writer and producer of the movie Mad Hot Ballroom, about the hell they had to go through to clear all the music in the movie:

If filmmakers have to worry about these things, documentaries will cease to be documentaries! What happens when the girls go shopping and there's music playing in the stores? We were lucky because in our movie the music wasn't identifiable, but otherwise what are we supposed to do: walk up to the store manager and say, "Excuse me but can you turn off your radio?"

I've been meaning to see this movie, I hadn't even thought of this aspect. Very interesting.

The professionally manufactured I Don't Know What I'm Doing CD is now available for ordering from my little Brad Sucks store. Thanks to everybody who pre-ordered -- your albums have been shipped and now I'm pretty sure pressing the album wasn't a total waste of time and money. And what more can a boy ask for.

The professionally manufactured CD of my album I Don't Know What I'm Doing is now available for orders. It's ten bucks plus shipping. I made enough money giving my music away for free -- through licenses and digital sales and donations -- that it was possible to press up some sexy CDs.

For a long time people have asked me to sell a "professional" copy of the album and I'm happy to finally be able to provide one. Thanks to everyone who helped make it possible.

I've been reading a lot about Findory's Adsense targeting. Some are alternately impressed and upset that they can't feed their own keywords into Google Adsense ads. (See here and here.) A few weeks ago I discovered a way to accomplish this sort of thing without having a premium Adsense account. I ran it by Google and they've OK'd it so now I feel compelled to share. Let me take you on a magical journey of nerdiness...

Better targeting

Google may not let regular publishers feed the Adsense ads specific keywords, but there's a neat technique I noticed a few weeks ago on the new Feedtagger.com (a very slick aggregator). I've checked with Google and been told this method isn't a violation of the terms of service, so hopefully the webmaster of Feedtagger won't mind me pointing his clever implementation out.

I noticed when clicking around on the the popular tags list on the left side of Feedtagger.com that a) the ads were refreshing without a page reload and b) the ads were eerily targeted to the keyword you clicked on. Try clicking "politics" or "food" for good examples. Pretty amazing targeting for such a noisy page. Any webmaster who's struggled with Adsense relevancy would be intrigued.

How it works

Curious, I looked through the source and found that the Google ad itself was in an IFRAME that's dynamically refreshed with Javascript. The default URL displayed in the IFRAME is:

http://www.feedtagger.com/search.php?search=null

Which displays a blank page with "null" in the title. When you click on, say the "food" tag, however, it refreshes that IFRAME to:

http://www.feedtagger.com/search.php?search=food

Which puts the word 'food' in the title and a Google ad on an otherwise blank page. The ad is then perfectly targeted to the word in the title. Replace the word "food" in the URL with any keyword and you'll see relevant ads (as long as relevant ads exist).

This is pretty cool. And obviously, extending this out, if you wanted to clone Findory's behavior you could dynamically load personalized keywords into the title tags of the IFRAME as the user clicks around the site so that the ads would be customized to the user's profile. I have no idea how Google would feel about that, though.

Warning

As I said, I did ask Google about this technique of forcing the relevancy of Adsense ads and they said it was "not a violation of any program policies". But they added:

However, please keep in mind that AdSense publishers may not display Google ads on pages that include the use of excessive, repetitive, or irrelevant keywords in the content or code of their pages.

I assume they're fine with FeedTagger's usage because it's very good about only using this technique to increase the relevancy of the ads rather than trying to hit high value keywords or other shady practices. Using this to scam your way into more money will probably get you kicked out.

So allegedly there's a Yahoo! Music hack that lets you get DRM-free songs. I've been wondering how long it was going to be until there was some sort of issue like this. I thought it might take the form of sales misreporting from digital download services, but this one would work too.

So is Yahoo! liable for damages to musicians if there's a security hole and their songs get downloaded without DRM?

This Reuters article describes how mobile phones are getting integrated into live shows. Artists can make exclusive offers available through phones and also fans can send SMS messages that then appear on the big concert screen for everyone to see.

The companies first worked together on a promotion for Anastacia in Europe. Renshaw said the initiative generated thousands of messages at each concert at a cost to users of 1 euro ($1.26) each. He estimated that 10 percent of the audience participated.

Very neat and takes advantage of people increasingly having these little buying devices on them all the time.

Derek Sivers from CD Baby has some sorta depressingly obvious news: cover songs sell the best on the digital download services. Derek claims the top selling independent artists are ones that do covers of well-known songs that people search for, therefore stumbling onto the new artists who have covered them.

So now, I'm advising musicians to do a creative cover song on their next album. Find something that hasn't been done TOO much. (Example: CD Baby has 762 versions of "Amazing Grace". Really!) Find something that you can add your unique twist to. Then make sure to include it on a full-length album, so that people who discover you by that song can get turned on to your own music, and buy the whole collection.

Derek's probably 100% right that that's what an aspiring artist should do, but now the idea of doing covers kinda creeps me out.

Matt Mullenweg writes about getting screwed by the copy protection on the new Dave Matthews CD. Non-nerds (such as my mom) have even been complaining to me about this sort of thing. Makes me wonder how well the record companies think it's working.

I went to a lot of record label websites tonight looking at shopping carts. When I was on the Warner site I noticed that ringtones are given almost equal prominence to the actual band stores. A Flaming Lips ringtone is $2.50, which of course is 150% the price of a song on iTunes. That is nuts to me.

Yahoo! Music launched today. It's a five dollar a month music subscription service, WMA format only, so you can't use it on your iPods. It also uses your existing Yahoo! ID, so if you've got one of those, you're already logged in. Lately I've been tempted by these subscription services (such as Rhapsody). Buying tracks with DRM on them still seems a bit backwards to me, but the ability to stream any music I'm interested in sounds great. Unfortunately none of them appear to be available in Canada, so that's one less decision I have to make.

Oh yeah and my album is here.

What goes up... is an entertaining (but oh so cynical) Guardian article about the rise and fall of "Firework bands" (aka one hit wonder indie bands) complete with a timeline and a PDF of the career trajectory of The Thrillers, a fictional firework band. This paragraph on music fans is amusingly brutal:

Anyone who does manage to become genuinely successful faces stratospheric expectations for their next record. Consider the Music, the Vines or the Polyphonic Spree, all of whom delivered more-of-the-same follow-ups to a withering lack of interest. Music-making has become a kind of gladiatorial combat, in which bands battle for attention while record-buyers casually tilt their thumbs up or down, forever craning their necks to examine the next contestant hovering at the arena entrance.

It's true that there's an awful lot of this going on -- the turnover rate for new exciting bands appears to be accelerating. Though at the same time it seems like most of those bands and labels over-spend to achieve something that was never meant to last, so what did they expect?

My album's included on the just-released Magnatune Tuneplug (the Rock Music Collection Volume One). It's a reusable USB flash drive that comes pre-loaded with the top 10 selling rock albums on Magnatune. Included are albums from Artemis, Arthur Yoria, Brad Sucks, Burnshee Thornside, Emmas Mini, Fluid, Jade Leary, Myles Cochran, The Kokoon and Tom Paul.

It comes in various sizes, but it's $70 US for the 512MB model. I seem to remember that it'll be available at some retail outlets, but you can read more about it and buy it online here.

How to Sell on Amazon - good writeup on how to get your book, CD or DVD on Amazon. Looks like it's $30 a year and they take 55%.

After getting a bunch of email over my micropatronage post the other day, I've been giving some more thought to Kottke's micropatronage concept as it relates to music. I think we can all agree that the Internet has blown music distribution wide open and that physical CDs are rapidly being replaced by digital downloading. It's also unlikely that DRM or legal threats will do much to stop the flow of music on the net. If these things are true, musicians are going to need a system of making money that doesn't rely on controlling the distribution of music.

THE MODEL

Think about PBS. PBS is viewer funded television content. When you donate X amount of dollars, you get an over-priced tote bag, but it's understood that the tote bag is a gift for your donation; you're not actually purchasing it. Thanks to donations, PBS continues to exist and make programming that everyone can enjoy for free, regardless of whether they contributed or not.

What if music were to switch to the PBS model? What if we replace tote bags with actual CDs by the artist?

THE APPLICATION

How it might work: the musician gives up on selling CDs via retail and gives his music away losslessly (FLAC/ISO) and for free on the Internet. Anyone can download it. Fans who donate, lets say a rough amount of $30, receive a "free" (as in tote bag) physical copy of the same CD, with real packaging, liner notes, etc.

PROS

Assuming this could work, here are some of the up sides:

• It lets artists distribute their music freely. All artists I know would love to do this. They all want new fans, and charging for access to the art is counter-intuitive.
• Internet trading of music (including net radio, podcasting, mp3 blogs) would directly benefit the artist as it would increase the possibility of getting more supporters.
• Allows artists to be directly supported by their fans. No RIAA, no record labels, no corporate interests, no middle-men, just keep your fans happy.
• Lower overhead. If you stop trying to sell CDs, you avoid retail chain gouges, record label fees. More money goes directly to the artist.
• CDs are less and less useful as a music distribution method, but still have value as a permanent physical copy of the music and also for things like the artwork and the liner notes.
• The system benefits artists that have good will from consumers, disposable pop music might not do so well.
• You can still sell the music digitally via iTunes, etc, to casual music consumers.

CONS

There are also some potentially negative aspects:

• May be a difficult mental shift. Will people think it's a $30 CD and be outraged?
• It means you cut out the possibility of retail sales or else you devalue your CD gift and anger the people who paid a premium to receive it.
• I assume only a small percentage of people would opt into this, so a large fanbase would be required to make a living.

SUMMARY

All in all, I think the pros far outweight the cons in this system.

If it could work, I'm pretty sure you'd wind up with a more logical and pure music system, where artists are supported by the goodwill of their fans, where Internet distribution benefits rather than harms artists and where CDs are still created but are used for what they're becoming -- a boutique item with more sentimental than practical value.

Metafilter's freaking out about it, but Jason Kottke's idea of macropatronage is an interesting one. The idea is essentially that regular folks can sponsor Jason so that he can go about blogging and doing web projects full-time. The write-up:

I'm attempting to revisit the idea of arts patronage in the context of the internet. Patrons of the arts have typically been wealthy individuals, well-heeled foundations, or corporations. As we've seen in many contexts, the net allows individuals from geographically dispersed locations to aggregate themselves for any number of reasons. So, when you've got a group of people who are interested in a particular artist, writer, etc., they should be able to mobilize over the internet and support that person directly instead of waiting around for the MacArthur Foundation or Cosimo de Medici to do it.

Whether Jason "deserves" to live off of his work or not is ultimately up to fans and supporters, which to me is about as pure as it gets. If you're not big on him, try to think of an artist you love and ask yourself how much you'd be willing to pay to keep that artist doing his or her thing for the next year or more.

Donations of course aren't a new idea, but I think the micropatronage term is an interesting switch in the fan/artist dynamic. "Donations" in context of the arts sounds like a tip -- "the artist is clearly doing okay on his or her own, but here's a bit extra." "Patronage" however sounds more serious -- like the work couldn't have existed without it.

Jason's doing it for something relatively intangible too, which should be of interest to musicians as the Internet is rapidly making music intangible. If you believe CDs are dying and want artists to resist DRM, the only thing musicians might soon have left under their control is whether new music gets made or not. Maybe micropatronage fits into that somehow.

Jazz Composer Nabs Grammy After Web-Only Sales. Crazy! Maria Schneider sold 10,000 copies and it cost $87,000 to make the album, which was apparently put up by fans via the ArtistShare service. I hadn't heard about ArtistShare before, it seems to be mostly adult contemporary artists. Interesting phenomenon. For $87,000 I could blow $1,000 on recording and $86,000 on securing myself a Grammy.

Got an email from Derek Sivers at CD Baby regarding MP3tunes. Turns out MP3tunes was listed as "Lindows" on the companies my album had been shipped to, so that explains that. Also it looks like the catalog is exclusively CD Baby artists and Derek says the artist cut is "the usual 65 cents per song, $6.50 per full-album", which is higher than it says in the FAQ and would be as high a cut as iTunes despite the purchase price being lower.

A cool feature: "All music purchased at MP3tunes remains in the user's "Music Locker" so they can enjoy unlimited download access to their MP3tunes music library from any web browser at anytime. There is no additional charge for users to re-download their music from their Music Locker."

Express URLs are handy AND dandy: http://www.mp3tunes.com/BradSucks

I played around with it a little more and here's my list of usability complaints:

• Titles and artist names are truncated too heavily, widen it up. (As ranted a bit more about here.)
• The horizontal sliding browsing thing, while cute, isn't user friendly. It's annoying to look through large lists. And combined with the tiny title length, I can barely read a full title anyway.
• When I click on preview links in Firefox I'm prompted to download the 30 second mp3 clip and then need to go open it manually. It shouldn't be hard to make this stream automatically.
• Severely limited number of CDs it shows me on genre pages, unless you count ones you see when you horizontally browse, which I don't because it's annoying.

All of those points make for a pretty crummy browsing experience and seem like easy things to change.