There has been some discussion (1, 2) about my comments in my 2006 resolutions. When I said that rants about the music industry are depressing and exhausting to me, that's all I meant. I'm not saying everyone should shut up or that there's nothing to complain about, just that I personally find it hard to read these days. As a shaky musician analogy, it's kind of like watching your parents fight. Fans are your mom, looking out for your emotional well-being, trying to keep you from getting hurt, and the music industry is your dad, telling you to straighten up, quit your bitching and get a job. I'm sure both sides have great points and both mean well, but I'd rather not be in the house while it's going down.
Yahoo! acquires WebJay - congrats to Lucas. Link goes to a short interview with him.
We're well into the new year now but I'm still technically on vacation. I'm trying to get caught up on email and a lot of things I've been putting off forever. Also my Wordpress 2.0 upgrade is still breaking in places (such as the full text RSS feed). 2005 was a pretty big one for me, a lot more action-packed than usual. A lot of life developments as well as a remix album as well as starting to play live (which has gone nicely so far thanks to the help of Bruce, Richard and Rob.)
I'm not generally into New Years resolutions, but I have a few music-related goals this year:
1. Finish my next album. I've been a bit paralyzed by even the minor expectations that it not completely blow. When I started doing music I was totally alone and there was little to no risk. Now there's a bit more and I guess I'm a huge baby who can't handle anything. Anyhow, this year I'll try to plow ahead regardless. And when people tell me my old stuff was better I'll become a Scientologist.
2. Blog better. I was blogging a lot about the music industry (particularly the online aspect) but in the past year I've become completely exhausted by it. I find most anti-RIAA and anti-DRM rants depressing these days and any time I go to blog one I eventually wind up quitting half way through. I'll try to find something else to fill the void but it may all be about Katamari Damacy.
3. Try to make some actual money. Through being a scaredy-cat and doing everything on my own and maybe some decent planning along the way, I'm not in the hole like a lot of my musician friends, but trying to justify spending the amount of time I do on this is getting more and more hilarious. In 2006 I would like Brad Sucks to be bought by Google or Yahoo! or even Ask Jeeves as the first ever Search Engine House Band. Which would be the true start of Music Industry 2.0.
Anyway, hope you all have a great 2006.
Playing around with the recently launched Google Base, I managed to jam my album in there. In the future I think musicians will no longer tour, instead they'll spend all their time traveling from website to website submitting their albums and songs to various services.
Click your mouse, say yeah! - interesting/funny investigative article on the online indie music scene. Goblin Cock gets a mention.
I Don't Know What I'm Doing is now available on Amazon.com. Better late than never.
CD Baby teams with Best Buy - CD Baby albums can now be purchased via Best Buy's website. Sweet!
American Idol Underground Legal Stuff - there's some outrage over this American Idol Underground service. CD Baby suggested it, I can't remember if I signed up.
Hey look, it's the Brad Sucks Online Collaboration Contest, brought to you by KillYourFM Magazine and MyVirtualBand.com. Here's how to participate.
MyVirtualBand.com is a site I think I've talked about before. Its main goal is to hook up potential musical collaborators and get them working on songs together. For this competition thing, I've provided the source to my song Dirtbag. People can now collaborate with it or re-record everything or do whatever the like with it. Entries will be judged and so on. Here's how to participate.
After a few people told me to do it, my album I Don't Know What I'm Doing is "Podsafe" now. You can find it here. Complaint #1: there seems to be basically an unlimited number of sites for musicians to upload their music to and they rarely, if ever, allow you to specify URLs. You have to upload each song individually off your hard drive like a chump. I'd like a meta-submitting/uploading service. Like an automated street team. Or sites should make it less annoying. I have MP3s on my fast website with neatly labeled ID3 tags. Please take advantage of that.
My other complaint is that these sites all have blogging services with no option to syndicate your own blog from somewhere else. I'm not going to start blogging on Myspace or Podsafe or whatever. There's no way. But if you were to syndicate my RSS feed, you'd have the illusion that I was participating and I would possibly build readers on your service (tying me to it, which is what you want) rather than just having a big empty blog there.
Harry Shearer launches record label - man, I'd love to be signed to Ned Flanders' label.
iTunes Music Store Top 10 Songs - top 10 charts from all the iTunes stores in the world. Very neat.
PayPal introduces micropayments - 5% + 5 cents on transactions under $2. Not sure if it's automatic or if you have to set up your account for it.
Magnatune "Big Ideas" - John Buckman has a list of potential new features for Magnatune.
The Chumbawamba Factor - interesting Pitchfork article on BigChampagne, a company paid by major labels to track what's hot on P2P as well as how the net is killing one hit wonders.
I meant to blog about this a couple days ago. Warner Music Group is starting an e-label:
Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music's chairman and CEO, said Monday that the new mechanism will be called an "e-label," in which artists will release music in clusters of three songs every few months rather than a CD every few years.
Magnatune owner John Buckman has some good observations as this is basically what Magnatune has been doing for a few years now.
The article claims that artists signed to the e-label will keep the copyright to their master recordings, which John says is a less evil agreement. But I'm assuming that all the major perks of getting signed: advances, promotion, etc, are all out the window as well. Which makes it another digital store with a decent brand name. I'd be like "I'm signed to Warner...'s e-label. Can I borrow ten dollars?"
It's a good idea and an e-label would give them flexibility and let the label experiment more with what might catch on with the kids these days without losing a bundle of money. It could work as a minor league for artists that aren't quite ready to be called up to the real Warner Music and have some money invested in them. If they do it right -- like pick bands with good songs for instance -- they could develop a neat little Internet alternative scene. But in my mind I picture a half-broken, basically unusable website covered in flashing ringtone ads, forcing DRM on you, pushing established bands and three song sets of watered down clones of them. But who knows.
Tod Maffin's doing a great job covering the CBC strike. I realize the CBC is Canadian, so not of much interest to people outside of here, but this labour dispute is taking place on the net, with blogs and podcasting thrown into the mix, which gives it more nerdy global appeal. Tod has a list of locked-out CBC worker blogs and locked-out producers are apparently starting their own podcast/news site at CBCUnplugged.com.
Robin Rowland has a good entry where he says "The CBC blog war, I predict, will go down as one major step in the changing media landscape."
It definitely looks that way from here, but I'm wondering if there are jobs for all these CBC workers in the new landscape. I certainly hope so.
Coolfer has a good overview of the final outcome of the Fiona Apple Extraordinary Machine debacle. The summary: the press went off about Sony holding back Fiona Apple's album without any evidence, the album got leaked, people went nuts about it on the internet, I believe "information wants to be free" was said at some point, over three grand was donated to freefiona.com, and everyone hated on the evil, evil record company. Neither Sony or Fiona offered comment. And it turns out it wasn't true. Fiona herself was holding back the album and has re-recorded most of it.
So the whole thing magically transforms into an evil record company red herring and a lot of free PR for Fiona's new record. Nice!
My first thought when reading about the Sony payola settlement was that maybe they're just diverting their payola funds to bribing blogs and this is a nice way to put a positive spin on that. So cynical! This CNet article called 'Indie record labels seeing gold' lifted my spirits though. Apparently the 5 cent per song raise we just got from iTunes was due to some intense activism. Sweet. I like all the dirty payola scams and emails that are coming out, someone should be saving them all. Such as:
The payments often came in creative forms, such as providing the station with "contest prizes" such as digital cameras, laptop computers or concert tickets, which sometimes found their way to DJs. In one case, an executive suggested getting a DJ's shoe size, sending one Adidas sneaker right away, and sending the second shoe of the pair after a particular song had been played at least 10 times.
That's fantastic! Also:
"WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO GET AUDIOSLAVE ON WKSS THIS WEEK?!!? Whatever you can dream up, I can make it happen."
"HELLO IS THERE ANYONE I CAN BRIBE IN THERE" "HELLO" "ANYONE??" "OKAY I'M GOING TO LEAVE A STEAMER TRUNK FULL OF MONEY ON THE PORCH" "BE BACK LATER TO SEE IF YOU TOOK IT"
Apple iTunes raises wholesale price to 70 cents in USA - CD Baby artists now make 63.7 cents per song through iTunes USA after CD Baby's 9% cut. The price is still 99 cents for consumers. Very nice.