At first I thought The Garden State effect was going to be a ranty anti-mainstream essay -- and while it is indeed that, it turns into more of a self-examination near the end which made it worth reading.

There’s a sizeable portion of the population that listens to the music they listen to because it’s there and they don’t know any better—a reality that actually predicates the existence of mainstream music. Here’s what I mean: nobody thinks long and hard about music and what it means to them and then ultimately decides to listen to Toby Keith.

The main problem I have with this attitude is that it dismisses the opinions and tastes of anyone who isn't an insular Pitchfork-reading hipster. That seems more than a little self-important to me, but I have a hard time giving middle class twenty-somethings credit for anything.

A related story: I was at an Apples in Stereo show a couple years ago and afterwards I stood behind some young girls to talk to Robert Schneider. When they were done, I moved up and went on about how much their album Tone Soul Evolution meant to me in my middle class twenty-something way. My eyes might have gotten a little misty as I tried to put my intangible feelings for that album into words.

While we talked, he told me that the girls before me were disappointed that the Apples didn't play their song from the Powerpuff Girls Movie soundtrack. Robert said they "don't play that shit" but said he was disappointed they didn't play more songs off of Tone Soul Evolution for me.

I guess I should have felt like a true fan, that my interest in them was "pure" and that he and I shared some sort of special musical connection. But mostly I wished the Apples in Stereo had more teenage girl fans so they could have played a better venue with decent sound.

The long-rumored Google Checkout was released today. Though nearly everyone said it would be a direct Paypal competitor, it lacks any user-to-user "bank account" transaction functionality and is basically a shopping cart service, but one with some compelling features. (Watch the flash tour here.) The most interesting aspect of Google Checkout is how it integrates with Google Adwords (their several billion dollar a year ad program), giving merchants an easy way to manage transactions as well as letting Google keep merchants honest and add an extra level of trustworthiness to Google Adwords. When you see a green shopping cart icon in an Adwords ad you'll know that Google is handling the transactions for that seller and that you're protected. Rather than create its own shopping portal, Google is trying to integrate the shopping process directly into its search results.

Here's the page for sellers. You can sign up without buying Google Adwords, but the incentive is strong:

Process sales for free. For every $1 you spend on AdWords, you can process $10 in sales for free. For sales that exceed this amount or if you don't use AdWords, you can process them at a low 2% and $0.20 per transaction.

So on a $10 CD sale Google Checkout would charge me 40 cents and Paypal would charge me 59 cents. But if I spend a dollar on Google Adwords, Google Checkout charges me nothing for that transaction. That's a big incentive as I'd be thinking about giving Adwords a whirl and know that I'm getting something in return even if the Adwords results in nothing.

Would I sign up for Google Checkout? I think so, but of course sellers currently have to be residents of the United States so I'm out of luck. Hopefully they'll expand that soon.

The 3.0 update of popular social tech news site Digg went online today. I've been reading Digg for a while now and have gradually been drawn into actually participating -- mostly in the form of burying stupid comments -- which is saying something as I normally like to lurk. The big news with Digg 3.0 is that they've branched out from tech and added more categories: Science, World & Business, Videos, Entertainment and Gaming each with sub-categories of their own. Given that Digg has proven itself to be a huge force for promoting stories and sending traffic, I'm hoping with its music sub-category it'll be able to draw the sort of attention to new artists that it draws to technology stories.

I keep meaning to blog all the promotions I turn down so I look cool and counterculture-ish. The reality is that I only turn them down because what they offer is so depressingly small (which is probably insultingly in line with what I'm worth). Here's a snippet from one I received today:

Hi Brad,

My name is [...] and I'm working at [...], a marketing firm based in Baltimore, Maryland. I wanted to reach out to you to see if you’d be willing to help us with a project with Twix. There are only 2 more weeks in which we have to gain several thousand more entrants into a Twix sweepstakes, with prizes totaling an amount of $4800. We were wondering if you’d be able to post a banner up on your website that would link to [...]. In return for you, we have tons of Twix bars to give away and we even have a couple MLB baseball tickets to give away in the Tampa Bay, Houston and Atlanta areas.

It's official Brad policy to not be against selling out. I certainly have lines I won't cross, but for the most part I support the idea of making money. But to slap some ads on my site for some free Twix bars is scraping the bottom of the barrel, even for me. Baseball tickets in another country don't interest me much either unless they come with plane tickets.

But then I thought: "Whoah, he said tons of Twix bars". What could I do with a stupid amount of Twix bars? Why, I could have the most chocolatey live show ever! Just think how they'd pile into the club if the sign said "Brad Sucks Live Tonight + FREE ALL YOU CAN EAT TWIX BARS".

So I wrote back: "How many free Twix bars are we talking about here?" No reply so far. I hope that's not the last time in my life I get to ask that question.

Grant Robertson has a good article on The Digital Music Weblog about Weird Al Yankovic's cut from digital distribution:

King of comic rock, Weird Al Yankovic says digital is a raw deal for artists like himself. When asked by a fan whether purchasing a conventional CD or buying a digital file via iTunes would net Yankovic more pocket money the artist answered on his website.

"I am extremely grateful for your support, no matter which format you choose to legally obtain my music in, so you should do whatever makes the most sense for you personally. But since you ASKED... I actually do get significantly more money from CD sales, as opposed to downloads. This is the one thing about my renegotiated record contract that never made much sense to me. It costs the label NOTHING for somebody to download an album (no manufacturing costs, shipping, or really any overhead of any kind) and yet the artist (me) winds up making less from it. Go figure."

This is one of the reasons why I get so tired with a lot of the music industry criticisms out there: a lot of them depend on the idea that artists make nothing worthwhile from CD purchases, which may be true in some cases, but not in all.

I get asked the same question occasionally and for my indie-self I make about the same whether you buy a CD direct from me or via a digital music store. (Update: except for Magnatune actually, where I only get 50% of what you pay.)

The 50 Dumbest Rock-Star Extravagances is a fun read. I don't know if bailing yourself out of jail should really be considered "dumb" though. Also check the rock star finances sidebar with Harvey Gettleston. [via]

I Don't Know What I'm Doing is now available for ordering in over 2400 records stores worldwide thanks to CD Baby's new In-Store Distribution. If you need any info on what stores near you will order my album, drop me a line with your location and I'll look it up.

The other week I did an interview with Mike from GarageSpin. You can check it out here and here.

John Buckman (Magnatune CEO) has some great blog entries on music publishing here and here. If you want a good introduction into the world of BMI and ASCAP, they're worth reading. I've been slowly wrangling with the Canadian equivalent for the past year.

I recently gathered the balls together to start calling bars around here and trying to book some small gigs. Apparently I have no end of opportunities in places where I am far away from like California and Germany, but shows in my city aren't exactly raining out of the sky. One thing that I guess I didn't anticipate when picking the name "Brad Sucks" years ago was how much fun this would make my phone conversations with bookers one day.

THEM: What's the name of your band?

ME: Oh it's "Brad Sucks"

THEM: ...Brad Sucks?

ME: Yep.

THEM: And your name's Brad?

ME: Yeah.

THEM: So you suck.

ME: Yeah I'm not very good.

THEM: ...

ME: ...

THEM: ...

ME: So are we in?

Winner of the "most unexpected award I've been given this year": Brad Sucks was the Small Business Blog of the Day over at Pajama Market the other day and there's a nice little write-up. Crazy stuff. Update: I answered some follow-up questions that are now posted here.

BitTorrent + Donations = Viva la revolution? is an interesting question on Ask Metafilter about providing a service that makes it easy to share music and donate to the artists (which I was actually just talking to someone about the other day.) Metafilter user scarabic suggested that the Internet doesn't need any help with the trading but to stick to the  facilitating donations aspect. Which made my wheels turn and I posted this:

The idea is decent but I think scarabic might be right. Why not find a way to hook donations into all the trading activity that's going on right now?

It would be interesting if someone would build a verified directory of where to donate money to artists. Have an open API so torrent trackers and other music trading sites could implement it as a feel-good gesture.

That way if someone's on some torrent tracker and is grabbing my album they could have a little link that says "Hey, like the album? Click here to donate to the artist."

I think that'd be neat and have the potential to catch on and also potentially put a nice spin on all the trading that's going on if it were to actually work in artists' benefit.

Not sure if it's actually doable though. If a big paypal directory's not possible, you could turn yourself into a collection agency, hold and distribute the money or something. (Then turn evil and crook all the musicians out of their cash of course.)

I haven't thought much about the technical aspects of it but I think it's an interesting idea.

No Revolution: Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose - a lot of this rant rang true to me, especially the label-as-VC idea which I've been thinking about for a while. [via]

New CD Baby digital distribution agreement - Major changes: 1) now specifically non-exclusive and 2) ringtones. Go buy 10 second clips of my songs for $5, dogs.

Jeff Price, the CEO of spinART and Tunecore, who I met at Canadian Music Week, posted his Tunecore pitch in the comments over here. If you're an indie musician interested in or already doing digital distribution it might be worth your while to check it out. Jeff's busy at SXSW right now but I'll be getting some more info out of him such as what the fees are like for musicians who might want to jump ship from CD Baby to Tunecore. I'll let you know what I find out.

Rolling Stones Rice Krispies Commercial - from 1964. Not a bad song, except that it's about Rice Krispies. [via]

Canadian Music Week (the one day of it I experienced at least) was fun. I went there, they had cancelled my hotel room, I wound up getting upgraded to a deluxe room which was hella swank with the double TVs and lounge area and walk-in closet and so on. I went to the panel and none of the moderators showed up and once we were on I felt I was mildly to relatively obnoxious which I consider a personal victory. I recommended that a woman violate the Alzheimer Society of Canada's copyright, said the word "bullshit", drank a lot of complimentary water and made a suggestive comment about Jeff Price, the CEO of Tunecore.

The panel actually went quite well, our impromptu moderator Jay Moonah did an excellent job especially considering he was only told he was moderating about five minutes before we went on. There was a decent crowd but an hour really wasn't long enough to get into answering everyone's questions about RSS, online radio, file-sharing, podcasting, promoting music online, copyright, remixes, blogs, digital distribution, generating buzz, Myspace and more. I felt we only scratched the surface and could have gone a lot longer but that's conference life I guess.

The main gist of my message whenever I opened my big mouth I think was that new artists need to rely on the internet to spread their music for them, that it takes crowds of people sending your songs around to come even close to competing with what the major labels do with millions of dollars, promotion-wise. I told the story of the recent Toy Story 2 Requiem mashup trailer that's been going around with an Israeli remix of my music on it and how that would never have been possible had I been tight-assed about my music rights and had a "media" section with 30 second clips rather than mp3s and slutty rights.

My fellow panelists were a real interesting and friendly group and it was great to meet them. They were all extremely knowledgeable and from different internet paths, which was fun. There was Jeff Price from spinArt Records and Tunecore (a service I'll be looking into more in the next week as it promises an even better artist cut than CD Baby for digital distribution), Dan Beirne from the mp3 blog Said the Gramaphone, Eric de Fontenay from Musicdish, Joe Gallagher from mvyradio.com and Will Evans from Soul Atomic (whose website doesn't seem to be working right now.)

After the panel I was thinking about going to check out some bands but instead got taken to an adult clown show called Lunacy Cabaret. Various clowns (and clown burlesque) and five dollar Bohemian beers. Very fun. Unfortunately I was too tired after the show to head out to the bar across the street for clown karaoke, which may be a decision I regret for the rest of my life.

Professional Writing and the Rise of the Amateur - John August has a transcript of a great speech about professionals vs. amateurs on the net.

As a follow-up to the logo contest results I've got t-shirts for sale with the winning logo on it in my new Spreadshirt store:

So I did this contest on Worth1000.com for a Brad Sucks logo. The final count was 79 entries, which I think was a great turnout. The user rating is in and you can see that here. But I ultimately get to decide who gets the $100 prize. So first off, here's the winner:

I thought about it for a long while but I wound up going back to this one. I like it because it's simple, clean, evocative and weird. What does it say? Something about falling / hurting yourself / being inept / breaking your neck / warning. Pretty general but I think it's spiritually connected to whatever themes my music might have. People I've shown it to have alternately found it funny or curious, but just about everyone has been intrigued by it, which is what I want.

Also for bonus points: the falling guy was taken from one of my Hawaii photos of a warning sign which also said: "if in doubt, don't go out". I loved that when I saw it. "Welcome to paradise - BEWARE THE MANY DANGERS." Great funny/sad stuff. That probably helps me feel a personal connection to it and less like it's some phony contrived logo.

SECOND AND THIRD PLACE

I also bought two of the other logos for a lower price and they are:

Brad Sucks with the fancy BS logo - I really like the BS logo part of this. The logo style combined with the words "brad sucks" I think is kind of funny but also quirky and interesting. It's probably not one I would use to always represent Brad Sucks because it might be a little too funny, but it has a simple weirdness and irony to it that I liked enough to want to keep.

brad sucks logo design - This is the one a lot of people I know picked as their favorite. It was a little plain to me at first but I warmed up to it as it's nice looking, simple and would be easy to use on things without taking up too much space.

Read on for some more jibba jabba about logo selection:

WHAT I'D DO DIFFERENT

Before I get to giving props to some of the other logos, I should explain some things I didn't know I was biased against. Maybe this'll be helpful info if other musicians out there are thinking about getting logos. If I had to do the contest over again, I'd specify:

- No guitars. While I can and do play guitar, putting a guitar in the logo to me says "BRAD SUCKS IS ALL ABOUT GUITARS" which it's really not. I'd feel like I'm trying to be Van Halen or Steve Vai or something. And even they don't put guitars in their logos (1, 2). Also as a small nitpick: I play left-handed and all the guitars in the logos are right-handed.

- No "suck" puns. Lollipops and lemons and so on are cute but I picture people just thinking I really dig on candy or have an oral fixation. "Hey, I'm Brad and I like to put things in my mouth, what's up."

- No smiley faces. Despite having a smiley-face logo currently in my arsenal, I don't need another one. Nirvana rocked the smiley face and that's hard to compete with.

OTHER NOTABLE ENTRIES

Brad Sucks Copyright Logo - This is a really excellently done logo and it does a great job communicating several things at once. My problem with it is the message it sends. It clearly says "Brad Sucks is a one man band who plays guitar (maybe really awesomely since it's in his logo) and doesn't care for copyright" which, while true (except for the awesome guitar part), is kind of a vanilla message and doesn't communicate much about the actual themes or character of my music. It would probably get me more nerd cred though.

Brain Fix - At first I didn't know what this one was supposed to be and then I read the description and I was all "awesome!" and grew to love the little brain icon. The only problem was that most people I showed it to didn't recognize it as a brain (often even after I told them what it was) so I had to count it out. I wanted to love this one though.

Napster Logo - This one's pretty cool and well done, but it looks a lot like the Napster logo. Despite it being ironic, I'd feel like I was advertising for Napster -- which would be extra awkward as I turned down advertising for Napster on here recently. And it's got a bit of a suck pun in there with the tongue out and all. Maybe more of a lick, but still in the mouth area.

There were lots of other great entries as well, but those were the three that stood out the most. CONCLUSION

I'm definitely glad I ran this contest. It was fun to do and as an unintended side-benefit it got a whole bunch more people into my music. I feel like I got my money's worth out of it and I'd recommend it to other musicians on a tight budget. I think you'd have better success if you gave examples of the sorts of band logos you like, rather than leaving it wide-open like I did. I don't think I was as clear as I could have been in my contest description. So that's something I'd pay extra attention to.