Found this gem on the Ween news page today:

I'm kind of overwhelmed by the amount of demos we've received for consideration at Chocodog Records. At the moment I'm behind a little due to the touring, but I've listened to every one that's been sent so far, and it hasn't been pretty. Here's pretty much what happens when you send me your demo. Usually me and a couple of friends get together at the ween studio around 10pm and drink beer and watch baseball. After awhile I'll say "hey I have this bag of demos sent to our p.o. box, let's check 'em out", and my friends will then groan, knowing that we're in for hours of torturously bad music. We go through the pile of envelopes, first we laugh as we read your bio, then we laugh at your photo (if you sent one), then we put on the cd and prepare ourselves for the worst. We give each track about 30 seconds to see if it sucks so bad that there's no hope of it getting better, if this is the case it gets immediately thrown in the trash, if it's mediocre, we'll listen for a minute and then skip to the next track. If that's mediocre too, then it gets thrown in the trash. After about 45 minutes of this process, all hope is generally lost and there is a really bad vibe in the room. The critiquing process gets shorter and tempers start to rise. We usually then will put on the best cd we have lying around, like Earth Wind and Fire or some other music where the people actually know how to write songs, sing, and play their instruments. This helps to cleanse our ears. So if you'd like to submit your music for consideration you can do so by sending it to Chocodog Records p.o. box 669 New Hope, PA 18938

Great.

des at Hometracked has an excellent post called The RIAA is not evil, an even-handed response to Gizmodo's proposed March RIAA boycott.

The article is a great summary of a lot of things that have annoyed me about anti-RIAA tech activism for a long time. I liked it so much I even posted it to Digg, which is something I never do.

This Piracy Kills Music short film is pretty heavy on style:

It's a little short on facts though. I'm not sure I buy that there are less artists making a living off their music than pre-1999 (kinda seems like there are more artists than ever these days) and it also makes no mention of the plummetting costs of recording and distribution. (via Ursi's Blog)

As I was plodding along working on my album today I wound up reading a lot of posts about the death of the album (1, 2, 3).

I thought the album was dead when I started putting my music on the net years ago. I didn't even bother releasing an album until a few years later ("people just want to download mp3s!") but I was totally wrong.

I don't have much artistic or romantic attachment to albums but I do think there's a practical aspect to them. Assuming it's not one good song plus eleven songs of filler, I'd rather have 45 minutes of entertainment from an artist I enjoy than 3 minutes. It's the difference between watching one episode of a series versus the whole season.

But I don't see why it has to be exclusively albums or singles, it's the future now, they can co-exist! I think as budgets shrink, artists become more independent and audiences diversify and fragment, it's harder to decide or define what a worthy "single" is. That's what the filtration of the Internet is for, that's why file-sharing is awesome. The hits will bubble to the top.

Do you want each song to be focus-grouped before you get to hear it? An album's still a pretty good vehicle for putting out a batch of songs and seeing what spreads.

Hooray, I have a digital music store now! You can buy DRM-free Brad Sucks tracks in high quality 192k MP3, OGG or FLAC formats. You can also buy my entire album in whichever format you like with the album art and lyrics included. Buy buy buy! I still feel strongly that people sharing my songs is vital to me as a musician, so I have no plans to stop giving my music away for free. But it's clear that many people want to pay for high quality versions of my songs and I'd like to avoid the middle-man and DRM and offer that directly if I can.

formats

Do people really care about audio file quality? I'm skeptical. But maybe digital purchases will act as a donation "with benefits".

I'm also not sure if anyone really cares about OGG or FLAC formats. I get emails asking for them, but we'll see. I could add other formats as well (WAV?) if there's any demand. I'll give it some time and see what's what.

the nerdy stuff

I wrote the store myself. It runs off Amazon S3 (for cheap and healthy bandwidth) and the Paypal shopping cart. A bunch of PHP and MySQL later and kapow. I stole the play button layout from Scott Andrew's store because everything he makes is pretty.

There are probably bugs, so please forgive me. I will fix them as soon as I hear about them.

I'm also considering packaging this whole sucker up so other artists can use it to inexpensively host and manage their own digital stores. Any kind of file would fit in there, not just music.

If you've got any feedback or ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Scott's got a new music store. I'm jealous, setting up something like this has been on my to-do list for months. The options seem to be PayLoadz and E-Junkie. Any others out there?

Update: Oh yeah I forgot about Kagi's Digital Download Service.

I've been trying to think of something thoughtful to say about Steve Jobs' anti-DRM essay.

There's a good analysis at Daring Fireball.

I think it's cool and all but I don't get why Apple can't offer DRM-free downloads for those labels (or artists) that want them. That'd give people who reject DRM a competitive advantage and put the squeeze on the majors.

I'm trying out two new (to me) music stores.

Jamendo

All music on Jamendo is free to download and licensed through one of several Creative Commons licenses or the Free Art Licence, making it legal to copy and share, as well as to modify and make commercial use of for some, depending on the licence. Jamendo allows streaming of all of its thousands of albums in either Ogg Vorbis or MP3 format, and downloads through the BitTorrent and eDonkey networks. (via Wikipedia)

I had tried to join Jamendo a while back but the "Jamuploader" software "jammed up" and "crashed my computer". It worked this time and my album is here. Nothing in particular has happened since then. It's a very creative commons friendly site and I've received a strange amount of email mentioning this site so I thought it'd be worth checking out.

Amie Street

Amie Street is an online music store and social network service created in 2006 by Brown seniors in Providence, Rhode Island. Based on a demand algorithm to determine song prices, artists upload music onto the site to allow users to purchase it for whatever price the song is currently listed at. Users can also earn credit by recommending ("REC") songs to their friends. If the REC was for a good song and leads to users purchasing it, the price of the song will increase. The user will earn credit based on the increase in the price of the song after making the REC. (via Wikipedia)

I like the idea of this one though whether it will work in practice should be interesting. My page is here. Songs start free but user recommendations drive the prices up and the users who recommended the songs get kickbacks.

So far there have already been a bunch of reviews of my music and the cost of my song Fixing My Brain has rocketed up to 7 cents.

One catch: looking at the album info I see that Fixing My Brain's revenue is currently at $0.19 and there's a "storage fee remaining" of $4.81. So I guess you have to pay Amie Street five dollars before you can make any money on each individual song (which is $60 total for a 12 track album). I'd assume at such low prices very few artists pay off the storage fee (at 7 cents I'll have to sell 71 copies of Fixing My Brain to pay off its storage fee) so each semi-failed song is money right into Amie Street's pockets. I'm not sure if they take a cut after the $5 has been paid.

I've been thinking about music videos a lot, mainly inexpensive but effective music videos. One of my ideas for the first single off the next album was to film myself playing and singing in front of a green screen and then put that online for people to remix (a la The Colbert Report's green screen challenge.)

Today I read that The Decemberists beat me to it. My hat's off to you, you damn, damn Decemberists.

I haven't tried the Linux music player Amarok, but they just added Magnatune to it as a music store (I'm on Magnatune). Pretty cool:

Amarok continues to blast ahead with release 1.4.4. We're thrilled to be able to take our long association with Magnatune to new heights with the addition of an integrated DRM-free music store with full-length mp3 previews. Magnatune's "we are not evil" attitude guarantees that you can purchase awesome tunes and the artist receives half of the purchase price.

Also I should probably say I'm totally loving Ubuntu. I can't imagine using it on my main desktop, but it's been wonderful to me after some disasters at the hands of SuSE and plain ol' Debian. The default brown theme needs to go though.

Notorious Russian online music store AllOfMP3.com has lost its Visa account.

Meaning that people can no longer buy DRM free albums for pennies over there anymore. I'm pretty down with file sharing, but the idea of paying a third party to provide MP3s always rubbed me the wrong way. Though I don't think my album was ever on there, so maybe that makes me even more angry now that I think of it.

Rob Hampton from A Guitar Teacher's Lesson Notebook posted some great advice on how to make a living teaching guitar. Surprisingly most of his advice focuses on using the internet.

When I read this post by Jay it got me thinking. He posted an audio ad for his own podcast and asked anyone to include it in their podcast and that he'd reciprocate by playing their ad in his podcast.

Which made me Google around a bit and now I'm asking: is there a site for ad-trading like that? Seems like it'd be a nice thing to have especially for the more hobby-level podcasts. You could organize straight-up paid advertising but then also simple ad trades between podcasts.

I met Jay Moonah in Toronto when I was on the Blogrolling panel at Canadian Music Week. He's an excellent speaker, podcast-enthusiast and all-round smart guy. He's got a new podcast called Online Music Marketing if you're into that sort of thing.

There's a fascinating Wikipedia page on hip hop rivalries. I don't know where they get the energy. Also I enjoyed this Wikipedia warning:

The neutrality of this article or section may be compromised by "weasel words."

Weasel words? According to Wikipedia:

Weasel words are words or phrases that smuggle bias into seemingly supported statements without attributing opinions to verifiable sources. Weasel words give the force of authority to a statement without letting the reader decide if the source of the opinion is reliable. If a statement can't stand on its own without weasel words, it lacks neutral point of view; either a source for the statement should be found, or the statement should be removed.

For example, "Montreal is the nicest city in the world," is a biased or normative statement. Application of a weasel word can give the illusion of neutral point of view: "Some people say Montreal is the nicest city in the world."

Good information.

I would like Clell Tickle to be my manager:

"We're talking about a man who uses violence and intimidation to secure promotion for the bands that he works with." Right on.

Now this is more my style -- I've been reading about it for a while, but Wired has a good musicians-in-Second Life overview called Second Life Rocks (Literally).

For those who don't know, Second Life is an online virtual world. Kind of a giant 3D chat room. I've popped in there a couple of times and it was sort of chaotic, but the music angle is interesting and appeals to the lazy person in me.

Suzanne Vega has already gigged in Second Life and Duran Duran will be performing on their own island -- which had better be called Duran Duranistan.

Even the front page of secondlife.com has this on it:

I think I may need to call a Brad Sucks Live meeting to suggest that our live show could benefit from an increased heavily armed robot and minotaur presence. 

According to the article there are lots of gigs going on all the time, I guess I'll try to check one out. Any recommendations?

I got psychologically suckered into signing up for Bebo this morning (everyone else was doing it), which in my circles has been getting the reputation of being a more music-oriented MySpace. The feature that intrigued me was playlists -- users can create and display playlists on their homepages of songs that Bebo bands add to their pages. Why MySpace hasn't added that, I have no idea. Here are my thoughts as I signed up and created my beautifully lame Bebo page:

• The username "bradsucks" was taken. Weird.
• You seem to be able to upload an unlimited number of songs which is way nicer than MySpace's limit of four.
• Drag and dropping the order of my top 10 songs is sweet, though arranging the songs on my album was done with cumbersome "up" and "down" links, which I gave up on.
• I still swear to the lord god above something needs to be done to make it quicker and easier to sign up for these sites. All of my music and data are available for the taking -- why must you force me to upload and label everything manually?
• You have to have a regular Bebo account and then you make band accounts inside them, unlike on MySpace where you have to set up a separate type of account. I guess this is neat but I have no interest in having a non-musician account.
• Instead of allowing the type of eye-gouging HTML customization that MySpace does, you're restricted to using Bebo-approved skins. They're pretty but they're not customizable in any way, which sucks.
• I now have two Bebo blogs (my regular user blog and the band blog) that I will not use and I can't hook up to this blog I have here. Get some RSS going or allow easy cross-posting or something.
• The search sucks, it's just a full text Google search of the public pages. So there's no way to search by location or interest in musicians or playlists or anything cool that would help me find people who are or might be interested in my music.
• Crazily there seems to be no way to link to my home page here. The profiles don't allow HTML and there are no fields for pointing to external band home pages. Additionally you can create albums of your music but can't provide a link to any place that the visitor could download or buy it. What in the sam hell.

So I like the additional song storage. MySpace users are often asking me to post additional songs so they can add them to their pages, but if I remove any of the original four I put up there, it breaks every page with those songs on them.

The additional songs and the playlisting are probably what give Bebo the reputation as being more musician-friendly than MySpace. But it's worse in that without links back to my site here or to a place they can buy my album it's hard to believe it'll sell any music for me. Not only that, it's unlikely almost anyone will make it back to my site here and sign up for my mailing list so I can keep the relationship going, keep them in the loop on future releases, etc.

The social networks are definitely useful for spreading music and that's certainly cool. But I find them frustrating -- like there's a huge barrier between the fans and the artist and that any contact between the two is almost accidental and always totally fleeting. And with Bebo's lack of external links it's driven home to me that, as a musician, it would be hard as hell to build anything lasting out of my social network "groupies" or "friends".

And I guess I wonder: is that the nature of the post-Napster musician/fan relationship these days or is it just a side effect of crappy web tools?

I like the idea of Snocap and I hope it (or something like it) catches on. Mashable's got a good write-up on it here:

Artists on MySpace Music (or hi5, Bebo, Multiply and any other site that supports Flash embeds) can post a widget that plays the tracks and allows you to buy them right away. Indie band “The Format” is currently using the widgets on its MySpace page, where you can buy songs from their album “Dog Problems”. Tracks cost $0.79 each, which Snocap automatically charges to your Paypal account.

I checked out the widget and it's not bad, though I found the checkbox interface confusing at first and my stomach turned at the idea of having to make an account on another service just to make a transaction under ten dollars.

What would be nice (for me) is a simple Flash widget for Paypal data transactions with no middle-man. So you can be all wandering MySpace looking for hotties in your area and then BLAM you've impulsed purchased my album for reasons unknown to you. If Apple was on the ball, they'd get an iTunes widget out there stat.

A few things about Amazon. First of all: for some reason for the past few months my cover art image is blank. Check it out. It was there before, now it's gone. Dunno, man. Trying to fix that. Also am I hallucinating or is someone selling my album for $39.99 here? What in the hell.

Update: The image is back. I'm going to start whining about every little thing that bothers me on here, it seems to get results.