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.

Justin's put together a Direct-X plugin (scroll down to his post) of the Jesusonic CrusFX. He's also been working on the Jesusonic SKULR 500 (pronounced 'secular 500'), which aims to be a more affordable version of the hardware.

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.

Soundtrack Composer - an educational Flash game about being a soundtrack composer.

Bands Whose Fans Make You Want To Kill Them - a wiki on how to avoid pissing off certain music fanbases.

The History of Sampling - a Flash interface for navigating the history of sampling in music.

Team Toxic Bass - watch some girl get uh pounded by bass.

I shipped off the master and artwork for I Don't Know What I'm Doing to the CD duplication place yesterday. After a year and a half of home-burning that sucker, there'll be a shrink-wrapped, professionally pressed version with a cover and a lyric sheet and everything soon. I'll announce a release date when I figure one out.

She Be She Strike - MP3s from a northern CBC radio station taken over by the Inuit janitor and his friends during a strike in the 80s.

"Please Don't Go Topless, Mother" songwriter tells all - interesting letter from the Nashville songwriter of a cute net famous song.

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?

Air Guitar Heaven - crowd and speaker posters for your walls.

Premature Death of Rock Stars - a nice page of info on premature rock star deaths. Average death age: 36.9.

Nintendo controllers as musical instruments - PowerPad midi keyboards, plus PowerGlove and Nintendo Uforce controllers.

NIN Release Garageband source to their new single - I should have blogged this a few days ago but I was underwhelmed by how it's Mac-only, so available to only a tiny fraction of potential remixers.

Adtunes.com - blog about music featured in commercials.

Studio A Build photoset - Pictures of Tod Maffin from I Love Radio's studio building project. Pretty interesting as I'm moving soon.

nintendo themes, a cappella - nintendo game themes done acappella.

Musipedia: The Open Music Encyclopedia - They're trying to develop a searchable melody database. I don't think anything kills the soul of a song like MIDI piano.

USB Controlled Disco Dance Floor - built by some MIT students, check out the video and photos. [via]