Scott Andrew's new record Save You From Yourself is out. Check it out, he's OG-Internet. Congrats, Scott.

In hanging around Cambridge and Harvard this week I spoke to a lot of people. Here are some of the links I remember referring to:

• Kevin Kelly's Better Than Free article. A great, great article breaking down what artists can still charge for when the art itself is given away for free.
• Scott Adams' How To Become A Cartoonist. I read this years and years ago and the idea of the "copy test" was hugely influential -- though I applied it to music.
• thesixtyone - community voted music site.
• Magnatune - "We're not evil", creative-commons based record label. Doing variable pricing long before Radiohead's In Rainbows.
• RCRDLBL - Advertising supported record label.
• Eminem sues Apple for using song - when talking about what would happen if Apple used one of my songs in their ads without permission. (I believe I said it would be "hilarious" and great for me.)
• The Superficial. When talking about the escalating trend of dismantling celebrities who "artificially" elevate themselves.
• Daft Punk's Live Show - I described their (awesome) masked, pyramided largely pre-recorded performances as blurring the lines of what people expect or want from live shows and what people will pay for.
• ccMixter.org - Creative commons based remix site.

Self-links:

• Brad Sucks Digital Download Store - the open source digital download store I wrote. Referenced when defending myself that I don't care about "the money" enough.
• Gimme Some Money - the open source icon donation thing on the right side of this page. Also reference when defending myself that I don't care about "the money" enough.
• Source - where to get all the source files for my album.
• Out of It community backup vocals - call for vocals for the title track on my next album (results soon, it's sounding good!)
• Toy Story 2: Requiem - the Toy Story 2 / Requiem for a Dream mashup featuring an Israeli remix of my song Dirtbag which led William Gibson to my music, later inspiring a character in his novel Spook Country.

I'll add more if I can remember any.

Sound was pretty rotten at the Harvard thing which was sad. Pretty much no PA which was like whoah. Gonna have to burn out the brain cells with those memories in them. The talk was fun though, a really engaged and smart crowd. Tomorrow I'm doing an in-class thing which should be super fascinating and then the show at the Middle East which hopefully will be much, much louder.

Boston is pretty nice from what I've seen which isn't much. I've seen a lot of car accidents though and now I'm going to go see a bar about some drinks for my belly.

There's a lot of enthusiasm about Guitar Rising -- a "real guitar" version of Guitar Hero. Just to be a stick in the mud I'm calling shenanigans: machine parsing guitar playing has been the holy grail of guitar nerds for quite some time. So unless the authors of this game have figured out something that all those folks working on guitar to MIDI translators for the past twenty years have failed to do, it will probably suck ass. And if they have figured that out, why not sell a multi-hundred dollar plugin to guitarists instead?

The Berkman Center at Harvard has posted the deets about my Web of Ideas deal there:

Web of Ideas with David Weinberger and Special Guest Musician Brad Sucks
Monday, February 11, 7:00 PM
Griswold Hall Room 110
Harvard Law School

RSVP is required if you're going as I think there's limited space.

Web of Ideas is an evening night discussion series at the Berkman Center, lead by Berkman Fellow David Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Everything is Miscellaneous. Each session will begin with a 20 minute discussion-opener, followed by open conversation. Food will be provided.

Be sure to say hi if you attend. I'm really looking forward to it, it should be pretty interesting and I like everyone I know down there already. Also one of my main passions is talking about myself so it seems like a perfect fit.

Crunch time. Here's what I've been up to:

Mixing the album. Did a mixing meeting with Rob and am back on track with the album. Actually excited about getting it out, which is strange for me. It's really taking an embarrassing amount of time. You would think this would result in exponential improvements and new material and awesomeness and you would be wrong. Just a lot of coordination and logistic delays.

I've been reading a lot about the album being dead and all I can think is: THANK GOD. I'm not sure I ever want to do this again. But what to do instead?

Getting ready for Harvard + the show in Cambridge. Looks like there'll be a Metafilter meet before and during (and after?) the show on the 12th. I think I've got my show pretty much down, new Firewire card = improved stability, blah nerd blah.

The big thing lately has been packing all my gear to get down there. Do you know what a custom guitar flight case costs? I will tell you: around $500. That's five HUNDRED dollars. It would be cheaper for me to fly to Boston, buy a $250 guitar and throw it in the garbage on my way home. I honestly haven't ruled that out but for now I've ordered an SKB Freedom case which apparently "smells" (read the reviews) but works good.

If my guitar is shattered on the way there, I'll buy a cheap one for the shows and give it to a homeless person before I leave.

Getting the website ready for the new album. I've been re-jiggering all my store stuff for the new album and beyond and that should go live in the next week I hope. Due to lack of sales I've decided to drop the OGG format and limit it to MP3 and FLAC. Simpler for everyone. OGG fans can always get the FLAC and convert it as it's lossless after all. I want to support open formats but I'd rather it not feel like a waste of time, energy and resources.

Finally swapped out the default items from Gimme Some Money to something more Brad Sucks-y:

You got your beer ($5), you got your pills ($10) and you got your twenty dollars ($20).

Bunch of things coming up:

• February 11th - Harvard University [Cambridge, MA] - Q&A and a few songs.
• February 12th - The Middle East [Cambridge, MA] - Full show
• March 7th - Canadian Music Week [Toronto, ON] - Speaking.

Hope to see you there.

There's a new button available if you care to donate:

Info (and previous button) here. As people have pointed out this button looks good at any angle.

Here's a picture I took when I was sorting socks a few months ago:

Look at all these different bastards! What for? Can the human race not agree on a black sock style?

What I'd like is a standardized black sock specification. So I could always buy replacement or additional socks that match the ones I already own. Please: open source community, W3C, Creative Commons -- somebody help make sense of this important issue.

Trent Reznor released some facts about the Saul Williams record he produced and then released digitally for $5 [nin.com]:

Saul's previous record was released in 2004 and has sold 33,897 copies.

As of 1/2/08, 154,449 people chose to download Saul's new record. 28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning: 18.3% chose to pay.

Of those paying,

3220 chose 192kbps MP3 19,764 chose 320kbps MP3 5338 chose FLAC

Thoughts:

• 28,322 * $5 = $141,610 which for a solo artist and zero marketing investment seems pretty decent. Of course partnering with a super famous established artist like Trent helps.
• With 154,449 downloads and earnings of $141,610 that works out to earning $0.92 per download which vastly exceeds all bandwidth costs.
• 154,449 seems like an extremely low number of downloads. The hype for this album was primarily in nerd-centric venues so I'm assuming the majority skipped the ecommerce shit and went straight to torrents for their downloads.
• This isn't counting other digital sales avenues -- did they put it on iTunes? That's where most people are buying their digital music these days, not going direct to the artist's website.
• I think putting such a low limit on what people could pay was a dopey idea. If we're going to be dealing in intangible value, why not let consumers decide for themselves?
• Are there really that many FLAC users out there?

All in all I think it was a success even if they feel disheartened. Trent admits that he spent too much on the record. I'd be interested to know what the costs amounted to. I can't even conceive of spending $40,000 on a record let's say and having $100,000 left over would keep me in beer and guitar strings for another year or two.

Anyone out there using allpeers? I've been wanting a way to easily share MP3s with friends for a while and allpeers seems pretty nice, though I've yet to get it to work in the Firefox 3 beta.

I'm 'frenetic' on there if you'd like to add me and make me listen to your favorite songs.

I've been jealous of Gimme Some Candy for a long time. I've hassled them to let me in but they're not accepting new artists. It's a great idea -- a tip jar with benefits. Supporters can buy items and leave a little message that gets displayed on the artist's homepage.

So I've written and released an open source clone that's pretty easy to set up. It's called Gimme Some Money. The default items are a star, heart and cookie but they can be swapped out. You can see mine (using the default icons) over on the right sidebar.

Requirements: PHP 4+/MySQL & a Paypal account

Update: fixed an IE/Opera bug and updated it to v0.86 (thanks to jason for pointing out the bug).

Hope everyone's having a nice holidays. I'll have a belated open source Christmas present for other artists up here tomorrow when I'm less stuffed full of spätzle, potato dumplings and beer.

That wasn't too miserable. v0.06 of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store is up with a pretty big overhaul:

• bsdds has its own shopping cart now instead of using paypal's -- should allow alternate payment methods
• zero dollar downloads
• buyer/downloader is now redirected to the download page post-transfer if PDT is turned on in paypal preferences)

The shopping cart needs some CSS love but that'll have to wait as I got things to do.

Holy mother of Christmas I would like one of these Gibson Robot Guitars:

Also please add: unstoppable killing powers.

Just uploaded a new version of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store. Two big changes:

• No longer requires Amazon S3. Your store files can be local and links will expire after your given duration (mod_rewrite required).
• Variable prices via text input. Previously variable prices could only be selected via a pre-defined list in the drop down. Now buyers can specify whatever they want as long as it's more than zero.

Next stuff I'll be adding:

• Integrate a shopping cart I wrote so that other payment options are possible (Google Checkout/VISA/etc).
• Handle zero dollar downloads.

Hooray for work!

Fantastic optimistic article in Wired by David Byrne about emerging music models: David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars. His conclusion:

No single model will work for everyone. There's room for all of us. Some artists are the Coke and Pepsi of music, while others are the fine wine — or the funky home-brewed moonshine. And that's fine. I like Rihanna's "Umbrella" and Christina Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man." Sometimes a corporate soft drink is what you want — just not at the expense of the other thing. In the recent past, it often seemed like all or nothing, but maybe now we won't be forced to choose.

As someone doing the 100% DIY thing for years, I've been scouting around for the low to midrange music biz services and been fairly disappointed with the options. Hopefully that'll improve.

The Washington Post has a cute article: The Moby Equation. A helpful sellout guide, taking into account rock and roll ideals, the song's sacredness, the artist's reputation, wealth and time since their heyday.

These days with a PVR and downloading TV from the Internet, television commercials are alien to me. The idea of a song being "wrecked" by a commercial seems like a thing of the past, but I'm often weird about these things.

Since finishing all the recording for my next record it's been exciting to work on new music again.

Thanks for the Add (demo) (5.2MB MP3)

One of my resolutions is to be more fast and loose with the creative output. Obsessing all alone was not helpful or fun.

Update: here are the lyrics for those that asked:

Thanks for the Add (demo)

gimme the mic cause i'm taking my life
in an unexpected new direction
i could care less about your breasts
or that your daddy never gave you very much attention
i'm the same as i used to be but i'm
doing my best to make a good impression
i don't wanna go on but i don't wanna belong
in this condition

did you know that i'm your biggest fan
i just wanna thank you for the add
can i introduce you to my dad

i'm feeling like a
dead man or the way i seem
cause i'm living underground with a fake id
i'm feeling like a
dead man or the way i seem
cause i'm twitching and i'm learning slowly

i'm turning my cell phone on in the middle of the interview
i'm digging a shallow grave to eliminate my point of view
gotta get suggestions how best to get your attention tell you i'm cool
i don't wanna go on but i don't wanna be long
in this condition

did you know that i'm your biggest fan
i just wanna thank you for the add
can i introduce you to my dad

i'm feeling like a
dead man or the way i seem
cause i'm living underground with a fake id
i'm feeling like a
dead man or the way i seem
cause i'm twitching and i'm learning slowly