Wire article on DRM-less music.

DRM-free music and where to buy it. Discussion, ratings, insights.

"When Pigs Fly"

This is almost a perfect follow-up to that last post.

I must admit I find it really hard to read long blog entries or articles on the web without printing them out, but my friend Al sent me this post on DemonBaby about the death of the music industry and I think it's a frickin' awesome summation.

When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.

A couple notes.

I never used Oink, but his description of it makes it indeed sound like an outstanding music distribution system.

He's pretty offbase when he starts to talk about newspapers, and I have first hand knowledge of that. The big newspaper chains are dinosaurs and just as manipulative as major labels, and they hardly have evolved quickly. They've resisted change to preserve the fat profit margin of their classifieds pages, when something like Craigslist points the way that Oink does for music. So ignore his paragraph on newspapers and he'll seem 15% smarter.

This paragraph? It made me smile widely:

"For the major labels, it's over. It's fucking over. You're going to burn to the fucking ground, and we're all going to dance around the fire. And it's your own fault. Surely, somewhere deep inside, you had to know this day was coming, right? Your very industry is founded on an unfair business model of owning art you didn't create in exchange for the services you provide. It's rigged so that you win every time - even if the artist does well, you do ten times better. It was able to exist because you controlled the distribution, but now that's back in the hands of the people, and you let the ball drop when you could have evolved."

~Arum
listening to "Supermarket Sweep" by Sol Seppy

"Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD's Coffin"

Pretty smart article in Wired: "Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD's Coffin"

If/when I start a band I'm not sure what I'll do about releasing material. I've thought about it a bit, and arrived at the conclusion that there's not much satisfaction in making CDs anymore.

I think I'll use a graphical flowchart based color-coded web page that meets Edward Tufte specs to create a visual tree representing song generation and song cycles, the passage of time, and how songs fit together.

I like the idea of then, almost in near-time retrospect, making an LP that's almost like a best of or a thematic collection, and benefiting from perspective.

~Arum
Listening to Bonnie Prince Billy 'God's Small Song'

This Is Why Al Gore Invented The Internet

I can't tell you how much this video of Santana blows my mind. I know what you're thinking: Santana? He can't be serious. But yes. I am. This may rank in the top 5 most fantastic things I've ever seen. Ever.



And this Clapton video is almost just as incredible.



And finally, more amazing than all of the above, is this video of the Reunited Van Halen performing JUMP in Greensboro. Don't cheat yourself...watch the whole thing. trust me...it's worth it.



The thing about the Van Halen video above that is most satisfying is that it is almost indistinguishable from this:

the artifact is officially dead, Arum says so

This week I downloaded a new release in its entirety for the first time. It was Spoon's new work, in fact.

That's a milestone.

I've recently migrated all my CDs to iTunes, and I've subscribed to eMusic, and scanned it for things I've lost or forgotten, and found some gems, but never before did I substitute buying the tracks for buying the artifact.

Some thoughts about the consequences of this.

CD artwork never mattered a ton to me, not like LP artwork. So I don't mourn that loss.

Words trump numbers once again. "Listen to track 8, it's great" won't be in the lingo anymore. Once again I know song titles. And I forgot how great Trumans Water song titles were. "Yakboy=Nurterer".

Emusic trumps iTunes. Thanks to Jet Aspirin for that. I feel like I'm at the Gap or at the mall when I'm in the iTunes store. The eMusic selection isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot more fun to peruse. And no DRM.

How the hell does the artist know how many times someone really downloaded their song from a third party distributor like eMusic? I bet that one has kept Cory Rusk up at night.

"I just got the new record/album/CD by XYZ" is now "I just got the new release by XYZ".

We're all librarians now. Catalogers. And some of us poor ones. I mean, who the hell submitted all the Richard Hell albums to the track listing storage database with "(Album Version)" after the song title? People like that should be shot on sight in the new world order.

Questions for you. What was the first track you downloaded? The first entire release? The first artist you discovered browsing through a web music store like iTunes?

~Arum

listening to some Mission of Burma track

Internet Radio Day of Silence

Wondering why Pandora, Rhapsody, my favorite WOXY.com, and other internt radio sources aren't playing any music today? It's to protest the absurd an grossly unbalanced new royalty scheme due to go into effect on July 15th.

It's the Internet Radio Day of Silence.

If you're a fan of internet radio, please take a minute and contact your congressperson about this issue.

Perhaps size does matter

Interesting concept.

*consults iTunes*

My shortest tracks, granted most of these aren't songs:

:04 Aural Brutality by The Moment on This Is The Moment [best possible name EVER for a 4 second song]
:04 13 13 by Clinic on Internal Wrangler
:04 Underture by Mercury Rev on Deserter's Songs
:06 Gravy by The Monkees on Head
:06 Static Intro by The Misfits on their box set [really, I didn't need more than :04 of this]
:11 Xmas Riff by T Rex on Tanx
:14 Load Bank by Unitone Hi-Fi on Wickedness Increased
:14 Three Car Jam by The Minutemen on Double Nickels

My longest tracks:

54:12 Baltimore by the jazz band Test, which I think is a whole set in Baltimore
32:13 25 - Tab by Monster Magnet
30:04 This Dust Makes That Mud by the Liars on They Threw Us All In a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top
27:37 Carnage Visors by The Cure
27:01 Bitches Brew by Miles Davis
26:23 Invasion by Revolutionary Ensemble on The Psyche
21:35 So That I May Come Back by Town and Country off their self-titled release

I skipped a couple Miles Davis numbers in there.

~Arum
currently listening to The The's Soul Mining

The Short & the Long of it...

Well, an interesting notion, to sort your songs by duration, which I sometimes do when I need a short track to fill up a mix CD, but I never really thought of which were my best, and, I don't use itunes, the program I use happens to sort things out by directory and I have many directories filled with songs on my 3 computers...so I actually fired up itunes (which I do have, but don't use) just to do this task...let's hope it sucks in all of my files...

The first thing I noticed was a preponderance of tracks from the American Hardcore soundtrack...great doc, and some great tunes... This is Boston Not LA - The Freeze clocking in at a whole 20 seconds...and Milwaukee legends die Kreuzen's "Think for Me" a whopping 1:37, which compared to some of the other tracks here, makes this like prog rock or something...

Beyond that I will offer up these curios...

Jimmy Gilmer - Sugar Shack 1:58 (perfect malt-shop bubblegum pop!)
Bob Dylan - Suze (the cough song) (instumental track ending with Dylan coughing) 1:58
Hank Williams - Honky Tonk Blues (an acoustic version) 1:59
Lisa Ekdahl - Flyg vilda Fagel (not what you think...Swedish folk singer) 2:00
Four King Cousins - God Only Knows 2:04 (one these gals was on My Three Sons!)

But most of these songs are longer, I must have some cool songs under 1 minute, I just can't
seem to get them into itunes at the moment...

At the other end of the spectrum, I've got some interesting ones as well...(and as well as some
of those Johanna Newsom Ys tracks)

Ella Fitzgerald - Basella 10:28
Louis Armstrong - Let's Do It 11:45
Pink Floyd - Interstellar Overdrive 9:43
Bob Dylan - Idiot Wind 8:52
Van Morrison - You Don't Pull No Punches, But You Don't Push The River 8:50

These are truely some epic tunes!

Anyhow, that's the short and the long of it...

The Short List

Sometimes I'll listen to my iTunes library alphabetically by song, or sometimes alphabetically by artist, but my favorite is to sort songs by duration. In that spirit, here is a list of the 5 best songs under 1 minute, and the best 5 songs over 10 minutes.

The Short List (in no particular order)
1. Hit (Guided by Voices / Alien Lanes) :22
2. Stop (Pink Floyd / The Wall) :30
3. Tahuti, Splendid Scribe (Impossible Shapes /TUM) :51
4. My Mummy's Dead (John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band) :59
5. Denver (Willie Nelson / Red Headed Stranger) :55

The Long List (also in no particular order)
1. Only Skin (Joanna Newsom / Ys) 16:53
2. I Dream a Highway (Gillian Welch / Time, The Revelator) 14:39
3. Desolation Row (Bob Dylan / Highway 61 Revisited) 11:21
4. Spiders Kidsmoke (Wilco / A Ghost is Born) 10:48
5. Pigs (Pink Floyd / Animals) 11:28

These lists naturally lead me to the question: What are the best GBV soungs under 1 minute, and what are the best Bob Dylan songs over 10 minutes.

I'm curious what other people's iTunes sorting yields. Blog away, people.

[Crossposted at Bob Loblaw's Law Blog]