Here’s what my next CD will look like:

The entire design is in ANSI art by Fredrik Olsson.

Since I’ve been going geo-crazy lately, here are some data pictures (wheee!!):

subscriber locations

Red markers for anyone who subscribed and entered their location in the past couple of days.

album sale locations

Blue markers for a couple years of album sale data.

subscribers and album sale locations

Not shown: Antarctica — not big fans of mine apparently.

If you want to stand up and be counted, you can sign up on the Live page.

Finally got around to making a muxtape and here it is. It’s more or less the contents of my iPod Shuffle distilled down to 12 tracks.

If you’ve got a muxtape, please to be posting in the comments so I may check them out.

Now, if you would like to, you can mark down your location on the Brad Sucks Live page so I can hassle you if I happen to be playing in your area (scroll down to the map).

It’s something I’ve been wanting to build for a while — a replacement/alternative for Eventful.com and it was pretty easy with Google Maps.

Eventful’s nice and I’ll continue to use it, but since it doesn’t give the artists access to their subscriber’s email addresses it’s a lock-in bullshit proposition and I can’t fully trust it.

I’m now also asking new mailing list subscribers to mark down their location and will be doing so for new BFF members as soon as I get around to it. It’s all optional of course — I know giving out locations creeps some people out, but think about how traveling to another city and nobody coming to my show creeps me out.

I’m in love with The Hype Machine. Specifically Hype Machine Radio.

Hype Machine is a music blog aggregator — indexing the songs and bands written about and linked to on popular music blogs. Hype Machine radio is “a non-stop stream of popular and recent tracks posted by music blogs.”

I’ve tried a lot of different audio streams over the years with no luck. I would rarely (if ever) find new songs and artists I wanted to listen to but The Hype Machine’s been delivering that on a regular basis. That’s pretty exciting for a music curmudgeon such as myself.

The aggregated aspect is very interesting as well — I find even if I don’t like a song that’s playing, it’s interesting to me that it’s noteworthy enough to have been blogged. So I find I’m a bit more patient and tolerant with the music compared to regular ol’ corporate radio.

I had given up on radio but now I need to figure out how to feed this into my living room.

In preparation for the new album release I’ve re-vamped all the music/store sections on the site. I’ll spare you the boring tech details but it was A LOT OF WORK. Here’s some of the new stuff:

• Affected pages are music, I Don’t Know What I’m Doing, I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Remixed, Outside the Inbox and the store.
• I tried to roll buying and listening together in a non-obnoxious way. Anywhere you can listen to the albums you can also buy them and vice versa.
• Combined physical and digital buying instead of having two separate stores.
• Every album has a flash player on it now for quick listening.
• Variable prices for I Don’t Know What I’m Doing. MP3s go for any price including. CDs have a $5 minimum.
• Paid downloads come off the ultra-reliable Amazon S3 servers and free downloads come off my clunky junkbox.
• Buying a CD gets you instant access to digital downloads of that album.
• OGG format is gone, bye bye, hardly anyone bought you!
• Lossless FLAC format is gone (but might come back?) It was more popular than OGG but not by tons and the bandwidth considerations make it rough to give away for free.

There are probably plenty of bugs (please let me know) but good lord am I glad that’s over with. Did Prince have to write his own storefronts?

Lured by a Metafilter group that plays, I bought Team Fortress 2 and have been playing a bunch. It’s very fun, but Team Fortress 2 Karaoke: My Heart Will Go On may be the best mod I’ve seen:

(via tittergrrl)

I get this sort of message all the time on MySpace:

Making Me Nervous won’t play when I add it to my profile I just discovered you (thanks pandora. com!!!) and I want my friends to hear how awesome this song is. I see from your comments other people have had the same problem… can you fix it?

I searched all over and I can see lots of people successfully have added my songs to their pages and couldn’t find any info on why it might be failing in some cases. Does anyone know what the issue is?

I’m not one to be spooked by technology but among my geeky friends the one thing we can still get nostalgic about is hard drives.

For instance: I remember my first hard drive. It was twenty megabytes and that was a large amount of space, at least double what most of my friends had at the time. It was huge and slow and loud and expensive.

Today I saw this external 750GB hard drive (7200RPM + 16MB cache!) on sale for $159.97 CAD.

Huge and cheap, amazing, etc, etc. The kicker hits me when I read: “This Drive Holds: 660 days of around-the-clock MP3 audio”. Man. Some sketchy perspective math:

• 660 days around-the-clock is 1.8 years of non-stop music, never repeating a single song.
• That’s 15,840 hours.
• That’s 990 days or 2.7 years of non-repeating music if we adjust for waking hours.
• 28 of these hard drives full of music would play for 75 years, the average American male’s life-span. Again never repeating a song.
• 28 drives (18,627,840 hours of music storage) would cost only $4,464 CAD.
• Digital downloads to fill those drives would cost roughly 370 million dollars.

I wonder how many hours of recorded music are out there. The iTunes Music Store has only 6 million songs in its catalog which would do you for the first 34 years I guess.