Brad Sucks » news

Out of It packaging

Brad — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:49:44 +0000

Here’s what my next CD will look like:

The entire design is in ANSI art by Fredrik Olsson.

Your locations

Brad — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:18:36 +0000

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.

Give to me your locations

Brad — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:14:33 +0000

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.

New music & store makeovers

Brad — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 03:37:15 +0000

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?

MySpace is still annoying

Brad — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:04:26 +0000

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?

Out of It vocals update

Brad — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:20:01 +0000

A while back I asked for some backing vocals to put on the title track of my next album. The mix is just about done and here are the folks whose vocals got included:

SexyJosh, Eric Peterson, Badcactus, Jeff Fal, Jonathan Coulton, Katherine Glover, Anti-M and Justin Bacon.

I’ll be trying to track you down soon for your real name and/or address for the liner notes and album shipping but if you happen to see this, please drop me a line. Thanks to everyone for participating!

Last night at Zaphods

Brad — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:56:36 +0000

The show last night went just fine, thanks to everyone who came out and to everyone who was just there.

Doing live shows these days is strange. I’m not sure what to expect anymore. Some highlights:

There was a really drunk guy yelling that we were “the next April Wine”. I think he was yelling that at all the bands.
There was another guy who just yelled “YOU LOOK LIKE JIMMY FALLON” at me which is a new one.
Tom from Furnaceface did the sound and he was awesome.
I believe my fly was open for the entire show. My first time (as far as I know).
My car got stuck in the snowy parking lot at 1am but luckily two homeless dudes helped me out for two dollars each. God bless them.

So who knows.

Stop The Spying!

Brad — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 06:13:58 +0000

I guess my song Making Me Nervous is being used in this Stop the Spying video put together by People For the American Way and the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

That’s super cool. Good luck, Americans! (Thanks, Justin!)

Brad’s social linkdump

Brad — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:50:28 +0000

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.

Harvard

Brad — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 05:46:57 +0000

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.