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?

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.

I’m nearly all out of CDs of I Don’t Know What I’m Doing and have a new album slouching slowly towards release. Thinking about dropping a few grand on plastic discs while I myself have downsized my once large CD collection to about 15 “keepers” is a tough thing to reconcile. It feels stupid.

I think I’m stuck with pressing CDs up for the near future. But what to replace them with?

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.

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.

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.