If you're interested in the perspective of an experienced working musician on the entire file sharing issue, you should read this article by Janis Ian. It describes the benefits of file sharing for musicians (exposure) and a number of the current problems facing established recording artists.

And as an interesting side note: I'd now like to check out some songs by Janis Ian, but Audiogalaxy is gone. The other file sharing clients are unreliable on my slow connection, so that's that.

In case you haven't been paying attention, the RIAA's been up to some pretty incredible stuff lately. First of all they managed to get Audiogalaxy (my favourite file sharing service) to block almost all songs available on their service, including mine. Thank you RIAA, that was really fantastic of you. Now that people can't freely distribute my songs on the best service available for it (thereby decreasing my distribution and increasing my bandwidth costs), I just want to buy you dinner and then maybe make out for a while. I'd be far more understanding if I thought that they had actually put any kind of significant dent in commercial MP3 sharing, but as I'm sure you're aware, everyone's just heading off to other clients now to download Eminem's singles. Then there's their hilarious fight against web radio. I keep trying to write a paragraph about this but I keep on falling off my chair laughing hysterically and drooling a bit. I wish this particular struggle had been going on when I was fifteen and hadn't yet realized the nature of commercial radio. I could have had one of those eye-opening experiences people tell me about and stumbled around saying "whoah man, you mean like radio's just like one big infomercial for albums? and they play ADS on it? trippy, dude!" if I had talked like that when I was fifteen.

All in all, it just makes me look forward to the horrible scary future of technology even more. Let's just see how much you appreciate MP3 file sharing when I can clone myself up an Eminem to imprison in my basement and punch and kick into making new songs for me any time I want. Sue me for royalties? Eminem clone army coming your way, suckers. And giant robots. And really, really tiny robots. And maybe mid-size robots with giant knives.

BorderlineGenre: Pop/Hip Hop Time: 3:12 Date: 6/12/2002 Album: Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing

Borderline was written and recorded in about two days and is the first track I've completed after building my new home studio and using my Event 20-20bas monitors. I'm pretty happy with the result. I think the production quality is up a bit from my previous tracks and that makes me feel a bit better about all the money I blew on speakers and drywall. The song is about mental illness and is kind of fun.

The other thing that's been going on while I've been stupidly busy is that I briefly was an official objector to the proposed increased copyright levy on blank audio recording media up here in Canada. You can read about it here if it interests you, but the bottom line from that page is: The current levy on CD-Rs is 21¢ each. The proposed CD-R levy is 59¢.

The proposed levy for MP3 players with non-removable hard drives is $21 per gigabyte.

The first one would affect me far more than the second, though they're equally pretty awful. The money collected from this levy would apparently be distributed among Canadian artists most damaged by the rapid rise of music sharing/copying/piracy.

My arguments were a) that this proposed levy would hurt my ability to produce and sell CD-R's of my music by raising my costs both in duplication and in backups. Neither of which have anything to do with taking money from any Canadian artists (except maybe me). And b) that 21$ per gigabyte is a hilarious amount of money, especially taking into consideration how huge, large, fast and compact storage is quickly becoming.

I was gung-ho about going the distance and attending meetings and maybe yelling "YOU'RE OUT OF ORDER!" once or twice, but I couldn't get anyone to fill me in on how much time I was going to have to commit to Fighting the Man. So I've withdrawn as an objector and instead re-submitted my long-winded rant as a comment which is in the records and will hopefully persuade everyone to give in to reason and do exactly what I say.

I had forgotten to post this bit of news, but my track Gangsta Love is apparently going to be used as the theme for a series about the mob being filmed in Vancouver called "Jimmy Two Thumbs". I've read the treatment and it sounds like it could be pretty fun. I have no other info about the project, so if you ask me I will blink at you.

I finally finished putting together Brad Sucks One, my first open source CD release. On top of getting CD quality versions of the songs available on the site, you also get the audio source and Sonic Foundry Acid project files of my tracks Difficult Situation and Overreacting for your tampering pleasure. You're free to do whatever you want with the source files -- and all for the low, low price of a measly ten American dollars.

Stay tuned for more tracks and the open source releases of those as well. Rock on.

After what seems like a month of dealing with awful hosting problems for both this site and my other ones, things seem to be back online. I have an injured finger and am hoping to get back on track with this whole mad crazy ill fresh Brad Sucks thang real soon.

My little studio room is complete. The Event 20/20bas monitors have been purchased but not set up yet. I am now poor, sore, tired and my complaints about those things are more or less completely ignored by even those who love me. Also: I spent all of today setting up equipment and tomorrow I will continue to do the same, taking occasional breaks to fret about dampening the reflections in the small room and wonder if I'll still be interested in making music by the time everything's all set up. Probably I will, but it seems like an appropriate time to wonder such a stupid thing.

What they don't tell you when you start down the path of rock stardom is how much time you're going to spend in Home Depot.

Brad Sucks tracks seem to be available on Audiogalaxy now. Check it out here. Overreacting seems to be my least popular track, which is pretty neat. Luckily I've only got three songs, I make no money and am relatively unknown, so nobody's bothered to accuse me of selling out or losing my hardcore edge with that track.

Though it was delayed by the celebration of the death of Jesus, work on my little studio room continues. I'm thinking it'll be approaching completion in about a week, though I'm unsure of how miserable insulating the ceiling and installing carpet is going to be, or how much additional sound dampening I'm going to have to do so that it's not the little box of echoes it is now. After that I'll be spending all my money in the universe on monitors, hooking everything up and then, finally, I'll try to finish up the bunch of half-finished tracks I've got lying around and put them online.

My studio construction is coming along pretty nicely and is probably about a week away from completion. I've been out pricing carpet and insulation and sound dampening foam as well as continuing my quest for near field monitors. Researching monitors is pretty annoying and I don't in any way condone or recommend it. Instead, I suggest you make a costly impulse purchase based on whatever speakers seem attractive to you and cost the most you can possibly afford. Rate them based on how heavy they are, or wind resistence properties or their colour or something. That seems to be about where my week of careful research has led me and let me tell you, it's a happier place than talking to other musicians and engineers.

My research has indicated that the Event 20/20bas's are probably the best bang for my buck. But if I were to walk into a room full of musicians and engineers and explain what I was thinking of buying, a riot would break out immediately and I would be torn limb from limb while people screamed brands like KRK, Behringer, Mackie and Genetec at me.

Here's an example of the type of conversations about monitors I've been having over the past week:

Me: Hey, so I'm thinking I'm going to buy the Event 20/20bas's. Most of the reviews are pretty good and lots of people recommend them and I realize they're not top of the line, seeing as though they're "only" $1200 Canadian, but I think they're probably good enough for me right now.

Engineer: [slaps me] They suck and you're an idiot! Don't bother. You're better off mastering your album on ten dollar Radio Shack headphones, you fucking idiot. They suck. You suck. Be a man and buy a REAL pair of monitors, like [monitors that cost ten thousand dollars each]!

Me: But I'm not expecting professional studio quality here, not to mention that I can't in any way afford it. It's just a small home studio and it seems like it would be silly to put myself in tremendous stupid debt paying thousands of dollars per monitor when I pretty much just want to make reasonable sounding demos. I always have the option of selling them later and upgrading when I have more money. Or if I want to get that 100% slick and polished sound, I can invest the money I would have spent on incredible monitors into professional studio time where actual trained engineers like yourself can worry about those things.

Engineer: Fag.

So it's a pretty exciting time. Also, I broke my electric guitar. I tripped over a cable and knocked it off its stand and it fell flat on its face, which snapped the pickup switch off. Rock on!

After going to WWF Smackdown! the other night, I've been trying to figure out how to work my music career so I can eventually be involved with wrestling in some way. Somebody sent me this:

If you nail "Hulk Hogan and the Wrestling Boot Band" into Audiogalaxy, you can download all of the tracks and enjoy them as much as I currently am. I recommend "Hulkster in Heaven".

(You could also order it here, if you wanted to.)

After scamming around on the net for a while, everybody's choice for some sort of affordable flat-response monitor solution seems to be the Event 20/20's. I had to wade through an awful lot of stupid arguments about monitors, but this review by Sound on Sound is pretty encouraging. The only other possible option I've been able to track down is the Mackie HR824's, which seem to blow the 20/20's out of the water, but with an understandable price increase that I probably can't manage at this point in my music and web design career.

Over the next week or two I'll be getting a nice sound-proofed studio room built, which will hopefully be a vast improvement over the current "really reflective and cramped bedroom" thing I've got going on right now. Also, I think I'm going to shell out the dough for real live monitors so I can actually attempt to learn a thing or two about mixing. But first I have to learn a thing or two about monitors.

I accidentally knocked my (apparently) glass guitar slide off my desk and it shattered on the floor into at least seventy-five pieces. I had always assumed it was made out of some sort of clear plastic but never tested it. Now I have. And now I have nothing to play slide guitar with. And instead of working on a new song tomorrow evening, I'll be attending WWF Smackdown! and will attempt to win the Hardcore championship on behalf of Brad Sucks and my fan. Watch for it!

There's now a music page with little notes on the three tracks I've got online. The next Brad Sucks track will probably be up in the next week or so. Possibly delayed by me going to WWF Smackdown! on Tuesday, which I am actually doing regardless of what you think of me for it.

Eventually I'm going to put some of the shady record deal offers I've received just from my three little songs online so you can all enjoy them as much as I have. They are numerous and trust me, they're nothing worth bragging about or I'd be bragging about them. I figure if I could get a nickel for every "SEND US YOUR DEMO AND SIXTY DOLLARS AND WE MIGHT SIGN YOU!!" e-mail I've gotten since I put my songs online, I'd be living on the moon right now in some sort of transparent Brad-dome equipped with a billion dollar recording studio and enough guns to protect me from the government and any space aliens that might come along. I'd spend my days working solely on experimental compositions using only empty beer cans, prescription bottles and a ten dollar Radio Shack microphone, you know, for art. But no nickels.

Here's what Lockergnome Digital Media had to say about Brad Sucks:

Brad writes songs that sample from all the best bands and artists of the 90s. "Overreacting" sounds like a mixture of REM and The Flys, "Difficult Situation" wouldn't sound out of place on any early Sebadoh album, and "Gangsta Love" resembles Mellow Gold-era Beck. Hell, even William S. Burroughs said it was okay for artists to steal: "Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them." Brad doesn't rip off other artists, he just knows what works and what doesn't. Besides, his sense of humor permeates every song, and that's quite original. All hail the Canadian paradox.

I skimmed this after I had just woken up and thanks to sleepiness and my negative worldview, the following words were the only ones that registered in my brain: 'sample', 'steal' and 'rip off', which was a little shocking. I read it again and then I felt fine. Ain't nothin' wrong with that.

I injured my left thumb two days ago shelling peanuts while watching wrestling and drinking beer. Playing guitar or keyboards makes me cry like a little girl with an injured thumb and no pride. You can extrapolate this anecdote into some sort of lesson if you'd like.