Derek of CD Baby reports on a meeting with Apple regarding indie music and their iTunes service here. The article has a lot of interesting and exciting information. Particularly this bit:

* Apple has hired an editorial staff with backgrounds in music to decide what gets featured. * Editorial team makes decisions every day as to what goes where. * Big labels don't get preferential treatment. * "We pick music we like, and we think everyone else is going to like." * "We've had a lot of people offer money", but Apple refuses money, and has no plan to ever accept money for placement. * Even what looks like a banner ad at the top of the screen is put there by Apple. * When an audience member doubted they'd stay with this policy, they pointed to their 20 years of selling Apple computers, and never selling icons on the desktop or any of the other things that companies have offered to pay them a lot of money to do. * (Plus Steve Jobs reminded us they have $41 billion in the bank and are not in debt. They're not desparate for cash.)

I'm not morally against ads or product placement, but I do think that in this particular case the iTunes service has the potential to become so much more than another bloated, useless mp3.com type bullshit music portal thing. Developing and maintaing the trust that they're actually trying to sell you music that you'll enjoy rather than forcing label interests on you will be so much more valuable in the long term to them. Imagine Rolling Stone magazine with a "click here to purchase this song or album" button after each review and they make money every time even one person follows their recommendation.

If you ran a system like that, why would you ever want to pollute up your reputation with trying to to foist a bunch of garbage on people?

I hope it all goes well for them.

The other day I received a reply from Neeru at the Creative Commons to the scenario which I posted here. Some folk were interested, so here's the reply:

The intention of the license is to give person X and Y a clear understanding of what terms they are agreeing to, hence the license, and the contract. The Creative Commons license carves out an exception to a full copyright, and is a contract that is agreed to by two people, and therefore, if used correctly, should stand up in court.

I'm not really sure what I think of this. On one hand, it sounds good and nice and fair and sensible. On the other, it seems awfully optimistic that everything will just work out for everybody. Perhaps it's just my complete lack of understanding about the law that makes it seem that way.

But I still wonder if the people (rightfully) taking advantage of the exceptions in copyright law specified by the licenses are going to wind up getting their asses handed to them at some point for taking it seriously.

I spent some time this morning looking for some good Freeware VST distortion plugins. I've been interested in making my mixes sound messier and a little wilder and I find the distortion plugins that come with Cubase a little weak. They either don't mangle sound the way I'd like or they sound like a cheap metal distortion pedal, which always sounds lame to me. Anyhow, after trying out a whole bunch of them, the best distortion plugin I've found so far is Cyanide 2.0. It's really a vast improvement over the effects that came with Cubase, so I'm pretty happy.

I have been told that you can now trade Brad Sucks shares on Blogshares. I apparently currently have two shareholders and I take my responsibility to them very seriously. battybaby and Pete, I will not let you down, whoever you are.

Here is a funny comic called Recording Artists Safety Guide To the Beach.

I ordered Cubase SX Complete on the weekend. I wasn't terribly impressed with the Cubase SX Power! book I bought and am hoping this one is better. The folks in the Cubase forums seem to indicate it is. You can never own too many manuals would be my motto if I didn't own too many manuals. Of interest on the site to other Cubase users though, is the Cubase SX Complete Beginners' Guide, which is a stripped down PDF version of the book with all the advanced stuff cut out.

I also found the Cubase SX Key Commands template in Excel format to be pretty handy, though I need to get them printed out somewhere, I think.

This guitar was built by Linda Manzer and is the craziest I have ever seen:

In 1984 Pat Metheny asked me to design and build a guitar with " as many strings as possible" The resulting collaboration was the Pikasso guitar. In 1992 I was asked by the late Scott Chinery to build a strictly acoustic version of Metheny's Pikasso. Thus, Pikasso II. This second Pikasso was recently on display at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in a show called "Dangerous Curves".

It's Raining Men A short film done by dcomposed, with my Pope Song as the soundtrack. He says:

It is a dramatic reenactment of the events that transpired on 9/11/2001 filmed in my back yard.

I think it's quite wicked.

Well, I think the time has come for me to pack up my little songs and put them on an album. I don't think I'll sell many, but it seems like a good idea if only for categorization purposes. "That's my old stuff where I was indie, this is my new stuff where I totally sold out." I haven't decided yet how I'm going to do this. I've been wondering for a while now whether I should just slap better quality versions on a CD in chronological order and call it a day or if I should make an attempt to revise and edit the songs and try somehow to make a more cohesive package out of them.

Just putting the songs as-is on an album feels a bit like a cop-out and it's also troubling how bad some of the recordings sound to me now. However, trying to fix up my old songs seems like it might be a big fat waste of time that I could be spending making new music. Also it might drive me totally insane.

I am posting this mostly to shame my future self if I wuss out or for some reason don't follow through with this simple goal.

Bowie Bonds Under Review:

Moody's Investors Service says it may downgrade about $55 million of bonds backed by music royalties of rock icon David Bowie in light of the sales slump in the recording industry.

Interesting to see the effects of waning sales in this area of the music industry as well.

For some reason I was reading Ain't It Cool News's Jedi Council meeting last night where Star Wars fans discuss how George Lucas has really gone off the rails. Here's a quote I found kinda funny:

"MORIARTY: There are ideas he's backed off of, thankfully, but not many. Look, everyone goes crazy sometimes, and the mark of a good artist is that they listen when someone tells them they're crazy."

Yes, if there's one thing art history has taught us, it's that only artists who are reasonable and compromising go on to greatness.

On Saturday I went to a show at the National Arts Center where my girlfriend was narrating an Inuit story with an orchestra. It was very cool and the show on world music was extremely entertaining and interesting. It was intended for kids so it was very accessible and I enjoyed it a lot. After the show, I went backstage and met and shook the hand of conductor Boris Brott. Even in the brief time I met him, he was ridiculously charismatic and energetic and friendly. I'm pretty sure he could easily have gotten me to join some sort of cult but thankfully either he was too busy or I wasn't quite up to snuff for cult membership.

If there had been more time I was going to ask him some questions about pop music. Apparently my girlfriend has his email address so I may still get a chance. I've never had the opportunity to ask someone so tremendously musically trained, talented and respected what the hell the deal is with songs like Nelly's "Hot in Here" and why music theorists can't just crank out top 40 stuff like nobody's business. We'll see.

Dirt Bag (Fear is Key Remix) Victor from Fourstones.net did this nifty remix of my song Dirt Bag and here's what he wrote on his site about it:

I'm ashamed to say I just discovered Roy Budd but I'm digging deep now and making up for lost time. Meanwhile the mad beats are from a Stone's Throw (no relation) release called "16 Corners" -- again, expect lots of digging from there in the next few tunes. And what can I say about "Dirt Bag"? Set shit on fire...

There were a number of thoughtful replies to my Creative Commons post the other day, you should go read them here if you're interested. I'd most like to reply to this part in evil_d's comment because I only really glossed over it in my first post:

Sure, licenses like these are legally binding. I'm pretty sure copyright laws don't require you to restrict use of your work if you don't want, they just allow you to. I assume you can release your work under any terms you want as long as they don't break some other law.

I see the licenses as very convenient for stating your intent to ignore aspects of copyright, but what if you change your mind? One of my questions is: how legally binding are these licenses for the licensees?

Here's a wacky scenario:

Person X slaps a Creative Commons license on their music requiring only attribution. They're pretty sure they're not going to make any money off of it, so what the hell. I, improbably evil Brad, take this music, modify it and somehow (use your imagination) make a kabillion dollars off of it. I give them credit as the author of the original work, thereby honoring the requirements of their CC license.

Person X sees me rolling around in hundred dollar bills and understandably has a change of heart. They come to me and ask for some of the money earned from their work. I, being totally frigging evil, tell them I am not giving them a single dirty damn dime, as specified in their license.

Let's say Person X doesn't accept this gracefully and instead takes the Creative Commons license buttons off their site and decides to try to get the courts to squeeze me for some of that money. Then what do the courts do? Do they pay attention to the Creative Commons license and tell Person X he's out of luck or do they just ignore it and go by the existing copyright law and force me to hand over some cash?

I haven't been able to find this addressed anywhere on the Creative Commons site. I would think that if they're actually trying to provide a real legal alternative to "all rights reserved", it's worth being concerned with scenarios like this.

This thread on Metafilter has once again made me wonder what the actual point of the Creative Commons is. I've looked at the Creative Commons before and had it recommended to me and have seen the licenses around on other sites for a while. But being a dumbass, I don't really understand how it's different than saying "do whatever you want with my dumb junk, I totally swear to god I won't sue you".

Are the Creative Commons licenses in any way actually legally binding? Is there anything preventing people from just changing their minds at any point? I assume the existing copyright laws overrule any pretty license button you may decide to put on your web site.

Maybe the purpose of the Creative Commons is simply to explicitly promote collaboration between artists. In that way I can see it being kind of handy, though I imagine there are other ideas that could be more effective for that.

So I don't understand. I also don't quite understand why people who aren't making any money off of their work worry so much about getting ripped off, but that's a whole other story.

Look And Feel Years YoungerGenre: Hard Rock Length: 4:37 Date: 05/22/03 Album: Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing

This is a song I made for the Outside the Inbox compilation. The subject line of the spam was, obviously, "Look and feel years younger". I have no idea what it's actually selling because I'm afraid to click on the link in the email. This song's a lot more aggro than the stuff I've been putting up here lately. Distortion and yelling and guitars as large as I could make them. There are many things I'm unsure of about this song, such as the solo and the quick drum break and how stupid maybe I sound, but I figure I might as well slap the song online and re-evaluate it sometime before the August 1st compilation deadline.

Currently my song I Think I Started A Trend is number one on the past week's top songs on somesongs, clocking in at a respectable (yet humble and indie) 8.06. Also noteworthy is that MC Frontalot of MC Frontalot fame said "I think this song rocks just the right amount." over here. That's practically a celebrity endorsement, people. I sent him an email inviting him to take part in my Outside the Inbox compilation but have insofar received no response unless he is sending emails encrypted to look like spam.

Flash Oblique Strategies:

In 1975, the musician Brian Eno and the artist Peter Schmidt published a set of cards called Oblique Strategies. Each card contained a phrase to be used as a guiding principle or strategy to help one accomplish a task. Here is a Flash version of that deck, with the original text created by Eno and schmidt.

The RIAA Radar:

The RIAA Radar is a tool that music consumers can use to easily and instantly distinguish whether an album was released by a member of the Recording Industry Association of America.

That's a pretty rad tool if you're into any sort of music activism and happen to be a little bit on the lazy side.

Bored and elbow-injured once again, I spent a bit of today looking around for music sites and thought that I should document my new finds as well as a few regular visits I make that I might not have mentioned before: resources

garageband.com - After my recent experience with somesongs.com I remembered garageband.com and went back to check it out. It's kind of a similar deal, feedback and ratings, but the music is more unabashedly mainstream and there are allegedly prizes if you do really well. I think I may try it out next and see how poorly I do. I'm not sure it's very compatible with my 26.4k lifestyle however. I've downloaded a few songs off of there and have been impressed with their quality.

homerecording.com/bbs - This is the place I go for general information and advice on home recording. It's the best resource I've found. As long as you're not a total ass, the users there are generally extremely helpful and there are a lot of very knowledgeable people kicking around.

songfight.org - This is a cool concept and a bit chaotic. Musicians are given a song title and they write a song to go with it. The songs are voted on and a winner is declared. It is once again a site that I have a rough time with, being at low speed. I hope to participate once I eventually go high bandwidth.

allmusic.com - This is generally my first stop when I'm reading up on bands. Allmusic's biographies are great, discographies very complete, the reviews are more often than not right on the money and the artist browser allows you to easily find similar bands you might be interested in. My killer app of all time would be some sort of Audiogalaxy-esque MP3 sharing client hooked up to Allmusic.

kvr-vst - Your one stop shop for the latest in VST plugin news as well as a searchable database of plugins. There are also various other useful resources for music nerds, such as the sound card latency database for when you're trying to deal with your moronic sound card. The forums are also pretty decent.

artists

scottandrew.com - It occurs to me as I list his site here that I've spoken with Scott by email a few times -- he has always been very encouraging and supportive and helpful and to me -- and I don't think I've ever told him that I really, really like his music. Maybe I'm a dick. He pulls off contemporary mature folk/rock, kind of in a Goo-Goo Dolls vein if you want to get all comparative, and his songs sound very professional and natural in a genre where most seem to wind up coming off forced and amateurish. I really like his latest song, The Big Lie That Solves Everything.

shannoncampbell.info - I was introduced to her when she kinda dissed me on her weblog over copyright thangs, but I didn't really check out her music. I just recently downloaded Scott Andrew and Shannon's collaboration on Dreaming Of Violets (originally Shannon's song I believe). It's a folky sad song and I really enjoyed it. She has one of the best voices of the women I've heard on the net.

Chris Voss - I just discovered this guy the other day on somesongs and I really like the two tracks he has listed there. I don't know anything else about him but I've been trying to track him and more of his music down.

If you have any cool music links, feel free to post or send them in.