Anti-RIAA Flyers from Downhill Battle. I'm just a big softy for civil disobedience.

Universal Lowers the Cost of a CD from $17-$19 to $13.

UMVD President Jim Urie said the move will benefit consumers and the company's retail customers, while invigorating the overall music industry. "Music fans will benefit from these price reductions. Our new pricing model will enable U.S. retailers to offer music at a much more appealing price point in comparison to other entertainment products."

I've been sitting around wondering a few things and then I realized that the people who read this weblog are probably the best source for the answers. Here are the questions: 1. Are there any net radio stations worth sending my album to? I'm on dialup so I have no idea about that whole scene.

2. Are there any independent music magazines/blogs/sites worth sending my album to? I think it would be nice to get it reviewed and have people say mean things about it officially on the record but I have no idea where's hip.

Inquiring artists want to know! Thanks!

I am really really excited about Cubase 2 which was announced the other day. You can watch the kinda lame Flash movie but here are screenshots of the new Project window and Mixer window. The sweetest thing is that it's apparently out on September 4th! That's like totally soon! I'm still looking around for a full list of features.

My mother says that track 9 (Overreacting) is "it" and "could go far" and my dad says that with some more instruments, track 4 (Bad Attraction), "could be a good song". It's also worth noting that while my mother offered to pay for the CD, she made me deduct shipping from the $5 price and I have yet to receive payment. My father, on the other hand, just asked to borrow a copy and then didn't return it.

So with some hesitation I decided today to send my CDs into CDBaby.com. $35 setup fee and they're going to charge $4 markup on each CD, but I'm hoping it will get the album in front of a few more indie music fans who might be Brad Sucks compatible.

Well, I submitted Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing to CDDB (I think) the other night and it has been showing up in Winamp, but I can't find any mention of it on either the CDDB for freedb website. So I dunno what's going on with that.

All the Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing CDs that have been ordered were mailed this afternoon. I assume it'll take about a week or so for the ones in North America and I have no idea how long for the overseas ones. I have a bunch more albums here all prepared and ready to go. So if you order one now you are free of the guilt of making me burn and label a CD. You will have only the guilt of making me address an envelope to contend with.

I slaved over CDs and envelopes and labels tonight to get all the CDs that were ordered ready. Barring some terrible unforeseen obstacle, they should all be in the mail tomorrow afternoon. Thanks to everyone who ordered one and also a big thanks to everyone who has been linking to me!

I've decided to start up forums again, but this time with a twist:

I get asked a lot of questions about home recording and songwriting and music business stuff. I also ask a lot of questions about home recording and songwriting and music business stuff. The questions and answers generally just disappear into thin air.

The idea is to use this forum for question asking and answering and archive everything so that it hopefully becomes somewhat of a Frequently Asked Questions file of music and recording eventually.

Everyone is welcomed to ask and answer questions. The best stuff will be kept and organized so that new people can easily browse through it. While I'm by no means an expert, I will try to answer any serious questions people ask and I will be encouraging musician and industry pals of mine to do the same.

The forums are pretty generic still, but they're open.

Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing now for sale. It's homemade. It's $5 US including shipping worldwide. I think it sounds pretty darn good.

I finished the Brad Sucks album today. It's called I Don't Know What I'm Doing and has twelve songs on it, mostly ones that are on this site though they've been tweaked and improved. I'll post a track list soon. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. After a whole lot of investigation and research, it seems the best option is for me to just burn CDs and mail them off as people order them. It would be nice to have cool packaging, but I really can't find a way to do that without it costing either me or you guys a bunch of money.

Best case scenario is that I come close to breaking even, the album is really inexpensive and it gets into a fair number of people's hands. These should not be crazy goals, but apparently they are.

I think I'm just about done the Brad Sucks album. There is so much I don't know about mastering and mixing it is just stupid. The only thing left to be done (I think) is to worry that the volumes of all the tracks are approximately the same. I think they're "close enough" right now, but could probably be closer to perfect.

I wrote to both DollarCD.com and CDBaby.com the other day but either haven't gotten replies or I've lost them while deleting the literally kabillions of Sobig viruses I've received today. I think I've figured out my plan for distribution and it is both cunning and sad.

Seems like all I do anymore is worry about sibilance, which is pronounced S, CH and T sounds in recording. I've been trying to listen to the tracks on my album on different systems, and on headphones there are often sibilance issues. I'm trying to figure out whether this is just because headphones suck and are all high-end or if it's a mix issue and I need to go back and obsess on all the sibilance a bit more.

It occurs to me as I spend hours doing this sort of stuff and not enjoying it at all that it's like the exact opposite of writing and playing music. Ho hum.

I'm just about finished my little compilation of my songs which I will call an album. I've been trying to figure out the best way to convert the songs into CD format without costing me a ton of money or sticking me with a big batch of CDs I can't sell because everyone just downloads the MP3s instead or doesn't care. I asked about CD duplication on the Songfight message board and got some really helpful replies.

I originally thought I'd just stick the album on Cafe Shops and be done with it, but since then I think I've decided that I want to distribute my album with CD Baby because they seem really frigging hip and on the ball. CD Baby requires a minimum of five CDs sent to them. With Cafe Press that would cost me $8.99 US a CD and then shipping on top of that. That is crazy expensive and dumb.

So this week I'm trying to figure out how possible it would be to make the CDs here on my own, at least in a limited run capacity. That and maybe DollarCD seem like the best options right now.

It would be nice to have a super slick product to try to sell all y'all, but I think it would be even nicer to be able to keep the cost real low. There is nothing more rock and roll than saving money.

There's an interesting interview with Ween at the Onion A.V. Club. Here's a bit on record labels that caught my eye:

O: At this point, with your Internet apparatus in place, is a label even necessary?

MM: People have been bringing that up a lot, but we were definitely not interested in putting out our own record. Everybody kind of expected us to do that, because we release records through our web site anyway. But they're live records, just for the fans, in very limited editions. I'm a traditionalist about music, in a lot of ways.

I like electricity. I like it a lot.

Here's a real interesting article written by Mike Edwards, frontman for Jesus Jones on the topic of selling out:

We didn't hesitate to accept the offer and I can't think why we should have. I recall from my music-press-reading days that accepting money from The Man is wrong but I can't remember why, or how it differs from signing a recording contract or playing a heavily sponsored festival.

Thanks to Kottke.

I'm thinking about renovating this crappy website and for the love of god I don't want to do it myself. Any web designers out there? Email me portfolio, rates, etc.

Daypop Top Weblogs reports that this humble weblog is the 83rd most popular or something. I have a very small number of weblog citations (pls link to me omg) but have somehow managed to rack up a 10.57 Daypop score.