Just as I start mouthing off about digital distribution being crud, CD Baby announces they've dropped the $40 fee to get your album digitally distributed. I have sold exactly zero copies of my album on CD Baby (though a few people who have bought it from me direct have told me they found out about it there), but getting included in the digital distribution junk is making me glad I ponied up the $35 + 5 copies of the album.

I'm real curious to see how this works out.

For some reason I was discussing Truck Driver's Gear Changes with people tonight and wandered over to the #1 Truck Driver's Gear Change resource: gearchange.org. There's a pretty fascinating article called The truck driver's gear change: a muso's introduction up there which elaborately defends each of The Beatles' gear change offenses. Very cool and also: silly.

Your 99c belong to the RIAA - Steve Jobs. This article in The Register is a little cynical sounding but it opens with a quote I like:

Wasn't the Internet, this weightless kingdom of bits and bytes, supposed to make distribution costs just vanish?

The author of this article seems really deeply angry at major record labels and possibly just angry in general. He also seems totally bewildered at some basic ideas in business. But I think I sympathize in that I find this whole iTunes universe totally bizarre and unnatural. To me it seems too much like the old decidedly F'd up model dressed up to look like something new. Maybe it'll stick, but right now it just feels like a step backwards to me and that technology + progress is going to lay the smack down on it any day now.

Did a phone interview with Murray Whyte from the Toronto Star today, he's a real nice guy and it was the least interview-like interview I've had yet. Hopefully I didn't ramble too much. It looks like the story on Outside the Inbox and I is going to run on Monday. Pretty exciting and also maybe totally terrifying! In case it doesn't make it into the article, in the interview I talked about home-recording being the new new-wave and the Internet being the next Seattle. I don't know if either of those things are true, but I would like a record of myself having said them before anyone else beats me to it. Ding.

Apparently I'm getting interviewed next week about Outside the Inbox for CKCU-FM, a local college radio station. I've been told that it'll be airing Wednesday sometime. They have a live audio stream so you guys can listen to it on the net if you want to hear me be a stumbly ass. I'll post the approximate time here when I find that out, I'm not sure yet what show it'll be on.

I've hastily put together a gallery finally. It has some art and things that nice folks have sent in. If anyone has anything to add, it would be awesome of you to send it in.

I just installed Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist plugin to see if maybe that will fight back some of the comment spam I've been getting here on Brad Sucks. If anyone has any problems posting legit comments, please email me and let me know.

A year or two ago for some reason I read Dilbert-creator Scott Adams' How To Become a Cartoonist. Recently as people have been writing in asking if it's okay to give out copies of my music (the answer is always yes), I've realized how influential one part of this article was on me. The copy test comes to mind at least a couple times a week:

3. Don't listen to your friends who tell you your comics are hilarious. They're lying. Don't listen to your friends who tell you your comics suck. They're idiots. The only reliable feedback is the copy test, i.e. does someone want to copy your comic and show it to someone else who you don't know. If someone says he likes your comic but he doesn't ask to copy it for someone else, he doesn't really like your comic.

Pretend it's talking about music. Far from being annoyed when people copy my stuff, I think it's one of the biggest complements an artist can get.

Today my CD-R drive fails on every CD I try to burn. Looks like a new drive must be purchased this weekend. Let's hope the next drive isn't a SISSY LITTLE BABY like this one. (Maybe shame will make it work.) Update: Shame had no effect.

Dropping Out Of SchoolGenre: Rock Length: 2:45 Date: 10/30/03

These song notes are so much fun to write. I should make a generic "NOT TOO SURE ABOUT THIS ONE, RELEASING IT ANYWAY" template and use that from now on.

Today I had pictures taken possibly for the Toronto Star. That was a really weird experience and now I am drinking heavily to help get the weird out. (Also I just like drinking heavily.) I also got a $35 ticket on the way home for not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign. It could have been $120, so I am thankful to the Ontario police, who are my lords and masters.

A week ago I was interviewed for an Outside the Inbox article for the Montreal daily La Presse and it ran today. Here it is:

«Les paroles à l'intérieur des chansons n'utilisent pas des mots pris aux pourriels, mais elles s'inspirent de leurs titres», explique Brad qui a réuni des collaborateurs de toute l'Amérique du Nord pour produire les 14 titres de Outside the Inbox.

I have no idea what I said there but I sure hope it's awesome.

Outside the Inbox is the site of the week on Maxim Online it seems:

Unless it's the easy-to-prepare, mechanically extracted meat counterpart, nobody likes to see spam first thing every morning. Now you can share your disdain for these time-wasting, bulk-addressed e-mails through time-wasting, poorly produced pop songs at Brad Sucks. Visiting will increase your penis size by three to six inches in under a month!

Did Maxim just diss us/me? First they make me feel ugly and now this.

I've been told the article on Outside the Inbox should show up tomorrow in La Presse. Some songs from Outside the Inbox are apparently being played on WMBC thanks to Wes Weber.

Outside the Inbox was mentioned (on air?) on 5FM, a South African (i think) radio station.

Thanks to everyone who has been linking to it and mentioning it!

Here I sit waiting for any one of my two bulk orders of padded mailers to show up so I can mail off more CDs. I also have learned that my CD burner overheats or something after doing 10-15 CDs in a row and starts burning coasters.

Many thanks to Tycho and also a big well hello there to everyone coming in from Penny Arcade, one of the only comics I read (along with Bob the Angry Flower).

Between churning out CDs and going to the office supply store to buy them out of mailing envelopes over and over, I've been meaning to blog some of the crazy hype Outside the Inbox has been getting, so here's a list of some of the bigger media coverage so that I can impress my mom: The Register (UK) Folha Online (Brazil) PCforalla (Sweden) Security Focus TechDirt SiliconValley Metafilter San Jose Business Journal

Outside the Inbox has so far made it to #8 on Blogdex, and you can track some (but only a tiny amount) of the weblog linkage here:

http://blogdex.net/track.asp?id=734581431021125345_PFA542.dbp.asp

And my personal hero Leo Laporte from The Screen Savers linked to it here.

I've done phone interviews with the San Jose Business Journal and Montreal's La Presse. Apparently the compilation has been mentioned on BBC Radio and I signed a waiver to allow LBC 97.3 to broadcast any of the Outside the Inbox or Brad Sucks stuff. Eric Wiltsher has told me they're going to let me know when that's going to happen so I can let you folks know.

I am assuming one day I will have time to work on music again.

The Register noticed Outside the Inbox. That is like a nerd dream come true.

So apparently Outside the Inbox is popular. The server seems to be holding up OK right now, but the traffic is flooding in and I'd like to have a contingency plan. If anyone's got bandwidth they want to offer up for mirrors (or maybe a BitTorrent or something?), please contact me. Thanks so much!

After so many delays, Outside the Inbox is now finally out. After screwing around with Cafe Press, it seemed best to just make the CDs myself for now and sell them for $5 US shipping included a la my album. Thanks so much to everyone who participated and also thank you for being patient through all the delays. I hope everyone enjoys the compilation!

Update: A few people have asked if they could buy both my album and Outside the Inbox at the same time and that's no problem, just Paypal me $10 and let me know you want both. Thanks!