Oh man, I wish I had thought of this. Instead of trying to undercut everybody by selling her CDs at almost cost, Marissa Marchant is charging more than everyone:

4 album set available for $2000.00 and $1000.00 for one cd. This is how much music should be worth, if there is talent there. They are cheapening music and talent, by selling it like it is fried chicken at kfc. I am not one dimentional. I am a singer, arranger, producer, and multi instruemntalist."

That's totally brilliant! As an indie, selling my stuff for $5 and giving away the MP3s, I have to practically BEG people to put it on Kazaa and swap it around to their friends. If I were to jack the price up to say... a MILLION DOLLARS A SONG (since along with all her many credits I also do the recording, engineering, computer tech work, mixing and mastering for my stuff), maybe people would get more of a thrill out of stealing my tracks. (via J-Walk)

Well, I've faxed off the documents and mailed the CD to Magnatune. I've talked to a lot of people about it over the past day and thought I'd share some (very possibly incorrect) observations here. A lot of musicians I know seem interested in Magnatune so maybe they'd benefit from some of this: 1. As harmless as a non-exclusive deal sounds, as far as I know, no major record company in the world is going to want to ALSO sign a non-exclusive deal. So if you're still holding out for Geffen to snatch up your album, a non-exclusive deal really isn't as benign as it sounds.

2. Various people raised the issue of the digital distribution deal (for iTunes, eMusic, the new Napster, etc) I signed with CD Baby being exclusive. This helpful page indicates that this is not a concern and that the only issue I would have is if Magnatune decided to go off and try to sell the tracks to iTunes or eMusic. In which case I'd have to choose between Magnatune and CD Baby for my digital distribution. (CD Baby says all it requires is 30 days notice.)

3. The 50/50 sliding scale model of Magnatune irked more than a couple of musicians and industry folk I showed it to. I was told that since Magnatune is not advancing you any money or promising to do any promotion, they couldn't understand why Magnatune would deserve 50% of the of the financial goodwill you generate as an artist.

When you buy a CD from Magnatune you're given the option of paying $5-$18 with $8 being the recommended price. It says underneath the pricing option "50% goes directly to the artist, so please be generous", which as several people pointed out, is the same as saying "50% goes directly to Magnatune, so please be generous".

Most other services (such as CD Baby and Cafe Press) take a flat amount per CD to ensure they profit on each transaction. Anything above that number goes to the artist. Does Magnatune necessarily deserve an equal tip each time you tip an artist on the service? For me I guess I don't really care, but it's probably something worth thinking about if you're looking at this as a potential big money maker.

4. To join Magnatune I had to agree to put a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license on the songs on my album. Whether this conflicts with my whole "no copyright" thing, I have no idea and basically I just don't have the energy to worry about it. You would think it would be easy to get the simple message "DO WHATEVER THE HELL YOU WANT WITH MY MUSIC, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD I DON'T CARE" across, but apparently it's a lot more complicated than that. In conclusion: I love licenses!

5. On the topic of Scott Andrew's post the other day about the Creative Commons and BMI/ASCAP royalties, you must sign a waiver when you join Magnatune so that BMI/ASCAP cannot collect royalties from Magnatune for the songs you specify. (I understand why, I just thought I'd throw that in for Scott.)

6. The contract is for five years, which seems like a dang long time. In the annotated distribution agreement it says "You give us these rights for 5 years (remember, they're non-exclusive rights, so you're not giving anything up)".

While it's true that a non-exclusive deal doesn't keep you from signing other non-exclusive deals, I think a lot of artists are secretly hoping that a really sweet EXCLUSIVE deal will come along within the next five years. Unless I'm mistaken, that means your album is effectively off the exclusive market for five years. Which I agree isn't a big concern for most people, but I don't know if I'd go so far as to say it's nothing.

Anyhow, I don't mean to harsh on Magnatune. I'm still real pleased with joining and I think they offer a cool, unique service that is bound to change and evolve over time as things get ironed out. These are all just things that came up as I was running it by friends of mine, some of whom are in the currently dying record industry.

A few weeks ago I saw Magnatune.com owner John Buckner on The Screen Savers on TechTV. It wasn't the first time I had heard of Magnatune, but I hadn't paid much attention. I kinda tune out when most people talk about music industry revolutions these days. But I listen to The Screen Savers. It was more interesting than I had originally thought. The concept is basically "shareware music". People can download 128k (i think) MP3s from artists and decide then if they want to pay to download high quality .WAV versions of the songs/albums.

I FTP'd them my I Don't Know What I'm Doing album MP3s last week for the heck of it and they wrote back today saying they'd like me to join Magnatune. I now have some forms here to fill out and send in if I so desire.

I basically have no idea if this is a good idea or not. It's apparently non-exclusive so I believe I can keep on doing what I want here, but that it will provide a service I would very much like to have: if a visitor decides they'd like to buy a high quality version of my album (or songs from it) they'll be able to do that through Magnatune and download it from them. Thereby removing my manual CD-burning, labelling and mailing labor from the picture, which would be certainly all right by me. For that it seems worth it.

I'm really interested and also terrified to see what happens! Hooray!

More Than Soup (brad sucks guitars remix) Craig Tanis aka Starfinger made a song called More Than Soup for Songfight. It made me laugh and I found it real catchy so I asked if I could remix it.

Also available is a version without guitars:

More Than Soup (brad sucks no guitars remix)

It was pretty relaxing and fun to work on a song that wasn't mine.

Wow! Adam Gessaman at idly.org made a video of himself walking to campus and back all set to my song Making Me Nervous:

Matt started by recording his feet and being the drone that I am, I decided to take his idea and copy it — even though my shoes are no where near as classy as his. It took me about an hour to patch together, and rather unlike Matt's laid-back stroll, mine reflects the insanity of the last week.

So, without further (and unwarranted) ado, here's my walk to campus and back today, [Divx MPEG-4 AVI, 18 MB] with the soundtrack provided by Brad Sucks.

Very cool! Thanks for using my song, Adam!

Scott has a thoughtful entry up wondering if Creative Commons licenses interfere with performing rights organizations like BMI and ASCAP. Here is my Creative Commons rant as I haven't had one in a while. As I've talked about before here, I just "don't get" the Creative Commons. They seem like good people with a noble purpose. I get asked occasionally why, being allegedly a web nerd and down with the online music, I don't have CC licenses on all my stuff.

I don't really have a good answer other than that licenses, even very gentle ones like the Creative Commons, just don't seem very progressive and/or rock and roll to me. "Here is my free music... AND NOW HERE ARE THE RULES FOR MY FREE MUSIC." What's the point?

It all just seems like artists are worrying about one potential disaster scenario: someone makes money off of their work and they don't get any. But at the end of the day, most of the people using Creative Commons licenses are so far away from this ever happening that it seems ridiculous to me to even be the least bit concerned about it. What if Madonna rips off one of my songs? First of all: what makes you think Madonna wants your songs? And as an unknown artist, what do you really have to lose if that were to happen?

Being worried you're going to lose out on the possible royalty winfall feels like lottery mentality to me. The odds are so so so SO small that you will ever win anything worthwhile or be ripped off by anyone powerful. I likes worryin' just as much as the next guy, but even I can't get worked up about something as improbable as that.

If there's money to be made in churning out crappy tracks in a home studio and putting them online, it seems infinitely more likely to me that the money will come from delivering good music and building a fan base that's willing to support you to make more. That should probably be the thing that artists need to spend a lot of time thinking about, not whether they bought a Super 7 ticket today.

I'm not against the Creative Commons by any means, I just don't understand what I as an artist have to gain by using their licenses. I'd happily put one on my music the moment I could see some sort of practical benefit to it, but right now I just don't see the use.

This blog's usually about music, but the good fellas at Penny Arcade are doing a charity drive called Child's Play wherein you buy things off of this wish list and sick kids at the Seattle Children's Hospital get the toys and games. I think it's a really cool and worthwhile idea. Good on Tycho and Gabe for using their awesome gaming power for good rather than the more obvious choice of evil.

Catching up on some Zeropaid this morning, two articles caught my eye. Bands 'urged to cut album tracks' about record labels asking their artists to slim down their albums:

"The final choice will always be the artist's, but I feel - and consumer research bears it out - that the public thinks albums have too much filler," Mr Ienner told the paper.

Unfortunately they don't name any artists except Outkast (for having a lot of songs on their new album) and Bruce Springsteen (for having only 8 on Born To Run). I don't think Outkast's doing too badly.

That article is also really funny if you read it as a call to action to reduce album content when you contrast it with the article Indie-Structable Rock Scene Smashes Major Labels:

"Bands are looking to make a good, solid album that you want to buy rather than an album with two singles and the rest is filler," said Andrew Katchen, a music writer for the Boston Globe. "There's less of an expectation and money funneled into an indie record, as opposed to say a Nelly album that has to sell millions of copies just to recoup marketing costs."

Ie. If you reduce the cost of an album and marketing and so on, it becomes much MUCH easier to make a profit.

I mentioned Vocaloid way back in July and now it's popped up in this New York Times article. It does a good version of hyping the possibilities of voice emulation, here's a fun quote from Michael Stipe:

Michael Stipe of R.E.M. heard a Vocaloid version of "Amazing Grace" online, and he said he was impressed. (The Yamaha Corporation includes samples with a recent press.) But he wasn't prepared to rush out and have a font created. "I would hate to think that 250 years from now Altria would use the Michael Stipe voice to sell organic soy to a Mars landing," he said. "It's intriguing in 2003. I'm not sure about 2303."

I think I've heard two different recordings from this thing. The Japanese one sounded really good and the English Amazing Grace one sounded pretty fake to me. I'm assuming this will go in the digital actors bin of "you can produce an OK lifeless facsimile of the appearance or sound of an actor or musician, but you can't make them do anything worthwhile without a ton of work and possibly the original artist".

The article also talks about cloning Elvis's voice for use in commercials but doesn't mention that there's a whole industry of Elvis impersonators already out there. I'm not sure making a program really makes an Elvis jingle much more attainable for advertisers.

You're Not Going AnywhereGenre: Rock ballad Length: 3:35 Date: 11/21/03

Here's a plodding sad-ish song to break up my streak of fairly up-tempo stuff. I think the mix may be messed up but I have fluid in my ear.

I got bumped off the Atlanta radio interview this morning because it ran long. I can only assume it was because of all the Michael Jackson jokes that needed to be said, which I can understand. Apparently the producer's gonna reschedule with me.

The fine fellas at Songfight pointed this article out to me, which talks about a lot of the lack of music filters on the net that I was complaining about the other day. But unlike me who just whined, this article actually pointed out a few neat things, like this iRATE software:

One promising though unpolished piece of software for finding new music is called iRATE Radio, created by a New Zealand computer programmer named Anthony Jones. It serves up a steady flow of legal MP3s from sites like IUMA, which are then rated by the user.

I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but I think it's great that people are working on this sort of stuff, seeing the potential in the net indie scene, etc, etc, blah blah.

Gonna be on "The Regular Guys" show on WKLS in Atlanta, Georgia at 9 EST tomorrow morning.

I forgot to mention that MP3.com is going tits up. I know a lot of people are going to be out of hosting and that sucks. The writing has been on the wall for the past few years, but it's still too bad. This all reminds me that I do deeply wish someone would get their act together and try to provide an MP3.com service that actually tries to point out the good independent stuff out there. There is a severe lack of filters on the net, which is great for artistic freedom but bad for people looking to listen to some good indie music.

I've been doing a lot of interviews for Outside the Inbox lately and the subject often turns to the home recorder/indie thing. I usually point them to Songfight or somesongs.com to check out the scene.

Both of those sites are cool, but Songfight isn't really ideal as an introduction for a casual music listener. Somesongs probably does a better job at pointing out good music than MP3.com ever did. The voting is a little zany though and I could see a more elitist editor/reviewer system possibly being more effective.

Seems to me there would be something in an MP3.com mixed with Pitchfork Media type service. I occasionally get the motivation to start one, but I'd probably have to give up making music to find the time.

Thanks to everyone who dropped a line to say happy birthday, I appreciate it in my heart! I had a nice weekend drinking, eating Chinese food and watching 24 on DVD. It was more fun than maybe it sounds.

Did an interview for The Rude Awakening Show on Laser101 in St. Maarten in the Caribbean just moments ago. Nice guys. Apparently they're going to plug Outside the Inbox and the Brad Sucks all week, which is super cool. I also did an email interview with ABC Science Online in Australia yesterday.

And now it is my birthday. I am 27.

Lightning blew up my modem last night. Awesome. Did the WLAN interview and now I have no more scheduled. For fifteen minutes of fame that sure took a long time. I'm wondering if I'm going to have an attention hangover next week, forcing my friends to talk to me in the form of an interview. "So Brad, what was the idea behind your day today?" "Well it's funny you should ask..."

The RED FM interview went okay except that my dumb Canadian mind had a hard time with the Irish accent of the host. He was very nice, I am just a tool. Still, I don't think it was too bad. My sass was not at optimum levels however. Tomorrow morning is the WLAN interview and then I gots nothing else lined up. Is this the end of the media thrill ride for Brad? Friday is my birthday! Glug glug. (drinking sounds)

If anyone got to hear the interview on the Charles Adler show, you got to hear me get peer pressured into making up a pretty awful dumb ukulele song on the spot. It was pretty weak and may be a subject to drink about this evening. The Shredd and Regan show went well, they seemed nice and very into the whole indie home recording thing.

I have an interview with RED FM in Ireland tonight at 6:45 EST.