Apparently AOL is blocking mail from my ISP (Allstream). I just started getting notices about this the other day but have been suspicious for a while. So if you didn't get a reply from me and are on AOL, that may be why (the other option is that I'm lazy but I've been pretty good about email lately). If you've been trying to get in touch with me, please send me another email and I'll use a different mail server to reply. Thanks.

Finally got around to tidying the web design here up a bit. Let me know if there's anything I goofed on.

I finally got sick enough of the sound coming from my Thermaltake Volcano 11 CPU fan to look around at my options for quiet CPU cooling. I previously owned a Zalman CNPS3100-Plus Flower Cooler and love love LOVED it. But once I upgraded to the 2600+ from my 1600+, I could no longer use it in quiet mode because of how smoking hot the new chip is. At the time they didn't seem to have any options for me, but a bit of searching tonight found me the Zalman CNPS6000-Cu Flower Cooler:

Which is what I want and what I have now ordered. $65 Canadian before tax and shipping. I totally can't wait to get it. In fact I'm going to go sit outside in the freezing rain to wait for it now.

Interesting interview with Apple CEO Steve Jobs about iTunes, Apple and the record industry. I particularly liked his assessment of the current issues in the record industry and conclusion that record contract advances should be done away with:

The remedy is to stop paying advances. The remedy is to go to a gross-revenues deal and tell an artist, "We'll give you twenty cents on every dollar we get, but we're not gonna give you an advance. The accounting will be simple: We're gonna pay you not on profits -- we're gonna pay you off revenues. It's very simple: The more successful you are, the more you'll earn. But if you're not successful, you will not earn a dime. We'll go ahead and risk some marketing money on you. But if you're not successful, you'll make no money. If you are, you'll make a lot more money." That's the way out. That's the way the rest of the world works.

This has been my pet theory for a while, that this whole system of advancing and recouping seems really dumb given how stupid cheap it's getting to make a record. Marketing still costs plenty though (and is a pain in the ass) so I think there must still be a role for record labels in there somewhere.

Dropping Out Of School (Craig Tanis remix) Craig Tanis did a remix of my song Dropping Out Of School. It's pretty cool, thanks Craig!

Got another friendly email this morning from CD Baby. It's looking like digital distribution for my album I Don't Know What I'm Doing is getting closer and closer. So far I've had to buy a barcode for my album and today I had to get ISRC codes for the songs on the album, whatever those are. They were free though and they look like this: us-hm8-03-09972 (that's for Making Me Nervous). The impression I get is that CD Baby is saving me from doing a lot of stupid paperwork and for that I heart them. If my stuff actually shows up on all these services I never use that would be super sweet as well.

Apparently it's the 10th anniversary of Frank Zappa's death today. I'm not sure if it shows at all, but Zappa's been a pretty big influence on me both in his music and his attitudes towards recording and the music industry. One of the things I admired about him most was how practical he was in regards to his art. I tend to avoid being sentimental about artists, but every now and then I think it's pretty crummy that Frank isn't around to play around with the latest gear, use the Internet to distribute his music and to generally be a pain in the RIAA's ass.

Did the Atlanta interview, went all right. They played the first minute or so of Justin Bacon's "My Parents Are Gone For The Weekend..." on the air. It got beeped, which was fun.

My interview for "The Regular Guys" show on WKLS in Atlanta has been rescheduled for tomorrow morning at 7:15am. I will be sleepy.

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.