I hope everyone had a nice New Years eve. Mine had cops, lawyers, scotch, video games and noise complaints! Then there was a lot of other socializing which is frankly a big crazy blur. Now I hope to return to nice boring routine for a while.

I added a guestbook because people seem to just leave general comments wherever on the site. Thanks to thegirliematters for her Movable Type guestbook tutorial thang.

I've been told the interview I did last week showed up on NPR and they played some of MC Frontalot's track. That's pretty cool.

So for a while now I've been thinking about buying a sexy new guitar. I'm not much of a guitar nerd, but after seeing the band Saturday Looks Good To Me perform months ago I decided (without knowing what one is) that I wanted a hollow body guitar. Something that's a little bit cool and a little bit retarded. After vaguely describing what I desired, my good buddies on the Songfight IRC channel pointed me to the Ibanez Artcore AFS75T:

So I am all ready with my money and my desire for the new hotness guitar. Should be a pretty simple process after this, but I play guitar left handed.

Here are the two main ways this is annoying:

1. I can't find a store around here where I can try one of these guitars out. 2. It's not clear whether a left handed version of this guitar actually exists.

And if we were to ever get past those two, there would be:

3. The left handed guitar is probably more expensive than the right handed.

So it's looking pretty bleak for the left-handed guitar lust.

Did a kinda sleepy interview about Outside the Inbox for Future Tense today, which is a 5 minute technology show that (if I remember right) airs on about 70 public radio stations in the US. Pretty sweet!

I got these books for Christmas and I'm pretty excited about reading them: Songwriters on Songwriting Tunesmith Melody in Songwriting Money Chords: A Songwriter's Sourcebook of Popular Chord Progressions

Maybe I'll be able to write songs again after I read them.

Hope everyone has a great Christmas!

I got an email from CD Baby over the weekend updating me on the progress of the digital distribution service. Apparently I Don't Know What I'm Doing is up on MusicNet which is AOL's bundled music service. If anyone's on AOL out there and wants to let me know if my stuff actually shows up, that'd be real cool. The list of pending services is pretty nifty: iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, MusicMatch, BuyMusic, Emusic and AudioLunchbox. Apparently the album has been delivered to most of them so it's just a matter of them sticking it online.

I kind of just bumbled into this digital distribution thing but I'm finding it more and more exciting as time goes on and the world slowly changes. People in real life are talking more and more about various digital music services and having my stuff on there feels somehow like I have snuck infinite copies of my dumb album onto the shelves of some massive international store. And I likes sneakin'.

My album I Don't Know What I'm Doing is now up on Magnatune. This means you can listen to, buy and download high quality versions (including full CD-quality WAV). The price is flexible, you can pay anything from $5 to $18 and I get 50% of whatever you decide to pay. Pretty cool! I'm real interested to see what happens and happy to be on board with the not evil folks at Magnatune.

Got it installed. It was pretty easy and nothing seems to have been broken. SWEET. God I just want to smash my old CPU fan into pieces for the amount of awful noise it subjected me to. Why would anyone suffer with NOISY HELL when you could have SWEET QUIET BLISS. Once again the flower cooler is well worth it and I am so so happy with it. Go buy one at QuietPC or wherever the heck else they sell Zalman coolers around you. Looks like I give up about 5 degrees of CPU cooling to run it on the absolute quietest mode. There's a fan speed control included so I can crank it up if I decide I care, which I doubt I ever will, ever.

I now have in my possession the previously mentioned Zalman CNPS6000-Cu Flower Cooler and I'm trying to drink up some courage to install it. I'm pretty good with computers but I am also sometimes an idiot who just plum breaks stuff he loves for no good reason at all. Such is the hex placed on me by that witch I dissed.

Many annoying things happened today, causing me to miss the CJAD interview. My apologies to anyone tuning in to listen, I am an ass and life is junk.

I'm going to be on CJAD radio in Montreal tonight at 12:45 plugging Outside the Inbox. If I remember right it's going to be simulcast on CFRB in Toronto as well, but I'm not real sure.

Anybody complaining about the current state of the American music industry should read this Billboard article about Iraqi pop stars:

Yousef fled the country after Uday had a group of girls beat him up at a concert, Khaled said. Former workers at Shebab recall other incidents, one involving Uday urinating on a singer.

and:

Like other exile singers, Bahr would return each year to sing for Saddam. "We had no choice so I think we can be forgiven. Most people understand this," he said.

Thankfully the RIAA has never urinated on me or had girls beat me up.

Cedric wrote in to tell me about this Mixman remix contest:

The Producers of "LADJ The Movie" have chosen 32 Tracks from the Mixman Library -- The Contest Trak-Pak. Use any version of Mixman to create your Remix. When finished, Export to RealAudio G2 format, and submit your Remix to Mixman Radio.

You can download the contest loops and a free version of StudioPro to do your remix and could win all sortsa crazy stuff like a Mixman DM2, a Gem DJ System, sample CDs, motherboards and video cards and more.

I think I'm too lazy to bother trying to learn some other software, but maybe some of you motivated people out there might be interested.

Jakob from heatstrokerecords.com wrote in to ask about my experience on CD Baby:

I know you use CDBaby for your CDs, and I was wondering, do you think it's worth the upfront cost and the cost per disc? I now own a small independent record label and I was wondering if it would be good to put our current CD in there. We aren't really popular right now, so we're looking for ways to expand our market. Has CDBaby garnered any extra sales for you? How many discs have you sold through CDBaby? Has site traffic increased at all since you started using it? And, granted my position, do you think it'd be worth it for me? Thanks.

The precious answers:

1. CD Baby has garnered only one extra sale that I know of (the person bought the CD from me and told me they found out about me through CD Baby).

2. I have sold zero of the original 5 CDs that I mailed them.

3. I only get the very occasional visitor from my CD Baby page so I'm pretty sure it's done almost nothing for my traffic.

And before I tell you what you should do, let me say that despite how grim that sounds, I'm very happy with CD Baby. CD Baby doesn't promise promotion and I think it would be a mistake to pay them money hoping it will boost your traffic. They just promise to facilitate the selling of your CD, which they do well. I'm even in Tower Records thanks to CD Baby. That combined with the potential of the upcoming digital distribution makes me very happy indeed. These are things I just couldn't have done on my own and it cost me maybe $60 US all said and done for the signup, barcode for digital distribution, shipping and CDs.

You also have to take into account that I undercut them in price ($5 US including shipping here, $6 plus shipping there), I don't have a link to them on my I Don't Know What I'm Doing page (though I should probably add one now that I think of it.) If it was the primary means of getting my album, I'm pretty sure my CD Baby sales would be way higher.

So from the looks of your page you're only offering mail order, which I'd say is a pain in the neck for just about everybody. I'd say either Paypal or CD Baby are your best bets for being able to simplify the process for customers a bit. I think I get away with Paypal okay because I have a pretty net compatible audience, but you may have more non-geeks in your audience who don't know what Paypal is, I have no idea.

Basically if I were you I'd just try to figure out if there are people who want to buy your record but are being scared away by the mail order process. CD Baby (and Paypal) will simplify this process for people. But don't expect getting listed on CD Baby to make your CDs fly off the shelves. The promotion will have to be done by you. Hope that helps!

I found out about the new Canadian levy on MP3 players today, which is a big fat drag. As Shannon explains:

Last week, the Copyright Board of Canada imposed a new copyright levy on MP3 players. This is in addition to surcharges that Canadians also pay on recordable media such as CD-Rs, cassettes, and Minidiscs (CBC has a nice summary of the existing and proposed increases). On the bright side, the Copyright Board of Canada decided against increasing the levies on these media, and also decided against imposing new surcharges on DVDs, memory cards and other removable storage media. And the fees on MP3 players were much lower than they might have been.

The original plan would have added $21/gigabyte of storage to the cost of audio players with permanent memory. That would have added $840 CDN to the cost of a 40G iPod. Instead, they went with a straight $25 CDN fee on players with 10G or more of storage, which is nearly small enough to shrug off.

On the subject of that I just got a 128 meg Creative Muvo the other day for $99 Canadian which I guess was unaffected by said annoying levy.

Looks like Winamp 5 (lite and standard) is out. At first glance they seem to have undone a lot of the awful that was added in Winamp 3. They also put the playlist time total back in, which actually was the number one reason I bailed on 3, as strange as that seems.

Update: looks like this may still be a wacky beta release. I'm actually running it and it works fine, but you may want to hold off till it's on Winamp.com.

Update #2: definitely jumped the gun, it's now up on winamp.com and the installation and program are signficantly different. So far so good though.

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.

Had a real nice phone call with John Buckman, the owner of Magnatune tonight regarding my various concerns expressed in this blog entry. I probably can't remember everything we talked about, but I now know that Magnatune is trying very enthusiastically to promote itself and the artists on the label, hence the 50/50 split and the 5 year deal. The 50/50 split is both philisophical (ie. it's a partnership between label and artist) and to cover costs. The 5 year deal is mostly to make sure that when Magnatune prints up compilations and merchandise that the artists don't yank permission away from them, rendering all of that stuff worthless. Which seems pretty understandable to me. He did say something about modifying the contract to 1 year either from now on or upon the artist's request, I can't remember due to being partially brain dead.

He told me they're most likely going to put a list of the latest promotional/marketing events and items online so that while nothing will be guaranteed contractually, the fussy worried artists like me can have a better understanding of what's been going on in Magnatune promotion-wise and understand the situation a bit better and why you're agreeing to some of the things you're agreeing to. I think that's a pretty good idea.

John explained the Creative Commons to me a bit and I think I feel slightly less confused. I at least got the impression he understands it and that it's somehow useful in licensing, so that seems all right by me.

He confirmed the concerns about the non-exclusive deal keeping artists from signing an exclusive deal but added two very good points: a) Major labels are very accustomed to not owning the previous recordings of artists. Like Nirvana and Sub Pop, etc. and b) Unlike indie labels, Magnatune doesn't own the songs of the artist, the artist has just licensed those particular recordings to them for a period of time. So if for some reason you can't work something out with Magnatune and the major label, you're within your rights to re-record the album and then you have exclusive control over that recording. With an indie, they own the songs and you are total-E boned.

Anyhow, I'm sure there was more and I hope I didn't get any of the things he said wrong. Basically in a nutshell: John seemed like a real good guy with a lot of cool ideas and a passion for what he's doing. I'm really looking forward to being on board and helping out in any way I can. Also he and his wife said nice things about my music and anyone who likes my music is OK by me.