iTunes Affiliate Program

The iTunes affiliate program is really, really exciting. I've written many times about the need for more DJs, independent radio and general music filter services on the net. Thankfully, MP3 blogs have become hugely popular in the past few months and are still growing at a crazy rate. Now iTunes Affliates can link directly to any songs, albums or artists on iTunes and receive 5% commission on any sales they're responsible for. Meaning that if you were an affiliate and you were to, say, link to my album on iTunes and anyone buys anything, you get 5%. Holy smokes! That's an incentive to promote my music far beyond anything I as a penniless and disorganized independent artist could offer on my own and that's just plain awesome.

So on top of it simply being fun to share music with your friends, you can now make some cash on the side just from people following your recommendations. These are the sorts of innovations and stunts that the digital music industry can pull off which I think will make it an exciting, interesting place, and I think we've only just now started scratching the surface of what can be done.

Also: Looks like even a smart guy like Cringely thinks it's exciting too. And he summarizes it excellently: "This is like sending tens of thousands of record sales people out on the road except that they can sell anything THEY like -- any of the one million iTunes songs -- making them salespeople with real conviction and maybe even with good taste."

business, musicBrad Turcotterant Comments
Open Torrent Trackers

Does anyone know of any good/popular Bittorrent trackers for legit (aka legal) material? I'm thinking about putting together an EP for one or more of my songs that I've released the source to. It would include the original song, a collection of the best remixes and possibly the source for the track as well.

I don't really want to deal with the hassle of trying to sell such a thing, but I'm thinking a big free torrent would get the job done nicely.

Please drop me a line if you know of any trackers I could use to distribute this thing.

Brad Turcottemisc Comments
Text Generators

I have a pretty big interest in text generators. Not to automate creativity (though that would be great if it worked) but to give it a helpful kick in the ass sometimes. So I was excited about Google Poem but the output from it wasn't very interesting. Which made me think again about how the web totally isn't providing the awesome word nerd web app I want.

What I'd like is a page that let you import streams (which ideally could be a webpage, a file you upload, an RSS feed) and uses word pairs or Markov chains or anything else cool to mix them together to varying degrees. (There are more features I'd want after that, but let's start slow.)

The idea isn't new, it's basically just a web implemention of the 1991 DOS program Babble! by Korenthal Associates, with no tiny memory restriction. If you included the RSS ability so people could easily mash up the text on their own and their friends' blogs, I think you'd have the feel-good hit of the summer.

Here are a few text mashup/generating sites I've come across that don't quite do the trick:

  • DadaDodo - This one definitely has the right idea and also gives a good overview of the use of cut-ups and generators in art, but the sources are pre-determined. The ANSI C source code is provided but I have no idea what to do with ANSI C code anymore these days.
  • The Shannonizer - this one only allows one source of text and the mashup is fixed with your choice of one of eight editors.
  • When you run out of words - this one will mash up whatever text you give it, but you're constrained to just one text source.

If anybody knows of any sites that do what I want, please let me know.

Brad Turcottemisc, rant Comments