Wrestling and other things

A few things things I've been meaning to blog for a while:

  • You can get physical CDs through Magnatune now. Adds $4.97 to the price, which is not too shabby. If anyone buys one, drop me a line and let me know how it is. (Direct link to buy my album.)
  • My album's finally available on the only Canadian music download service PureTracks now.
  • A custom remix of "Dirtbag" is being used as the theme music on the IT Conversations series Voices in Your Head by David Slusher.
  • I forgot to mention that my track Look and Feel Years Younger is being used on the intro for the Millennium Wrestling Federation. I do enjoy the pro wrestling, so this is great. Thank you Echelon!
musicBrad Turcottemedia, misc Comments
A Look at MSN Music

msn musicI checked out the recently launched MSN Music last night and was pretty impressed. The interface is slick and clean and previewing is entirely browser-based (looks like IE only), making it even simpler than iTunes to check out clips of new bands and much simpler than iTunes to send people to pages of the store. Prices seem to be the same as iTunes and the format is of course WMA chock full of DRM. This means it's incompatible with all the iPods out there, which is going to hurt it in the short term. Also as far as I know you can't buy anything from the store in Canada so there's not much else I can say about that.

Some suggestions:

  • Put more bio and discography content in there. Become a useful music encyclopedia resource like Allmusic with easy previewing and purchasing of songs. Do this right and you'll have a resource that web savvy types would be constantly sending new potential consumers to even if they themselves aren't interested in the purchasing part.
  • Let users embed song previews -- and links to buy the song -- on their websites. So if I wanted to make my killer mix of 80s hits I love and you should have, I could list them all on a page on my weblog here with 30 second previews and links through to buying the tracks from the MSN Music Store. Why would I do that? Because it's easy, it costs me no bandwidth and is something I can't easily do on my own. Giving people referral kickbacks like iTunes would obviously be an added bonus. This would be like the awesome iMix feature of iTunes except instead of being only useful to people who are already inside the store, it would be open to the majority of web users.
  • Artist and record label RSS feeds. Why not give users the option of instant notification when there's new stuff to buy on artist pages, or entire record labels. I can't really see a downside. The catalog is a bit empty in some areas right now and I'd like to be able to watch for when stuff I want shows up.

All in all I'm pretty impressed. Now they just need to get my music in there (delivered on August 27!) and we're all set.

musicBrad Turcottereview Comments
Easy MP3 podcasting with dirCaster

So I was complaining about how annoying setting up multiple Podcast / RSS enclosure feeds was last night. I want to Podcast all the remixes people do of my songs but I really don't want to make blog posts for all of them or maintain a whole other blog just for that. We came up with an idea and my pal Ryan whipped up a PHP script called dirCaster. Basically you drop this script into a web directory full of mp3s and it makes a Podcast feed of them sorted by file date, with data extracted from the ID3 tags. As you add new files to the directory, the feed will be updated dynamically. Quick, dirty and easy. My remix feed using it is here.

It has some pretty obvious limitations but seems to get the job done with minimum fuss. It should work for the usual talk radio-ish use of Podcasting, but I also like the potential of using it to share small feeds among friends. Like I can set up a directory of my current favorite songs I want to force my friends to listen to and they subscribe in iPodder or jPodder or what have you. Then they'll automatically download any new songs I throw in that directory. Pretty neat.

Brad Turcotteblogging, tech Comments
Now Podcasting

When I was in Seattle the big buzzword everyone was throwing at me as a little net musician was Podcasting. I don't own an iPod so I automatically disqualified myself from being interested in it. I've had a chance to read up on it now though and it's really just aggregated audio content, which I am a fan of. You jam audio (generally audio you make, radio shows, etc.) into your RSS feeds, and then there are tools such as iPodder to automatically download this content. As a next step it'll cram it into your iPod so you can listen on the go.

As a net musician, priority number one is getting my dumb songs out there to as many people as possible. Without a giant budget I have no sure-fire way to get onto the radio, so obviously the idea of a free opt-in broadcast service is nice and exciting.

Thanks to Pieter Overbeeke and Bernard Flach's enclosure modification for Wordpress (which Pieter verified to me works fine with Wordpress 1.2.1), I've added enclosure support to my latest song entries. This feed here should get you the latest Brad junk into your aggregator. The main feed will now have enclosure support for my songs as well alongside my regular postings.

I'm also trying to figure out a way to move all the remixes people have done with my source files over into a feed of their own as well, but that's being a bit trickier.

musicBrad Turcotteblogging Comments
Fans Rule

Fans Rule is a great entry by Scott Andrew about how the number one importance to new bands should be the accumulation of new fans, not worrying about copy protection. I've rambled a lot of similar stuff in the past but Scott's entry is very well written and worth reading.

business, musicBrad Turcotte Comment