Here's a thread from Ask Metafilter discussing the gap between perceived success as a musician and actual financial success. It's mostly anecdotes about famous or semi-famous musicians that have day jobs. It's strange to me that this fact is still a mind blower. Sometimes I wonder if artists being more up front about their earnings would impact file sharing. Something I've noticed is that many people exaggerate what they think musicians earn, which makes it easier to dismiss buying their albums after they download them. What's $15 to an artist who's riding around in a limosine, right? What if you knew he took the bus? To work? Where he gets paid less than you?

Major label culture does a lot to encourage the belief that once you're on the radio or on MTV you're rich and a complete success. It can be good for business, sell albums and attract more fans. And the artists happily go along with it for the same reasons and because it makes them feel good -- nobody wants to be a failure. But it can also trigger a backlash where fans (especially Internet fans) don't want to support you because they've been convinced that you don't need their support.

It makes me think about alternative/industrial bands that I dissed when I was a teenager because I thought they "sold out" when it's pretty clear in retrospect that they were probably just barely scraping by.

I'm guessing that as the label and star system flattens and spreads out (which is already happening gradually) the disparity between fame and big bank accounts will become more obvious.

I Ate iPod Shuffle - a fun poem about eating an iPod Shuffle. [via]

FAWM - It's February Album Writing Month apparently. 14 songs in 28 days.

The WriteExpress Online Rhyming Dictionary finds better rhymes, but Rhymezone displays the results in a more useful way. I hate it when that sort of thing happens. I absolutely refuse to write my own web based rhyming dictionary, dammit.

Exist Angst wrote to tell me that my song I Think I Started A Trend has moved up from #45 to #20 on the Triple J Net 50, making it the highest gainer in the past week. If you would like to vote even more for it and fight against the dark forces of uh Interpol and uhh the Team America soundtrack, you can do that here. It's just the Net 50, no big deal, right? Nay, says he:

Songs that do well in the net 50 get played more often by the station and move up into high rotation. In fact if enough of your songs do well in the net50, I Dont Know What Im Doing could easily become a feature album.

Woo, rock the vote.

For eight years Barry Wood has been going to NAMM (the big music product showcase) and has posted the weirdest stuff to NAMM Oddities. You can check out the 2005 edition to stay current or go all the way back to 1998. Great site.

iPod Hacks - repository for iPod hacks.

Text Mixing Desk - A cut-up tool for text. This one shows more promise than most of the other web ones and the source is available. [via]

I went looking for the most expensive new and non-limited edition guitar that I could find tonight. Looks like the winner is the CF Martin D-45 V Dreadnaught Vintage Series Acoustic Guitar with a list price of $9,599.00. Sam Ash generously offers a 25% discount however, so you can get it for the low low price of $7,199.99. It gets a pretty good rating on Harmony Central, but I think just spending that amount of money on a guitar would compel me to give it a 10.

If you’re willing to include limited editions, the Martin D100 Deluxe, signed by Martin Chairman Martin IV is a uh bargain at $96,000.

>Update: Looks like Eric was right and I was pretty far off. A guitar called La Venezia lists at $26,250 and the most expensive I’ve found it for is $21,000 here.

If I were to buy a new MIDI controller (which I’ve been thinking about), I think it might be the KORG KONTROL49. Check that sucker out. Tap pads, faders, knobs. Sexy.

Rocklopedia Fakebandica - an encyclopedia of fictional bands.

Here’s a pretty crazy looking Pac Man Guitar that I would be more than happy to own:

The Pac Man Guitar. Dave "Timely" Winer of the Howards and the Baltimores requested this piece. He called my bluff after I replied, "Not only can I build it, I can make the headstock blink as well!"

Also awesome off the Specimen Products website are the aluminum instruments such as the aluminum ukulele.

Distributing Music Over Telephone Lines is an article from a 1909 issue of Telephony magazine describing the groundbreaking music via phone service:

Wilmington, Delaware, is enjoying a novel service through the telephone exchange. Phonograph music is supplied over the wires to those subscribers who sign up for the service. Attached to the wall near the telephone is a box containing a special receiver, adapted to throw out a large volume of sound into the room. A megaphone may be attached whenever service is to be given. The box is attached to the line wires by a bridged tap from the line circuit. At the central office, the lines of musical subscribers are tapped to a manual board attended by an operator. A number of phonographs are available, and a representative assortment of records kept on hand.

Back then I guess you didn’t need DRM because everything sucked. (via JB)

PayLoadz - "PayLoadz offers a secure Digital Goods eCommerce service for anyone to sell intangible goods online. "

Divider - Why Are You Doing This? is the new album by Jeff Fal, who is one talented and all-round cool dude. There are MP3s you can check out and the CD is a mere $10. If you require a single, I nominate track 10: "Flagwavers".

Frank Zappa on Crossfire in 1986 - This is like the awesome prequel to the John Stewart Crossfire video. (via revgeorge)

MSN Music has RSS feeds available for their Top Songs, Top Artists and Top Albums. Neat! (via msnsearch weblog)

mp3blog TopList - a list of mp3 blogs ranked and scored by their Technorati and del.icio.us popularity.

MyVirtualBand.com - neat site for online music collaboration. (via Scott)

Derek Sivers' CD Baby Rewrite Journal - meant to blog this a long time ago. Very interesting to watch the rewrite of CD Baby.