A batch of freshly hatched remixes:

• Bad Attraction (Future Boy Sambadelic mix)
• Borderline (Fantastic Vamps 8-Bit mix)
• Making Me Nervous (Autolect mix)
• Sick as a Dog (Future Boy Old-Time mix)
• Sick as a Dog (The Canine Fever Dream mix)

Despite a few additions this week, Sick as a Dog gets the award for being the least remixed song so far.

Apparently the remix podcast feed was broken, it should be fixed now. Thanks to Herbert for letting me know.

There's an interview with me here I did a while ago. As for Podcast play, I think The Skinny on Sports is using my music as an intro/outro. I see others fly by on Technorati but I lack the drive, ambition and organizational skills to write them down.

Hey, if you're the person who did the MatterOverMind remix of Making Me Nervous, please email me as I've lost your address. I'm on the home stretch of contacting remixers for the remix compilation.

Got an email from Derek Sivers at CD Baby regarding MP3tunes. Turns out MP3tunes was listed as "Lindows" on the companies my album had been shipped to, so that explains that. Also it looks like the catalog is exclusively CD Baby artists and Derek says the artist cut is "the usual 65 cents per song, $6.50 per full-album", which is higher than it says in the FAQ and would be as high a cut as iTunes despite the purchase price being lower.

A cool feature: "All music purchased at MP3tunes remains in the user's "Music Locker" so they can enjoy unlimited download access to their MP3tunes music library from any web browser at anytime. There is no additional charge for users to re-download their music from their Music Locker."

Express URLs are handy AND dandy: http://www.mp3tunes.com/BradSucks

I played around with it a little more and here's my list of usability complaints:

• Titles and artist names are truncated too heavily, widen it up. (As ranted a bit more about here.)
• The horizontal sliding browsing thing, while cute, isn't user friendly. It's annoying to look through large lists. And combined with the tiny title length, I can barely read a full title anyway.
• When I click on preview links in Firefox I'm prompted to download the 30 second mp3 clip and then need to go open it manually. It shouldn't be hard to make this stream automatically.
• Severely limited number of CDs it shows me on genre pages, unless you count ones you see when you horizontally browse, which I don't because it's annoying.

All of those points make for a pretty crummy browsing experience and seem like easy things to change.

CrimsonBay - it's like iTunes for Indian music. Cool! [via]

MP3tunes has launched. It's the new DRM-free music downloading site by Michael Robertson, formerly of MP3.com. The site is painfully slow under the load right now so enter at your own risk. Songs are 88 cents, albums are $8.88, which are both lower than iTunes. The about page says artists get almost 60 cents a song and almost $6 an album. (Then subtract the digital distributor's cut before it gets to the artist, which can range tremendously.)

My album I Don't Know What I'm Doing is in there here. I have kind of a morbid fascination with what genres music services jam me in. MP3tunes puts me in Pop / Quirky, which seems as good a place for me as any.

Since the site's swamped I haven't gotten to look around much, but dudes, what is up with the heavy truncation on artist names and album titles? On the front page I see "Theme Fr..." by "Elias K...", "Figures...." by "Two Ton...", Serenade..." by "Rachell...", Capricor..." by Mark Ha...". When not a single artist on the front page can fit their full name or album title, it's time to shrink the font or widen the screen or something so visitors can read what the hell they're supposed to click on and buy. And mouseovers on the truncated titles would be nice.

It'll be interesting to see if MP3tunes catches on with the anti-DRM set. Will they accept it as a good way to get media in a format that's useful to them or call "too expensive" on it and keep downloading music for free? Guess we'll see.

Turn your Mac mini into a low-cost recording studio - An extensive how to from Engaget. I'd love to see a cost comparison with the PC.

PodBrix - handmade lego people with iPods.

Band to Band - "construct a simple 'family tree' based upon the interrelationship of band members" [via]

Euphemisms For Death and Dying - I am fascinated by this list of death slang.

Tiny Mix Tapes is a fun idea. Submit some words, a concept, anything, and they'll try to come up with a mix tape tracklist for you based on what you submitted. Here's part of one:

High Voiced-bastards that play rock and roll.

01. Pixies - "I've Been Tired" (Surfer Rosa & Come On Pilgrim) 02. The Dead Milkmen - "Punk Rock Girl" (Beelzebubba) 03. The Flaming Lips - "Kim's Watermelon Gun" (Clouds Taste Metallic) 04. The Beatles - "Wild Honey Pie" (The Beatles aka The White Album) 05. Danielson Famile - "Good News For The Pus Pickers" (Fetch The Compass

The bizarre requests are the best part.

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.