I went to a lot of record label websites tonight looking at shopping carts. When I was on the Warner site I noticed that ringtones are given almost equal prominence to the actual band stores. A Flaming Lips ringtone is $2.50, which of course is 150% the price of a song on iTunes. That is nuts to me.

Soundtrack Composer - an educational Flash game about being a soundtrack composer.

Yahoo! Music launched today. It's a five dollar a month music subscription service, WMA format only, so you can't use it on your iPods. It also uses your existing Yahoo! ID, so if you've got one of those, you're already logged in. Lately I've been tempted by these subscription services (such as Rhapsody). Buying tracks with DRM on them still seems a bit backwards to me, but the ability to stream any music I'm interested in sounds great. Unfortunately none of them appear to be available in Canada, so that's one less decision I have to make.

Oh yeah and my album is here.

Bands Whose Fans Make You Want To Kill Them - a wiki on how to avoid pissing off certain music fanbases.

Remixes, a mashup and a cover, oh my:

• Borderline (16-1lab mix)
• I Think I Started a Trend (Zipper mix)
• I Think I Started a Trend (cotxetxe reverse mix)
• Look and Feel Years Younger (Cyberpest mix)
• Koalas with Guns (Bad Apples) - mashup of A Tribe Call Quest's Bonita Applebum and my Bad Attraction.
• Work Out Fine (Tom Nash cover)

Latest source is still I Think I Started a Trend (61mb). Other source is available here. Send me your mixes.

The History of Sampling - a Flash interface for navigating the history of sampling in music.

Guitar Freaks 2nd Mix - awesome looking coin-op guitar game. Apparently Guitar Hero is going to have a guitar controller also. [via]

Team Toxic Bass - watch some girl get uh pounded by bass.

I shipped off the master and artwork for I Don't Know What I'm Doing to the CD duplication place yesterday. After a year and a half of home-burning that sucker, there'll be a shrink-wrapped, professionally pressed version with a cover and a lyric sheet and everything soon. I'll announce a release date when I figure one out.

A shout-out to podcasts that have been playing my junk:

• Dreadful Snake Radio
• Communicando Podcast
• Crank Farm
• The Rock Show by the Ewan Spence
• tartanpodcast
• Tired Thumbs

I'm also told I was part of an impromptu battle of the bands on the Jay Thomas Show on Sirius satellite radio where I lost to Jay Thomas's 14 year old son. That's pretty awesome, but also a crushing blow and a massive intelligence failure.

Thanks to anyone else out there forcing people to listen to my music. Drop me a line if I missed any places!

She Be She Strike - MP3s from a northern CBC radio station taken over by the Inuit janitor and his friends during a strike in the 80s.

"Please Don't Go Topless, Mother" songwriter tells all - interesting letter from the Nashville songwriter of a cute net famous song.

Slightly rearranged site design is online now. The blog is now here. Please update your links for uninterrupted Brad service. In the site design there were a few goals:

• Reduce sidebar clutter. I'm down to one now and working through it in therapy with the love and support of my family.
• Move the weblog to a /blog/ page, to make the site a bit less crazy for new people.
• Break up the news and weblog so I don't feel like I'm burying the news whenever I blog.

The front page is just a placeholder right now and will have a static, more traditional band design in the future once I have something worth featuring there.

There's now a Flash player on the right sidebar under my album for a quick listen. I'm not usually a big fan of Flash, but in this instance I think it's way more convenient than having MP3 links. You can still get the MP3s on the album or music pages of course. Let me know if you have any feedback.

What goes up... is an entertaining (but oh so cynical) Guardian article about the rise and fall of "Firework bands" (aka one hit wonder indie bands) complete with a timeline and a PDF of the career trajectory of The Thrillers, a fictional firework band. This paragraph on music fans is amusingly brutal:

Anyone who does manage to become genuinely successful faces stratospheric expectations for their next record. Consider the Music, the Vines or the Polyphonic Spree, all of whom delivered more-of-the-same follow-ups to a withering lack of interest. Music-making has become a kind of gladiatorial combat, in which bands battle for attention while record-buyers casually tilt their thumbs up or down, forever craning their necks to examine the next contestant hovering at the arena entrance.

It's true that there's an awful lot of this going on -- the turnover rate for new exciting bands appears to be accelerating. Though at the same time it seems like most of those bands and labels over-spend to achieve something that was never meant to last, so what did they expect?

Vintage radio catalogs and ads - lots of great old ads for radio and recording gear through the 1900's. [via]

Air Guitar Heaven - crowd and speaker posters for your walls.

Double Guitar - watch this dude rock his split double axe.

Premature Death of Rock Stars - a nice page of info on premature rock star deaths. Average death age: 36.9.

Revenge of the Screen Savers - I was a big fan of the show and now some of the principals have reunited for a regular podcast.

Nintendo controllers as musical instruments - PowerPad midi keyboards, plus PowerGlove and Nintendo Uforce controllers.