Extraordinary Machine

Coolfer has a good overview of the final outcome of the Fiona Apple Extraordinary Machine debacle. The summary: the press went off about Sony holding back Fiona Apple's album without any evidence, the album got leaked, people went nuts about it on the internet, I believe "information wants to be free" was said at some point, over three grand was donated to freefiona.com, and everyone hated on the evil, evil record company. Neither Sony or Fiona offered comment. And it turns out it wasn't true. Fiona herself was holding back the album and has re-recorded most of it.

So the whole thing magically transforms into an evil record company red herring and a lot of free PR for Fiona's new record. Nice!

business, musicBrad Turcotte Comments
Remixes, drummer and news

I'm sure there are more I've missed on CCMixter.

Also, holy crap, a drummer has been found. His name is Bruce, here's a sample of him on his electronic kit rocking out to Look and Feel Years Younger:

I met with him this week and Rob and I are pretty excited about kicking it live.

Podcasts I'm told I've been played on recently:

Some other things:

  • One of my songs is in "A Few Minutes With Them" (Windows Media / Quicktime) a short film that's getting submitted to festivals. If you have any feedback on it, send it to comments@bullyfilms.com.
  • One of my songs is also going to be in a Dutch snowboard movie being made by RELOAD. I went snowboarding last winter and broke my ass.
  • Teru, a prolific remixer, has gotten a page of his Brad Sucks remixes up on New Music Canada. Check out the page here.

The many times delayed remix album is more dangerously near completion than ever before.

musicBrad Turcotteextras, media, remixes Comments
Backing up

The topic of backups has come up a lot lately. And reading this comic and the posts over at Penny Arcade made me data-sad. Not that I'm a shining beacon of data security by any means, but after years of getting burned regularly, I started using the simple and excellent Syncback Freeware to copy my data to another drive. I'll probably upgrade to SyncbackSE soon, the super duper new version. It only costs twenty American dollars and has a lot of great features to justify itself. Highly recommended. Don't even bother with that Windows backup program.

Brad Turcottetech Comments
The Economist interview

Last week I did an interview with The Economist of all magazines. But don't worry, it wasn't about my massive indie rock riches (which are both very massive and very real) -- it was about Magnatune. Hopefully I don't come off like too much of an ass in it and a lot of rich people with monocles buy my album.

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Live Brad Sucks, take 2

So once again I'm trying the live Brad Sucks thang, but this time with support. Tomorrow is the first practice with Rob Cosh from redcar. I'm pretty excited about it, I think it'll suck less than when I was trying to do it all by myself.

Brad Turcottemisc Comments
Personalized Google

I've been enjoying the new Personalized Google homepage. It's quick and doesn't piss me off, which must be a Google design mantra. I'm experimentally adding it as my browser homepage and I haven't had one of those for at least five years. This would be a perfect place for them to put a to-do list and a calendar that integrated with Gmail. If it had that I think I'd finally be forced to ditch Outlook for Gmail.

Brad Turcottetech Comments
M-M-M-My Payola

My first thought when reading about the Sony payola settlement was that maybe they're just diverting their payola funds to bribing blogs and this is a nice way to put a positive spin on that. So cynical! This CNet article called 'Indie record labels seeing gold' lifted my spirits though. Apparently the 5 cent per song raise we just got from iTunes was due to some intense activism. Sweet. I like all the dirty payola scams and emails that are coming out, someone should be saving them all. Such as:

The payments often came in creative forms, such as providing the station with "contest prizes" such as digital cameras, laptop computers or concert tickets, which sometimes found their way to DJs. In one case, an executive suggested getting a DJ's shoe size, sending one Adidas sneaker right away, and sending the second shoe of the pair after a particular song had been played at least 10 times.

That's fantastic! Also:

"WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO GET AUDIOSLAVE ON WKSS THIS WEEK?!!? Whatever you can dream up, I can make it happen."

"HELLO IS THERE ANYONE I CAN BRIBE IN THERE" "HELLO" "ANYONE??" "OKAY I'M GOING TO LEAVE A STEAMER TRUNK FULL OF MONEY ON THE PORCH" "BE BACK LATER TO SEE IF YOU TOOK IT"

Update: here's a decent PDF full of payola emails.

businessBrad Turcotte Comments