Warner Music Group is starting an e-label

I meant to blog about this a couple days ago. Warner Music Group is starting an e-label:

Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music's chairman and CEO, said Monday that the new mechanism will be called an "e-label," in which artists will release music in clusters of three songs every few months rather than a CD every few years.

Magnatune owner John Buckman has some good observations as this is basically what Magnatune has been doing for a few years now.

The article claims that artists signed to the e-label will keep the copyright to their master recordings, which John says is a less evil agreement. But I'm assuming that all the major perks of getting signed: advances, promotion, etc, are all out the window as well. Which makes it another digital store with a decent brand name. I'd be like "I'm signed to Warner...'s e-label. Can I borrow ten dollars?"

It's a good idea and an e-label would give them flexibility and let the label experiment more with what might catch on with the kids these days without losing a bundle of money. It could work as a minor league for artists that aren't quite ready to be called up to the real Warner Music and have some money invested in them. If they do it right -- like pick bands with good songs for instance -- they could develop a neat little Internet alternative scene. But in my mind I picture a half-broken, basically unusable website covered in flashing ringtone ads, forcing DRM on you, pushing established bands and three song sets of watered down clones of them. But who knows.

business, musicBrad Turcotte Comments
CBC Strike

Tod Maffin's doing a great job covering the CBC strike. I realize the CBC is Canadian, so not of much interest to people outside of here, but this labour dispute is taking place on the net, with blogs and podcasting thrown into the mix, which gives it more nerdy global appeal. Tod has a list of locked-out CBC worker blogs and locked-out producers are apparently starting their own podcast/news site at CBCUnplugged.com.

Robin Rowland has a good entry where he says "The CBC blog war, I predict, will go down as one major step in the changing media landscape."

It definitely looks that way from here, but I'm wondering if there are jobs for all these CBC workers in the new landscape. I certainly hope so.

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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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