GuitarWiki - the guitar wiki is coming along nicely.
Asian pop culture wiki - a huge amount of information on the Asian pop music scene.
As an update to my previous post (Florida hammered by Katrina and the waves), here are some more Katrina headlines I've spotted:
- Katrina and the killer waves - Sunday Mirror, UK
- Hurricane Katrina Making Waves, Heads West - All Headline News
- KATRINA & THE WAVES - 1010 Wins, NY
- Tropical Storm Katrina Brings the Waves As it Nears Florida - Elites TV, TX
- Katrina and the waves set oil on course for $70 - Investor's Business Daily
- Katrina and its waves spread across southeast Florida - EiTB, Spain
- Crude above $67 as Katrina makes waves - Financial Times, UK
- Tropical Storm Katrina Brings Her Waves Closer to Florida
- Katrina whips up the waves in the Bahamas - Independent Online, South Africa
I'm not even sure why this fascinates me so much. It has this unique natural disaster/one hit wonder/tragedy/walking on sunshine combination that's apparently very attractive to me.
Update: Back on the 24th the Atlanta Journal Constitution ran a story called Tropical storm bears down on Florida that opened with:
South Floridians won't be walking on sunshine when Katrina and her waves crash ashore later this week.
Which is pretty much the motherload.
After getting told many times that Myspace is a great place to promote your music, and in interviews about "the biz" telling people I had heard that Myspace was a great place to promote your music, I'm finally putting my music on Myspace. Here's my dumb page. There are four streamable songs and I have three friends. They are: Tom, everyone's default Myspace friend, Scott Andrew, who is a 100% legit pal, and Robert Schneider from The Apples in Stereo who's promoting his side project Marbles. Check it out!
If you're a Myspace user, I invite you to befriend me.
Tunafish - Bram Bos (the creator of the legendary Hammerhead rhythm software) has released a stripped down VSTi sequencer/rhythm machine.
When they named this latest hurricane Katrina it was inevitable. The news has shown remarkable restraint, but The Australian went there: Florida hammered by Katrina and the waves. This is London went there as well in their Showbiz section: Katrina and the waves sink MTV.
I saw Katrina and the Waves open for Corey Hart many years ago. They played "Walking on Sunshine". There were no casualties.
The Chumbawamba Factor - interesting Pitchfork article on BigChampagne, a company paid by major labels to track what's hot on P2P as well as how the net is killing one hit wonders.
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.
Google Talk - the long-awaited Google instant messenger is out. It's got VOIP and it's tied to your Gmail account. I'm "bradsucks".
altered books - "Cut the bindings off of books found at a used book store. Find poems in the pages by the process of obliteration." I really love these.
Bob Moog Dies - read his Wikipedia entry.
World's Largest Band converts webpages to MIDI files. I did up three of my sites:
The In4mador one is probably my favorite, though it gets pretty repetitive. Stripcreator's not bad either. Brad Sucks though is boring and I don't see any hit potential in there.
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.
MixtapeTorrent - a tracker full of mixtapes.
Hulk Hogan: Real American - IFILM has posted the Hulk Hogan: Real American video from 1986, brother.
Wordpress WYSIWYG editor preview - a demo of the post editor coming to Wordpress 1.6. Resizable, WYSIWYG, very slick. I hope it uploads images nicely.
(The Other) Top 10 Most Ridiculous Black Metal Pictures of All Time - the sequel to this one. Ah, pig heads.
Flow - this interactive music video... thing... kicks ass.
Musicalgorithms - generate music from various algorithms.
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!