ccMixter 2

The new revision of ccMixter launched today and it's looking pretty swank. You can see my new page here. Besides the nice new design, I like the addition of the podcast buttons and RSS feeds. I'm now subscribed to the Brad Sucks remix feed, which is way easier for me than sorting through my disgusting mailbox.

One day when I have some time to goof around with it, I'll whip up a Wordpress plugin to import that list of remixes onto my site here.

musicBrad Turcottewebsite Comments
Pandora

I've been trying out Pandora. It's a Flash-based music player (first 10 hours are free), you enter an artist or a song that you like and it tries to find similar music for you. The data is based off the Music Genome Project which is described this way:

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Pandora's interesting and while the songs do tend to resemble each other in a superficial sort of way, after an hour of listening I can't say I've found anything I like. It seems "major key tonality, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation and extensive vamping" doesn't really get to the heart of my musical taste.

music, softwareBrad Turcottewebsite Comments
Katrina and the killer waves

As an update to my previous post (Florida hammered by Katrina and the waves), here are some more Katrina headlines I've spotted:

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.

musicBrad Turcotte Comments
Myspace

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.

Brad Turcottemisc Comments
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