Trent Reznor released some facts about the Saul Williams record he produced and then released digitally for $5 [nin.com]:

Saul's previous record was released in 2004 and has sold 33,897 copies.

As of 1/2/08, 154,449 people chose to download Saul's new record. 28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning: 18.3% chose to pay.

Of those paying,

3220 chose 192kbps MP3 19,764 chose 320kbps MP3 5338 chose FLAC

Thoughts:

• 28,322 * $5 = $141,610 which for a solo artist and zero marketing investment seems pretty decent. Of course partnering with a super famous established artist like Trent helps.
• With 154,449 downloads and earnings of $141,610 that works out to earning $0.92 per download which vastly exceeds all bandwidth costs.
• 154,449 seems like an extremely low number of downloads. The hype for this album was primarily in nerd-centric venues so I'm assuming the majority skipped the ecommerce shit and went straight to torrents for their downloads.
• This isn't counting other digital sales avenues -- did they put it on iTunes? That's where most people are buying their digital music these days, not going direct to the artist's website.
• I think putting such a low limit on what people could pay was a dopey idea. If we're going to be dealing in intangible value, why not let consumers decide for themselves?
• Are there really that many FLAC users out there?

All in all I think it was a success even if they feel disheartened. Trent admits that he spent too much on the record. I'd be interested to know what the costs amounted to. I can't even conceive of spending $40,000 on a record let's say and having $100,000 left over would keep me in beer and guitar strings for another year or two.

Anyone out there using allpeers? I've been wanting a way to easily share MP3s with friends for a while and allpeers seems pretty nice, though I've yet to get it to work in the Firefox 3 beta.

I'm 'frenetic' on there if you'd like to add me and make me listen to your favorite songs.

I've been jealous of Gimme Some Candy for a long time. I've hassled them to let me in but they're not accepting new artists. It's a great idea -- a tip jar with benefits. Supporters can buy items and leave a little message that gets displayed on the artist's homepage.

So I've written and released an open source clone that's pretty easy to set up. It's called Gimme Some Money. The default items are a star, heart and cookie but they can be swapped out. You can see mine (using the default icons) over on the right sidebar.

Requirements: PHP 4+/MySQL & a Paypal account

Update: fixed an IE/Opera bug and updated it to v0.86 (thanks to jason for pointing out the bug).

Hope everyone's having a nice holidays. I'll have a belated open source Christmas present for other artists up here tomorrow when I'm less stuffed full of spätzle, potato dumplings and beer.

That wasn't too miserable. v0.06 of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store is up with a pretty big overhaul:

• bsdds has its own shopping cart now instead of using paypal's -- should allow alternate payment methods
• zero dollar downloads
• buyer/downloader is now redirected to the download page post-transfer if PDT is turned on in paypal preferences)

The shopping cart needs some CSS love but that'll have to wait as I got things to do.

Holy mother of Christmas I would like one of these Gibson Robot Guitars:

Also please add: unstoppable killing powers.

Just uploaded a new version of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store. Two big changes:

• No longer requires Amazon S3. Your store files can be local and links will expire after your given duration (mod_rewrite required).
• Variable prices via text input. Previously variable prices could only be selected via a pre-defined list in the drop down. Now buyers can specify whatever they want as long as it's more than zero.

Next stuff I'll be adding:

• Integrate a shopping cart I wrote so that other payment options are possible (Google Checkout/VISA/etc).
• Handle zero dollar downloads.

Hooray for work!

Fantastic optimistic article in Wired by David Byrne about emerging music models: David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars. His conclusion:

No single model will work for everyone. There's room for all of us. Some artists are the Coke and Pepsi of music, while others are the fine wine — or the funky home-brewed moonshine. And that's fine. I like Rihanna's "Umbrella" and Christina Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man." Sometimes a corporate soft drink is what you want — just not at the expense of the other thing. In the recent past, it often seemed like all or nothing, but maybe now we won't be forced to choose.

As someone doing the 100% DIY thing for years, I've been scouting around for the low to midrange music biz services and been fairly disappointed with the options. Hopefully that'll improve.

The Washington Post has a cute article: The Moby Equation. A helpful sellout guide, taking into account rock and roll ideals, the song's sacredness, the artist's reputation, wealth and time since their heyday.

These days with a PVR and downloading TV from the Internet, television commercials are alien to me. The idea of a song being "wrecked" by a commercial seems like a thing of the past, but I'm often weird about these things.

Since finishing all the recording for my next record it's been exciting to work on new music again.

Thanks for the Add (demo) (5.2MB MP3)

One of my resolutions is to be more fast and loose with the creative output. Obsessing all alone was not helpful or fun.

Update: here are the lyrics for those that asked:

Thanks for the Add (demo)

gimme the mic cause i'm taking my life
in an unexpected new direction
i could care less about your breasts
or that your daddy never gave you very much attention
i'm the same as i used to be but i'm
doing my best to make a good impression
i don't wanna go on but i don't wanna belong
in this condition

did you know that i'm your biggest fan
i just wanna thank you for the add
can i introduce you to my dad

i'm feeling like a
dead man or the way i seem
cause i'm living underground with a fake id
i'm feeling like a
dead man or the way i seem
cause i'm twitching and i'm learning slowly

i'm turning my cell phone on in the middle of the interview
i'm digging a shallow grave to eliminate my point of view
gotta get suggestions how best to get your attention tell you i'm cool
i don't wanna go on but i don't wanna be long
in this condition

did you know that i'm your biggest fan
i just wanna thank you for the add
can i introduce you to my dad

i'm feeling like a
dead man or the way i seem
cause i'm living underground with a fake id
i'm feeling like a
dead man or the way i seem
cause i'm twitching and i'm learning slowly

Just an FYI: through some mix-up which was not at all my fault, the Brad Sucks gig on December 17th has been cancelled. Total drag.

Marc Orchant has died.

I met Marc when I was in Seattle at Microsoft a few years ago -- he was a super friendly, knowledgeable guy. We kept in contact and he was always passionate about what he was doing and what everyone else around him was doing. He was a guy I had hoped to meet up with again down the road and it's shocking that I won't get that chance.

My best to his family.

One exhaustive search and some tireless tagging later, my sample library dreams are mostly realized. The winner? MediaMonkey 3.0 beta. Voila:

MediaMonkey 3 adds support for multiple genres and a "track browser" similar to the one I like in foobar. It doesn't work exactly as I want -- I'd like to have two genre columns and be able to select, say "drums" and "kick" and have it exclusively display samples that are tagged "drums" AND "kick". But it doesn't -- it shows any that are tagged drums OR any that are tagged kick. But doing keyword or keyword -> album is still a great improvement over simple directory hierarchies.

It's also really helpful rating samples that I use frequently. MediaMonkey 3 also supports multiple libraries, all the file formats under the sun, drag and drop to Ableton Live works good and it's totally free, woooo.

And here for your benefit are the results of my many media player experiences trying to find the right sample organization client:

foobar2000 v0.9.5 - Just... complicated. Need foo_custominfo to handle WAV format genre metadata. Then that data doesn't work in the facets view, etc, etc. I'm sure some foobar hacker could make it do what I want, but I don't have the time or energy.

musikCube - Has facet view, does drag and drop, doesn't do multiple genres.

Winamp - Sort of does what I want with enough wrestling -- though the interface is a little retarded in the mind. But it won't do sample drag and drop to Ableton Live, so you're out.

wxMusic - Crashed reading in my media library and gave me lots of warnings that it couldn't read certain WAV files.

mp3rat - mp3rat only does MP3s I guess. Imagine that.

I just saved you a lot of thankless work. Enjoy!

With completing all recording and sequencing on my next album and me regaining my enthusiasm for making new music, a complete sample library reset is in order. I'm a sample hoarder but my current setup (30-40 gigs of loops and samples in d:\music\samples\ subdirectories) has always been awful. The hierarchy's all wrong and it sucks to browse. For a long time I've wanted a del.icio.us tagging style sample browser but I understand it's a limited market.

But lately I've been using the latest beta of foobar2000 for my mp3 listening and organization. One thing I totally love about it is the facet view:

You can enter a search query or click in any of the panels (you can choose what tag you want each facet to be based on) and it narrows down the other panels based on your selection or search query. It's really fantastic and makes it easy to explore your collection.

So a light bulb went off last night: this is exactly what I want for my samples! With some help from the foobar2000 forums I set up another copy of foobar and had it index my sample directories. Big problem: foobar saves all the metadata to the actual audio files -- .WAV files don't support genre metadata. Boned.

I've been scrabbling around trying to make foobar do what I want with various plugins but it's a pain in the ass. Now I'm on to trying other media players...

Really like the song Phantom by Justice but wish it had lyrics and vocals? Here is Phantom by Justice with vocals and lyrics by The Phantom:

I've been lazy with the blogging lately. Too busy, too boring. To make up for this I have put my latest Twitter status at the top of my blog now so you can know that I'm not dead if this is a concern of yours.

Twitter has been a pretty interesting service. Casual status contact with people I like is a nice addition to instant messaging. What would otherwise be a worthless bit of information is meaningful when it's someone I care about.

That being said, I hate it when blogs that I subscribe to decide to cram their worthless twitters down my throat via RSS so I will not be doing that.

Waterloo solo show went pretty good I think. Compared to Ottawa bars it was pretty surreal playing for people who were already pretty into my songs. All the laptop stuff went ok. Some show notes:

• I needed to run 6 1/4" outs into the soundboard. The soundboard was unfortunately at the back of the giant room and the sound fellow only had two DI boxes on stage and was running an XLR snake to the back. Luckily I brought along my Behringer UB1204 mixing board (just in case) that I was using for practice. So I wound up doing the sound from the stage, which was an interesting challenge when you're playing guitar. The word is it sounded OK so I guess like... I'm a sound genius.
• It is weird to mess up your own lyrics in front of people who know them and are singing along.
• In rehearsals my song switching method (via a Nostromo n50 I found in a box) worked flawlessly. On stage however as soon as I finished a song I completely forgot what song I had just played and where I was and what was happening. So there were some false starts which nearly blew my whole ruse.
• I need to edit the songs so they cut the vocal delay effect off when they're over. Too many times I was like "thank you! thank you! thank you! .. thank you! ... thank you! what the- thank you! what the- .. what the- thank you! ... what the-"

Those are all pretty minor things it seems judging by the people who came up to get CDs signed or whatever afterwards. So I feel pretty good about it. Waterloo U. students are very smart, friendly and attractive and I was given a Waterloo hoodie by the residence council so now I can pretend that I'm one of them.

And as for travel notes:

• The Super 8 should legally be forbidden from using the word "super" to describe their hotel services.

Thanks to the folks at Waterloo for having me out, everyone in the audience and anyone I met that I of course have immediately forgotten the name of. Fun!

Welp, I'm off to the Waterloo show tonight. I have shown due diligence in making sure there are limited glitches in my laptop live show so now it's all up to my lord and saviour Jesus Christ who I have always believed in without wavering, amen, am I right guys.

And I guess maybe I'll visit City 7 on the way.

Been getting some confused emails from Waterloo University students. But I've double-checked: the show is still on: 10pm this Friday at the Student Life Centre. See you there!

Bought a 37" LCD TV to make my Xbox 360 feel better, it's pretty sweet. Also had my first Xbox Live Halo experience tonight and it lived up to my expectations: I got brutally destroyed by some kid yelling racist stuff at everyone. Ah, the future.