In preparation for the new album release I've re-vamped all the music/store sections on the site. I'll spare you the boring tech details but it was A LOT OF WORK. Here's some of the new stuff:

• Affected pages are music, I Don't Know What I'm Doing, I Don't Know What I'm Doing Remixed, Outside the Inbox and the store.
• I tried to roll buying and listening together in a non-obnoxious way. Anywhere you can listen to the albums you can also buy them and vice versa.
• Combined physical and digital buying instead of having two separate stores.
• Every album has a flash player on it now for quick listening.
• Variable prices for I Don't Know What I'm Doing. MP3s go for any price including. CDs have a $5 minimum.
• Paid downloads come off the ultra-reliable Amazon S3 servers and free downloads come off my clunky junkbox.
• Buying a CD gets you instant access to digital downloads of that album.
• OGG format is gone, bye bye, hardly anyone bought you!
• Lossless FLAC format is gone (but might come back?) It was more popular than OGG but not by tons and the bandwidth considerations make it rough to give away for free.

There are probably plenty of bugs (please let me know) but good lord am I glad that's over with. Did Prince have to write his own storefronts?

Lured by a Metafilter group that plays, I bought Team Fortress 2 and have been playing a bunch. It's very fun, but Team Fortress 2 Karaoke: My Heart Will Go On may be the best mod I've seen:

(via tittergrrl)

I get this sort of message all the time on MySpace:

Making Me Nervous won't play when I add it to my profile :( I just discovered you (thanks pandora. com!!!) and I want my friends to hear how awesome this song is. I see from your comments other people have had the same problem... can you fix it?

I searched all over and I can see lots of people successfully have added my songs to their pages and couldn't find any info on why it might be failing in some cases. Does anyone know what the issue is?

I'm not one to be spooked by technology but among my geeky friends the one thing we can still get nostalgic about is hard drives.

For instance: I remember my first hard drive. It was twenty megabytes and that was a large amount of space, at least double what most of my friends had at the time. It was huge and slow and loud and expensive.

Today I saw this external 750GB hard drive (7200RPM + 16MB cache!) on sale for $159.97 CAD.

Huge and cheap, amazing, etc, etc. The kicker hits me when I read: "This Drive Holds: 660 days of around-the-clock MP3 audio". Man. Some sketchy perspective math:

• 660 days around-the-clock is 1.8 years of non-stop music, never repeating a single song.
• That's 15,840 hours.
• That's 990 days or 2.7 years of non-repeating music if we adjust for waking hours.
• 28 of these hard drives full of music would play for 75 years, the average American male's life-span. Again never repeating a song.
• 28 drives (18,627,840 hours of music storage) would cost only $4,464 CAD.
• Digital downloads to fill those drives would cost roughly 370 million dollars.

I wonder how many hours of recorded music are out there. The iTunes Music Store has only 6 million songs in its catalog which would do you for the first 34 years I guess.

I'm nearly all out of CDs of I Don't Know What I'm Doing and have a new album slouching slowly towards release. Thinking about dropping a few grand on plastic discs while I myself have downsized my once large CD collection to about 15 "keepers" is a tough thing to reconcile. It feels stupid.

I think I'm stuck with pressing CDs up for the near future. But what to replace them with?

A while back I asked for some backing vocals to put on the title track of my next album. The mix is just about done and here are the folks whose vocals got included:

SexyJosh, Eric Peterson, Badcactus, Jeff Fal, Jonathan Coulton, Katherine Glover, Anti-M and Justin Bacon.

I'll be trying to track you down soon for your real name and/or address for the liner notes and album shipping but if you happen to see this, please drop me a line. Thanks to everyone for participating!

I'm not sure there's a greater music video than this one of the Edgar Winter Group playing "Frankenstein":

The description is: "Feel ROCK's majesty condensed into 10 short minutes." Here's the play by play:

ryan: we're playing music... in the 70s!
ryan: keytar and sax. and that hair
brad: you can't play BOTH lame instruments! that's MADNESS!
ryan: oh, and he plays the drums too!
ryan: edgar winter is my new chuck norris.

I think Edgar should have worn a wizard hat.

The show last night went just fine, thanks to everyone who came out and to everyone who was just there.

Doing live shows these days is strange. I'm not sure what to expect anymore. Some highlights:

• There was a really drunk guy yelling that we were "the next April Wine". I think he was yelling that at all the bands.
• There was another guy who just yelled "YOU LOOK LIKE JIMMY FALLON" at me which is a new one.
• Tom from Furnaceface did the sound and he was awesome.
• I believe my fly was open for the entire show. My first time (as far as I know).
• My car got stuck in the snowy parking lot at 1am but luckily two homeless dudes helped me out for two dollars each. God bless them.

So who knows.

A long time ago I wrote a thing called the Temple of Ego. It was inspired by a few other websites but basically the goal was to aggregate all the data you put out on other services, creating an overall stream of all your activity on the web. FriendFeed just opened to the public and it does just that. It's slick and does what it's supposed to do. I'm at http://www.friendfeed.com/bradsucks/

It's extremely simple but there's a lot of potential here. Searching, filtering, shuttling data from one service to another, openID, trust networks. With a nice simple API a lot of services could be built on top of it. It'd be the new meta-Twitter.

I guess my song Making Me Nervous is being used in this Stop the Spying video put together by People For the American Way and the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

That's super cool. Good luck, Americans! (Thanks, Justin!)

Scott Andrew's new record Save You From Yourself is out. Check it out, he's OG-Internet. Congrats, Scott.

In hanging around Cambridge and Harvard this week I spoke to a lot of people. Here are some of the links I remember referring to:

• Kevin Kelly's Better Than Free article. A great, great article breaking down what artists can still charge for when the art itself is given away for free.
• Scott Adams' How To Become A Cartoonist. I read this years and years ago and the idea of the "copy test" was hugely influential -- though I applied it to music.
• thesixtyone - community voted music site.
• Magnatune - "We're not evil", creative-commons based record label. Doing variable pricing long before Radiohead's In Rainbows.
• RCRDLBL - Advertising supported record label.
• Eminem sues Apple for using song - when talking about what would happen if Apple used one of my songs in their ads without permission. (I believe I said it would be "hilarious" and great for me.)
• The Superficial. When talking about the escalating trend of dismantling celebrities who "artificially" elevate themselves.
• Daft Punk's Live Show - I described their (awesome) masked, pyramided largely pre-recorded performances as blurring the lines of what people expect or want from live shows and what people will pay for.
• ccMixter.org - Creative commons based remix site.

Self-links:

• Brad Sucks Digital Download Store - the open source digital download store I wrote. Referenced when defending myself that I don't care about "the money" enough.
• Gimme Some Money - the open source icon donation thing on the right side of this page. Also reference when defending myself that I don't care about "the money" enough.
• Source - where to get all the source files for my album.
• Out of It community backup vocals - call for vocals for the title track on my next album (results soon, it's sounding good!)
• Toy Story 2: Requiem - the Toy Story 2 / Requiem for a Dream mashup featuring an Israeli remix of my song Dirtbag which led William Gibson to my music, later inspiring a character in his novel Spook Country.

I'll add more if I can remember any.

Sound was pretty rotten at the Harvard thing which was sad. Pretty much no PA which was like whoah. Gonna have to burn out the brain cells with those memories in them. The talk was fun though, a really engaged and smart crowd. Tomorrow I'm doing an in-class thing which should be super fascinating and then the show at the Middle East which hopefully will be much, much louder.

Boston is pretty nice from what I've seen which isn't much. I've seen a lot of car accidents though and now I'm going to go see a bar about some drinks for my belly.

There's a lot of enthusiasm about Guitar Rising -- a "real guitar" version of Guitar Hero. Just to be a stick in the mud I'm calling shenanigans: machine parsing guitar playing has been the holy grail of guitar nerds for quite some time. So unless the authors of this game have figured out something that all those folks working on guitar to MIDI translators for the past twenty years have failed to do, it will probably suck ass. And if they have figured that out, why not sell a multi-hundred dollar plugin to guitarists instead?

The Berkman Center at Harvard has posted the deets about my Web of Ideas deal there:

Web of Ideas with David Weinberger and Special Guest Musician Brad Sucks
Monday, February 11, 7:00 PM
Griswold Hall Room 110
Harvard Law School

RSVP is required if you're going as I think there's limited space.

Web of Ideas is an evening night discussion series at the Berkman Center, lead by Berkman Fellow David Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Everything is Miscellaneous. Each session will begin with a 20 minute discussion-opener, followed by open conversation. Food will be provided.

Be sure to say hi if you attend. I'm really looking forward to it, it should be pretty interesting and I like everyone I know down there already. Also one of my main passions is talking about myself so it seems like a perfect fit.

Crunch time. Here's what I've been up to:

Mixing the album. Did a mixing meeting with Rob and am back on track with the album. Actually excited about getting it out, which is strange for me. It's really taking an embarrassing amount of time. You would think this would result in exponential improvements and new material and awesomeness and you would be wrong. Just a lot of coordination and logistic delays.

I've been reading a lot about the album being dead and all I can think is: THANK GOD. I'm not sure I ever want to do this again. But what to do instead?

Getting ready for Harvard + the show in Cambridge. Looks like there'll be a Metafilter meet before and during (and after?) the show on the 12th. I think I've got my show pretty much down, new Firewire card = improved stability, blah nerd blah.

The big thing lately has been packing all my gear to get down there. Do you know what a custom guitar flight case costs? I will tell you: around $500. That's five HUNDRED dollars. It would be cheaper for me to fly to Boston, buy a $250 guitar and throw it in the garbage on my way home. I honestly haven't ruled that out but for now I've ordered an SKB Freedom case which apparently "smells" (read the reviews) but works good.

If my guitar is shattered on the way there, I'll buy a cheap one for the shows and give it to a homeless person before I leave.

Getting the website ready for the new album. I've been re-jiggering all my store stuff for the new album and beyond and that should go live in the next week I hope. Due to lack of sales I've decided to drop the OGG format and limit it to MP3 and FLAC. Simpler for everyone. OGG fans can always get the FLAC and convert it as it's lossless after all. I want to support open formats but I'd rather it not feel like a waste of time, energy and resources.

Finally swapped out the default items from Gimme Some Money to something more Brad Sucks-y:

You got your beer ($5), you got your pills ($10) and you got your twenty dollars ($20).

Bunch of things coming up:

• February 11th - Harvard University [Cambridge, MA] - Q&A and a few songs.
• February 12th - The Middle East [Cambridge, MA] - Full show
• March 7th - Canadian Music Week [Toronto, ON] - Speaking.

Hope to see you there.

There's a new button available if you care to donate:

Info (and previous button) here. As people have pointed out this button looks good at any angle.

Here's a picture I took when I was sorting socks a few months ago:

Look at all these different bastards! What for? Can the human race not agree on a black sock style?

What I'd like is a standardized black sock specification. So I could always buy replacement or additional socks that match the ones I already own. Please: open source community, W3C, Creative Commons -- somebody help make sense of this important issue.