Daniel

I don't post here much anymore. I do read my friends' journals still, so am around, but you can keep up with what I am doing better in other places.



Or find me in one easy place: Friendfeed.

Today there have been a lot of articles regarding the state of the music industry floating around, particularly via Boing Boing and a lot of people's Livejournals. So, I'm going to share some of the best articles I have saved the past few years, since so many people are interested in this subject.

The Music Industry Is Not In Trouble
Indie film producer thanks pirates for downloading his movie
Statistics from Radiohead Online Release
How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV
People who illegally share music files online are also big spenders on legal music downloads
Top 10 Most Useful Tools for Online Music Enterprise
The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online
Example of How DRM Affects Basic Consumers
Downloading Is Not Illegal
The Internet Debacle - An Alternative View
Music Is Not a Loaf of Bread
The Chumbawamba Factor
Record sales are tanking, and there's no hope in sight: How it all went wrong
Piracy Is A Business Model, Says Disney Co-Chair Anne Sweeney
The Problem With Music by Steve Albini
Courtney Love does the math

I think most of these articles help confirm these ideas:

1) The way music and movies are consumed is irrevocably going to change.
2) People who make money with music need to change their business model if they want to continue to be profitable.
3) The new system can be used to promote art effectively if people/businesses are willing to adapt.
4) The music and movie industries are not dying. All this change will encourage all sorts of growth and innovation, it just takes innovative people stepping up and using all this power in a creative way.

And opposing views, because I'm fair. Though I am not fair enough to not say that I think these articles are nothing more than crying from small labels unwilling to think of creative ways to adapt to the changing climate. Calling your fans unethical thieves will never generate much sympathy in my opinion, and someone will be there to replace these guys when the market marginalizes them. Never the less, opposing views:

The End of an Era
Buy Don't Burn

Any independent musician marketing themselves in a serious way should read this guy's blog:

http://newmusicstrategies.com/

And his free ebook:

http://newmusicstrategies.com/ebook/

What is prompting me to write this is this particular post:

http://newmusicstrategies.com/2007/04/15/thing-11-the-death-of-scarcity/

It is basically a brief article about the economics of endless supply in how it relates to music online. It is a concept anyone serious about selling music should take seriously.

There may have been a time where you would press a thousand copies of a CD, give away a couple of hundred as promos, and try and sell the other eight hundred. Now, you can press a thousand, give away a million, and still sell the thousand.

The death of scarcity makes a nonsense of the notion of the ‘lost sale’. If someone would never have bought your music in the first place, but acquires the music through some other means (perhaps as a recipient of one of those million promotional copies), you haven’t “lost a sale”, you’ve gained a listener. More importantly, you’ve gained attention

I get so tired of hearing independent labels or musicians crying about how it is unfair that piracy is killing their business. This idea of downloading killing the business is absurd. This whole downloading phenomenon is not going away, and that's good! This idea of every download being a lost sale has always been a load of horse shit. This guy's blog and ebook are exceptional sources of ideas and information on how to deal with this changing business climate.

I put together a mix for Halloween. It consists of various tracks from older horror movies, etc. This isn't some "best of" soundtracks mix, but rather a mix of moody, vintage material mostly taken from obscure/cult/B-movie films.

Download Mix in zip file here.

Track details:

01 - Gene Moore, Dark Entry
"Carnival of Souls"
02 - Paul Glass, The Seed Of Astaroth
"To the Devil a Daughter"
03 - Giorgio Gaslini, School At Night (Lullaby - Music Box Version)
"Profondo rosso"
04 - Ennio Morricone, Dark Revelation
"Exorcist II: The Heretic"
05 - Richard Band, Cantos Profanae
"Troll"
06 - Goblin, Suspiria (Celesta And Bells)
"Suspiria"
07 - Jay Chattaway, Subway Terror
"Maniac"
08 - Tangerine Dream, Darkness
"Legend"
09 - Stefano Mainetti, Zombi 3 (Seq. 2)
"Zombi 3"
10 - Paul McCollough, Farmhouse
"Night of the Living Dead"
11 - Fabio Frizzi, Occhi di brace
"City of the Living Dead"
12 - Walter Rizzati, Walt Monster End
"The House By The Cemetery"
13 - J. Peter Robinson, "The Gate" End Titles
"The Gate"
14 - Robert Rodriguez, Doc Block
"Planet Terror"
15 - Nico Fidenco, The Magic Is In Progress
"Zombi Holocaust"

Is the world flat? I never thought about it. I tell you what I’ve thought about. How I’m going to feed my child– how I’m going to take care of my family. The world, is the world flat has never entered into, like that has not been an important thing to me.

Goddamn internet. How can such a brilliant tool for communication be such a vessel of evil? Curse ye, internet.

I'm telling you, we need to be doing this ourselves:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/11/10/viking.ship.ap/index.html

Except, we need to actually be raiding and looting with it.

Taken at Rick Santorum's concession speech. Amazing.



This wouldn't be nearly as funny if it were someone other than Santorum.

Obeject called "Xena" officially named Eris. I don't give a crap about Pluto's demoted status, this is awesome.

I'm a little confused about all this "Iran better not..." and "If Korea does this, then we'll..." talk from the U.S. government. What do they think they're going to do to these countries, precisely? The U.S. hasn't even been able to wrap up this Iraq thing, which seems to always have been a significantly less serious threat.

It kind of reminds me of that Black Knight scene in Monty Python's "Quest for the Holy Grail".

"What are you gonna do? Bleed on me?"

"I'm invincible!"

"You're a loony."



Oh wait. I guess we have nukes we can launch at them, too. I guess that settles it.

I think what needs to happen is a group of us find a Viking long boat, and we should sail up Lake Michigan and raid the Michigan Upper Pennisula. Who's in?

And where the hell do we come up with a Viking long boat in this day and age?

P.S. There is almost no chance of profitting from this. Or even coming out alive, though I am sure we can somehow work out a deal to get into Valhalla.

What a rip off.

Yesterday was suppose to be the most evil day of the beast ever. I didn't see any earth destroying explosions, terrible demons with pointy horns that drool flesh eating acid. No sick horses, no horde of zombies. Or emo kids getting punched in the face. Nothing. I didn't even get to see any tiny imps. At least the great Satan could have broke me off a little imp. Was I on the wrong evil planet yesterday, or what?

Although, as I mentioned elsewhere, it was kind of sweet typing shit into Excel spreadsheets at work, pushing "control + ;" and seeing 6/6/06 popping up all day. Unfortunately, that's about as sinister as it got.

Anyone running a business online should read this and understand it:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/31/1441201&threshold=-1

This will impact you if it passes. It will impact casual users, too, but it could cripple people making a living running an online business.

Anyone interested in buying a Gameboy SP with a flashable X-Rom cart? Details on the X-Rom cart:

http://www.gameboy-advance.net/flash_card/gba_X-ROM.htm

I'm looking to sell for $110, which covers shipping. What you will get:

Cobalt Blue Game Boy SP. It is used, looks used, but I am the only owner, and it is taken care of. I'm selling it because of how infrequently I use it. Anyone unfamiliar with the Gameboy SP, it is the flip top one that is pretty small. It is about 3.5" by 3.5" or something like that. It gets over ten hours of battery life. I play it so rarely that one charge lasts me a month or more.

X-Rom 512M flashable rom cart. Kind of sweet, because you can load Gameboy ROMs on it, and carry quite a few games on one cart. Or, even cooler, and this is the reason I got it, you can throw an emulator for the onld 8-bit Nintendo on there. And you can load a lot of games. So if you have fantasies about playing Zelda, Zelda 2, Ninja Gaiden, Megaman, the original Final Fantasy or Castlevania on a Gameboy, you can do it with this. I think I have thirty games loaded on it right now.

Link cable for X-rom cart. It is a USB cable, and you flash the cart with your PC. You will obviously need a PC with USB. You will also need game ROMs, which are easy enough to aquire.

A few extra game carts, including Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Castlevania Aria of Sorrow and Circle of the Moon, and some old arcade collection, I forget which one. It has Galaga and Dig Dug on it.

A nice little carrying case for the Gameboy that also has a pouch to carry a few carts around.

If you have a Gameboy DS, this cart will work with it, but you need the SP to flash the cartridge. Email me if you have questions about how it works, etc. It is pretty easy. If you're interested, email me at dt10111@yahoo.com. When I sell it, I'll remove this post, or update it or something. I'll consider trades if you think you have stuff I'd want.

I have a bunch of neat crap (gadgets, etc) to sell, so this is only the beginning!

It is pretty brilliant when Sprint calls to do a random customer satisfaction survey, and my connection drops during the interview.

If you've emailed me recently from a gmail account, and I haven't replied to it, please resend. I found an email in my Spam box today from a gmail account. I find that pretty annoying, but at least I've been sort of paying attention to it lately.

I guess that's a note to yahoo mail users: watch for gmail addresses in your spam box.

There are so many great caption possibilities for this picture:


Cool dudes show President Bush how to "pump gas".


I can almost imagine the conversation going on there.

I hate regurgitating shit I find on the Somethingawful forums, but this is simply one of the best things I've ever heard, and it must be shared:

God Will Fuck You Up