press play already

My Hot 10 from 2008

View Comments Published by elliott bledsoe on Monday, 8 December 2008 at 1:33 PM

Brisbane's local community radio station 4ZzZ fm are now welcoming your list of 10 to be added to the hottest 100 tracks from the yeah that was 2008. Tune in on New Year's Day to 4ZzZ's Hot 100 to see if you're tracks made the cut.

Here's my hottie list (in no particular order):

Another Day by Dragonette from Galore (I know that it was released in 2007 in the United Kingdom, but like the United States it didn't come out in Australia until 2008)
The Four of Us are Dying by Nine Inch Nails from The Slip
Electric Feel by MGMT from Oracular Spectacular
Shake It by Metro Station from Metro Station (don't lie, you love it too!)
Relativity by Grafton Primary from Relativity (even if they sound like a hybrid Joy Division-Depeche Mode-New Order hybrid)
Talk Like That by The Presets from Apocalypso (even if it was used in that weird A-League advert)
Ce Jeu by Yelle from POP-UP
This is Halloween by Marilyn Manson from Nightmare Revisited (Although almost everything on the Nightmare Before Christmas covers album is great! In particular I also love Poor Jack by Plain White T's and To The Rescue by Datarock)
Don't Fight It by The Panics from Cruel Guards
Into the Nightlife by Cyndi Lauper from Bring Ya To The Brink

Some stuff I wish I could have put on there but it came out in 2007 not 2008:

My Moon My Man by Feist from The Reminder (Released 2 February 2007)
My People by The Presets from Apocalypso (Released 4 December 2007)
Hunting For Witches by Bloc Party from A Weekend In The City (Released 9 July 2007)

Who makes it into your list? Comment with your top ten and make sure you get your list together and email it into 4ZzZ before December 20 to be part of the Hot 100.

Clipster: Walk the line

View Comments Published by elliott bledsoe on Tuesday, 9 September 2008 at 4:02 PM

I remember a couple of years ago when I was still living the Fortitude Valley, I was walking down Brunswick Street Mall and a stranger stopped me and asked if I always walked like I was in a film clip. Even now I think back to that moment and smile.

I wish I could walk around in my own little film clip all the time.

I suppose Kylie in Michel Gondry's clip for Come into my World starts to blur the real-world line a little (albeit in a somewhat Groundhog Day way).

Kylie Minogue - Come into my World, Directed by Michel Gondry

If the video goes down it is because Universal Music Group has forced the YouTube user to disable embedding. If that happens you can view the official YouTube video for E-Pro here.

What kind of film clip walk would you want?

Lady Gaga steals show at NewNowNext awards....

View Comments Published by Stephen Gregory on Wednesday, 25 June 2008 at 11:58 PM

Lady Gaga has been revealed to the public in her first official televised performance at the NewNowNext awards, delighting and intriguing onlookers with this flashy little spectacle. And by flashy, I mean seizure inducing.

'Just Dance', the catchy electro-pop number is the first single off her debut album 'The Fame'. Before making it onto MTV screens, Gaga was notorious around New York for her performance art and basement club gigs in which she would play keyboard and set cans of hairspray on fire.

Girls still having fun....

View Comments Published by Stephen Gregory on Tuesday, 17 June 2008 at 12:38 PM

Cyndi Lauper is back with this fun, synthy rock number 'Into the Nightlife' off her tenth studio album 'Bring ya to the Brink'. Lauper shows us that the longer toothed ladies can still give us something to dance to in a time when MTV is mostly plagued by brainless hotties who got their recording contracts upon completion of a reality show filming schedule.

She even does so without having to resort to showing off a botoxed labia *cough*madonna*cough*.

With lyrics like:

"Got this endless itch to ride,
into the night,
fortune cookie says I'm right,
Kung Fu like"

it's easy to remember why we love Cyndi.

Songbird is Harder Better Faster Stronger

View Comments Published by elliott bledsoe on Saturday, 14 June 2008 at 7:26 AM

It is hard being the little brother. With the imminent release of Firefox 3 looming on the horizon it is surprising the launch the Songbird 0.6 even made a blip on the Google News feed despite its pretty impressive expansion.

I would like to introduce you all to Songbird.

Imagine this:

It's a warm night out in the internets and a certain popular open-source software platform (Firefox) sits at an internet bar sipping cocktails with a certain popular but problematic proprietary music player software (iTunes). One thing leads to another and pretty soon they are both struggling to keep up the RAM as they duck off to "spend some more time together to view each others source code."

Ok, this isn't me just having some strange fantasy about a hot love affair between open source and proprietary software, just bear with me.

So what would happen 9 months later? Songbird, that's what!

Songbird is a music player-web browser hybrid, all wrapped up in a sleek black-tone skin (but if you don't like the look, don't worry, there's a number of 'feathers' or skins you can choose from). Along the top you have the music player with the standard directional buttons and play/pause (if you're more old school and like your play, pause and stop buttons separate there is an add-on for that). Along the left is your music playlists and bookmark navigation in an iTunes-style interface.

Whenever you view a page with playable tracks the browser lets you know with a pop up bubble. Convenient. Plus it's got all your standard features: simple bookmarking, tabbed browsing, in page text search. Other useful features: there are a number of integrated services to help you discover new music, there's a built in metadata editor,

You don't need to rebuild your iTunes playlists, Songbird can import them exactly as they are. I imported about 8000 tracks and it took just under 5 minutes. It even has support for portable media devices. And best of all, a number of useful add-ons like (or indeed from) Firefox are also available on Songbird. My add-on picks:

Well MozCC of course, the add-on which scans each page you look at's metadata and informs you if it is under a Creative Commons licence;
Of course also the add-ons to allow you to explore Magnatune and Jamendo;
Shareacholic, for all your web 2.0 bookmark/tag/share goodness;
Audioscrobbler to keep updating your Last.fm account;
Mash Tape, which pulls in a wealth of useful info from around the web about the artist currently playing; and
Tab Effect, for a bit of OS X-style pretties.

Note: some of them aren't available on 0.6 yet, but they should be soon (I hope).

The honesty: it is still buggy. The 0.6 release is the public alpha so there are still some complications. But it is by no means unusable. This little software package is destined for big things, but you wouldn't think it given the comparative fanfare between it and Firefox! Come on net users, fair go hey?!

Get Music :: Thinner netlabel

View Comments Published by elliott bledsoe on Monday, 9 June 2008 at 5:57 PM

There are heaps of online music labels out there, but none of them are quite as cool as Thinner!

Thinner

Thinner homepage

Thinner has existed in one form or another since 1998. In it's most recent iteration there is just so much about it that sets it apart. Even the most basic of things–how it presents its artists and albums–sets Thinner apart from other websites doing providing a similar service. Unlike all other netlabels (that I have seen anyway), which still present the artwork for a album available online in a static form reminiscent of old publishing/recording production offline, Thinner takes full advantage of the online environment. No, not (just) because it has a clean, black-tones, java-happy design aesthetic, but because every album on the site has a unique flash album cover. My screenshot (above) simply cannot demonstrate the dramatic effect this has. You'll just have to head over to the site and check it out for yourself.

It is a netlabel that makes its music available under a Creative Commons licence so you are free to download, distribute and remix the tracks, as long as what you do with it isn't making money. As far as I can tell, the netlabel signs downtempo musicians. Currently the site represents 33 artists from Europe, Asia, America, South America and even one from here in Australia: Ben Businovski from Perth (Deception is a good track of his)! Samples of tracks can be streamed on-site and whole tracks are available for download. The site has recently moved into taking bookings for artists on the label and promoting gigs of artists on the label.

But Thinner is not just about giving you access to great music on flexible terms; they also run Thinnerism Blog, a space moving forward the (much needed) dialogue towards the future of the music industry. Well worth checking out as well.

Worth pressing play for: I really enjoyed the washed out minimal sound of Pheek which is a whole new take on spoken word (in particular listen to There You Are).

Praises: Everything about this website exemplifies the future of music listening AND sales online. The attention to detail with the site is brilliant. I love that every genre/tag for music has a different mini-icon to represent it.

Annoyances: A couple of things annoy me. The explaination in the About section references the Attribution, Noncommerical and No Derivative Works elements but I could only find albums under a CC Attribution-Noncommerical (2.0 Generic) licence, so not sure where the No Derivative Works comes into it. Could confuse people who don't know the licensing model very well.

Also you can't stream a whole track and not all albums have a way to download the whole thing, you have to download each track separately.

Recommended tracks:

Ben Businovski – Deception

Pheek – There You Are

MiTunes: might as well tune out!

0 comments Published by elliott bledsoe on Wednesday, 4 June 2008 at 12:51 AM

Insight, the SBS's current affairs program, ran a special tonight called MiTunes on music downloading which almost made me tune out. From the outset the likelihood of an engaging and challenging program that explored the true possibilities for music in a digital age were slim since the central question the program posed was possibly the most tiresome and unproductive question to ask: "Should music be free?"

The unoriginality of the angle was set to destroy the value of the program. There it was, droning away in Jenny Brockie's uninspiring introduction, and tainting every possible response that the youth in the audience were going to make with that bitter piracy after-taste that the record label is always complaining about. It didn't matter that these young people's comments only emphasised evident market failure. David Torr made the comment that, when buying a CD you, "...get lots of songs that I might not necessarily like." And why would you buy what you don't want when you can get online and download exactly the track you want.

The program then threw in the Australian hip-hop artist Harley Webster (better known as Phrase). Now, good on the guy for getting out there in a tough musical genre but don't floss me with the 'If it isn't hard enough already, downloading means I'm making almost nothing from CD sales..." line. If no one knows/cares who you are Phrase, then you wouldn't even be in a position from people to "stealing" $3 from you. The economic value of your music requires audience, the growth of his he attributes to downloading: "do I hate them for [downloading] or do I... love them for coming to the show and telling their friends?" You make more money over all for a gig than you will once the retailer, distributor and record label takes a cut of the sale price so you're better off in live performance. He's been touring a bit lately, which is clearly means he has a strong enough national audience to sustain gigging in other cities. Not too bad given he hasn't been around long. Sadly, he still felt the need to throw in an, "At the end of the day it is stealing." Forget the free publicity of course. It's like you took the words right out of the Australian Recording Industry Association's mouth. So nothing new from here.

[SIDENOTE: Phrase may be the only hip-hop artist on a major label in Australia but I wonder how much it is actually doing for him given that a Google Search of Australia only result using the keyword 'Phrase' or 'Phrase hip-hop' finds his MySpace and his Australian Music Online profiles well before even a mention of his label. I couldn't even find his official profile (which has a particularly unwieldy URL I might add) by Universal Music Australia in the Google search results, I had to discover his label first, go to their website then search for him again within that site before reaching anything useful. Given that it is from Universal's Get Music website that you can purchase Phrase's music, and the fact that the higher ranking search results reveal sites with no ability to purchase his music, if I were Universal I would be thinking more strategically about where I place access to content.]

Nothing to note really out of the next musician to talk: Taasha Coates from The Audreys (on ABC Music/Warner Music Australia) sounded about as awkward as their particular brand of pop blues (with no roots). She was ancy about the whole thing, actually mentioning that it was strange to be in the same room with the "downloaders." It's much easier to sue/badger/complain about "them" when they are a faceless mass than it is when they are your fans and they are sitting right beside you. About the only two things she said of any worth was that she probably would have done it when she was a teenager, had the technology been available and that touring was really "healthy" in Australia at the moment.

And speaking of available technology, at least Tim Levinson (solo as Urthboy and member of The Herd) gets it. He talked about how crucial mix tapes were for him growing up as a source of new music. Downloading, as far as he is concerned, is just the same thing on a bigger scale.

Predictably, Stephen Peach, the CEO of ARIA, rabbited on about some number of billion downloads in Australia alone, and how that equaled $x million lost. He kept reminding us that "We're talking about theft," but the last time I checked (which was tonight), stealing according to s391 of the Queensland Criminal Code states:

"391 Definition of stealing
(1) A person who fraudulently takes anything capable of being
stolen, or fraudulently converts to the person’s own use or to
the use of any other person anything capable of being stolen,
is said to steal that thing."

So there is a requirement that the act of taking must be fraudulent to be stealing. And fraudulent in this context is defined in subsection 2:

"(2) A person who takes or converts anything capable of being
stolen is deemed to do so fraudulently if the person does so
with any of the following intents, that is to say—

(a) an intent to permanently deprive the owner of the thing
of it;

(b) an intent to permanently deprive any person who has
any special property in the thing of such property;

Downloading a file from its source does not remove that file so I don't know how it could be said to have permanently deprived the copyright owner of their music! By definition downloading is not stealing!!

But Peach couldn't seem to quite make up his mind if he wanted to lynch the "stealing" kids who download or the ISP for 'just not doing what ARIA want' (which is to force ISPs to disconnect repeat downloaders of infringing material). Peach seemed to infur that the youths' willingness to download was somehow linked to a belief that it was a right to do so. "It is not a right, it is a reality" came the words of reason from Kate Crawford from the Media Research Centre at University of New South Wales (and of course one half of b(if)tek probably unbeknownst to Insight), "And the industry has to engage with this reality. Trying to turn ISPs into copyright cops unfortunately isn't going to solve the problem for it."

Crawford got it right: the record industry has gone down the 'this means war' path, stocking the armory with digital locks, spyware and punitive measures, attacking their customers, prosecuting their fanbase and stopping people from consuming music in the ways they want to. Image where we'd be if all the money that has been spent on investigating, litigating, limiting the use of music and on developing DRM tools and record industry endorsed content portals had been spent further developing the technologies that have respond to new music consumption habits.

Enter Peter Coroneos from the Internet Industry Association , who drove home the market failure we're experiencing. He sees the push by bodies such as ARIA to force ISPs to do their copyright dirty work for them (in warning and disconnecting users) as the wrong approach. If users want to do it, then find a way to revenue raise and provide that flexibility. I agree with Coroneos' analogy that ISPs are essentially a delivery service, just like Australia Post. Australia Post isn't liable for what I send through the mail, why should ISPs be forced into a situation where they are liable for every person who has internet access via their service? Surely this will stifle the introduction of better, more competitive service providers, to the detriment of Rudd's broadband dream. What we need is aa model that remunerates the record industry and artist without affecting the value of the internet to consumers. Which dovetails nicely into what Kevin Bermeister from Kazaa had to say.

Bermeister talked about the economy of piracy being disipated into a number of different parties, many of which have benefited from the internet. The next step he says is to unify all the parties using technology that can facilitate all the needs of all the parties. He said, "The copyright owners want control, consumers want content that is convenient and that they choose." The logical place to draw revenue then is at the ISPs.

Which brings me to Scot Moris, Director of International Relations at the Australasian Performing Right Association. Talking via video conference from Rome (how exotic Scot!), Moris also took up this line. He acknowledged that pay-per-download/use digital services have not made up the lost revenue of record sales, but said there isn't much you can do about that. Instead, move forward and look at new ways to regain revenue (such as revenue sharing with ISPs).

And so we've come full circle. From naughty downloading thieves to regaining lost revenue at the most sensible point in the chain of production and consumption. The only problem is that this is nothing new. So many scholars, business people, public thinkers and commentators have been saying this for the better part of five years. What is this new model? What does it look like, how does it work? Where do I sign up?!

I appreciate that I am in a unique position where I am exposed to this kind of discourse all the time, but even my roommates got it. So all an all, Insight wasn't very insightful. Just as well I watched it on free-to-air TV, it wouldn't have been worth the bandwidth to download it.

the banner image is a transformative work of recording on the fly b by saintbob, which is available under a creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike 2.0 licence.