As I desperately try to finish my work so I can go outside and play, I wanted to take a moment and post another short random playlist. (So glad I heard of Leona Lewis long before Miss Oprah “discovered” her.) Some of you really enjoyed the one I posted two Fridays ago.
(Obligatory disclaimer: Seeqpod is a music search engine, and I’m sharing a playlist. Seeqpod doesn’t host copyrighted MP3s, and neither do I. Do not illegally download and/or share the MP3s!)
As always, play hard, be good, stay safe, and rest easy this weekend.
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I found a link to an old story in the New York Times magazine called “Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog.” It was published last year, but in web time, that’s old.
The gist of the well-written and appealing story is this: new and/or struggling musicians can make a decent living without record labels and big marketing machines if they harness the power of the web by starting blogs, running discussion boards, and interacting with fans, who want to feel connected.
Musicmakers and Blogupdaters
Heavily featured in the piece is a musician named Jonathan Coulton, who quit the 9 to 5 to write and perform music. He posts a new tune on his blog every week. Coulton’s earning a decent income selling his music online, and he’s managed to build quite a fan community.
One fan creates illustrations (for free) for each of his songs. Other fans make videos for his songs and post them on YouTube, which promotes his music and creates even more fans. Yet another fan built a web site to archive fan-made videos.
Coulton makes (and saves) money when traveling by doing what I call “target touring.” He polls readers to find where they live and schedules a concert if there are more than 100 fans in a given area. That way, he knows a show will sell well, and he endears himself to fans even more by hitting smaller towns where other acts rarely tread.
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Tom Tancredo was right.
We don’t need to round up and deport millions of illegal aliens. Just enforce the law, and they’ll leave, he said. I always thought the “we can’t deport millions of people” argument was a fallacious one anyway, but no matter.
Last month I wrote about Prince William County’s efforts to crack down on illegal “immigration” in its midst. Yesterday, the Washington Post published another one of its notoriously gag-inducing stories about “poor illegal aliens” afraid of the police. I find them quite tedious, so I empathize if you don’t want to read this one. But if you must: “In N.Va., a Latino Community Unravels.”
I’m waiting, in vain I suspect, for the Post to do a sympathetic human interest story on how American citizens and legal aliens in Northern Virginia have been negatively impacted by people sneaking across the border, bringing all kinds of social pathologies with them, getting paid under the table, changing the character of the neighborhood, and on and on.
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For 17 years, Jeff Price owned an independent label called spinART Records. He managed to do great things, but that was before the so-called digital revolution. In 2004, Price realized the label was no longer sustainable.
“The advent and general adoption of the Internet, digital media and hardware took control of the global music industry away from the record labels and media outlets and handed it to the masses,” he writes. (Source)
Rather than cursing the masses and resisting changes brought on by the Internet, Price decided to adapt. He wanted to stay in the music business but needed to make money. “[W]hat could I do to remain in the music industry under a model that would not rely on selling music (the exploitation model),” he asked himself. “And thus the idea for a new model was born, turn distribution into a service for a simple up front, one time flat fee.”
Digital Label
Price created a service called TuneCore, which allows artists to upload songs and create albums. TuneCore places these albums in online music stores, and artists keep all the profits and all their rights. And they can cancel their accounts at any time. The catch? Well, if you want to call it that, TuneCore charges 99 cents a track, 99 cents a store per track, and $19.98 a year per album for storage and maintenance. Not a bad deal.
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