zed equals zee

An assortment of music and technology news from around the Internet:

Indie music label sponsors BitTorrent site. Florida’s Awesome New Republic, and their music label Honor Roll, decided to try a new strategy to reach potential listeners. They are sponsoring torrent site isoHunt via a banner ad linked to a torrent download of their debut album, Rational Geographic Vol 1. The idea, of course, is to get the word out about their music. [more at TorrentFreak]

Makers of DJ software to release vinyl. Serato Audio Research, makers of the widely-used DJ software Scratch Live, are releasing tracks on vinyl. In the Scratch system, all the music is in MP3s on a laptop, but the interface to control it is still in the form of two turntables. However, instead of the records storing the music itself, the two records are pressed with ‘control tones,’ which can translate the physical movement of the record by the DJ into a signal used to control the music in software (you can see the regular grooves in the photo above). Serato decided that, since they were pressing vinyl records anyway, they could do something cool with the other side, which has led to Serato Pressings. The first three releases include tracks by Diplo and Blaqstarr, and more records are in the pipeline

Social tagging and music. Paul Lamere wrote a terrific conference paper that includes everything you wanted to know about tags and music: the good, the bad, and the ugly. You can download the paper as a PDF here.

This week’s reading assignment. Canada’s Globe and Mail has been running a terrific series called The Download Decade, including a bunch of feature-length articles: Thank You, Napster; How The iPod Changed Everything; If Piracy is Wrong, Why Does it Feel So Right?; New Media, Old Rules; and the latest, Making Way for the Mobile Decade.

MP3: Awesome New Republic – Rotary Clone