zed equals zee

After a summer hiatus, zed equals zee is getting back on a regular posting schedule. But you probably still want to sign up for the RSS feed.

Catching up on some music, tech and culture from around the web and around the world.

Owen Kelly designed the graphic, above, to help bands visualize their fanbase, from casual fans to the long tail of committed fans. Click for a larger version, and read more about it here.

In case you haven’t been following The Flamings Lips, who played in Boston last night, they have an interesting model for music distribution: when you bought your ticket, you received immediate access to three tracks from their new album. This month, you received access to three B-sides. And finally, after the show, you receive access to an audio download of the concert. All nice and legit, with the cost of the music factored into your ticket.

Nina Paley, creator of Sita Sings the Blues, collaborated with QuestionCopyright.org to come up with the Creator-Endorsed Mark. It complements Creative Commons licensing, in that it allows distributors of CC-licensed work to indicate that they are sharing profits with the creator. Paley argues that, when fans connect with a creative work, they want to give back to the artist and it should be clear when they are doing so. Read a PBS MediaShift article about it here, and you can download the marks here.

Finally, you’ve probably heard that Apple is planning a proprietary album format, code-named Cocktail, which bundles together an album’s worth of music with assorted extras like art, movies, and lyrics, all wrapped up in a shiny DRM’ed wrapper. Since music lovers have made it clear that they aren’t interested in buying albums when they can buy songs they want à la carte, it’s not clear to me why they’d be interested in buying Cocktail packages – Apple’s sweetening the pot, but rather missing the point. But straying a little bit outside the purview of this blog, it does make me wonder about the future of DVD extras – when we are downloading movies instead of buying DVDs, what will become of all the additional goodies that filmmakers provide? Will they just go on a website to help promote the download? Premium content? What do you think about bundling extras with downloadable content?