Posts Tagged ‘flaming lips’

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Music, tech, and culture roundup

September 18, 2009

canadianMusicWikipedia

Colbert Report to stream albums. The Flaming Lips were on the The Colbert Report on Wednesday night, and the Mountain Goats (whoo!) are scheduled to be guests in a couple of weeks. More interesting, though, is that both artists will be streaming their albums, before the official release dates, on the Colbert website.  Here’s hoping it leads to new fans and bigger sales. [via Underwire]

Canadian music wiki. Journalism student and CBC Radio 3 intern Amanda Ash is working on putting together a Wikipedia-style database of Canadian music as her thesis project, tapping into CanCon-loving music fans (whence the awesome illo, above).  She’s soliciting ideas – go help her out.

Another fun online musical toy. In the same vein as the online Tenori-On, there’s a web-based musical instrument, Nudge, with a range of sounds and tempos. If you come up with something you like, you can embed it in your blog or share it with your friends. Warning: making pretty melodies is quite the timesuck. [via Indie Music Tech].

There and back again. Over at the New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones has a thoughtful profile of Trent Reznor, tracing his journey from indie, to major label, to indie again.

What does filesharing mean for composers? Lyricist and composer Björn Ulvaeus (sound familiar?)  argues that musicians can ‘sing for their supper,’ but songwriters can’t, and they might end up the big losers with declining music sales. This probably explain why composers and songwriters are trying to get a cut from 30-second song previews on iTunes.

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Music, tech and culture roundup

August 31, 2009

long tail graphic

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?

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Threesome: Defending CanCon (sort of)

June 25, 2009

mountie

Last week, CBC Radio 3‘s online radio broadcast and their Sirius Satellite radio station merged their playlists and schedules as a cost-saving measure. As part of the merger, they solicited input on whether the joint entity should play 100% Canadian music (as the online radio did) or 85% Canadian music, as was the case for Sirius 86. Scores of people sent in comments, and in the end they decided to play only Canadian music, but to also reserve the right to make exceptions: for example, covers of Canadian artists by non-Canadians, or for Neko Case, “who is American, but is widely considered an ‘honourary Canadian.'”

But the whole issue of CanCon in the age of the Internet probably deserves to be reconsidered. If you’re not familiar with this, the basic premise is that Canadian broadcasters are required to play a certain fraction of Canadian content, as a way of supporting Canadian artists who might otherwise be drowned out by the bigger and better-funded American industry (or as cultural protectionism, take your pick). Many Canadian artists have gotten airplay via this support, and there are some artists (like Sloan and The Tragically Hip) that are superstars north of the border but who’ve never really made it big in the US.  When broadcast was the primary means of disseminating music and video, the CanCon requirements made a certain amount of sense (remember, something like 90% of Canadians live within 100 mi – ie within broadcast range – of the US border). But it’s not clear how it’s going to shake down these days. On the one hand, the global playing field is increasingly leveled by the existence of Internet. On the other hand, it makes it easier to follow, see, and support local bands. Tellingly, one of the reasons why CBC Radio 3 decided to go with the 100% (give or take) Canadian approach in the merger is because, in a crowded online marketplace,  it differentiates the station from the rest of the world.

MP3: The Flaming Lips – After the Goldrush (Neil Young cover) [more]

MP3: Ben Gibbard – Complicated (Avril Lavigne cover)

MP3: Neko Case – If You Knew [more]

Image: Ride On by Flickr user eskimo_jo, reposted here under its Creative Commons license.

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Threesome: Superman’s songs

August 13, 2008

Inspired by a pub trivia question about the Crash Test Dummies song, as well as an NPR story on Superman’s birthplace (no, not Krypton – Cleveland, OH), here are a trio of songs about the Man of Steel. Three plus a bonus, actually – you can choose between Laurie Anderson’s cerebral version of ‘O Superman’ or the dancefloor-electronica M.A.N.D.Y. version.

MP3: The Flaming Lips – Waitin’ for a Superman (more Flaming Lips)

MP3: Sufjan Stevens – The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts (more Sufjan Stevens)

MP3: Laurie Anderson – O Superman (more Laurie Anderson)

MP3: M.A.N.D.Y. vs. Booka Shade feat. Laurie Anderson – O Superman (more M.A.N.D.Y.)

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