Posts Tagged ‘music think tank’

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Here from Hypebot or Daily Swarm?

November 5, 2009

portrait-debcha

Thanks for stopping by! zed equals zee is a music, culture and technology blog based out of Cambridge, MA.

You might also enjoy the following posts:

Streaming vs downloading: Do we really want a jukebox in the sky? Or does it make more sense to hold it in our hands?

Music, webcomics, NPR and money. What can independent artists learn from the business model of webcomics and NPR?

What will music fans pay for? A longer version of the post on Music Think Tank.

The future is what it used to be. An appreciation of an astonishingly prescient 1991 essay by Momus. Music industry, don’t say no one saw it coming.

The name-your-own-price-model: some data. An independent videogame company tries the NYOP for one of their games. What can musicians learn from their experiment?

Read: Fans, Friends and Followers: An interview with Scott Kirsner, author of Fans, Friends and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age.

128 or 320 kbps – can you hear the difference? Test yourself to see if you can distinguish between low and high bitrate MP3s.

Feel free to poke around the rest of the blog. If you’re intrigued, you can subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter.

(image: a commissioned portrait of me by rstevens)

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Roundup: Neko Case, Crocodile, Blogger, more

February 18, 2009

neko-case[photo: Jason Creps/NY Times]

A round-up of a few items that are either new or that I haven’t had a chance to post:

A long profile of Neko Case in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. The best part, for those of us obsessed with infographics, is this interactive map with samples of her solo music and work with The New Pornographers, The Corn Sisters, and more.

If you’re interested in the direction that music and the music industry is going, and you’re not already reading it, I highly recommend Music Think Tank. The postings are typically thought-provoking and knowledgeable.

Speaking of music blogs, Boston’s own Ryan Spaulding, of Ryan’s Smashing Life, was interviewed for this LA Weekly article about disappearing posts on music blogs hosted by Blogger. It’s certainly starting to look like Google (who acquired Blogger in 2003) might be violating its ‘don’t be evil‘ policy by eschewing takedown notices in lieu of simply deleting posts without warning. Ryan makes a  morally compelling argument: “By pulling down my post, they destroyed my intellectual creativity, the very same thing they’re erroneously accusing me of doing.” (‘erroneously,’ because, like many music bloggers, he is posting MP3s at the behest of the same record companies who are presumably putting pressure on Blogger to remove posts). You can read Ryan’s own post on the topic here.

There’s an amusing posting at Panopticist about Andrew Hearst’s experience purchasing AC/DC tickets from scalpers, and the role of typography and design in differentiating between real and counterfeit tickets. [thanks, Clive!]

Finally, Seattle’s Crocodile has a website! We posted previously about its imminent re-opening, and the first listed show is Hot Buttered Rum on March 21st. The calendar page is lovely, utilizing ‘concert posters’ rather than simple lists. [via Seattle Subsonic]

MP3: AC/DC – You Shook Me All Night Long [buy]

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