The Spectacular Return of ‘The Spectacular Spinning Songbook’-Elvis Costello has decided to revolve again this year – bit.ly/14B7sRD
— Elvis Costello (@ElvisCostello) March 22, 2013
March 22, 2013
Marvelous Band + Game Show to Tour Again
March 19, 2013
Jon Brion on Songs vs. Performances
In 2006 whilst on a relatively rare appearance outside Los Angeles, Greg Kot & Jim DeRogatis of SoundOpinions interviewed Jon Brion.
TL;DR edited version: An illustrated YouTube excerpt of Songs vs. Performances
June 29, 2012
Philip “Pud” Kaplan
Why am I writing about Philip Kaplan? Pud founded AdBrite and Fucked Company. In retrospect, Fucked Company may have best thing I ever experienced on the internet (perhaps except for 4chan, about which I cannot and shall not comment). This is perhaps astounding because FC was nothing like the internet of today.
FC was all text.
Were such a forum to exist today, one might exclaim: “Fucked Company is the well-spring of tomorrow’s poetry, yet also the definitive locus of the internet’s largest anarchist cesspool.” A bizarre prototypical social network. I spent what seems like a lifetime reading FC during its brief existence, whose era was pre-Y2k to post 9-11. The “Happy-Fun-Slander” board, purportedly authored by vetted employees, was a momentum trader’s wet dream. I found my tribe among the free-for-all non-elite mosh-pits – a treasure-trove of unbounded raw emotion. The rumor was many comics and writers both tested and gathered material from the message boards there. When Pud finally shut it down (there were tears, lawsuits, and worse), I asked him if it’d be possible to curate a Best-Of book. I don’t think anything was ever re-constituted from its ashes, though Pud did sell a book about the experience of running the joint.
To be clear: FC was the antithesis of web properties today – anonymity was essential to its existence. As such, it was an elaborate sock puppet theater whose sophistication has not been replicated in the transparent, post-Facebook era. The only openly verified in-real-life FC persona was Pud.
Cut to today. I just asked Pud about his newest venture, Fandalism. I told him I’m a fan and I loved the concept, but I’d like to talk about what happens after the “dates” hook up .. ya know: getting tabs, rehearsal schedules, lyrics, finding the right key signature for the singer, remembering your unique arrangement, and so on.
If something wonderful results, I’ll let you know, but I feel very confident about approaching the domain defined by the intersection of “practical technology” and “musical practice”.
Namaste.
References
- 2002 BBC interview with Pud behind his drum kit talking about the early internet (including FC) .. after he finds out they’ve been taping for an hour, he starts playing (nice chops there!)
- http://www.adbrite.com/
- http://fandalism.com/pud#
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_J._Kaplan
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
May 17, 2012
Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss? -Full Post
By David Lowery
(Copyright in the author, used by permission)
What follows is based on my notes and slides from my talk at SF Music Tech Summit. I realize that I'm about to alienate some of my friends that work on the tech side of the music business. These are good well intentioned people who genuinely want to help musicians succeed in the new digital paradigm.
look for Lady Kier's comments ..
November 17, 2011
In SocialBookFace, the Music Plays YOU!
[originally posted on Rdio] I’m afraid the road ahead for digital music purveyors will continue to be bumpy. Expect the multi-billion dollar social media investment bubble to get serious about demanding returns from advertising, entertainment, gaming, and publishing revenue streams. Maybe it’s already started with the arrangements made between Facebook, Spotify, MOG, Pandora, Rdio, et al.
Perhaps as an appropriate seque – what about that☟&✖% SOPA bill in the House? Run any kind of a web site, link to the wrong place and have your DNS pulled and payment processors turned off, just like they do in China and Iran. Regard who’s giving supporting testimony: the Register of Copryights, the MPAA, Pfizer, MasterCard, and the AFL-CIO. Certainly no friends of the kind hosts here.
Ugh. Sorry. I’ll include ponies and rainbows in next post.
September 2, 2010
My heart still belongs to Lala
dude, where's my Lala?
I’ve just taken a test drive of Apple’s Ping and I am totally underwhelmed. As a user of Pandora, Rhapsody, Last.FM, MOG, and most significantly, Lala, I am completely befuddled. Why in the world would only iTunes purchase history be considered in user profile creation and not the wealth of data contained in the user’s iTunes library? There are play counts, ratings, playlists, genre tags, BPM annotations and so forth. No, really, can someone explain this to me? As it stands, Ping is utterly worthless to the musically driven social net citizen and is not likely to perform a meaningful social networking function in Apple’s marquee media store. Surely Apple must realize how scale-free social networks are formed. Without well-connected nodes capable of generating quality content, and without those nodes’ mass of preference data there is nothing going on here. Had my library and playlists been pulled in I just might have cared enough to write some reviews, invite my tribe and hang around long enough for a little more Lala DNA to show up. Not a chance now.
In summary, dear Apple, compare and contrast how hard Last.FM works to import and export user music preferences.
![~encounter~[phase~one~]](http://static.flickr.com/8404/8752005462_3d1d0da72f_t.jpg "~encounter~[phase~one~]")
