lifebsideben

Lenny Kravitz just released a new album, ‘Love Revolution’, and it’s a typical Lenny album: not groundbreaking, but eminently listenable. His is probably the only music that would be classified as straight “rock” that I listen to these days, and this album doesn’t disappoint, although telling it apart from his other CDs isn’t obvious if they’re loaded in the changer.

Anyhow, I knew the album was forthcoming, not because I follow him that closely, but because I went to the Oracle OpenWorld party back in… December? It was pretty amazing actually, quite impressive, with 3 separate stages, free for conference attendees (of which I wasn’t, but my friend’s husband was and gave me his ticket), and featured the likes of Billy Joel, En Vogue, Stevie Nicks, and our man Lenny. There were some bands that would appeal to a younger demo as well, but I have to admit I must be getting close to the Oracle vendor target market in age, because a couple of the bands were too heavy metal-ish (or what passes for it these days) for me, and a couple others were just plain going on stage too late. Yes, I am coming to terms with my lameness is later life. But, I got to see Lenny anyhow, and he definitely puts on a good show. I also saw him at the Shoreline many years ago, and was impressed with the energy he put into the corporate gig, it was about at the same level as his concert. He did play a track (the title track) from the new album at the Oracle thing, and it was Zeppelin-ish Lenny goodness, so I’ve been awaiting the new album.

So I saw it at Costco on Thursday night, but for $13, which seems un-Costco-like. I figured it’d probably be on sale cheaper at Target or similar, and sure enough yesterday I was at target to buy valentine’s stuff for my kid’s playgroup, and saw it for $9.99, with a “Only at Target” sticker that said ‘Digital Extras: Video downloads include a behind-the-scenes look at the new CD PLUS 2 acoustic songs and 4 of Lenny’s classic videos. Over 30 minutes in all! Also featuring the single “I’ll be waiting’ & ‘Bring it On’. Offer valid while supplies last or through 05/05/08″. Sounds pretty good. I’m going to buy the album regardless, but a couple acoustic songs sounds good. Now, how to go about actually getting to this content? Beats me. No insert in the (hateful) thin paper packaging (I don’t mind the reduced environmental impact, but there have to be more usable designs than this!). Nothing on my receipt. Nothing on the product page on target.com. Nothing on Lenny’s site. OK, I’m stumped.

Does it not make sense to publish an URL on the sticker? Maybe that checks against my receipt that I bought it? Or put an insert in the CD itself with a special code (as Kanye West has done)? How difficult is this?

Tags: bitching, Lenny-Kravitz, Music, Target

First, the geek link: Old school Lasonic boombox, retrofitted with wi-fi, mp3 decoding, and web browser interface (shweet)

A few posts ago I wrote a bit about downloadable music and bus models, etc. I got a couple comments from Ani at LaMundial.net, and now their new album is available for download for free. Yep, free (as in beer). And, the stuff’s even good! These guys can play, you should definitely check it out. Maybe even rename the files with titles like “50_cent_pimp_lamundial_bulletridden_remix.mp3″ and put them on your eMule (kidding). Give it a listen.

Tags: Music

A few years ago I thought it would be great, with all this fileswapping going on (Naptser was new), it would be cool if there was a way to pay artists when you download and like their stuff. A site, where the funds would go to them, and it would at least go easier on your conscience, even if you didn’t receive any kind of legal right to the content you might have received. This is fraught with problems in the Real World, such as the record companies wanting no business in this, what to do with collaborations (divx movies?!), how to make sure the artists themselves get the money, and the ever-present micropayment dillemas. (There’s lots more problems, but that’s the starter kit.)

Lately I’ve been finding this is an attractive idea to me again, but the problems aren’t really solved (maybe SMS helps with the micropayment issue a bit, in Europe, sort of, OK not really.) This is because I realize that I am quickly becoming CD-free, or trying to.

What does this mean? I moved to Europe a year ago; one thing I wasn’t going to take schlep overseas was a few hundred CDs (and especially not their cases). So I bought one of those big album thingys for CDs, and stuffed it with about 100 discs, and carted it over–I also brought my PC, which already had a sizable mp3 collection (probably 80% of which are from discs I own.) My CDs went into storage in the brother-in-law’s basement (as well as the DVD cases, and roughly 100 other boxes of junk.) Once I got to Spain, the first place I lived didn’t have a CD player, so I couldn’t play the CDs… but I could play them on my PC, and also drop stuff onto my mp3 player (a 192MB flash-based thing, good enough for a week of tunes without reloading.) The CDs collected dust. Before I moved I listened to CD-Rs burned of mp3s I owned, in my Aiwa aftermarket car stereo; partly because of the 10-albums to a disk capability, but also because I didn’t want my “original” cds to get stolen.

Later, I moved to a real place, but was never motivated to buy a real CD player (although did end up getting an alarm clock one, but only use the alarm clock functions.) Anyhow, I have this stack of CDs in the cabinet that I never look at or play. The songs are all ripped to mp3s on my or the wife’s computer (she is an iTunes fanatic, I’m windows boy.) Now I pull stuff onto her iPod and listen to it commuting back and forth to work, and no matter what, I don’t really have any use for these plastic disc things. They just take up space. I don’t miss the 500 I have in storage in the US, especially the ones whose content I really like, because the content is duplicated (”backed-up” if you’re reading this from the RIAA) on my PC.

Last week I was watching european MTV (Spanish I think, but we get several variants), and they played a video by some group (turns out one guy) called Four Tet. It was amazing. I searched emule and yah, the latest album is available. The next day (patience with the mule!) I was listening to the album, and really dug it. Great stuff. Before winamp delivered the last track, I was leaving him praise on his website’s comment form, and trying to figure out how to buy the album. Turns out it’s a small indie label (yay) called DominoRecords in the UK, and they have a pretty nice site. Within 15 minutes I had purchased that CD, and one of his previous ones as well. (The Internet is a great thing.)

That’s how I got back to the pay-the-artists-directly-website-is-a-great-idea (but really isn’t) idea. I want the music, and maybe the booklet would be cool, but damn, I don’t want more of those stupid prerecorded CD things. I would be much happier, and I suspect the artist would have been too, to just download the music off their site after I paid, and maybe pdf’s of the booklets. Virtual is good. I have lots of virtual space. Bandwidth is infinitely cheaper than pressing discs, printing booklets, assembly, packing, shipping, etc. I can’t be the only person who is willing to make the change (and if I could get a slight discount on the “license”, that would be great–but the 10 UKP was perfectly reasonable for the great music in this case, anyhow.) There’s no easy way to do this in aggregate, though. Maybe ASCAP and BMI could handle it for some music, since they already pay the artists, but that’s just a start (and methinks the RIAA would squelch this immediately anyhow.) And how do you pay painters, scultors of public art, dancers, and other people who you might want to?

Dealing with the status quo, I believe artists should probably all just have their own websites and accept Paypal donations or similar. It still leaves me with the problem of how I pay Bravo for the episodes of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, I’ve downloaded. I guess there will be a DVD set released at some point and I’ll buy that, just as my way of saying ‘thanks’. I can’t get Bravo in Spain, at all, but on the other hand, I had Bravo legitimately for years in the US and there was hardly ever anything decent on the channel, so maybe I’ve already “paid” for it. A problem for another day, and a more creative solution than I can devise now, to be sure.

Tags: big_business, Music, Spain

with my sincerest apologies to Ice Cube and his classic “Jackin’ for beats”…

gimme that site, fool
it’s a full-time jack move
b-bside yo homie make that page load
and i’ll jack any typepad, yahoo
that’s the name of the suckas i’ma redo
ain’t got no busines model
but drop PHP, break ya off somethin’ proper

OK, so I’ve had a really hard time motivating myself to work on prince.org lately. There’s 34 open bugs/feature requests in bugzilla, and a few small things I just want to add. But for some reason, it’s tough to sit down and do it; maybe partly due to the heat in Barcelona now. Yeah, that’s it. Well, anyhow, I’ve been thinking what to do with some of my other domains, including princefans.org, I’ve been trying to come up with something, not just another portal/forum/?. I still enjoy that, but it’s 90% done how I envision it, in the org already. I wanted to clone Craigslist for Barcelona in EN/ES/CAT languages when I was moving here, but found out it was already done, and really well, at that. I thought of blogs, since I’ve toyed with them for so long (paid LiveJournal account for 2 years, then tried MT, b2, …) Honestly, typepad is the friendliest so far, which is what I need to encourage me to actually use it. And that it’s hosted is a plus, otherwise I’ll just tinker with the code and not blog. Many readers might consider that a plus, however

One of the moderators (well, really ex-moderator) from prince.org IM’d me today about a thread she started discussing the “reputation” of the org. We chatted about how “out of control” it seems to be. I think this almost always happens, with “almost anything goes” forums. Adding more moderators (which I am going to do) will help, but anything with such a large, diverse group of people with varying opinions, will devolve into chaos. We’re not quite there, and I don’t think it’ll ever get to the point of total anarchy, but it’s worrying at least to her. To me less so, but she’s perhaps more in touch with the site contents than I am–I actually don’t read it too much. Point is, I think this is endemic to large communities built with the “message forum” paradigm. I believe the blog paradigm for communities has inbuilt limits to this destabilizing effect, and I’m really interested in investigating it further.

In short, I am excited about the prospect of providing a typepad-like site, for Prince fans (because that’s the group I have access to, and a suitable domain doing nothing, and a lot of creative energy in those folks). I’m certainly not aiming to steal TypePad’s business, or make something nearly as involved. A simple experiment in community-building via blogs. There are some technical challenges that are vaguely interesting, too. Not sure whether I’ll make another blog for that project, or comment here, or even do anything. Hopefully the good people of typepad won’t mind me jackin’ some of their ideas. If someone gets really into it, I’ll just push the user toward them anyhow, I think.

Vaguely related anecdote: my wife (when she was my girlfriend) met Ice Cube, when he was just blowing up. His first solo CD was out, and it was the bomb. I played it to death, and he was in town for a show. My wife was walking in midtown (New Center area) with a distant cousin, and ran into him. She actually got his autograph for me on a napkin. It says “To Ben–stay up! Ice Cube”. I think I even have it, still, packed away somewhere. Funny. I’m glad to see his career longevity, seems like a really smart guy.

Tags: blogging, Music, princeorg