Entries associated with the tag "Internet":

John Campbell is a Chicago-based artist who makes a strange and brilliant webcomic called Pictures for Sad Children. His most recent installment deals with one of the deepest fears of any dedicated music geek. I suggest you read it, then click on the "first" button and start the whole thing from the beginning.

Like you were really going to get any work done today anyway.

(Via the Chicago Independent Radio Project blog)

A lot of people blame the popular and terrible combination of MP3s and tiny computer speakers for what's being called the loudness war--artists, producers, and mastering engineers seem to be in an arms race, using heavier and heavier compression and mixes that keep everything cranked all the time. This has led to a loss of dynamic variation and nuance in a lot of recorded music, but supposedly nobody listening really cares because they're all using such shitty gear they can't hear the difference.

But this phenomenon has roots that go back further than the MP3 era. When Metallica released the Black Album in 1991, for instance, they boasted that it was mixed and mastered louder than any other record on the market at the time. Seventeen years later Metallica is again upping the ante in the loudness war, releasing an album, Death Magnetic, so supercompressed that its waveform looks like one fat line with no ups or downs. There's even audible clipping in some drum and guitar parts.

Mastering engineer Ian Shepherd compared the CD version to the Death Magnetic songs on Guitar Hero III and found that the GH III versions are actually less compressed than the disc's. There's an online petition asking for a reissue of Death Magnetic with a less fucked-up mix, but the odds of that happening are approximately zilch. Which explains the impromptu wiki that's formed over at the Pirate Bay in order to extract a definitive GH III audio rip--which they'll seed and share, making the pirated version actually better than the retail product.

I have a good idea what Metallica will think about that.

(Via MusicRadar and Wired's Listening Post)

Just a quick note to say that Steve Krakow, aka Plastic Crimewave, the man behind the Reader's Secret History of Chicago Music strip, finally has a Web site. (It must be very strange for him to work in a medium where he can't draw and letter everything by hand.) Looks like a few kinks still need to be worked out--the site's brand new--but you should bookmark that sucker. It's only gonna get more interesting with time.

On a related note, Steve's band, renamed the Plastic Crimewave Expanse for the occasion, has just been added to the bill with Roky Erickson & the Explosives at Double Door on Sunday, August 31. The reason for the new handle? A modified lineup. Drummer Lawrence Peters is out of town, so Ben Baker Billington of Druids of Huge will fill in--plus Steve's brother Adam is guesting on sitar.

The world just got a little more dangerous for eBay vinyl addicts with the launch of a new site called Ain't Just Soul. Local programmer Kumar McMillan has put together what he calls a "portable record player for the Internet" that scrapes audio from used-vinyl auctions on eBay (in a range of genres from Afrobeat to garage rock) and presents it in a simple but visually appealing fashion, complete with links to the auctions themselves. It took me just four clicks to get from the site's opening page to giving serious thought to bidding on an obscure Michigan garage 45 that's opening at 20 bucks. 

McMillan says it's a work in progress, so input is welcome. He really wants it to work smoothly with the iPhone, which conjures up visions of nightmarish situations involving beers, the encouragement of fellow record geeks, and entire bank accounts converted to vinyl.

The Skittles-colored Web 2.0 chaos that normally greets you at Muxtape.com has been replaced by the notice "Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA." Given the RIAA's attitude toward people who do anything with their music besides listen to it alone in a locked room with the curtains drawn, it's no surprise they have a problem with Muxtape--I'm surprised it took them this long to make trouble, actually. And given the RIAA's preferred means of "sorting things out," it's hard to be optimistic about Muxtape's future.

Have you seen the totally insane video for Radiohead's "House of Cards" that they shot with lasers instead of cameras?

The major difference between this type of 3D-plotting setup and a traditional optical setup is that while a camera basically just absorbs the light coming into it, the lasers digitize a whole bunch of information that can be visually represented in any medium the data will fit. The band's made that data public, and one of their fans--presumably one with a glut of free time and an inhuman level of patience--has undertaken the insane task of converting part of it to Lego.

Between this and issuing the isolated "stem" tracks to "Nude" for a remix concert, Radiohead is leading the pack of bands turning themselves into public open-source projects. If only some other band would take them on, so I can write geeky technical blog posts without the word "Radiohead" in them.

Fake Shore Drive's Andrew Barber got an interesting pseudonymous e-mail this morning from someone called "Prometheus," who claims to have lifted Rhymefest's iPod from a public appearance and found his long-delayed album El Che on it. Prometheus is now promising to leak the album a track at a time over the next few weeks.

Records are leaked online all the time and for all kinds of reasons: to generate buzz before a legit release, to get revenge, or just because a copy got left within arm's reach of someone who shouldn't have it. Prometheus's reasoning is new to me, though. In a lengthy screed accompanying the first two leaked tracks, he (I'm guessing from the language) puts Fest on blast for his poor choice of record label, his tour cancellations, and his lax iPod security, and complains a lot a lot a lot about El Che's repeated delays. Contrary to all obvious logic, he promises that this is going to be a good thing for Fest:

I got songs from your iPod. I'm going to leak a record from EL CHE every week until you drop a single or a video or some shit. The people have NO FUCKING IDEA how hot this shit sounds. Well, I'm going to show them. You had everything on your iPod. Even old, vintage shit. I'm gonna drop that, too. Until you or your weak-ass label keep your word and start dropping some fucking music. And, I'm not playing. I'm going to make you a better artist. I can't wait to see what you do.

Some of FSD's typically salty commenters are speculating that this might be a hoax, but if it's for real it might represent a brand new kind of Internet-facilitated artist-fan interaction: management guidance via online capitalist blackmail. 

Who says there's no innovation in the rap world in 2008?

Things have been so hectic the past couple of weeks that I just haven't been able to squeeze in any time to bag super hard on the new Girl Talk album, Feed the Animals. Lucky for me Hipster Runoff has stepped up to handle the situation.

I'll never forget the first time I heard Girl Talk. One of my altest bros sent me the CD. He couldn't believe I hadn't heard Girl Talk yet. He was like "U HAVEN'T HEARD NIGHT RIPPER? IT'S FCKNG AMAZING, BRAH?" We had a party to attend later that night, and instead of pre-partying with faggie electro, we decided to hear some wacky mashups. I saw my alt-bro's eyes light up as he exclaimed, "OMG. Is that James Taylor? This R0X0RZ!"

For my birthday I would really like it if everyone read that post and then never talked about Girl Talk ever, ever again. My birthday is in February but I don't think that should matter.

One weird development in the Internetization of music is that the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim has become one of the best online distributors of really well-made compilation albums. Ghostly International's Ghostly Swim comp has replaced most of the stuff I've skimmed from Discobelle on my electro playlist, and Chocolate Industries' new World Wide Renewal Plan looks equally solid, with contributions from the Cool Kids, Diverse, and Hollywood Holt, who doubles as a pitchman in commercials for the comp.

I'm not about to make any wild claims about WWRP stealing spins from Tha Carter III or anything, but in terms of easybreezybumpin nice-weather mix tapes this one's pretty quality.

(Video via Fake Shore Drive)

The award for Somewhat Inexplicable and Strangely Banal Government Web Site of the Day goes to the Federal Highway Administration's Some Road Songs page, an impressively exhaustive list of songs that are about or at least mention highways and roads. It gets points for going deep and obscure--I can't name off the top of my head any other Department of Transportation Web site that name-checks Ida and Hayden--but it still feels like something cubicle dwellers did to distract themselves from their jobs.

A better idea would be for the Federal Highway Administration to step up and reissue this:

Promising "23 Truckin' Hits," Road Music is the single best thing I've ever bought at a truck stop, which is saying a lot, especially if you know how much I like cheap stimulants and even cheaper porn mags.

Trucker C&W is a longtime fascination of mine--I know way more about the history of "Convoy" than anyone should. It probably goes back to my grandparents putting on Hee Haw or Barbara Mandrell's show when they came over to babysit. (My first concert was the Oak Ridge Boys. I think I was seven.) Maybe eight years ago, when I lived in Ann Arbor, WCBN aired an afternoon-long trucker-country program and I was utterly transfixed--I spent about two hours driving around town, just because I didn't want to miss anything by getting out of my car to find another radio inside.

"Convoy" is on Road Music, sort of--it's not the C.W. McCall original but a cheapo cover by "T.H. Music Festival"--but though it's probably the best-known trucker song, it's hardly representative of the genre in that it has a pretty positive outlook on the subject of truck driving.

A surprising amount of trucker C&W is about how much it fucking sucks to drive a truck for a living--the tedium, the danger, the rampant drug abuse, the loneliness that comes with existing in a perpetual state of transit. Road Music's track listing includes such happy-go-lucky hits as "Passing Zone Blues," "Widowmaker," and "Endless Black Ribbon." Even in the upbeat "Six Days on the Road"--maybe the second-best trucker C&W song, represented here by the superior Dave Dudley version--the narrator is only happy because he's about to get a break from driving his goddamn truck. It's like a CPA writing a song called "The Only Thing Keeping Me From Killing Myself During Tax Season Is My Cocaine Addiction."

There's still country music being written about truck drivers, but as its own subgenre trucker C&W died out around the time America got over its mid-70s fascination with trucking and CB culture. Maybe it's time for someone at the Federal Highway Administration to pay musical tribute to the horny, drug-addled sociopaths who keep our country running.

(Some Road Songs link via Cardhouse)

Radiohead just announced that it's running a fan-created remix contest at radioheadremix.com, where you can listen to remixes of "Nude" from In Rainbows, vote on your fave, and post your own.

I actually have a column coming out in a couple days on the benefits of artists going open-source with their music and encouraging fans to get creatively involved with it through things like remixing, so I like that Radiohead's going there. I just think the way they're going about it is a little off.

To remix the song you have to buy its "stems," as they're referring to the component tracks--i.e., vocals, drums, strings, etc. They're available as DRM-free MP3s for purchase through iTunes for 99 cents apiece, and if you buy all five stems you get an access code for a GarageBand-compatible project file. (Strangely, buying all five together costs you a dollar more than buying each separately.)

I think that if musicians expect their audience to work for them for free--which, when you break it down, is what's happening here--they shouldn't charge for the privilege, especially if they're the ones who made such a big deal out of releasing the actual album in a way that encouraged free downloading and trading. 

Of course Radiohead has the kind of fans who will buy anything the band tells them to, and considering the number of remixes that have already been uploaded to the site, plenty of people aren't bothered by the situation.

Because I don't have quite enough Web 2.0 social-networking nerd-toy sites clogging up my Firefox toolbar, I went ahead and signed up with Muxtape, the online mix-tape site. The idea of online mix-tape making sounds like the ultimate in geeky tweeness, and the site's look really pushes that feeling--under an image of an actual cassette tape there's a big grid of apparently random (but clickable) usernames, each in its own brightly colored box.

Turns out the only things you can customize in your profile are your username and the color of your box. This has a double advantage. It's a real time saver, considering how other networks practically ask you to compile an autobiography for your profile. And it imparts a soothing, Zenlike simplicity to the user experience--all you can do on Muxtape is listen to mix tapes and make mix tapes, nothing more.

That soothing Zenlike vibe started showing its first cracks, though, as soon as I started uploading songs. There aren't too many rules to learn: files must be MP3s of under 10MB, you only get 12 at a time on your account, and you agree--wink, wink--that you have permission to put the songs on Muxtape's site. But the actual upload process is a hassle.

You can only upload one song at a time, and choosing your tracks involves navigating layers of folders in a little window. About a third of the songs I uploaded errored out and required at least one more attempt to get them up. Granted, I uploaded the first couple using the latest Firefox beta, which is kinda buggy, but I had similar problems with Safari 3.1. Muxtape is, after all, a brand new site, so it's to be expected it'll have bugs of its own.

And though Muxtape did a pretty good job handling the artist names and titles for the songs I put on my page, Hawkwind's "Quark Strangeness & Charm" came up as "Untitled" by Unknown, and I triggered a lot of error messages trying to fix it before I managed to get a sorta-correct version of the title up there. Maybe the Muxtape people have a low opinion of that era of Hawkwind.

Listening to a Muxtape is a much simpler experience. You get a list of songs in large, black Helvetica type on a white background. Click on a song and it plays. Click it again and it stops. No other controls. Sound quality's good, and I haven't experienced any noticeable lag in the streaming. If you're interested in checking out my mix, it's here.

Whether or not I ever update my mix depends on whether or not the uploading interface improves. With all of the menu navigation and upload errors, it took me the better part of an hour to get my Muxtape set up, and even though I was multitasking during the process, that's still a lot of time to make a mix--at least one that doesn't require recording things in real time to an actual cassette. If Muxtape gave us a drag-and-drop bulk uploader like Flickr has, I'd probably be up on it on a daily basis, and I wouldn't be wondering if my Muxtape account is going to fall by the wayside as quickly as my iMeem.

Sometimes it seems like real life is just a pale imitation of the Internet. I love my cat, but she has yet to ask me if she can has a cheezburger, and on the rare occasions that I leave the computer I wouldn't have instant access to hardcore porn if I didn't always carry at least two Internet-capable devices at all times. Even getting mugged isn't as cool as having your identity stolen online.

But sometimes the Internet reaches across the divide and intrudes on uncomputerized existence to make things a little more bearable. For instance, tonight at the Funky Buddha Lounge the Frenchies who run Fluo Kids, my favorite I-can't-read-it-but-I-download-all-the-songs dance-music blog, will actually be physically present, spinning some of the very same tracks they've put online. I imagine it'll be a lot like living inside their blog, albeit briefly, and that sounds pretty nice.

Was anyone else excited about downloading Qtrax, the free and legal P2P music-sharing source? I was, until I realized that the beta that'll be made available at midnight is Windows only. Oh, and also it has none of the major-label deals that were supposed to make it a legitimate threat to iTunes et al, so it's already starting to look like a nonstarter, especially considering that Amazon's poised to jump into the mix and fuck everyone's day up.

In related and less legal news, the Pirate Bay has announced that its user base has broken the ten million mark, offering up over a million torrents to share, including one that contains the complete Slayer discography and is extremely highly recommended.

After spinning more than 170 shows in 2007, Flosstradamus is taking some well-deserved time off. While the duo's laying low, J2K is cleaning out his room and running an eBay side hustle. Most of his offerings are things you'd expect from a hipster-beloved DJ, like spare Oakleys, a lot of ten Mishka T-shirts, and one of those confusing Japanese watches from the future. The real surprise is his recently retired iBook, which went through all those shows with him. To quote the item description, there are "about 25 gigs of music on it, lots of Flosstradamus exclusives, along with serato, ableton, and flossy fx, our patented effects program." That means it could end up a pretty good deal, unless some maniacal J2K fan goes bonkers because he autographed it and bids it through the roof. At this very moment the top bid is $213.83.

Oh, and here comes a press release telling me everything I just typed. Also, and I quote, "Flosstradamus are currently at work on their debut album to be released in Summer 2008. Including fellow Chicago-based artists such as Kid Sister, The Cool Kids, and Philadelphia-based MC Amanda Blank, Flosstradamus will be handling production duties, showcasing their signature party-rocking expertise in the studio as well as the club." So there you go.

The guys over at Daytrotter (my past column on them is here) are fiercely independent, almost on an Ian MacKaye level. So when I opened up my RSS feed this afternoon and the first thing I saw was the news that the site is getting a "substantial investment" from the more Dad Rock-leaning Wolfgang's Vault I was a little thrown. I e-mailed main Daytrotter-er Sean Moeller for some info and got back a typically upbeat and verbose reply, which follows in its entirety:

Thanks so much Miles!
The great thing about all of this is that nothing is going to be affected at all. I retain my share of the ownership of the company and all of the creative control/vision of Daytrotter. Bill Sagan and Wolfgang's Vault have no intention of messing with anything involving Daytrotter, which was the most important thing for us to know going forward with partnering with them. We didn't have any intention of doing any of this if we weren't going to get to continue calling all of the shots. We were doing fine going about this our own comfortable way. We didn't need anyone. But when the WV folks approached us and allowed us to continue with the freedom that we've always had while providing some always necessary money to make sure that's possible, we felt really lucky. It's been an intense amount of hard work to get to this point and we had no intention of throwing that away for a few bucks. We are still Daytrotter, I am still Daytrotter, along with Pat Stolley, Brad Kopplin, Phil Pracht and Johnnie Cluney and that's never going to change. You're not going to see anything different in the way we exist. You're going to see MORE great stuff. That's it.

I don't know how you go about getting sweet-ass deals involving no-strings-attached cash injections, but if anyone has any suggestions please send them my way.

First Journey gets a new lead singer through YouTube. Now Anthrax hires a dude who sent them a MySpace message. I'm just waiting on one more kinda-cool kinda-dumb social-networking-rock-star-hiring event so I can announce the "semi-washed up 80s rock bands are the new teenage emo chicks" trend. 

Also, do you want to invest in my planned biopic of new Journey front man Arnel Pineda? It's going to be a lot like Rock Star but with more of Neal Schon getting his quest for a new singer repeatedly derailed by his friend IMing him links to celebrity nip slips. Box office gold!

Right after I woke up today I read through a couple weeks' worth of the Lefsetz Letter that had backed up in my RSS feed. Usually I only read Bob Lefsetz for the bizarro logic he flings about seemingly at random as he mixes strange proclamations about how hip-hop doesn't matter as a cultural or economic force with nostalgic odes to ski seasons and Eagles shows 30 years past. He's like the crazy uncle of the music industry, and I know several other people who read him regularly for that fact alone.

But the other day he wrote something that I not only fully agree with but actually sort of respect. In a post decrying Clapton and Steve Winwood charging $250 for tickets to a sort-of Blind Faith reunion, Lefsetz writes:

What’s next? Reunions of bands that didn’t exist in the first place? Is Eric Clapton going to go out with David Gilmour? Is Ozzy going to tour with Alice Cooper as part of the same band? We are really scraping the barrel here.

But that’s rock history for you. Everybody’s cleaned up. And now cleaning up. That old soul, that’s gone, been long eviscerated, and the only people who won’t admit this is those on the take.

Pretty good, right? And right on the money, too? But 10 AM is far too early to be having unsettling experiences like agreeing with Bob Lefsetz. Only now, and with the help of some coffee, am I feeling OK about things.

Last week Stereogum posted Drive XV, an album-length tribute to REM's Automatic for the People, an album that turned, shockingly, 15 damn years old on October 5th. Chicago's well-represented by Catfish Haven's gloom-folk take on "Monty Got a Raw Deal" and the Narrator's bonus track, "Try Not to Breathe", which actually sounds like it could be a missing track from their recent (and excellent) All That to the Wall.

Catfish Haven bassist Miguel Castillo writes in his liner notes, "Many a beer was consumed in honor of this project." Jesse Woghin from the Narrator, on his band's cryptic credit, "Additional programming by the Mannequin Men DJs," says, "Seth [Bohn, drummer for the Mannequin Men] was there drinking beer for 1 of the 2 days of recording." So Chi-Town may be able to claim not only two of the best tracks on the comp, but also the most beeriest. Way to go, guys. You make us proud.

My friend Dave sent me the link to this:

I asked him how he found it, like, was he searching for Throwdown videos for some reason? He told me no, that he'd ended up finding it through another video of moshing cats. He is the kind of guy who can really make your buddy list special.

I hate to give Bill O'Reilly's brain-dead jihad against hip-hop any more publicity, but I do get a good schadenfreude buzz off of watching him get taken down when he fucks up. So if you haven't already seen it, here's O'Reilly getting ethered by video blog superstar Jay Smooth.

The little Flash video game at Pinback's Web site is hardly going to take the place of NBA Street Homecourt as the center of my day to day existence. But November Fireflight's a pleasant enough diversion from actual work, with pleasantly dreamy design and non-stressful gameplay that sort of approximates what it would be like to be a really stoned member of Pinback. As an added bonus, the duo's upcoming Autumn of the Seraphs (which comes out September 11 on Touch and Go) plays in the background.

I haven't listened to Autumn too much yet, but I kind of like it, which is surprising. I saw them play the day that I moved to Chicago, and their supremely long and unexciting—okay, boring—show led me from just sort of not liking them to thinking they were an absolute shit band. I'm something of an expert at holding grudges, but Autumn's good enough for me to let this one drop. Good job, guys. High fives.

Bradford Cox from Deerhunter got mugged over the weekend. The dude used to bother me pretty harshly, but I've revised my opinion after reading his blog—which is basically a long, sustained "fuck you" of moderate-to-severe intensity toward anyone who wants to mess with his personal program—and after reading his two-way interview with Dennis Cooper in the most recent issue of ANP Quarterly, aka the best magazine since Don Diva.

So I understand that Bradford getting mugged is a suckness of substantial size. But I think the real tragedy here is that no blog that I've seen covering it has gone for the gold with what I would consider to be the only headline this story could have: "The Deerhunter Becomes the Deerhunted." I've been watching my RSS feed all day, waiting to see those words roll in, but nothing.

But despite not using my main choice for the Deerhunter piece, Drowned in Sound sort of wins the Internet today for running the headline, "Gwen Stefani's Tits Annoy Malaysia." There is some real truth buried somewhere in those five words.

Well hell yeah: Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk is reporting that webcasters are catching a major break from the egregious ruling handed down by the Library of Congress's Copyright Royalty Board, which would've bankrupted most Internet radio providers and essentially shuttered the whole webcasting business for at least a few years. The public response to this unfair development has been big enough to get the generally techno-phobic U.S. Congress involved in sorting out the matter. Congress will be mediating discussions between a coalition of webcasters and the RIAA spin-off SoundExchange, which handles collecting and distributing Internet royalites. As of right now, the per-channel charge has been trashed—salvation for mega-multi-channel entities like Pandora—and SoundExchange has agreed not to collect the revised-rate back royalties that webcasters were going to have to pay on Monday.

What does this mean? Well, if they can hammer out a decent deal, it'll mean that webcasters are going to continue to be able to do their thing without having to pay out more royalties than they collect in revenue, which would be great. And I guess it also means that Congress not only took action against an industry behemoth in response to the demands of a coalition of (mostly) independent media outlets and their constituents, but also handled a somewhat complicated technological issue with a measure of grace and fairness, which has me wondering if any other elementary principles of reality have been violated today. I just went to the faucet to check if water is still wet, and it is . . . for now.

I'm not sure why, but for some reason I'm keeping up with the Consumerist's coverage of Best Buy's Geek Squad and their tendency to steal anything—especially porn—from the computers that are brought in for service. (Long story short: if you have incriminating photos/video on your computer you should learn about encryption.) An unexpected nugget in the comments section of a recent post led me to the forums of a goth-industrial-vinyl pants site called Side-Line, where the main guy behind the noise band Caustic (MySpace here) publicly outed a fellow site member who may be uploading independently released albums to sketchy file-sharing sites in Russia.

The debate over the accuser, the accused, and who is or isn't in the wrong raises a couple of interesting questions about the effect of file-sharing on independent musicians and what they can or should do to combat it. Is the "name and shame" technique fair? Petty? Just? How about contacting the uploader's employer, as the Caustic guy did after he found out some of the uploads were coming from the accused's work computer? Is that taking it too far? 

I've recently been re-examining my own views on sharing music, especially indie music. For all the ample schadenfreude I get from watching major-label album sales tank, it's disheartening to see the same trends hitting independents. I think trying to get someone fired for making your album free to download is a bit, shall we say, extreme. But I can't help thinking that a guy who uploads a self-released record by a working band without permission is a complete asshole.

Jessica Hopper and I have Internet beef over the new Lil Jon/Gucci Mane/some other guys track, "I'm a J." (You can listen here, if you're into hearing awful bullshit.) Hopper calls it "phenomal bad goodness." I say that it makes me want to take my ears to court and sue them for all they've got for emotional anguish and lost income that exposure to it has caused me. I've always thought that critics who claim that Southern party styles like crunk, snap, crank, and bounce have a dumbing-down effect on hip-hop in general were just overreacting, but "I'm a J" is giving me some reason to think they might be on to something. The song is like the audio equivalent of huffing paint. You can almost hear the fizzy sound of your higher brain functions dissolving. I'm guessing that since I hate the song so much it will become inescapable by the end of the summer. Cruel world.

If you're interested in some real good-dumb Southern-ness, I recommend hitting up Soulja Boy's MySpace page and listening to each track about a dozen times. I have mad respect for his janky-ass customized sunglasses.

A little while back I did a column on webcasting and the egregious royalty rate the RIAA's shill-men, SoundExchange, pushed through the Copyright Royalty Board. In it, I quoted a few theories from the webcasters at AccuRadio about how the rate hike might affect the industry, if it didn't demolish it outright. Daniel McSwain floated a theory that labels—specifically major labels, due to administrative complications that could effectively lock indies out of the process—might use a legal loophole to offer lower royalty rates to webcasters who agreed to play certain artists the labels were pushing. (And, incidentally, screwing over the artists that are supposed to be entitled to a cut of the royalty cash.) Excerpt: "This would allow the industry to 'dictate the look and sound of playlists,' according to McSwain. 'It takes away any autonomy from webcasters and puts it completely in the labels' hands.'" 

Including that idea in the finished piece was a tough sell to my editors, as it's impossible to prove that the labels intended to exploit a loophole they might not even know was there. Even I thought it verged on the kind of feverish hypothesizing that I recognized from reading too many books on conspiracy theories.

Tuns out we shouldn't have underestimated the majors. SF Weekly has broken the news that a new start-up webcasting service called Slacker.com has "stated in the press that it made direct license deals with the majors that have saved it the hassle of paying higher royalties." Reporter David Downs is calling the setup "dark payola": indebting the company to the labels' wishes with rate cuts rather than flat-out giving them money.

Major labels: making your most evil nightmares come true.

So, doesn't it sound like a good time to call your congressperson about the Internet Radio Equality Act? 

On the rare days that it's updated, Gabe Said "We're Into Movements" is far and away the best hip-hop blog on the blogoweb.com. Oh Word describes it as being "actually too next level to follow at times," which I would have to agree with, but GSWIM's dizzyingly abstract epistles usually pay off with some deep insight into the nature of the rap game. Plus they're hilarious.

The latest entry, "Go Now, Brother," breaks away from the usual future-level snaps for an elegiac but funny portrait of Stack Bundles, the third-string Dipset affiliate who was gunned down near his home in Far Rockaway, Queens on Monday. A lot of commentary on Stack's murder has worked in some not-too-subtle digs on his lack of commercial success, which the Gabe Said post acknowledges but also embraces. It's sad, kinda goofy, and reads like Joan Didion on assignment for Ego Trip. 

For the past couple years there's been a trend where companies put streaming audio jukeboxes on their Web sites for no apparent reason. Usually they're programmed to reflect some quality of the business, some level of "extremeness" or "family-friendlieness" or whatever they're trying to project. The one thing they all have in common is that they're utterly useless. I only ask for a limited amount of information from the Domino's Pizza Web site: what's the number of the closest location to my house, and do they still have that Garlic Bread pizza? (They don't, sadly.) I definitely don't go there to get tipped off to "hot new sounds" and I can't imagine why anyone else would either. But that didn't stop Domino's from launching the dTracks Music Player. 

The image that Domino's seems to be projecting with their song selections is "absolute blandness"—befitting a company that ditched the Garlic Bread pizza—with a dash of "hopelessly out of it." The player has three playlists: the "Clubbin Mix" combines Euro-club dance music and neutered hip-hop in a way I haven't heard since 1990. "Summer Road Trip" seems like it was programmed in an alternate universe where John HPopper and Tom Cochrane have been THE musicians of the past 15 years. The only really modern-sounding channel is the "Party Mix"—a misleading title, given that the whole thing is shitty emo no one on earth would want to party to. It's also the only playlist where the dTracks' middle-of-the-roadness actually worked for me. Outside of My Chemical Romance—who are geniuses—I prefer my emo as average as possible. I like knowing on first listen exactly where the song's breakdown will happen and what it'll sound like. Immediately after listening to every song on the playlist, I found myself absolutely unable to recall a single band name or scrap of melody, which was perfect. Thank you, faceless emo bands. You wasted a half hour of my life pretty good.

I was curious if the pizza/music connection was popping off industry-wide, but so far no other pizza company has stuck a music player on their Web site. Pizza Ria had a sort of sweetly annoying pop song on their splash page. I guess it was okay. The pizza I got from them was better.   

Amazon just announced that sometime this year they'll be opening an online music store stocked with "millions of songs" from over 12,000 labels, including EMI. No word on pricing or bitrate yet, or who else they're dealing with besides EMI, but they're promising that files sold through the service won't be locked down with DRM, which is killer news. Given the amount of love consumers seem to have for Amazon in general, I could see it being one of the only real threats to the iTunes Music Store's dominance of the online music market.

I'm guessing that Amazon's deal with EMI will include Paul McCartney's solo discography, which is about to be reissued and released to online music stores. I highly recommend you take the opportunity to purchase a copy of McCartney II, which has been sort of hard to find on CD, probably because it's supposed to be his least favorite work. Which I can sort of understand. Most of his solo material can be divided into sappy sentimental ballads ("Feelings" Paul) and elaborately structured pop ("Important" Paul), but II is a lunatic sugar-rush of home-recorded synth-pop full of bizarre ideas and nonsense lyrics ("Stoner with a 4-track" Paul). Recently the Devo-ish track "Temporary Secretary" has been revived, bizarrely enough, by some European hipster DJs who figured out that it can totally hang with Daft Punk and trashy electro hip-hop remixes in terms of providing goofy, hyperactive good times.

I just listened to the new Marilyn Manson leak--OK, most of it--over at Stereogum, and I have to agree with their assessment that "Heart Shaped Glasses" sounds more than a little like the Killers circa 2004. But listen to the bass line and you can hear that Trent Reznor isn't the only old-timey gloom rocker biting the DFA. And there's something about the cadence and delivery of the vocals--and even the lyrics, a little--that suggests some exposure to Craig Finn and the Hold Steady. In fact the whole thing sounds like the work of someone with more than a passing acquaintance with exactly the type of music that Stereogum normally covers, which leads me to wonder: is Marilyn Manson into blog rock? And if so, can we expect more indie sounds from his upcoming Eat Me, Drink Me?  Given that the tentative track listing includes songs called "Mutilation is the Most Sincere Form of Flattery" and "If I Was Your Vampire" I'm not going to bet on it. But I can't stop thinking about what a Marilyn Manson cover of "Young Folks" might sound like. Can make that happen. Are Internet petitions legally binding in California?

Also, did you know Lil Jon is way into hockey? Like, so way into it that he's blogging the NHL playoffs for NHL.com? I don't care about hockey, so I'm not actually reading his blog, but whoever came up with the idea of posing Lil Jon with the Stanley Cup strapped into his passenger seat is a MacArthur-level genius.

One of the best parts about living in Kalamazoo—you might be surprised, but there are actual nice things about living there—is Western Michigan University's radio station, WIDR. And one of the best things on WIDR is the long-running show SwaG!, an hour of high weirdness hosted by the enigmatic Bat Guano, a man obsessed with archaic kitsch, bizarre sonic oddities, psychedelic weirdness, noise, and surf guitars. The show's blend of the insane and the inane makes an unsettling mixture that, depending on your mood and the quality of the broadcast, can be either the most interesting radio you've ever heard or else completely irritating on a level you'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere else on the dial—Christian rock radio included. Interested parties can find a small archive of past shows here. I recommend listening with friends.

And speaking of kinda-crazy guys, I've recently discovered the blog written by DJ, cultural commentator, and cocreator of what a lot of people consider the most important remix of all time, Steinski. When I met him after his last Chicago gig he came off less like an old-school hip-hopper and more like those Asperger's-inflected hacker geniuses that do to computers what Steinski does to music, and his blog sort of reflects that. There's only about a month's worth of posts so far, but I've added his blog to my RSS feeds on a hunch that once he starts getting deep into it there's going to be some serious knowledge up there.

It's days like today that make me fall in love all over again with the Internet. It is snowing like a motherfucker outside, and I pledged within seconds of waking that I wouldn't be leaving the house today. Luckily all of the good music out these days is in digital-only form, so if like me you're telling Mother Nature, "Fuck off, I've got a stash of frozen enchiladas and an Xbox," you can still get some decent jams.

I just finished downloading And Justus for All, the new mix tape by Little Brother and Mick Boogie -- it takes a minute, since it's a 27-song monster and not a mini-album like Talib Kweli's recent free download Liberation -- and I can already tell it kind of kills. The news that fan-favorite producer 9th Wonder was ditching his full-time status in the group had a lot of hip-hop geeks calling the next Little Brother record a fall-off without even hearing it. What they weren't banking on -- and, OK, I also believed the antihype for a second -- is that Phonte and Big Pooh are still two of the smartest and most hilarious MCs working. Sure, Mick Boogie sometimes comes off like a bootleg 9th Wonder, but that's not going to ruin my day or anything.

Stereogum posted earlier that Snowden has a remix available as a free download, at least for the time being. As a rule I try to avoid any band that sounds like Interpol, but Snowden doesn't just share Interpol's gloomy atmospherics -- they're also nearly as good at writing hooks. Their Anti-Anti took a while to grow on me, but I've ended up getting mildly hooked on it. None of these remixes take any big chances, but their crunchy electro bump should earn them a spot in either your "party" or "gym" playlist.

While we're on the subject of workouts, Aesop Rock's contribution to the Nike + Original Run series is up at the iTunes music store today. If you didn't hear about it when LCD Soundsystem dropped the debut Original Run track, the point of the series is that Nike commissioned a bunch of artists to write original 45-minute-plus songs that they hope you will use in conjunction with their iPod setup in your running workout. Given the tiny number of musicians I can imagine pulling off a feat like that, it sounds like a potential trainwreck. But like LCD's James Murphy, Aesop Rock has put together an epic-length track that doesn't ever get tedious. The basic musical theme runs through an extended series of build-ups and cool-downs that actually sounds like what I vaguely remember a workout run feeling like. If you're not working out and you have a normal human attention span, I'm not sure what use you'll have for the track, although I have a suspect (and hate myself for suspecting) that there will be at least one fanatic indie rap fan using it as the soundtrack to a vigorous sex session. Which, I guess, counts as a workout.

One thing I almost noted in my end-of-2006 column but didn't was how much hip-hop fell in love with MySpace last year. We had "MySpace Jumpoff," we had Raekwon giving shout-outs to his white dudes who put him onto internet social networking, and if this had happened a couple weeks earlier it would've been at the top of my list. All of the hip-hop Internet nerds have been waiting for rap beef to go digital, and Jim Jones and the Dipset hacking Tru Life's MySpace page is exactly the ridiculous "it's on" moment were hoping for.

I was skeptical that it was an official hit -- Jim Jones seems like he's incapable of dealing with any technology more complicated than, say, shoelaces -- but as soon as I saw the screen caps I was convinced. The obvious, completely dumb insults like the, "no, you're the guy in the Borat bathing suit" response are classic Dipset, and who else would go after Tru Life but the posse behind the weirdly obsessive Jay-Z beef?

Given that competition is the hip-hop's driving force, I'll bet that MySpace drive-bys like this are only the beginning of rap war online. Don't be surprised when some scrawny, basement-pale kid toting around a tricked-out Linux box become the second most ostentatious entourage member next to the jewelry caddy.

I've seen a few blogs talking about how former Catherine Wheel front man Rob Dickinson shot an entire video on his cellphone and how this could potentially change the world. But everyone is talking about the tech, not the video itself, which is a shame. (The phone is really nice, although for $700 or so I would kind of expect it to take some bitchin-ass full-motion video, and maybe also have a bottle opener or chiropractor function or something.) I don't know if it was intentional, but the video functions as a greatest-hits collection of bad 90s alt-rock video cliches, including such beloved tropes as:

- The guy in an outfit that looks somewhat humorous when stripped of its usual context.

- The faceless-but-sexy woman/object with a hot ass and the wardrobe of one of the slutty moms in The Ice Storm.

- Those annoying fade-to-white cuts that turn your TV into a malfunctioning-strobe-light emulator.

- The dickhead playing a guitar in the desert.

- The "ugly alternative duckling that turns into a beautiful alternative, um, mermaid" storyline. (This cliche is a direct descendant of hair metal's "all along she was actually hot, but no one knew until she took her hair down from that bun" myth.)

- Just throwing some retro car or something in there. Because, "whatever."

- The ironic and meaningful message at the end . . . or is it? 

I would say the video is totally worthless, except I could imagine that whatever kids grow up to make the Yacht Rock of the year 2020 will find this a valuable resource in extracting the worst soft-alt ideas of the 90s.

Salon has just started the public-voting phase of its Song Search contest, an open-submission Internet battle of the bands. I like the contest in theory -- I love a good battle of the bands, and it appeals to my "the Internet is free and everybody do a band with your computer" cultural-political slant. The only problem I see with it are the gatekeepers between between the 500 entries recieved and the ten that will be pitted head-to-head: "The sharp music minds behind Brooklyn Vegan, Blissblog, ultragrrrl, Largehearted Boy, Music for Robots, and Tofu Hut[.]"

I could be persuaded to guess that the type of musician who would be amped about entering a song contest on Salon is more likely to play wussy indie rock than, say, doom metal, but if there were any doom metal entries, they aren't likely to get past a group of similarly-opinioned indie-rock bloggers. So what we're ending up with is the average of opinions from a group of people with seriously average tastes. Given that both of the songs in the first showdown feature mournful-yet-also-somehow-naive-sounding female singers, the mathematical average of the six bloggers' tastes equals "Joanna Newsom." The odds of something unique-sounding slipping past them are minute. I got distracted for a second toward the end of the Colorforms track, and when iTunes went into a Corrina Repp song, I didn't even notice. The Caterpillars get filed right before Cattle Decapitation, so at least they didn't have the same problem.