Category Archives: Music

General, Music, Politics

Not enough time in the day–or the real reason no one’s buying CDs nowadays

Music CD, I’m just not that into you

In the four years from 2001 to 2005, overall time spent on these pursuits rose to 3,482 hours per person from 3,356 hours, about a 4% increase. But that didn’t benefit all forms of entertainment equally. Here’s a table I’ve created from the MPAA report showing the change in hours per person spent by activity:

Cable and satellite TV +125
Consumer Internet +52
Home video +29
Broadcast and satellite radio +26
Wireless content +15
Video games +12

Consumer books 0

Movies (at the theater) -1
Consumer magazines -3
Daily newspapers -14
Recorded music -50
Broadcast TV -65

There’s more, but the idea is that, since we only have so much money, and/or time, we spend both on what gives us more pleasure per unit.
I’m glad to see that book reading hasn’t declined (although it would be nice if it had increased), which puts a lie to the idea that we are less literate the more we’re online.

Art, General, Music, Tech

My top ten cool things for 2006

Everybody else is doing top 10 lists, why not me. 😀

  1. wxPython
    Yep, cross platform, fairly easy to learn, more powerful than Tkinter (Python’s “official” GUI toolkit). It may have some faults, but it works well for me as a noob Python programmer.
  2. Democracy TV
    The free and open source internet tv platform. There’s an opportunity to build a new, open mass medium of online television. We’re developing the Democracy internet TV platform so that watching internet video channels will be as easy as watching TV and broadcasting a channel will be open to everyone. Unlike traditional TV, everyone will have a voice. An alternative to mass media, and corporate controlled TV. Hundreds of “channels”. My favorite? Punkcast.com, of course. 😀
  3. Coffee By Design
    Coffee By Design’s mission is to educate people about specialty coffee and to provide them with the best quality coffee beans available at our Micro Roastery and Coffeehouses in Portland, Maine. We take pride in our reputation for offering the highest quality products at a fair price as well as providing extraordinary service. Our goal is 100% customer satisfaction. Damn good coffe. Fairly local to me, only 3hrs away. Great seveice, and good pricing. I recommend the Rebel Blend Dark Roasted coffee. Not only because it’s good but because a portion of sales goes to Rebel Blend Arts Fund, which gives grants to artists.
  4. My cowon IAudio M5 Portable Digital Audio Player.
    Plays all formats. of audio files you can throw at it, holds 20GB worth of music(and just about any other kind of file, but you can only view text files, not pics, or anything else.) Works with Linux, since it’s basically just a porable hard drive with music playing software on it.
  5. Download Punk
    See my post on this fine site.
  6. Ghostland Observatory
    These guys actually beat out Exene Cervenka and Joan Jett (both of whom I love, and had new CDs out this year) because of their originality, and total coolness and independence. Try Piano Man from Paparazzi Lightning.
  7. Musee Picasso in Barcelona
    From my 2 month working excursion. My favorite thing, a great collection. See this post for more things.
  8. Someone Comes to Town Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow
    This fine book beat out a couple of others as my fave read this year, for it’s absolute strangeness, and great writing. On the short list:
    Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
    Driving with Shannon by S A Robinson
    I thought I did a review of this, but I didn’t. It’s a semi-autobiographical memoir of a couple of teen age punk rockers trip cross country in the early eighties, a good, but not great book.
  9. Eternal Gaze
    A wonderful, animated short about the artist Alberto Giacometti
    It even beat out How to draw a Bunny, for me.
  10. My wife
    Who continues towards her goal of being an RN, works a demanding job, and still loves me for who only knows what reason.

There’s really so much more like Cobh, Ireland, other bands, and download sites, my kids, my cats, my dad, ART books, not having internet for 2 months, Richard Dawkins, Keith Olberman, and many, many other things that I can’t think of, but, these are my top 10 cool things.

General, Music

Download Punk

Legal punk rock downloads? You betcha. Downloadpunk.com is where it’s at. More than 500 indie/punk labels (including Ian McKaye’s Dischord, Fat Wreck, Alternative Tentacles, and Beer City), most of your favorite punk bands (no not all, some notables are missing, like The Buzzcocks, Dead Milkmen, Gang Green, and Rollins Band, but most of the bands you’ve heard of, and some you haven’t, they’re there.) You won’t find Brittney, or Christine, or any of the top 40’s bands (thank goodness) but you will find Very Metal, the Ramones, Dead Kennedys, Jello Biafra, Government Issue, Minor Threat, SOA, Black Flag, Radio Birdman early Offspring, and Green Day, and more.

It’s $.79-$.99 per song, or $3.99-$10.99 per album. (it says in the FAQs $9.99, but I believe I did see one full album for $10.99) Watch for free downloads scattered here and there. It’s all DRM free, and comes in either MP3, or WMA formats, at bitrates of 192kbps. I’d like to see them offer Oggs also, since those formats aren’t Free, but, I can live with MP3s for now. You can, also, opt in to giving an additional 1% of your total purchase to one of several charities (explained here).

This is a great way to support indie/punk artists, and labels, the music is high quality, and _you can play it anywhere_.
I give these guys an A, and can’t wait to get a little more money and shop some more with them. I’d give them an A+ but besides the Ogg thing I have two problems with the site.

  1. Their sample player doesn’t work in Firefox on Linux (I don’t know why–it works in Opera, so maybe it’s not their fault.)
  2. No downloadable artwork/linernotes. I’d pay some extra money to get liner notes etc. I know nobody else does this either, but it would be a nice thing to have.

This is one of my favorite, cool things, I found in 2006. 😀