Category: Music

Songs for Good Spirits

Susan Getgood tagged me in Hilda Carroll’s collective playlist meme.  The idea is to add one song that lifts your spirits every time you hear it.

Those who know me musically know that uplifting songs are not my strong point.  But I can think of quite a few songs that make me really happy every time I hear them.  As Susan and others have said, it’s hard to pick just one.  But after thinking about it for a bit, I did.

It’s a song called Weight of the World off the record Built of Stone by the Cigar Store Indians.  I heard them play it live on XM once and the lead singer said he wrote it for his kids.  One listen by any parent of young children will send you running for the crying towel.  Not because it is sad, but because it is so perfect.

These lines sum up the way the song makes me feel (remember that he is singing to his kids):

You gotta try to live your life
Kinda like a script
Like you’re in a movie
Like you’re watchin’ it
20 years from now
You won’t give a damn
You’re a tempest
Born and raised…and loved

An absolutely perfect song.  Wonderful advice. I gotta go find my kids and hug them.

I’m going to tag Matt Moran, Jeff Balke and Blonde 2.0.

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RanchoCast – 6/9/07 Edition

I just uploaded a surprise edition of the RanchoCast podcast (it was a surprise to me, at least, as I thought it might be on permanent hiatus).

I played some great music by Lloyd Cole, Charlie Robison, the Gourds, Manassas and others.  Give it a listen.

I don’t know if this means the RanchoCasts are back or not.  My current thinking is that I need to either team up with one or two other people or have a rotating panel of guests.  My ideal format would be a mix of music and tech talk.

I know the microphone sounds crappy.  The Logitech 350 that works so well in Skype seems to skip a little when recording to my hard drive.

The Lost Rituals of Music

Fred Wilson talks about vinyl LPs and says he might start buying his music on vinyl again.  He says if you really want to collect music, LPs are the way to go.

abb I suspect Fred misses the good old days when listening to music was the thing, itself.  As opposed to something you do while you’re doing something else.  These days everything is compressed.  Time.  Music.  Fun.  Back in the day, we’d put Frampton Comes Alive on the turntable, sit back and just enjoy the sound.  Same with the Allman’s At Fillmore East, and the best one of all- Europe ’72.  We’d read the album covers and the liner notes.  We never felt hurried, like we should be doing something else.

Our record collections were tangible.  We could browse through them like books.  The joy of picking out a record, taking it out of the sleeve and putting it on the turntable was a ritual to our passion.

Then came the bombs. 

MTV started the assault by killing the radio star.  The Disney Channel continues that same assault today, by making the music very tangential to the show or the person or the product.  Nashville does its part by marketing media creations as country stars.

The effect of all of this is that music, for music’s sake, is quickly becoming an antiquidated pastime.  Like horseshoes and croquet.  The purists still enjoy it, but the rest of the world uses music as a garnish for some other main course.

I don’t know if going back to LPs can turn the tide.  But I know there’s no sense of anticipation when clicking on an MP3 like there was waiting for Duane to hammer out the slide guitar riff at the beginning of Statesboro Blues.

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YouTube Activism

Here’s some pretty amazing YouTube activism by Greg Hewlett, a blogger, Texan, amputee and, by all accounts, fine blues singer. 

Link for feeds.

Unfortunately, Greg reports that the bill amendment that would have forced insurance companies to provide better prosthetics coverage was stripped from the bill.

While unfortunately not successful in this case, this video is a great example of the sort content activism that can reach a lot of people in a short time.  I probably wouldn’t have read a letter about this topic from someone I didn’t know.  But I watched this video 3 times.

Good pickin’, effective message.  Rock on.

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Fresh Cream

I am really excited about this.

I have seen a lot of concerts.  Cream is one band I’ve never seen live, and if they play anywhere near Texas, I’ll fix that.  We saw Eric Clapton not long ago, and he was great.

Here’s a link to the embedded video for feeds.

Now, if the remaining members of Led Zeppelin would tour again, I could plug the other huge whole in my concert portfolio.

On the other hand, I’m not all that stoked about this.

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Alms for the Poor or Bring Out Your Grateful Dead

willblogforfoodC|Net reports that the music industry is offering “small” webcasters the option of paying “below market” royalty rates on the songs they play, keeping the required royalty rates essentially the same as they are under a 2002 law called the Small Webcaster Settlement Act.

It’s not known what the cutoff for “small” would be, but the SaveNetRadio coalition argues logically that almost all webcasters should be considered small by broadcast standards.  Once they get more popular, however, they might very well grow themselves out of business under the proposed plan.

While I’d love the ability to stream some MP3’s from Newsome.Org, the bigger issue is not helping bloggers put a few streaming MP3’s online, it’s ensuring the viability of the places most of us go to get new music- the Pandoras and Rhapsodys of the world.

As Techdirt points out, this is likely an attempt to distract the growing number of politicians who have been looking at this very important issue.

While I’m happy to see the music industry negotiate a little, there’s a lot more work to do before we’re done.

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Pre-Owned Cars, Unrequested Fission Surplus and Digital Consumer Enablement

They started calling used cars pre-owned cars as a marketing ploy to make people feel better about buying a used vehicle.  I’m not sure why people needed to feel better about it, but apparently they did.

And I just know I’ll feel a lot better about DRM infested songs if we start calling it Digital Consumer Enablement, or DCE.  I had to check to make sure I wasn’t at The Onion, when I read this nugget:

Speaking at a panel session at the NCTA show in Las Vegas Tuesday, Zitter [HBO’s Chief Technology Officer] suggested that “DCE,” or Digital Consumer Enablement, would more accurately describe technology that allows consumers “to use content in ways they haven’t before,” such as enjoying TV shows and movies on portable video players like  iPods.

No need to worry about all the problems, technological and philosophical, that DRM causes.  Let’s just give it a pretty name and everything will be all right.

As Joey deVilla points out, Mr. Burns would be proud.

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DRM: Dumbass Restrictions Maintenance

Everyone is talking about crime
Tell me who are the criminals
I said everybody’s talking about crime, crime
Tell me who, who are the criminals
– Peter Tosh

I can’t believe what I just read in a Forbes article about DRM.

Here is a quote from the article explaining why other members of the record label cartel are unlikely to follow EMI and Apple’s lead and start selling music online that is not infested with DRM:

Other online music retailers say they’re worried that following Apple’s lead will confuse customers who may already be baffled by a crazy quilt of restrictions that envelop the industry.

Isn’t that sort of like saying that poor people would be confused by having money?  Or at least like saying renters would be confused by ownership.

Anyone who’s lettered enough to make it through the registration process at some online music store will be able to distinguish between “restricted” and “unrestricted” and “$.99” and “$1.29.”  And even if some people automatically click on the cheaper DRM-infested option- so what?  People buy crappy stuff all the time because it’s cheaper.  The confusion argument is a canard.  As Forbes points out, rocket science is less confusing than the myriad of subscription plans these online stores offer.

Meanwhile, executives of other cartel members said at some OPEC, I mean record industry, event that getting rid of DRM is not a priority for them.

Really?  I’m shocked.

There’s no confusion there, only greed and shortsightedness.  It’s about trying like mad to protect a monopoly built on a dying business model.  It’s about the nominal cost of manufacturing a CD and the not so nominal cost the cartel charges to the buyer and the artist for doing so.  And it’s about how little respect the music industry has for its customers.  “We don’t want the whole world to be a college dorm.”  Are you kidding me?

It’s not about whether it’s good for the cartel.  It’s about what customers are entitled to and what they are disciplined enough to demand.  And sometimes, as Larry Borsato points out, what they are promised.

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MediaMaster – Update

I wrote the other day about my experience with MediaMaster.  I said I liked it, and that I was in the process of testing the claim that there are currently no upload limits.  Here’s an update.

I uploaded around 5,000 songs into my account, thereby effectively confirming that there is no current limit.  I can’t tell you exactly how many because the album cover-only library interface doesn’t give you this information.  As I mentioned the other day, the library interface needs a major overhaul.  Badly.

While the songs sound good over the internet, the system doesn’t handle huge libraries very well.  I constantly get a message stating that “a script in this movie is causing Adobe Flash Player 9 to run slowly….”  Slowly as in not at all.  Since I doubt the MediaManager business plan was based around people like me putting thousands of songs in their libraries, I can look past this problem.  But it does limit the service’s usefulness as a backup plan for large libraries.  I have around 27,000 (legal and unshared) songs on my music server.  It would take approximately the rest of my life to upload the rest of them.

I tried out the widget on Newsome.Org for a while, but the interface is (hopefully) a work in progress and it interferes with page navigation and scrolling while it loads.  So it’s gone, at least for now.  On a related note, unless Blonde 2.0 revisits my blog to counter-balance Randy, Mathew and Earl‘s ugly mugs, I may have to lose the MyBlogLog widget too (I get those guys back by plastering my ugly mug on their pages every chance I get).

All of this is not to say that I am disappointed in MediaMaster.  I think it is a neat service that will probably get better over time.  It’s not (yet) a place where audiophiles can store and access their entire library, but it is a great way to store and access portions of your music.  And it would be a great solution for those with more moderate music collections.

I like MediaMaster a lot now.  I hope it gets even better.

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Yahoo Lyrics Search: A Bad Opening Act

I have been waiting for a reasonable place to find and search song lyrics.  Since Lyrics.ch was shut down by the greedy publishing industry years ago, the only way to find song lyrics has been to google the song and visit one of several ad and pop-up infested lyrics sites.  Now Yahoo has tried to come to the rescue.

Through a deal with Gracenote, a company I am not fond of due to its conscripting for profit the formerly open source CDDB, Yahoo can now allow legal, centralized lyrics searches via it’s Yahoo Music page.

I should have been suspicious when I first visited the search page and saw mostly photos of artists I either don’t recognize or don’t like.  But I soldiered on hopefully.  The search engine is fast.  I think I know why- because the database is so small.

I tested it first by searching for “my feet are too long” to see if it would return John Prine’s Dear Abby.  No luck.  I tried “Dear Abby” and found a song by George Strait.  No Prine.

Next I tried “no senator’s son” and found CCR’s Fortunate Son.  “We can share the wine” returned the Dead’s excellent Jack Straw.  “Never leave Harlan” found no results, even though a song search found Darrell Scott’s excellent song of the same name.

“Killed John Wayne” did not find the Guadalcanal Diary song, thereby proving that Mathew Ingram is a better lyrics source than Yahoo.

“Muskrat Love” found neither the Captain and Tennille version I was expecting nor the Willis Alan Ramsey version I hoped for.

My conclusion is that the lyrics database might be fine for the casual music fan who likes current hit songs and middle of the road oldies, but this is not the one-stop shop for true music fans I hoped it would be.  In fact, I was pretty disappointed.

It would be so much better to have some open source, Wikipedia-like database for lyrics – which could also be ad supported.  But that old greed thing once again stands in the way of logic and usability.

There are also a couple of things about the interface I don’t like.

First, the results are not in any kind of alphabetical order, and they are not sortable.  They should be sortable by artist, song title, genre and year.  Additionally, you have to manually select lyrics search for every search, because the search box selection defaults to “All” (which includes artists, albums, songs, videos and lyrics).  This is an unnecessary irritation.

And the biggest pain in the ass: you also cannot copy (as in copy and paste) the lyrics once you find them.  This is idiotic and shows once again how little the music business trusts or respects its customers.

In sum, Yahoo’s lyrics search is a nice attempt to provide a much needed service. But it’s not ready for prime time.

Not by a long shot.

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