This is outrageous.
Absolutely insane. Awesome, but insane.
Those crazy Welsh.
Yeah. That’s right. I’m all on top of the electronic pop music scene. Where was zed=zee on that one?
[queue funny little dance]
Oh. I forgot… out snowboarding and having fun. Hm. Sounds… well, kinda nice. In a not-working-kinda-way. Wow.
Clearly, I’ve been working on course websites and writing up assignments for the past n days straight. The start of classes, at this point, will be a relief, just because it will break up the monotony of planning. Bring forth the chaos!
Fred Benson on the CC Blog pointed to the fact that NIN’s “Ghosts I – IV” was the best-selling MP3 album at Amazon for 2008. This is remarkable in no small part because “Ghosts” is an album that you can legally download from the Internets for free. The Creative Commons license on the work allows you to share and remix the work in non-commercial contexts.
As it happens, I had a $5 credit at the Amazon MP3 store, which sells DRM-free MP3 tracks that can be played on any MP3 player. The album costs $5, and a significant percentage of that goes directly to the artist. Seemed like a good use of the promo credit… assuming the artist gets a cut when the promo credit is used that way. (Woot! It downloaded before I could finish writing the post.)
I’ll have to say more about open content at some later point… it’s brewing in the background as part of my long-time desire to see more ebooks in the classroom and fewer $100, six-ton texts in my students’ bags.
I forgot that there are entire weblogs dedicated to ripping old, out-of-print LPs.
That said, I was amazed by what happens when you order pizza online:
Dominoes has a live page that, as you watch, it updates with the status of your pizza. Now, why did we order pizza? Because we have reduced our store of food at home to the bare minimum as we prepare to leave. That, and we failed to buy fresh vegetables today before the store closed. So, we had nothing in the fridge.
Again, I’m amazed by technology. I can order a pizza online, and have live updates in my browser. Crazy.
I’m easily amused lately. It must be the stress of the move. And I’m posting a lot of random poo.
I was trolling through YouTube, and found a few fun videos.
Here’s one of the Gas House Gang and a women’s quartet doing the 8-part barbershop arrangement of Lida Rose. The video quality isn’t so good, and it isn’t a perfect performance, but it’s fun to hear it as a 2x4x arrangement. (Ah. Here’s a higher-quality version with the women’s quartet Showtime.)
In the realm of barbershop comedy is 50 champs to get Osama. You have to know a fair bit about the barbershop community to find this funny.
The Acoustix was a trend-setting quartet; I believe two of the four were classically trained and sang with the Dallas opera (although that’s based on old memory cells). Tonight, Tonight is a marvelous arrangement, with the melody passing through all four voices, and the tag (or ending) is one of the more mind-bending chord progressions I’ve encountered in a tag. An interesting video is this one of the Acoustix jamming in an airport tram-car…
I also wandered through some videos of Rockapella… for example, their jam on Under the Boardwalk with True Image is fun, and Zombie Jamboree in concert is also cute. I think this came from a concert somewhere in Pennsylvania… their rendition of Tempted by Squeeze. (And, for comparison, the original.)
Which might as well drag me all the way back to collegiate a cappella. Here’s the UNC Achordants doing Wayward Son, which they’ve really done a nice job with. They also do a nice job with MacPhearson’s Rant, if that’s what the song is actually called…
Well. Firefox crashed. Who knew.
So, no, we don’t have TV. And I don’t usually spend an evening poking around YouTube. But it’s fun being able to wander around the world of a cappella music with no particular direction in mind, and enjoy the music found along the way.
Any dance song you could imagine dancing to while wearing skygoggles is a good dance song.
and
Any dance song that makes you think of some guy sitting in his studio crouching over lots of weird looking equipment, toggling with this knob and raising that equaliser, banging his head like he was Data receiving stupid amounts of information via his positronic connector, and this was the Enterprise just about to start a journey into a Black Hole of sound, that’s a good dance song.
found at
http://20jazzfunkgreats.blogspot.com/
Also rocks:
http://my.opera.com/Licorice Pizza/blog/
Update, moments later: As it turns out, I found both of the dance tracks tedious. C’est la vie. But I have discovered an entire web-phenomenon of people ripping old LPs and placing them online available for download. Awesome.
Jadud you goober, “The Pirates who Don’t Do Anything” is a decade-old
song from the very popular Veggie Tales series. Reliant K is covering
the song, but they surely didn’t write it.http://www.bigidea.com/music/singalongs/pirates_boatload.htm
http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/v/veggietales4708/werethepirateswhodontdoanything209666.html
There you have it. Dave has spoken.
I don’t understand why CDBaby and Magnatune don’t team up.
CDBaby is an online record store that sells albums by independent musicians; the musicians take a significant percentage of the sale, unlike traditional CD sales through retail vendors.
Magnatune provides a similar service; they market and license music by some excellent artists, at incredible prices (read: my student loans have come due), and in a variety of open formats. For example, when I purchased the Bach cello suites, I was able to download MP3s and WAV files of the audio, both DRM-free.
I think the CD is dying; the only reason I’d consider buying a CD anymore is to get a high-quality version of one or more tracks without DRM. But in truth, I don’t want the CD, I just want the music; and, as a result, I’m just not likely to buy the music if my only option is to go out and buy or order a CD.
So when are CDBaby and Magnatune going to get together? CDBaby has a huge catalogue, and Magnatune is slowly growing into a bastion of good practices in the online music retail business. Can something be done to benefit CDBaby, Magnatune, and the artists?