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While walking around town I usually have my ipodShuffle crammed into my ears. Either I’m working on some new TPH tunes (a great way to write lyrics – if you can’t remember them between walking trips, then they usually are worth forgetting) or listening to one of the many business, advertising, marketing or music related podcasts available for free.

On the Advertising Age podcast “why it matters” the host was mentioning that American Idol made 2.5 Billion (yep folks – that’s a billion with a “B” – I just checked the podcast again). continue

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Noise once pointed out during practice that the music for Song About a Girl was really just a loose ripoff of Pachebel’s Canon in D Minor (if you’re not sure what that is, go to a wedding where there’s a 90% chance you’ll hear it, or keep reading). That didn’t bother me cause I always liked that song and even thought myself a bit clever for reinventing a classical piece.

One of my employees forwarded me this with the question “is this guy actually playing this? ”

Near as I can tell, he is. It’s pretty amazing.

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We got podcasted on Insomnia Radio #45 again, I'm listening to it right now. I always enjoy the company we keep when Jason includes us in his podcasts, it's quite flattering. Really liked the Fredalba lead-off track.

Jason, if you're getting this: yes, we are compiling material for the new record so we'll get you something as soon as it's ready.

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The Brunswick. I spent a few nights there back in the day. We'll be there on Oct 22/2005 opening for Osterberg, we go on before them, which means we get to play our set before they destroy the place (which they've been known to do).

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This page explains why Harvey Danger is releasing their new album Little by Little in it's entirety, for free, over the web. And this is the page you can download it from (which I'm doing right now).

Their reasons seem to echo the emerging sentiment from the indie fringes of the music scene:

we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is…

They see it, we see it. The RIAA doesn't. This is becoming a bigger deal now than it was in the past. It used to be about simply watching dinosaurs sinking into the tarpits with amusement, chuckling as they launched a flurry of lawsuits at the manufacturers and distributors of tar. But since the stakes have been ratcheted up by the RIAA takedowns of bitorrent sites this is becoming a bona fide struggle.

Who will the RIAA sue when all the artists start distributing directly over the web?

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We're playing at the Drake Hotel, Triple-X Thursdays (Get your mind out of the gutter, Triple-X is a DJ) along with our faves, Kelly and the Kelly Girls.

The Drake Hotel is 1150 Queen St W, TORONTO, we're on 11pm, Kelly Girls at midnite. $5 cover.

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I've been dutifully ignoring the hysteria around “Broadcast Flag” until now, chalking it up as some problem a bunch of foreigners were going ballistic over and I really didn't care. Today there is a lot of buzz around the net that its going to get snuck back into legislation as an attachment to some other Bill (I never understood how US politics worked in that respect, they can pass legislation on duck hunting and somebody can sneak in a rider to nuke Switzerland).

So today I got curious enough to actually look it up. What the hell was Broadcast Flag anyway? Its a simple binary digit that is supposed to mean “you can't tape this”, save it to any non-volatile media, skip commercials, etc.

The ramifications are that hardware and software vendors are supposed to start complying with this at some point and suitably neuter their offerings to respect the flag.

The situation came up here in Canada last year when XM Radio sued Scott McLean for his TimeTrax software which could record satellite radio broadcasts for later consumption.

Suppose for a minute I am the original artist behind this graphic (which I'm not):

And then I sell it to you, but I tack on a EULA: You agree that you will ONLY look at this image and see a vase or a candlestick. You WILL NOT see two faces when you look at this picture. If you do, you are in violation of the EULA. I will sue you.

Sound nonsensical? It is. Similar to the fact that the picture is nothing until the light bounces off the canvas or the screen, onto our retinas and is parsed by our brains, if I pay you for a bitstream, all it is is 1's and 0's until it hits my processsor and my operating system. What I do with it at that point is my business, not yours.

I believe the marketplace will ultimately reject any technology that embraces this approach and 12 year olds will crack anything that tries.

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We’re happy to announce that we’ve been added to NXNE, we’ll be taking the stage at The Black Bull on Queen St., Thursday June 9th at 11:00pm.

The show should be podcast, watch this space for more details.

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Is the title of the write-up about us in the Toronto Star business section today. If you need a login (which are free) and don't feel like creating one, try this:

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I'm listening to Evil Genius Chronicles podcast number 99, interviewing Paul Melancon (whom I've never heard of until now) and there is a lot of talk about the music industry, breaking in, getting signed, and recouping.

As Paul laments, he doubts he will ever “make it” in the music business in the sense that he feels he'll never get signed because no major labels will ever sign a thirty-year old who doesn't look like a teenager. And he's probably right. He goes on to say that he would be thrilled if he could just generate enough income from his music career that he wouldn't need a day job.

We here at Parkdale Hookers International Inc. know we'll never get signed, we're nearing 40 and at varying stages of balding, and we like our dayjobs (it's a lot easier to like your dayjob if you own the company 😉

But I think Melancon hits on a few points which will define the ever widening rift between the mainstream music industry and the shift ocurring in the medium we use to transmit music (you know, analog to digital, the end of discrete units called “records”, “songs” or “albums”, the beginning of “downloads”, “clickthroughs” and “conversions”).

Listening to the podcast, I like Paul Melancon's music, I think it isn't an unrealistic dream of his to derive a living from turning out more like it. And I think he'll have a better shot at it if he just forget's about the major labels. Everyone will.

My “big dream” for the where the music industry is going and how the internet will effect it is that we'll see something emerge that hasn't really existed before: a musician middle class. Until now you either made it big or you're bussing tables and there is no middle ground. Very few artists exclusively writing or performing their own music and bringing home somewhere between 30K and 100K a year, steady.

I think that will happen, and it won't be because the indie bands crack the DRM conundrum and manage to make their music uncopyable. It's going to happen because the indies are going to do an endrun around DRM, forgo the major labels and develop their own inroads to their public via podcasts, blogging and P2P.

As I've said many times: our band isn't trying to sell 500,000 records. We're out to get 50,000 uniques a day to our website. Who cares if you miss out on a theoretical mechanical rights royalty of 2.5 cents a track when you can earn

$2 CPM?

The model will work. If the Parkdale Hookers never get to 50K-a-day on our website it won't be because the model failed, it'll be because our music did.

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