Category: Internet

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Weird Al says he gets less when you go digital

I caught wind of this from Slashdot[article] and navigated back to the horse’s mouth, aka Weird Al Yankovic. According to the “Ask Al” section of his website, he claims that he’s actually losing money when you buy his music digitally from sources such as iTunes.

Tim Sloane of Ijamsville, MD asks: Al, which of these purchasing methods should I use in order to make sure the most profit gets to you: Buying one of your albums on CD, or buying one of your albums on iTunes?

I am extremely grateful for your support, no matter which format you choose to legally obtain my music in, so you should do whatever makes the most sense for you personally. But since you ASKED… I actually do get significantly more money from CD sales, as opposed to downloads. This is the one thing about my renegotiated record contract that never made much sense to me. It costs the label NOTHING for somebody to download an album (no manufacturing costs, shipping, or really any overhead of any kind) and yet the artist (me) winds up making less from it. Go figure. [weirdal]

I’m sure this can’t be said for all recording artists out there as this comes from his renegotiated contract. I wouldn’t put it past record companies to snag artists in situations like this, so it is something to really consider when signing with a label.

When it comes down to it, staying independent is a plausable way to go if you can handle the work. If you are working for yourself instead of a label, you might be able to support yourself better rather than having profits like this being plucked away from you, while being legally binded, I might add.

Additionally, Weird Al fans might be interested to know, if you don’t already, that you can expect a new album from him soon.  Apparently the album was slated to come out this month, but, you guessed it, problems with his record company has delayed the release.  In situations such as these, I should say that you shouldn’t expect the new album soon but instead that you can hope to see it be released by the end of the year.  The music industry can be kind of crappy like that.

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Flock to a new web browser

I’m using Flock to make this post as an experiment. I recall hearing a little about this web browser during its initial phase of development, but the beta 1 of the program was released today.

What’s the big deal? Well, users of FireFox would be interested to know that it is based on your beloved browser. Flock goes a little bit further to integrate many of the web tools that are quite popular these days, especially bloggers.

Flock is a free web browser that makes it easier than ever to share photos, stay up-to-date with news from your favorite sites, and search the Web. [flock]

That doesn’t sound overly impressive, but there’s more.

Some of the features include drag-and-drop photo uploading for Flickr and Photobucket, an in-built RSS aggregator, direct blogging tool(Blogger, Drupal, LiveJournal, MoveableType, Typepad and WordPress), and shared favorites/bookmarks. [slashdot]

The current release is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, but remember that this is a beta. There are still bugs to work out of the browser, but my initial look at it is positive. Flickr support is pretty cool, but I haven’t really tried doing too much with uploading anything new. I have a handy widget for doing that.

We’ll see how this posts as my final test with it for today.

Blogged with Flock

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Rescue Me fifteen minute short

My post about the season three of Rescue Me is one of my more popular posts.  Since we are two episodes in, I thought I would give a brief update, minus any storyline.  Why?  Because season three won’t premiere in Canada until August 30th, according to a comment left by a reader.  Watch for that on Showcase.

Rebecca sent me this link of a fifteen minute short that, according to what she understands, they made in between the last two seasons of lighter material.  I just finished watching it, and it is just that.  It made me laugh.

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I’m thinking of a word right now, but it’s not kitty

World Cup Winners - rathergood.comI’m getting more and more excited for the World Cup[wiki]. I know next to nothing about anyone in the sport other than the fact that David Beckham[wiki] is married to Posh Spice. I also know that in America, we call it soccer, even though the sport has been around longer than American football.

This short from rathergood.com gets you even more in the mood, regardless of who you are pulling for. As to who I’m going for, I can’t really say. Like I said, I know very little. I do hear that the U.S. is an underdog favorite. There’s also that part of me that likes Mexico, and Brazil is always worth checking out.

Living in such an international city as Vancouver, it’ll be tough not paying attention to the festivities. I hear Commercial Drive is the place to be. I’ll have to check it out, maybe even bring some recording gear along with me.

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Hillary Rosen and life after the RIAA

If there was anyone I disliked more during my days at KRUI, it was Hillary Rosen[wiki]. Just a short time after we had established the station’s first webcast in history, I learned all about the DMCA[wiki], the RIAA[wiki], and Hillary Rosen. We were so proud to have our tiny little station getting people to listen from all over the world, only to fear the pursuit of charging incredible, per song, per person fees for our streams.

We fought where we could, contacted our representitives in congress, and staged our own “protests” like good college students do(it even got me on TV news). We just wanted to have out radio station on the web. That’s all. Play our music and be happy. And if the RIAA would have had their way, we would have been low on their radar, but the fees would have caught up sooner or later.

Today, Hillary Rosen is no longer the head of the RIAA, leaving the organization in 2003. She’s picked up blogging for the Huffington Post, and one of her latest posts offers a very intriguing view about the RIAA’s actions regarding individual lawsuits against copyright violators through file sharing networks.

But for the record, I do share a concern that the lawsuits have outlived most of their usefulness and that the record companies need to work harder to implemnt a strategy that legitimizes more p2p sites and expands the download and subscription pool by working harder with the tech community to get devices and music services to work better together. That is how their business will expand most quickly. [huffingtonpost]

Hello, music industry? Are you getting this???

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Taking on the PodPress

I just completed an upgrade of PodPress from version 4.4 to 5.8 for my podcast. I should always know better that anytime I have it in my head that something will be pretty easy, it won’t. It took me a while to hammer out all the kinks, but the upgrade completely killed my RSS feed. And for those of you who don’t know, that’s your pipe for getting these little audio buggers out to the world.

With that said, I like what they’ve done in this version. This WordPress plugin is constantly under development, so be on the careful lookout for updates. Read the FAQ’s, visit the support forums, and be confident in your editing skills. This plugin is great once you get it installed. It’s the upgrades that will catch you by surprise.

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A Reason To Fly JetBlue?

In addition to having some of the lowest fares for flying, JetBlue[wiki] hopes that WiFi on their planes will make their airline even more appealing.

JetBlue Airways Corp. won a wireless license to offer high-speed Internet and other communications services on commercial aircraft in a U.S. Federal Communications Commission auction that ended on Friday. [reuters.com]

It seems like there are two types of people when it comes to JetBlue; those that think it’s the worst airline and those that think it’s one of the best. Their record doesn’t help them too much either, but this is a boost for those business travelers out there.

Among 19 carriers reporting to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, JetBlue had the lowest on-time arrival rates in January, according to the Department of Transportation’s Air Travel Consumer Report for that month. The popular upstart airline landed on schedule just 70.6 percent of the time. Hawaiian Airlines was best, with a rate of 95.9 percent, and other airlines arrived promptly 78.8 percent of the time.

The report is more bad news for JetBlue, which lost $42.4 million during the fourth quarter due to fuel costs, and it plans to raise fares to improve profits. But it did have one of the lowest rates of canceled flights, at 0.2 percent, which could be tied to its many delays. Other airlines would rather cancel a flight than hurt their arrival rates. [abcnews.com]

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Russia On the Download

Wired.com is running an article about Russian websites where you can download music in mp3 format at rock bottom prices. More so, the concern about it is coming from “U.S. trade and music industry officials” stating that continued operation of the site is a direct obstacle for Russia joining the WTO.

“The United States is seriously concerned about the growth of internet piracy on Russian websites such as AllofMP3.com … the world’s largest server-based pirate website,” Neena Moorjani, chief spokeswoman for the Office of the United States Trade Representative, said Friday.

“Russia’s legal framework for intellectual property rights protection must meet WTO requirements…. In that context, we continue to call on Russia to shut down websites that offer pirate music, software and films for downloading,” she said. [wired.com]

You would think that this would be about oil, or something more precious to daily survival, and not piracy of music. That’s all it takes to stop your country from being apart of the WTO club. I would imagine that the pressure from the U.S. government is heavily influenced by lobbyists for the music industry, working the playground method of a little bullying to keep them from hanging out with the rest of the cool kids. The argument makes sense for both parties, but I keep coming back to this feeling that the music industry needs to stop fighting this and start to undermine these things to take advantage of it in some way.

This also made me curous about another Russian download site, mp3search.ru. The site appears to still be up and running. I gave that a shot and experimentally dropped twenty bucks on the site to see what it had to offer. For the most part, it’s good source with some reservation, but this was just over a year ago that I last did anything with it The selection was still growing, and bit rates of the mp3’s averaged around 192k. However, sometimes you would download a bad rip of an album that had lots of gross errors in the audio. At nearly $.10 a song, you get what you pay for.

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28 Days Slater

28 Days SlaterHilarious! I watched so much Saved By The Bell[wiki] in my lifetime, including some of The College Years[wiki] and The New Class[wiki]. Can’t forget those middle school years with Ms. Bliss either.


28 Days Slater[teamtigerawesome] is freaking funny, I kid you not. They are up to episode three, and I hope they keep going all the way to twenty-eight. Even more creepy is that Rebecca just turned the TV on and Saved By The Bell is on right now. Too weird…

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The State

Taco Mail on YouTubeYouTube can be dangerous if you are someone with a short attention span and are easily distracted, much like myself. So when I discovered that episodes and skits of The State[wiki] are on there, I had to really restrain myself from watching them all in one sitting. Regardless, I still freaked out and got really excited. I even watched “Taco Mail”[youtube] since it was short, but I stopped there before I got completely lost in my excitement.

It was my friend, Isaac, in high school that was the other huge fan of this show. In fact, it was the humor in The State that I blame for my warped sense of humor, even to this day. Combine this with the hours spent watching Monty Python[wiki], and I admit this is incredibly geeky, we were apart of a pretty good improv group for our high school speech competition team. We took the group all the way to state competition, but we tanked there when we failed to do well with our draw of “canned food isle in the grocery store comes to life.”

I still make references to this show only to have very few people know what I’m talking about. What I really want is the episode with the little kid that has everyone at the dinner table saying grace before dinner only to pray for God to strike down one of the little kids at the table. I think his name was Billy, or Timmy? Bobby? And then the prayer is over only to have the little kid run outside, look at the camera, and he says, “What they don’t know is that God and I… are like this.” He shows his index and middle fingers crossed just as God pulls up on a motorcycle. Little kid hops on, and off they ride.

At least it goes something like that. All I really know for sure is that The State was hilarious. It was sad to have it fade away like it did, but a large portion of the cast has moved on to other things. It pains me to say that MTV created probably one of the funniest programs in my lifetime, but they haven’t done anything to match it since.

“My name is Doug, and I’m outta… heeeeeeerrre.”