"In sum: It’s awesome that Palmer’s Kickstarter has done so well — but look at what it’s entailed. It’s entailed time, effort, planning and work both backward and forward in time. That currently $439,000 isn’t a windfall for her; it’s a marker of what all that commitment to the work has earned.
"If you’re one of the people looking at her Kickstarter money with stars in your eyes and awesome plans of your own in your head, ask yourself first: Have you put in the time? Earned the credibility? Scoped out the financial balance sheet? Made the commitment to fulfill every single thing you have promised? Palmer has. If you haven’t — on any of this — be aware that your results, shall we say, may vary."

(The earlier part, about the very long process of reputation- and network- building which got Palmer to this point, is quite astute, but too long to excerpt.)

What on Earth are you waiting for?

"Why do some music styles gain mass popularity while others thrive in small niches? Banding Together explores this question and reveals the attributes that together explain the growth of twentieth-century American popular music. Drawing on a vast array of examples from sixty musical styles--ranging from rap and bluegrass to death metal and South Texas polka, and including several created outside the United States--Jennifer Lena uncovers the shared grammar that allows us to understand the cultural language and evolution of popular music.
"What are the common economic, organizational, ideological, and aesthetic traits among contemporary genres? Do genres follow patterns in their development? Lena discovers four dominant forms--Avant-garde, Scene-based, Industry-based, and Traditionalist--and two dominant trajectories that describe how American pop music genres develop. Outside the United States there exists a fifth form: the Government-purposed genre, which she examines in the music of China, Serbia, Nigeria, and Chile. Offering a rare analysis of how music communities operate, she looks at the shared obstacles and opportunities creative people face and reveals the ways in which people collaborate around ideas, artworks, individuals, and organizations that support their work."

I'm tempted to make this into a problem set, but it's probably not challenging enough.

A: " ... I like to go home, hug my parents, drink chai with my mom, watch Hindi movies and re-Indianize two days a week before I re-emerge into the filth that is progressive liberal white America in trendy Williamsburg.Q: "Why do you speak of your friends in Brooklyn as filth?"
A: "They know what they did."
--- Sadly, their music does nothing for me.

Awww.

I have a hard time believing this is from 1958 (except at the very end).

Wow, that actually worked!

It's a great song, but that video is so many kinds of weird and wrong I don't even know how to count them all.

A robotic gamelan orchestra.

Don't ask me what the title means. Papers may be worth tracking down. Huge causal inference problems implicit here.

Update: thanks to Wolfgang for telling me that "Dengue Fever" is the name of a California-based Cambodian rock band.

Update 2: They're on emusic and they sound pretty good.

I can't say I care much for Yoshi's music (owing to a general tone-deafness w.r.t. hip-hop), but, c'mon, this is cool.

Color me boggled.

Generate your own indie album cover. The results (follow the link to the flickr pool) are astonishingly convincing.

Enthusiastic extrapolation to best-seller lists, collaborative filtering, del.icio.us, the scientific literature, etc., left as an exercise for the reader

27 1/2 minutes, of which 2 1/2 are sustained applause at the end.

One of the best novels I have ever read.

"The discourse supporting classical music so reeks of historical blindness and sanctimonious self-regard as to render the object of its ministrations practically indefensible."

The 30 September 1965 coup, the massacres, and a song about soup