""

""

With clouds over Europe darkening, managers like Mr. Burnstein are increasingly turning their long-term focus to places with stronger currencies, like South America, Southeast Asia and Australia. When Metallica ended their “World Magnetic” tour in Australia a year ago, they played not just Sydney and Melbourne but also harder-to-get-to Perth.

“We’re a U.S. export the same way Coca-Cola is,” he said. “We look for the best markets to go to.”

“Right now Indonesia is on my watch list,” he smiled.

And get this:

Eight months before Metallica takes the stage in Germany, Mr. Burnstein decides whether the band should be paid in dollars, euros or a combination of the two. If exchange rates swing in a way that hurts Metallica’s earnings, he buys derivative financial instruments to lock in a preferred rate. Sometimes ticket prices are hiked to compensate for possible currency-related losses, though Mr. Burnstein shuns this strategy.

“Nobody is looking to make a foreign-exchange trade to make money, but you don’t want to be a loser,” the scraggly bearded manager said.

Here is one conclusion:

“A weak dollar is the best thing for American rock ‘n’ roll,” said Bill Zysblat, partner at RZO Productions, which has handled tours for the Rolling Stones and the Police.

The article is here, interesting throughout and for the pointer I thank Kanishka Kacker.

"Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out."

"X Lossless Decoder (XLD) is a tool for Mac OS X that is able to decode/convert/play various 'lossless' audio files. The supported audio files can be split into some tracks with cue sheet when decoding. "

""On the Media" has used this jingle every time we've discussed Present and Future Business Models for Monetizing the Newspaper Industry for the past year or so. We've decided to update it though. Stay tuned..."

The API for python swinger "the Internet Synthesizer that lets you make things with music and video. We've done the following: rearranged the syllables of a vocal line, walkenized and cowbellized hundreds of thousands of songs in a week, mixed up the hits of a drum beat and synced it to another loop, beat matched two songs, split apart DJ mixes by their individual tracks, made new kinds of video mashups, corrected sloppy drumming, synced a video to a song, transitioned between two covers of the same song, made a cat play piano, put a donk on it. We're making this available as an open source SDK for Python (other languages forthcoming!) that can be easily installed for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. It accesses the Echo Nest Analyze API at http://developer.echonest.com via the pyechonest wrapper and plays with the results to make new concoctions of audio and video. You'll need an Echo Nest API key to use this SDK, instructions are found on the following install pages."

the GNR is awesome, as is white rabbit

awesome music beatbox webapp

garage band in your browser.

"Unbelievable use of optical trickery in this new clip for Moray McLaren's track "We Got Time". Every last bit of animation in this piece was done in-camera, and since that claim is slightly hard to believe, director David Wilson has included a nice making of that spells it all out. "Using both praxinoscopes and the technique of matching up the frame rate of the spinning record to that of the camera, no computer super-imposing was used; what you see is what rolled off the camera. The transitions between each section of animation was created by simply cutting or wiping between the bits of footage." All the animations were created, drawn and coloured by the director David Wilson."

"[W]hat you NEED to do is this - give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people's email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special - make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan. Make a premium download available that includes high-resolution versions (for sale at a reasonable price) and include the download as something immediately available with any physical purchase. Sell T-shirts. Sell buttons, posters... whatever. [emphasis added]" trent reznor

Lullaby collection from around the world

"LMMS is a free cross-platform alternative to commercial programs like FL Studio®, which allow you to produce music with your computer. This includes the creation of melodies and beats, the synthesis and mixing of sounds, and arranging of samples. You can have fun with your MIDI-keyboard and much more; all in a user-friendly and modern interface."

"Simple sinewave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer. Each triggered step causes a force on the underlaying wave-map, which makes it more cute."

search the web for any song in the world

an interactive music video. very creative.

you've got to try it

"When something that was originally scarce starts becoming abundant, something strange happens. You find that you start making money because of that thing rather than with that thing. That’s the Because Effect."

simple music puzzle game

"if it appears twice on your computer then Duplicate Cleaner will find it" can search through metadata too, apparently

You should watch this now. "Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it -- and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections."

"The eyes. Other results vary across genre, for instance gospel and blues sing more about hands than eyes. And get this: 'As for the genre that talks about body parts the most, hip hop takes the honors with more references than any other genre. Meanwhile, gospel refers to the body the least. There are plenty of other data points to peruse. It's nice to know that 23.64 percent of hip hop songs refer to the behind, while 11.83 percent of rock songs talk about eyes.'"

dial your mood and watch photos with streaming music that conforms

People buy stuff, but what we all crave are relationships. Payment is an elemental type of relationship. Very primitive, but real... Paying has to be super easy, idiot-proof and frictionless. There can't be hurdles. The easier it is to pay, the more eager

Q: Favorite Bucky Fuller quote? A: "Fire is the sun unwinding itself from the wood." (via Preoccupations)

Jan 08 overview of music search tools

The record industry will not be in charge of the characteristics of filesharing systems. They may get remunerated for their use, but they won't be able to dictate their functionality... If they want to cash in on filesharing, they'd better do it soon, bef

No doubt LED is the future. Technology is moving forward at a rapid rate, but LED's look and behave differently. Should we be striving to achieve the same result but in a low power form, or adapt to the products and use them to do new and exciting things

won't this cause record labels to wrap the promo cds in a eula?

pro tools plugin to manipulate individual notes. wow. via kk's ct2: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ct2/~3/262132737/single-note-control-in-recorde.php

"enabling that kind of behavior, where the fans are the ultimate arbiters of what gets played and what gets popular, is the end game for all of this."

apparently strips DRM from lots of things. enables sharing too.

the music featured on Salle de Departs episode recently.

Indian musicians cover the GnR classic

A Google Coop engine for lyrics search

allows you to free your iTunes Music Store purchases (protected AAC / .m4p) from their DRM restrictions with no loss of sound quality.

In a world where many people get their music for free, we wanted to create a site where bands we loved could put their music out there for free AND get paid for it

Soundbank, mixer, and sequencer

this portion of moby.com, 'film music', is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short.

The Hype Machine tracks a variety of MP3 blogs. If a post contains MP3 links, it adds those links to its database and displays them on the front page.

Kevin Kelly talks to the prototypical Renaissance 2.0 artist about why music has ceased to be the center of our cultural life, why art doesn't make any difference anymore, and why Brian Eno offers no resistance to seduction.

What makes a sound "musical"? (go darkmatter!)

program designed to make life easier for anyone who wishes to find and update their album art for their music collection. The sources for the pictures can be defined by creating plugin scripts.

multi-track audio recorder that enables you to record your band, create a podcast, create mash-ups or remix a song. (GarageBand for Windows)

library metaphor for Oink makes more sense than economic analogies: for digital music & data, there’s lots of demand but no scarcity at all, which either requires that we rebuild an economic model not based on supply & demand, or start embracing commons

summarizes the problem the CD industry has. Not only are they fighting something cheaper, they’re also fighting something better than they are willing to offer. Is it any surprise that they’re losing?

Brilliant campaign to get youth interested in art

we as a culture need to examine how we feel about music and art.

African music blog

ype in the Arist and Album you want, hit find, and you're off!

ultimately, DRM only affects people who buy media honestly, rather those who nick, borrow or cheat their way to it.

Patrick Hughes is a young man at Univ. of Louisville who was born blind and crippled and yet now plays the piano beautifully as well as "marches" in the Louisville marching band.

a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons, where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want.

Using green screen footage provided by the band we cut a simple music video. We then degraded the images and printed out each frame sequentially. (all 4133 of them) We then nailed each "shot" of 50-100 posters to various structures and posts. Then using a

fetches data about the music being played on your media player (Winamp 5, Windows Media Player 9...). It gets the list of albums, lyrics, album covers and a lot more. With moreTunes, you can also repair the id3 tags automatically, rename your files in a c

Highly recommended with good fidelity and noise cancellation.

Sound samples of several river boat calliopes

a free MP3 streaming server that allows you to connect and stream your music using only a standard web browser. - Play your music anywhere!

enables you to stream your digital music and videos to any internet connected computer using a web browser.

recommendations across media

Our desire to believe in an orderly universe leads us to interpret the uncertainty we feel about the future as nothing but a consequence of our current state of ignorance, to be dispelled by greater knowledge or better analysis.

"People are spiritually starved, and feel, just below the surface, that their culture is strangling them."

Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out.

a podcast aggregator. It’s a tool to subscribe to RSS feeds which supply downloadable files. Doppler will go out and fetch the files enclosed in the RSS feed and will automatically add them to your preferred media player.