Indie 69 August 2011 Playlist Released

empty.... full

August already? The summer is going by fast, and not as “summery” where I am.  Not much to say this month except that I think its a good , if sparse , playlist this time.

Get it HERE ( TPB link )

No “Tasty Leftovers” planned this month. May be a failed experiment. Hard to say.

Cover art credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/sandcastlematt/2628582339/

Cover and this document: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)

See you here, and in September.

Enjoy. Get some sun while you can.

Indie 69 July Playlist Released!

BANG!

A few days late, but worth it. This one just took FORfriggenEVER! There will again be a “Tasty Leftovers” playlist in July, some time around the 15th. There were again just far too many good tracks to fit into a 69 or even 100 track playlist. And when the size of the whole thing approaches a GIG, you know it’s just too much for one music download.

Not much to say here aside from posting the link. I’ve been busy with a few other things, far too busy to be posting my musings and meanderings here in the old blog. But that will change as the summer moves along. I had some trouble with truncated files again. Somewhere through the process of using memory sticks to bring all the files with me so I could work with them wherever I decided to be for the day, many files ended up with the end of the song missing, or the file going from around 6mb to around 300kb. NOT good. So I ended up spending a LOT of time, last minute, seeking out copies on Hypem. I sent off e-mails to the artists whose tracks I could not locate copies of. Sadly, I couldn’t wait around for replies. So if you are one of those people, not to worry. You’ll get on next month.

I found a few surprises in the inbox as I was going through submissions. One was a very special song by an artist that I love, based upon a true story I wrote. It was moving, beautiful.  I cannot WAIT to get permission to share it with all of you. The other news was that I was sent an invitation to Google Music Beta!!! I’m excited to give it a shot and when I’ve used it for a few days I’ll be sure to write a review up and post it here. Has anyone who reads this blog tried it? What did you think?

So on to what you’re all here for…

Grab the July Indie 69 New Music Playlist

HERE

(and in all of the usual places you steal it from… lol)

SEED SEED SEED!

Hope you enjoy the hell out of it. I think it’s a “very special” playlist this time. Like a very special episode of your favorite sitcom. Except without a victim.

Whatever that means.

Be sure to read the NFO file inside the playlist and give me some of the specific feedback I’m asking. (open it with notepad or your favorite plain-text reader of choice… look for PDF versions in the near future)

Cover Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/frankauge/2646601665

Cover and this document: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/deed.en

See you in a couple of weeks for the Tasty Leftovers. I’m going to have some real fun with it this time.

Indie69 June 2011 Tasty Leftovers Now Released

I can has head?

Okay, so what the hell is this??

Well, these days I’m getting about 400 tracks a month or more. And to be honest, there’s only room for just SO many tracks on the main playlist. And I’ve noticed that there’s SO MUCH good music left over every month, it just gets tossed into a folder and forgotten, for the most part.

That’s not fair if the whole point of this is to get new music HEARD. So I decided to put together a second playlist now, every month (I presume), featuring these leftover tracks.

These TASTY leftover tracks. So eat up!!

GRAB IT HERE!!: GULP!

Yummy.

You may notice a lot more remixes, instrumentals and more obscure experimental or weird stuff here on this playlist. So if that’s your thing, you may like this one even more.

But that’s not everything here… there’s plenty of sweet pop goodness and rock delectibles and edibles to chew on.

Enough eating metaphors to fill you up yet??

groan.

Anyway. Enjoy. And remember, if you found YOUR music here, it doesn’t mean I thought any less of it.. quite the contrary. These are NOT REJECTED TRACKS!! Those go in the trash.

That comes to about half of what I get going into the recycle bin.

Hope you all like it. It was fun to put together. As much as the other playlist. I imagine I will even do this one with quite a bit more care and attention from now on, even throwing
in some older stuff and personal favorites from time to time. A kind of playground for my evil whims. Bwahahahaha!

See you in July, Guy.

Cover Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mohawkalex/4503736486/

Image and this document: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

P.S. – The concensus is in. The concensus being that I decided. I’ll put these out when I have enough tracks to justify it about halfway through the month.

Indie69 June 2011 New Music Playlist now available

The mantis quietly judges you.

Well, well. June has arrived. And change is in the air.

…So that’s what that smell is…

I’m going to do things this month a little bit differently. Instead of stuffing a few tracks left over into a folder, and because there are now usually SO MANY good tracks left after I’ve narrowed it all down, I’ve decided to do a second playlist every month featuring what I call the “Tasty Leftovers”.  These are not rejected tracks. These are the ones that I liked but for whatever reason just didn’t seem to fit. Or would have made the playlist just TOO huge. Since I started off about halfway through the month this time with (around) 400 tracks, and STILL didn’t catch up with 100% of the e-mail submissions alone (if you were left out and your track was great.. chances are I just have not heard it yet.. check next month), I decided that it’s just getting far too huge for a convenient download. I cannot imagine everyone wanting to download over a gig of music just from my playlist alone, every month. So now there’s a second playlist (watch for it here) to take care of what was left for the month that didn’t suck. The whole idea of all this is to help this music get heard, new music. And with so much of it being so good, it just seemed wrong to stuff it in a folder and forget about it.  And let’s face it, that’s what was happening. There are only so many hours in a day and so many days in a month. The “Tasty Leftovers” for this month number more than 100 tracks. It’s up to you if you want to grab both playlists or just the main one. If you dig the instrumentals and remixes, the extremely eclectic or bizarre.. you may find a few examples of that in the leftovers. But there are quite a few pop and rock tracks in there as well.

I must apologize, however, for not having the time to double-check for duplicates this time. I scanned over it and trusted my memory this month. I hope it served me well and did not fail all of you. But if it did, I hope it’s not too much trouble to delete a couple of dupes. But let’s get to the playlist now and I’ll save my babbling on for a little further down the page…

You can grab Indie69 June 2011 New Music Playlist HERE and at all of the usual places you find it.

I would also like to announce my official intention to move the site to a new host with more flexibility, even though I adore WordPress.com. There are just a few tiny, specific reasons why I want to move to a new place. One of them is better community flexibility and more direct control over ways to submit music, as well as a specific interface I prefer at the new host. IF you are interested in guest blogging, let me know. I’m interested in finding music lovers who would like to post short reviews and mp3 downloads. Although I adore music criticism, I prefer to focus on what you DO like rather than posting articles about things you hear that you do not. I find very little value in being “warned” about bad music when so much of it is available for free. What’s the risk?? If I like a sample track, chances are I won’t HATE the album. And if I hate the sample track or single, why on earth would I buy the album? There’s no risk anymore which kind of takes the purpose of a lot of the criticism and flushes it right down along with things like Blockbuster stores and floppy drives. It’s still really enjoyable to read a well written review, and there are so many of those out there. But when things go negative these days, I tend to find myself wondering about things like motive and personal issues rather than the music. Is it just me? I’m not saying  “love everything you write about”, I AM saying “don’t write about music that you think is terrible”. There are exceptions, of course.  If something is so terrible that it becomes humorous or compelling in some other way, by all means write about it. I also ask that the focus be on new music or specific genre. If this all sounds fantastic and you’re okay with just getting a link and credit, get in touch at indiesixtynine@gmail.com . I expect to start the move this month.

Coincidentally, May was this blog’s best month ever, stats-wise. That was nice to see.

I hope you love the playlist(s) this month. Keep in touch, I love the e-mails and submissions. You know where to find me now on Twitter and Facebook (personal profile coming soon, I think). And keep your eyes open for the “Tasty Leftovers”, expect to wait no more than a few days, if that long. Comment if you’d rather see it arrive halfway through the month instead.

..and remember, always.. SEED SEED SEED! (even the old stuff.. I just re-seeded all of the 2009-2010 playlists)

Cover Image Credit:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mohawkalex/4503736486/

Image and this document:
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Indie69 April 2011 Playlist is out!

Sorry, no April fools joke this year*. Just couldn’t come up with a good one. Saying I’m quitting is old hat now, so it’s just played out and tired to do the same old thing over and over. Bleh.

So this year is the year I decide to leave the jokes and pranks to others.

The music is a big improvement over March, with many happy surprises. I’m going to leave it at that for the most part and just remind you that I love music submissions ( indiesixtynine@gmail.com ) and if you search sxsw on TPB you will find my best of SXSW 2011 torrent. I picked what I thought were the strongest 100 tracks out of the thousands that were made available this year at the official site and the unofficial torrents of said tracks.  Get that thing here. (tpb link via tinyurl)

But I know what you really want…

Indie 69 April 2011 New Music Playlist (TPB link via TinyUrl)

Grab it, seed it, share it, talk about it, use it to decide what to buy! Find a way to support the artists you love. Then do it. Vital.

I expect May to be my official celebratory playlist, double length. February was my real anniversary, marking the start of my THIRD year of doing this. Crazy, I know. It doesn’t seem like that long, but there it is. I was in far too bad shape at the time to really do it justice. But I’m far better now. So look out. See you then, and in between here.

Image and cover art credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/thraxil/1387925406

Image and this document: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

*Oops, 96 tracks instead of 69. Must have mixed up my numbers. My bad.

6.9 Tips for Dropbox Submissions (and submissions in general)

drop box 69

I run into a few problems here and there related to mp3 submissions. They can be frustrating, mildly annoying and in the worst case scenario, make it impossible to nearly impossible for me to include the track in the playlist. You have no idea how terrible it feels when I have a track sitting in a folder, a track that sounds amazing, only to find out that the track is called “song name.mp3″…….

Ouch.

Then I think to myself.. no problem. I’ll just check the id tags.

Double ouch. Nothing there. Not even the song name in the file name. So what do I do? Start a full investigation? Rely on my superpower (addled memory)? No, I simply have to move on. And that is very, very sad. I’m not being facetious! I find it genuinely sad when there’s a track I cannot attribute to an artist at the very least. And the file names that are truncated or incomplete are NEVER the band names or artist’s names, they are always song names. And in most cases, the song titles are common and could be any number of artists. Truly a shame.

So I thought now would be a good time to do a sort of “best practices” post regarding mp3 files, submissions and related things. I bring to you…

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6.9 Tips for DropBox and E-mail Submissions

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Tip 1 – If at all possible, find a way to e-mail tracks to me instead of using a dropbox. Yes, it may take a few moments longer, but in the end it’s better for both of us. I pay closer attention to e-mail submissions, and they are easier to keep track of in my gmail. Then, if something does go wrong, I can hit reply and clear it all up rather than having to sign into a site again, find the track on a long list of tracks and hope that the information I’m looking for is there. ( indiesixtynine@gmail.com )

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Tip 2 – Get your file names and id3-4 tags right. If your song spreads around, as you probably hope it will, virally even, it will be important to you to make sure a few details are present in the file. Things like, oh.. I dunno.. your name or the band’s name? The name of the song? Less importantly, the name of the album or maybe even your web site urls? Cover art is a nice touch, even if it’s a digital only release.  You can edit these tags easily with programs like Winamp just by opening the file and clicking in the part of the program that typically displays such information. This will allow you to edit the info and save it very easily. There are also nice programs out there such as MP3Tag – The Universal Tag Editor . MP3Tag is freeware and works wonderfully. It’s easy to use, powerful and versatile. Never trust iTunes, as wonderful as it is, to do all the work for you. MP3Tag will let you add cover art easily, edit extended tags, and supports ID3v1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, iTunes MP4, WMA, Vorbis Comments and APE Tags. Good stuff.

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Tip 3 – When you are choosing encoding quality, choose wisely. Even if your track is lo-fi. I’ve met completely unknown artists, I mean completely unknown, who are severely and unrealistically paranoid about their music being “stolen”. Look, if you want your music heard, the only way to do it these days is to put it out there to BE heard. It’s your right to keep it to yourself, of course. And it’s your right to decide how it’s shared, if you believe there is power in that somehow. But if your intention is to have what you created heard by an audience, you will find that the “industry” is unwilling to take chances on emerging talent when it comes to exposing your music to a large audience. If what you created is something you believe is worth hearing, and you release it to the wild in the right ways, it WILL be heard. It is my opinion that in most cases this type of paranoia is usually not what it seems to be on the surface. I believe it is a sort of masked self-sabotage or fear of failure. Some of these people feel that if they release a low-quality mp3, people will be encouraged to buy a CD or a higher quality download version of their song or album. In my experience, this is not the case. What it really means is that the track you sent out the the public, the track that represents YOU and your new work, simply sounds like crap and will be perceived as such. There are really no subtleties and strategies here. If what you put out is crap, people will remember you as crap. Use the best quality encoding you can, at the highest bit-rate possible. And if you really want people to hear the subtleties of your recording, give people lossless versions of your tracks on your own site.

I would be so happy if there were even enough new lossless promotional tracks out there monthly to fill a new lossless playlist even 10 tracks long each month. But I just do not encounter enough of these monthly, at least not from genuine sources. The world of piracy seems to be the only true domain of quality currently, with a few exceptions. It’s not as if our portable music players don’t have the space needed to store these tracks, they more often do now than do not. For most people, mp3 is simply good.. enough. It will take a willingness and enthusiasm on the part of artists to encourage the use of lossless formats, because the common listener clearly is not asking for them.

But back to reality here. There are options, and the quality of encoders do vary. While the rest of the world of encoding rests on its laurels, the LAME project has and does continue to develop and improve mp3 encoding technology. LAME is only released as source code because of patent issues, but many open source, closed source, free and paid encoders use LAME to encode mp3 files. You can find a list of these programs HERE. UberStandard has a fantastic step by step guide to getting the absolute best quality CD rips (if you are ripping from a mastered CD of your own rather than from a mastered, higher bit-rate, lossless digital file) that makes it all very, very easy. There are other guides out there, as well as other encoders. Look around. But do your research if you care about your music and how it’s presented.There may be some controversy surrounding the various mp3 encoders out there, my advice is to try a few different things and go with the one that suits your ears and maybe a few other ears as well.

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Tip 4 – Include some information about your project/recording/band/process/history along with your file. Many artists may feel uncomfortable with what feels like self-promotion, but if you truly are doing it “indie” or “DIY”, you should probably relax your self-promotional standards a bit, as doing otherwise would go a bit against the whole idea of DIY/Indie projects. If you just cannot bring yourself to write your own bio, get a friend or a critic familiar with your work to do it for you. Make it short, informative and fascinating. If the whole project cost 15 dollars to make and you used all borrowed instruments, mention it. Figure out what makes your project stand out and focus a little on that.The music will speak for itself, and any context you add that is appealing, unusual or fascinating will improve that first listening experience. Include a little info on the other people involved in your project, to a point. But I don’t need to know who your management is or the name of the guy that loads your gear and who he toured with before becoming your personal slave.

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Tip 5 – Check your links. If you are not attaching a file, and are instead pointing to a download, make sure that the download works and if it does work make sure that the number of hoops I have to jump through to get said file(s) are as few as possible. I recently was sent a link to an mp3 submitted for the playlist that sent me to a site, which required that I join the site, then wait for a confirmation e-mail containing a link to the file. When I finally got the automated confirmation and reached the link, I discovered that in order to download the file I needed to allow javascript for approximately 9 domains. (NOT an exaggeration) Then, after allowing all that scripting, the file still would not download. I simply had to set it aside and move on.I realize that this type of process is very common and somewhat popular, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck the stink out of rotten eggs. Because it in fact does. I also realize that this is sometimes not the fault of the artists themselves. All they know is that the service they are using is common and widely used. My suggestion is that if you are using a service to reach fans and/or promotional resources, try the service first as if you were a fan or a blog (or playlist). Then count how many seconds pass before you want to go do something else. Direct downloads and attachments, the “old fashioned way” (in other words, 2009) is always best. Keep it simple, make it fun (or at least not annoying). And try to remember exactly what it is you want to do by making a file available for download and stick to that one task. Any service that is trying to DRAG a fan to a site and make them stay there or force return visits for something as simple as a file download, is repelling to fans. A compelling site brings fans back because when they last visited, they found what they were looking for, hassle-free. And when it comes to critics, you don’t generally want to piss them off right before they listen to your music, attaching that emotional response to your music, probably for some.. permanently! Just because a service is popular or widely used, does not mean it is useful to YOU. It may be useful to some established artists, ones who already have ravenous fans willing to jump through hoops to get to their content. But to others it may mean the difference between giving your music a shot or NOT. And don’t even get me started on streams. Someday, streams may be available to us 24/7, wherever we are. For now, this is still not the case. Even for those of us with modern smartphones and unlimited , fast data plans. Even for those people, networks are unstable and unpredictable, sites go down (or go away completely). Nothing… NOTHING beats a file that a music fan can HAVE and KEEP. Nothing. And nothing promotes your music better than your music.

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Tip 6 – Exclusives feel good. Yes, you want your track to reach as many ears as possible. But when I get an exclusive track, even a few days early, it feels great. And I’m going to be paying closer attention. This may or may not be true for other playlist peeps. And I’m not sure many artists actually realize the size of the audiences we reach (collectively) every month quite yet. When you consider the number of monthly playlists out there now, and the various ways some of them make the files available, you have to imagine it’s in the hundreds of thousands at this point. I know Blalock’s and Criznittle’s playlists get TONS of downloads every month alone. Add in the rest of us, and you’ve got some pretty big numbers, rivaling most blogs out there. But the focus still seems to be on giving bloggers the exclusives. And that’s fine. When I get them, I smile. When I do not, I don’t frown or anything. That’s for others to do. Like you when you reach 400 people instead of 40 thousand, along with a snarky review that compares you to the flavor of the week because it makes them feel like better critics. Don’t get me wrong, I loves the music blogs. Without them I wouldn’t be doing all this. And I am kinda one of them. I just tend to focus on what I like and do not spend a lot of energy on tearing down the tastes of others, as much as I respect the art of criticism. I just see a lot of really underdeveloped, deceptively polysyllabic critics on overly-respected blogs lately. While a lot of the less-read blogs are doing the real work out there and following their own trends. The point is…. notice us. We’re working hard to get the music out there because of pure love for it. And I think we’re all doing a better job of it than many of us get credit for.

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Tip 6.9 – If you submit a track for a playlist, be sure the track can actually be downloaded. There have been several recent SoundCloud submissions that have been stream-only. Know what you’re submitting to. And, (here’s the .9 part) don’t suc…

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I hope this has been helpful to some of you out there, and not too snarky. I cannot wait to hear your music. Genuinely.

Image credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/darwinbell/2936681653/

Image and this document licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0) license.

Indie 69 March 2011 New Music Playlist is Released

That took longer than expected! But it’s done now and I can get some much needed sleep. Yeah, I’m still awake rather than rising early. That cookie simply crumbled. I hope you like this month’s selection more than I did. I found a few too many sound-alikes for my tastes this time around. I mean.. there are still numerous great tracks in there, and I do hope you like it more than I did. I guess I’m kind of talking it down a bit, eh? I’ll stop.

This is March, so I included a rabbit (or Hare) for the cover this time around. That rabbit’s stare is so intense, huh? He’s thinking, planning, knowing. Something.  I feel so lucky to have found that image AND it was a Creative Commons image!

Blahblah, on to the music….

You can grab the March playlist HERE and all the usual hangouts where it’s been found lurking in the past.

Remember to keep seeding it. And I want to remind everyone who downloads these playlist torrents to remember to SPREAD THE WORD! About all of the playlists, not just mine.  Through Facebook, Twitter, any way you communicate with others. You may have noticed I stopped doing my monthly playlist round-up posts. Well, that was partly because of time constraints and partly because indierockplaylists.com does such a bang-up job of it now. Check the site out to grab ALL of the playlists that came out this month so far. You will be very filled with super happy joy! I Promise.  So much music. A few duplicates, but that’s easy enough to fix now isn’t it? Just be sure to keep seeding and copy/paste (NOT CUT) the files to a new folder/library before you start deleting tracks. Seeding is so important. You probably download the music for the same reason I compile and curate, for the music.. because you love the music. Show that love by seeding as long as possible. And if it’s slowing things down for you, remember most bittorrent clients allow you to throttle/adjust the bandwidth used by any particular torrent. Better a slow seed than no seed. Always. Always.

I’ll stop begging for seeds now and get to work on April. Yep, right away. This month was so frustrating on so many levels that I have decided to start earlier from now on to be absolutely sure I find the best possible selection of new music with as few sound-alikes as possible.

Original Image For Cover :  http://www.flickr.com/photos/dirkstoop/152751595/

Cover image and this document:

Creative Commons:
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic  (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Indie 69 Jan/Feb 2011 Playlist is out now! (2 year anniversary)

That’s right, the damned thing is out. And what a fantastic month(s) it is. Rather than be all confusing and put out 2 in one month (3 if you count the best of 2010), I decided to trim them both down to a nice, compact 69 tracks and start off with a bang for the new year. And there are some really great tracks in this one. There are surprises, mild disappointments, masterpieces and decent examples of genre-bending in there. I have mentioned before that when I do all BUT the best of playlists, I always keep in mind the listener who may not share my tastes. If something doesn’t seem to be my “cup of tea”, I will include it many times because I know it’s admired, anticipated or well-reviewed. This month, even in those cases I found myself genuinely impressed. Must be something in the air this year.  I live for those moments when a track that seems like its something I wont like transforms or builds in a way I didn’t expect and ends up being something that I admire or even adore. Last year a few of the more country-tinged or “Americana” leaning tracks had that effect on me. Normally, very much not my cup of tea. Horizons:Expanded. This year, I cant put a label on it yet, but it’s got a lot of bass and makes me want to get up and move. It’s also quirky as #V(k. And a little bit doo-wop. I think. Maybe. Perhaps. Nah.

So without further ado (for the moment.. rest assured I’ll continue to babble on below).. I present

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Indie 69 Jan/Feb 2011 Playlist available HERE and at all the regular places/haunts. Grab it, share it, spread it, tweet it and fergahdsakes play it. And I mean all of it. Not just the first 20 or so. This month is special. Hear it from front to back this time. Trust me. Gifts are within. Gifts of sound. A plethora of potential transformations and synesthesiae . ahem.

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hokey. sry.

EDIT: So after having finished all of this, I realized this is my 2 year anniversary. Yay me. Back to your regularly scheduled post.

So Nee-ways.  Just a quick reminder to be sure to follow me @indie69 and when you see playlist-notification tweets, re-tweet ’em. Do the same for all the other playlist peeps as well. Let’s get this music out there, spreading even more this year.

Listening to some of my local alt, indie and non-commercial stations, i noticed that their own “Best of” playlists for 2010 had some gaping, glaring omissions, across the board. I know radio is dying, but it’s still a bit of a barometer. And end of year lists that don’t include HUGE numbers of artists and tracks that were clearly superior, are simply unacceptable. We have to be better curators and pollinators this year. All of us. No matter if that means re-tweeting your favorite playlist releases, handing a CD to a DJ in your town or… hell.. doing your own playlist. As I’ve mentioned here before, I will do my best to make time to help anyone who wants to start doing this. (  * indiesixtynine@gmail.com )  Which reminds me, I have a gargantuan amount of e-mail to catch up with. So I should get on that now and stop going on and on here. Have a great February and look out for more short posts to highlight things I find in the interim, as well as longer reviews and a feature article here and there like old times. Love ya all.

*indie69@gmail.com is a girl in India. She won’t help you. I don’t think. Maybe she will, but she’s not me. Guaranteed. To get me, you gotta spell it out.

Cover Art Source:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/theilr/4806856995/

Alternate cover source:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/vikamno/535190786/in/photostream/

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see these little sharing buttons down here? use ’em! they’re not gonna press themselves. much.

Indie 69 June 2010 Playlist Released

Indie 69 June 2010 Cover Art

Sorry for being so late this month. The extra time I set aside for it was probably worth it.

Due to a very personal near-tragedy, this month’s playlist almost didn’t happen. I remember a time when I swear it almost felt like each opportunity I was presented with to be a flake was greeted by me with near-enthusiasm. Even when it came to things I loved. But those days are long gone. I’m certainly no “Mr Responsibility”, not by a long shot. But I have changed in these last 5 years or so. Everything seems immediate, important, vital. When you almost lose someone you care about and love, things come into focus or you shut down.  I guess in a way I’m lucky I haven’t been taking the latter road. Time will tell.

I didn’t have as much time to focus this month, which could either be good (randomized, less focused or predictable) or bad (dupes, too much focus). It’s hard for me to tell. I just try to make it as diverse as possible and trust my ears as your ears by proxy. In other words, instead of only adding things  “I” would like, I listen for quality, originality and diversity. And a few that I’d like, too.

New this month, finally, are Zune HD wallpapers. I’m sure there are not very many of you out there with Zunes, but if you do have one I hope you like ’em. I still have no idea if the iPod or other players use the “wallpaper” thing at all. I know my old gigantic Creative player didn’t. There’s not much else that’s new other than the music. And again if there are any dupes please forgive me this month. I just didn’t have as much time. That said, there are some GREAT new tracks this month. And I have something so amazing right now, sitting right in front of me in the form of an advance CD, that I’ve promised not to share until the time is right. And it is KILLING me. It’s so good. Won’t be long now. Album of my summer and probably will be for a lot of you as well. You’re gonna love it.

Enjoy the music and look out for my monthly Playlist Roundup to catch all the other playlists coming out this month, all in one place.

And remember, if you don’t want to have 5 copies of the same new song that was added to ALL the playlists in a particular month, use uTorrent (I’m sure other clients allow this, too). When you start to download and that first screen pops up you can de-select songs you don’t want to grab. Just un-check them. Of course it’s always helpful if you seed the whole thing, but being selective can save disk space and time. I get it.  🙂

You can grab the Indie69 June 2010 New Music Playlist HERE.

FUNNY : When I uploaded, I double checked the name so something is going all funny at TPB. Then when I tried to edit, it saves and it’s exactly the same when I re-check it.

I’ve been through this kind of thing before and when you delete and try to re-up it’ll tell you it “already exists in the database” and won’t let you upload. So for now, until it lets me edit and actually change it, the name of the torrent is:

Indie69 June 2010 New Musiaylist (LOL!!)

…and in all the usual places. Enjoy, seed, share, go see the shows.. go buy the CDs or the downloads if you love what you hear. And tell everyone you know about the playlists and the artists. Spread the word. See you here in the blog and in July for the next playlist. I still have thousands of words to publish and I’m never satisfied, so I’ll be “letting go” of these posts that I keep re-scheduling and re-editing as the month goes on.  And if anything happens to me that would deny me access to the Internet for any extended period… this blog would just keep on publishing without me for quite a long time. Thank you, WordPress scheduling.

Image and cover art Credit – http://www.flickr.com/photos/paradisecircus/25882660/

Creative Commons – Attribution – Non-Commercial – Share-Alike

Alternate Cover art sources –

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lrargerich/3796091862/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lrargerich/3795264491/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cobalt/167189240/

Finished covers and alternate covers can be found within the playlist folders along with Zune and Zune HD wallpapers and maybe other stuff.

p.s. – Can you spot a theme or region this month? How about an old track? Comment if you noticed anything.

Apple, Comcast and the slow death of the push-pull Internet

Finding a balance.

Some of you may already have your iPads. You may have pre-ordered early enough to have it in your hands. You may have already had a chance to play with it and marvel at its unique interface. Perhaps less unique if you’ve seen a sci-fi film in the last 20 years, but still unique and elegant to most(and to me). I wouldn’t want to (or suggest that I have the power) to take anything away from your happiness. But any apology I provide will not change the reality we now face as these commonly-called “walled gardens” starting to become the norm rather than the exception. Apple, Comcast and many of their ilk are slowly, quietly destroying the foundation of computing and the Internet. Some are even going as far as allowing no access to file systems or even the hardware itself. (hmm. who could that be?)

“Oh, we don’t want to complicate your experience with things like dirty old file systems, and if you open it up it gets your fingers all ewwwey and dirty anyway. That would ookey. Here. Watch this, it’s shiny!”

In other words, “hey, 10 to 30 percent of our users, go f^(k yourselves” followed by that laugh we all know. The laugh you hear from someone who just said something awful to you and gets away with it because they “didn’t really mean it at all”, right? Something like…

“hahaha.. yeah, I’m not sure anyone is going to read a blog post written by YOU that goes on THAT long..hahahahah! Silly.. so silly.. you’re so funny..isn’t he the funniest? that’s kinda refreshing, that kind of hopeless,charming faith in the patience of readers…hahahaha.. how long have you been doing this blogging thing now? yeah.. that’s a LONG time, huh? oh.. gosh.. so serious.. hahaha.. oh you know I’m just teasing you.. jeeze.. hahahaha”

And then you have to go to a shrink to have him help you build and discover the “internal tools” necessary to prevent you from waiting outside such people’s houses at night to inject them with a sedative so that you can tie them up in your basement, skin them alive and pour rubbing alcohol on their exposed musculatures. Or.. something.**

See, from the beginning of those tcp/ip stack early days of dial-up, there has been a sort of sense that someone, somewhere, would like to take the open, free Internet and turn it into TV.  A magical land where mysterious, hidden and magically powered creators toil away in the dark and produce the images, stories and places you’ve always wanted to see.  A place where only a select few, who knew the right people, went to the right parties and graduated from the right southern California universities were allowed to create these images.  Because to let just anyone have potential access to millions of other human beings at a moment’s notice, on the same level as these vaunted few, would be a travesty. While we sat in our comfy chairs and grumbled about the onset of the “spam” problem and the “commercialization” of the Internet, something far more sinister than over-zealous small business was happening slowly. An awareness grew. The moment a user did anything beyond downloading, chatting and surfing (say, like a server of some kind), even back then, ISPs were quick to fire off an e-mail to you explaining that you either had to shut down or pay a higher fee for what was clearly “business-level” access. In other words, even if you were clearly NOT a business, if they noticed that you were serving more traffic than you were consuming, regardless of the strain or lack of strain on their infrastructure, you got shut down. These problems sometimes resolved themselves through competition, but not always. Back then, it all depended on how much competition was in your region. Usually, in most places in the US, not much.

Luckily for the Internet so far, it’s taken many, many years for the people in charge of old media to take us seriously. I think the moment when it all became interesting to them was the moment the news media started talking about how all these “Internet” people (said using the same tone they would use to describe your common aol chatroom trolling  kiddie fiddler of old) were getting all these songs and eventually movies for free. Oh sure, there were dot-coms.  We even had a boom and bust. But it was fear that really got their attention. Up until, say, the threat to and eventual murder of Napster, we were not taken seriously. Only when we became a credible threat to their bottom line did they finally truly notice exactly what was going on behind the curtain. We were dismantling their empire while they were busy trying to create “marketing buzz”, “tie-ins” and “viral campaigns”. Right.Under.Their.Noses. Oh, I may hate nostalgia, but part of me misses the late 90’s underground optimism. Your (print) BoingBoings and Mondo2000s, that sort.

As we found new ways to manipulate and mash-up their “properties”, perhaps making a subconscious, collective statement, they fought back with the DMCA, the RIAA and the MPAA.  Instead of competing and winning back lost customers, they lashed out. Instead of taking responsibility and fixing what was broken, acknowledging missed opportunities and moving forward, they pointed fingers and manipulated numbers to gain sympathy. They “re-educated” young people into believing that making a copy was the same as physical theft. In much the same way as the new right has spent countless years and money perpetuating the myth of the “liberal media”, pushing the already conservative at the core for broad appeal media even further right, garnering sympathy from those of us less informed or educated about the history of such things. Now you can’t watch the news without .0002 percent of an ill-informed, barely-veiled racist and borderline-fascist-while-calling-everyone-else-fascists minority screaming its manufactured, impotent outrage while getting 28% of the media coverage. Using some of these same methods, they have nearly convinced a new generation that they need a mandatory middle-man between them and their culture. And it’s a powerful, angry, jealous middle-man. One who is prone to temper-tantrums and random financial violence toward old ladies and children. Do not tempt the righteous fury of this corporate-man-beast-god. It will devour your parent’s college savings like a pack of hyenas on the rotting carrion of a lost kill. See, they never really tapped that hippie thing, so it’s a little personal. And don’t think for a second that the people behind these two successful, sleeper-cell like causes are not one and the same.  The very same people who buy up radio and TV stations/networks while funding new laws to make it easier to do so are also the people who own 80% or more of what you watch, read and listen to. And they DO want to control the methods of distribution, the most important of which is the Internet. As you see partnerships grow in places like, say, YouTube, ask yourself if the changes you see happening make it easier or harder for you to be exposed to new media being produced by PEOPLE rather than corporations. And how easy do you think it would be to accuse, say, Universal Music Group of violating a rule or copyright as opposed to them accusing little old you of the same? Are you in “good standing”? Are they? Chances are, they’ve spent millions of man-hours removing content created by fans of their artist’s(the ones they OWN) work. Usually to fill a void they’ve abandoned or ignored in their catalog. Or in some cases, tributes to long dead artists. Even songs playing in the background at parties or in a (shudder) criminal act of accidental ambiance. So who, in reality, is truly in “good standing”? Not UMG, not by any standard other than the one required by the YouTube legal department. You know the one. The department that makes the real decisions. The department that calls the shots at Google.* (all while small towns across America are doing everything short of public sex acts to make Google their new ISP)

All while raking in record profits and sobbing in public about their “losses”.

And let’s examine the role of ISPs a little closer. Recently, Comcast won a court battle with the FCC in DC Circuit Court. The battle was over whether or not the FCC had the power to prevent Comcast from throttling users based on what protocol they were using. Comcast claims it was simply a matter of traffic shaping to deal with high demand and certain users “hogging” bandwidth to the extreme and had nothing to do with the protocol at all. In spite of the fact that bittorrent was the protocol in question. What people quickly forget is that bittorrent is not the only protocol ISPs have been blocking and interfering with. It’s well-known, common knowledge that in Canada, for instance, ISPs throttle Skype calls. You can count on it like clockwork. After a certain number of minutes, you’ll have to re-connect or will be unable to establish a stable connection again for some time. That’s not about bandwidth hogging, it’s about trying to make your competition look bad. It’s pure and simple anti-competitive behavior. And if it were happening in any context outside the Internet, people would either lose huge amounts of money over it or in some extreme cases, go to jail.

and.they.won.

See, it may not seem like a big deal. Especially if you’ve never created anything and tried to distribute it over the Internet. There are a lot of free “services” that will host your content. Most of them will want to wrap your content with ads for other content*** or make users jump through hoops to get at it in various ways. Then you have the paid services. And if you suddenly find out an audience larger than your family and friends  actually wants what you’ve made, watch the hell out. Here come the bandwidth bills and mandatory account upgrades. Essentially, most likely without fully realizing it, what this circuit court judge has done is make it easy and legal for Comcast to shut down the little guy (or the medium guy in the case of Skype). Sure, most of the time bittorrent is used for downloading content backed by large media owners and distributors, against their wishes. But it’s not the only use for bittorrent. Period. There’s no getting past this point and truth. It’s essentially like making mom and pop CD stores illegal because MOST of them illegally re-sell promo CDs that were never meant to be sold.  It’s not just unfair, it’s illegal. You cannot do that in most countries. And in the ones you CAN do it in, you can just as easily pay the local police enough cash to burn your competitor’s store down or shoot and kill him in his driveway as he arrives home from work. Some would want you to believe this has something to do with suppression of the free market and over-regulation. But this just simply is not the case. Anti-competitive behavior and it’s prevention through regulation is the absolute foundation of a truly free and fair market. And the keyword here is not fair, it’s free. As the proponents of what they call a free market will claim from time to time, free speech has limits. You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater, right? Well, anti-competitive behavior is the “yell fire” of the free market. If it is not prevented, a truly free market cannot survive. Everyone must play by the same set of rules, period. Right now, you have the people who you should be most wary of doing their damndest to be the ones re-writing the rules. (following the lead of Banks perhaps?) They would love it if it were illegal to have a marketplace that essentially doesn’t charge to rent a metaphorical table space to sell or promote your goods or services. What the rest of the reasoning world would call a FREE MARKET. And that IS what bittorrent is. It’s like a virtual free table space. Or close to it. Beyond the act of initially “seeding” a torrent, as long as there is demand for what you have on display, the downloaders take care of the rest of the bandwidth needs. No excessive bandwidth overage charges, no inquiring calls from your ISP, no hosting account, no “business account” (another term for what is commonly known as a protection scheme).

The.Way.It.Should.Be. Many would like to take this thing we call bandwidth and convince us all that it needs to be watched like a hawk, treated and charged as if it were at a premium and regulated so the “pipes don’t clog”.

These people know that the word is spreading. Artists left and right are jumping the middle-man ship and going it alone or with partners that serve them primarily or only them. This new DIY spirit is spreading amongst big, established acts now as much and as often as it is with new, younger, indie acts. The early signs of it happening in film are there as well, with big name directors as well as small, experimenting with new ways of funding and distributing/monetizing their films. If you don’t think this scares the steaming crap out of stale, middle-man curators of old, you’re… well.. wrong. Knowing this and coupling it with the fact that there is NO larger, better-known and used protocol that virtually removes the cost of mass distribution than bittorrent, you can see the big picture start to come into focus. Of course they want to block or slow it. Sure, they’ll tell you it’s piracy they want to stop. SURE.. sure. Suresuresure. They also know that it costs FAR less to bribe politicians and use money to influence lawmakers than it does to actually try to compete with the larger, hard-to-tap-into emerging culture. And unfortunately for them, it’s a “free culture”.

Now that I’ve written all this, it really feels like I could have summed it up with just a few simple ideas. Don’t believe the hype and educate others. Spread the word. Contact congresscritters. When you hear people talk about the “free market” right out of college after reading Atlas Shrugged 30 minutes before your conversation, put what they say in context. Nudge them toward the concept of taking those ideas out of the “similar to the liberal pollyanna utopian vision” realm and into the real world, where it counts. Isms are always great (and seductive) living in a conceptual bubble. They tend to deconstruct themselves predictably in potentially disastrous ways when applied without reasonable adjustments. Like rock star boyfriends. It’s all fun and games until you’re pregnant and the rent is due.

And MOST of all, get out there and PUSH. If you create things, USE the Internet in smart ways to distribute. Because if we don’t in greater numbers real fast, we’ll look insignificant and the control goes right back where it was before, to the people with the most money to pay for unneccessary services and middlemen. Remember, you already pay for the Internet. And last time I checked, it was 2-way by design.

…

*Fair? Probably not on a certain level. But do you think it’s possible for one of the world’s largest corporations to take a stand once in a while against what can only be described as a dying business community in order to fight for what they know is right, once and for all? Does anyone honestly believe that with the right set of brains and the money to get the job done, Google could LOSE in a fight for say, fair use? If they became the aggressor for once instead of reacting against threats only, maybe they’d have a fighting chance. We’ve certainly done our part to turn Google from a garage project into what it is today. And if you think it was the seed money, investments or “good bidness sense” that did it, do us all a favor and just find a new cave to live in. Because without its users, Google was and IS nothing. Period. No matter how fancy, how perfect or how improved it’s been over the years, nothing any one or two people did in that company made as much of a difference as DEMAND did. We needed Google back then, and they were there giving us what we demanded. No demand, no users, no Google.  Part of what made them into what they are today was right place, right time. And you need look no further than the practical admission of this in their motto.. “don’t be evil”. That’s not the motto of someone who thinks they ONLY worked for what they have(keyword:only). It’s the motto of a young Arthur who just pulled Excalibur out of a f^(#|4g stone!!!

**Never actually happened. Honest.And I wouldn’t even know how to start when it comes to skinning people. I wouldn’t know, for instance not to corkscrew the legs or start up the middle of the leg. Or to skin UP to the head and Grab the lumps where the ears are, underneath and separate them carefully by cutting them off as close to the skull as possible. Nope. No idea.

***Torrent sites display ads just as much if not more than the so-called free distributors. But would they ALL if they didn’t always have to feel like they were taking such a HUGE risk? Think drug war for a second.  The moment the risk factor is removed, free, open torrent sites that are ad-free or ad-light would pop up in the hundreds. In the first week. Of course people always want to make money, but there are also ALWAYS people who want to do something else.

Image Credit – http://www.flickr.com/photos/cyanocorax/2207816424/

Creative Commons – Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic