FREE MUSIC sampler from Regime Change

This album includes 4 tracks produced by Abel Okugawa and was mixed at Monkeyclaus studio ,enjoy !

The kick off party was a great success! Thanks to everyone for coming through, and to all the people around the world who watched the party via the internet. France, Australia, Serbia, Canada and all throughout the USA were watching the party online.

Photography by Kimberly Mufferi

In addition to a hysterical design concept, graphpaper.com has a cool post by Chris Fahey on the concept of ownership in the media world.

Slightly restated and abstracted, the point might be that impending total internet connectivity might provide an opportunity for content owners to reclaim some degree of control, because local files will be rendered as irrelevant as the CD was five to ten years back. To put it another way, if CDs were typewriters and MP3s were Microsoft Word documents, Imeem and Last.fm and other streaming services could become the Google Docs of music -- a powerful, compelling online interface to the content that makes you forget that you don't actually control the files containing it.

Down in the comments, Fahey suggests that a heretofore unforeseen level of innovation is called for.

Offering cool ways to just browse a dumb database, which iTunes is and which last.fm largely is, too, won’t be enough.

I'm not so sure I agree with that, simply because I can't ever say I've seen it done. The closest I've seen online is the AllMusic Guide, which is great, but also offers database services for the music industry and as a result contains very little by way of user interaction and tends to be a little clinical at times since it's often used as a means of professional verification by people active within the industry. What's more, a brief (as in, one night when I happened to log on during a testing period) foray into audio has been largely abandoned -- which is a travesty, if you ask me -- and they've still never recovered from the absurd interface they skinned the site with six or seven years back, which typically requires half a dozen clicks, each with a page reload, to get to the information you want.

The closest I've seen in a local application is the CoverFlow function in iTunes, but at the end of the day that's all glitz and very little substance. Smart Playlists are the closest thing we've seen to a functional evolution, but in iTunes the query logic is fantastically dumbed down. Even in other more advanced incarnations, such as the Media Views available in Winamp, the available metadata fields are limited and populating them takes more time than most people have. That is, instead of having to manually add "Greenwich Village Folk" to the comment field of every qualifying MP3 in my collection, I'd like an application that can query AllMusic and connect Bob Dylan to Phil Ochs without requiring each user to separately tag every individual file -- especially since musicians are just people, and their relationships are constantly changing just like anybody else's (who is the lead singer of Van Halen this week?).

For your daily dose of silver lining, at least the Music Genome Project should offer a whole lot of potential. It seems to be working well for Pandora so far -- I've heard nothing but rave reviews.

I am also not so sure about the title he gave the post: "R.I.P.: Owning Music (1880-2008)." I think he's on the right track, and a few of the bleeding-edge industry players are as well, but it's a little premature to pronounce media ownership dead when the alternative he's so excited about doesn't yet exist.

But let's get back on topic -- back in 2001 or so, I was naive enough to write off the iPod simply because I was expecting that the next generation of portable media player would be a "thin client" that would connect over the internet to my home music collection instead of redundantly carrying the files along with it on a hard drive. So far we still haven't really departed from that model.

As Fahey points out, Rhapsody was a step in the right direction, and indeed I was very excited about it in the early days. The deal breaker for me was that a lot of the music I wanted -- and already had on my hard drive -- was not present on Rhapsody, and even though they used a desktop application for delivery, they didn't allow you to mix local MP3s with Rhapsody streams in the program's playlists. This meant that every listening session had to consist exclusively of either Rhapsody streams (via their player) or local files (via Winamp). I didn't think this was a cognitively coherent way to approach music, and it was enough of an annoyance to send me back to Kazaa.

My anti-Pod ideal music player from ages ago was essentially a "big jukebox in the sky" with minimal local hardware and an awesome and personalized music library stored remotely. I was mostly trying to keep my pants pockets light, but Fahey is essentially extending that same concept to all interactions with music.

The sad thing, I think, is that I'm still waiting after all these years for something even remotely approaching the "jukebox in the sky". I'm a bit closer with the media server I am running out of Winamp, but there's still a long way to go.

If only somebody made a well-designed portable music player with internet connectivity...

Early Sweet Crude Bill Podcast from the Vault

http://www.monkeyclaus.org/?feed=rss2

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Wal-Mart's recent abandonment of WMA format for their download store shows that they do indeed know what they're doing and can respond to the emerging market in a fairly savvy fashion. Some of the majors still aren't on board -- which is pretty odd, given that they're participating in Amazon's MP3 store -- and Wal-Mart remains a hated corporate behemoth, especially for rural-dwelling soy-milk hippies like the Monkeyclaus team, but after nearly ten years of stagnancy and complete, utter, across-the-board stupidity with regard to online music retail, we have to back anything that moves us into the sensible, open market that will benefit honest consumers and independent musicians. (They're claiming they can't sell me mp3s because the Linux machine I'm posting this from is incompatible, which makes no sense, but hey, maybe we have to take baby steps here.)

This also casts doubt on our earlier assumption that Wal-Mart just wouldn't give a damn about music retail and Apple's ever-strengthening hold on it. At the same time, it lends credence to the spreading suspicion that the participation of major labels in Amazon's store is just a ploy to weaken iTunes -- why else would they care which retailers are selling the unprotected copies of their content? In many cases they're excluding iTunes, and now they seem to be doing the same for Wal-Mart. One has to wonder whether they have some back-room deals with Amazon that Wal-Mart was not willing to duplicate.

Either way, the beauty of using a non-contaminated format like MP3 is that it lets everyone in and creates a level playing field, no matter how large or small the outfit may be. Yes, it's good for us, and our enthusiasm here is self-serving. But the thing is, it's also good for you -- unless your last name is Bronfman, that is.

From the lighter side of the sinking record industry: the recent iTunes music retail coup made it to the Onion's weekly Q&A feature. As one who reads this feature regularly, I think that's pretty cool.

What do you think?

We have to reproduce it here because it appears he has his site configured to swallow old posts entirely and never display them again:

Hello-

First of all, a sincere THANK YOU for the response to Ghosts. We are all amazed at the reaction for what we assumed would be a quiet curiosity in the NIN catalog. My faith in all of you has been restored - let's all go have coffee somewhere (my treat)!

Today we announce the expansion of the Ghosts project into the visual world. This record began as an experiment with us using sound as a means to describe visuals. Early in the project we thought it would be interesting to see what the community could create / collaborate on as a reaction to the music we were making. We wanted to keep the canvas as blank as possible for you, hence the lack of descriptive song titles and the primarily textural artwork and packaging.

So here's the plan: we've teamed up with YouTube to host a "film festival" around Ghosts. The concept is for you to take whatever tracks you feel inspired by from Ghosts and create what you feel should accompany them visually. You will be able to see all of the submissions, and a team of us (including me) will be sorting through them and setting aside ones we feel are exceptional. Eventually (within a couple of months?) we will present a virtual "film festival" with me and some special guests presenting selections of your work.

This isn't a contest and you don't win elaborate prizes - it's meant to be an experiment in collaboration and a chance for us to interact beyond the typical one-way artist-to-fan relationship. We've discussed some interesting ways this could go, including multiple installments of the online "film festivals," to broadcast TV specials, to a one-time live performance of the entire Ghosts record with your visuals involved. It really depends on how this progresses and develops.

We are all very much looking forward to what you come up with, and hope you enjoy the experience. Visit our YouTube channel for information on how to participate.

TR

Then, a few days later, Radiohead announced a similar contest.

Beyond the fact that Radiohead's is expressly framed as a competitive event while Reznor's seems to be intended more as a celebration of fan enthusiasm, one key difference between the two is that Radiohead's is sponsored by online cartoon portal Aniboom, and thus all submissions will be animated. While that's a notoriously difficult medium in many ways and this is not for the faint of heart, the winner will get a $10,000 budget and the official Radiohead stamp of approval for the final version of their submission.

Then again, I've seen teenagers do some remarkable work in Flash, so in another sense this stipulation opens the contest up to fans who don't have access to serious video production tools.

Regardless, anybody who remembers their 1997 video for Paranoid Android has already seen how this might turn out.

All the reports are teeming with the names of other artists who can legitimately claim to have done this before either Trent or Thom, but I think the key difference is the environment created by the preceding record release. Using the internet to connect with fans is nothing new, but everything changes when you frame it as a dramatic break from the status quo as both these bands have.

The best part about this, however, is that it's starting to seem like each wants to outdo the other, and that can only lead to more cool developments in the near future. In a best-case scenario, Reznor's recent comments about Radiohead's In Rainbows scheme can be described as a friendly sparring match. He called their offering "insincere" on the grounds that the files were gross, low-quality 160kbps and the download option was removed entirely once the traditional physical release hit stores. In a worst-case scenario, he's seriously annoyed with them and is itching to deliver the equivalent of a knockout punch. Either way, he's right to call them out on that -- In Rainbows was a landmark release, but Trent beat the pants off those British brats when it comes to things like the integrity of the files, embedded artwork, and digital extras.

What's more, hopefully the bickering will inspire more musicians to move their operations online and join in the fun. The Rolling Stones are reportedly in a position to take their masters with them when their contract with EMI expires, for example. And to strike up the classic dichotomy one more time, remember that the Beatles still aren't available on iTunes.

Both groups are undeniably rooted in the old school way of doing things, but you know they're at least paying attention -- all this is just getting too cool to ignore, even if you're Keef or Ringo.

Now I'll admit that despite my ongoing frustrations with iTunes and the iTunes Music Store (and irrespective of my lust for their hardware!) I still have a lot of respect for Apple when it comes to the ongoing political issues in the music business. Their hard and fast stance with regard to iTunes pricing combined with their stubborn refusal to support competitors' media formats on the iPod singlehandedly saved listeners from a disastrously incoherent market in which DRM would undoubtedly have been used to manipulate them into repeatedly purchasing the same songs. Steve Jobs even ditched his own DRM as soon as the copyright holders allowed it. Pretty much solely because of Apple, you can now buy music that won't stab you in the back from the likes of Amazon, and it's no longer unreasonable for smaller DRM-free stores like us to reach for big-fish artists and labels as clients.

Summarizing and analyzing the past five years of iTunes politics could take up several posts, though, and it isn't really the point at the moment anyway. There's now an antitrust lawsuit of some sort over Apple's refusal to support the WMA audio format that was favored by the competing online music stores which used DRM. (Until they all tanked, at least -- remember Coca-Cola's music store? Exactly.)

The stance adopted by a lot of the kind-of-major-but-not-as-important-as-Apple players in the digital music game is, of course, that closing out competing media formats is anti-competitive. And they're right, to a certain degree -- after all, the iPods could very easily support more audio formats than they currently do, and Apple's deliberate attempts to prevent that can't possibly be construed as good for the consumer.

If that seems to contradict the preceding adulation, remember that we're talking about audio formats here, not DRM formats. I see no problem with the iPod supporting WMA, and it's only the acceptance of competing DRM schemes that would have landed consumers in trouble. And we won't even get into the irony of trying to break up the Apple monopoly by forcing them to implement the DRM scheme of a convicted monopolist.

So here we have all these hardware and media companies complaining about not being able to sell DRM protected music, but somehow nobody has yet called them out over the fact that they're not doing it themselves.

You'd think that in order to make a compelling case in front of a judge -- or in the public eye, which is ultimately the most important judge of all -- they'd offer up feature-laden hardware with support for every media format on the planet in order to contrast their strategy with Apple's artificial limitations.

Those guys are out there, but the point is not whether Cowon or the late iRiver made for more capable nerd trinketry. The problem is that powerful devices like that are not the expected standard among the iPod competitors. Where's the RealAudio support? Amazon only sells MP3, even though it's been years since Allofmp3 demonstrated that it's entirely feasible to run a multi-format download store with operating costs of merely pennies per track. And, of course, the Microsoft Zune still can't play Ogg Vorbis even though it is an awesome, totally open, and 100% patent-free format.

These are niche media formats with small user bases, for sure, but supporting any of them is trivial. If Apple's opponents really want an open marketplace, they owe it to us to make it truly free -- sell media files in many formats simultaneously, and make sure hardware support for those formats makes it to market more often than not. Then just let me pick what's right for my needs and get the hell out of the way. For the most part, they're all just trying to leverage their chosen form of lock-in, which smacks of "do as I say, not as I do."

In other words -- guys, if you want broad format support, do it yourself before filing your lawsuits!

This is particularly aggravating for an audio encoding geek such as myself, because I'm not happy with the encoding options as implemented by either Apple or Amazon. Sorry, guys, but judging from the services you're providing, I've concluded I can configure an encoder better than anybody on your staff. (I should point out, though, that eMusic comes pretty close to getting it right.) That, too, is probably a post for another day, but at least our customers are getting the benefit of my pent up frustration when they buy the kick-ass audio files we've loaded into the Monkeyclaus download store.

While Monkeyclaus doesn't yet have extensive built-in support for the niche formats, that issue is indeed on the development roadmap. In the meantime, we do sell FLAC, from which any format under the sun can be generated with a mere right-click using tools like Foobar and dBpowerAmp. Neither Rhapsody nor Napster nor any of the other also-ran download stores do that.

Don't get me wrong, though, this frustration is not limited to them. Even though I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to iTunes, when wishing upon stars and birthday candles and such I still inevitably hope for FLAC support in Quicktime. Keep your fingers crossed.

The good news that keeps us going is that online retail still promises an unprecedented breadth of connection: more buyers, more sellers, and more transactions, even if the totals tend to stay somewhere south of triple-platinum. Squabbles over the specifics of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray aside, Bill Gates himself has said that we're more or less already upon the days of the last physical media format ever.

So get your stuff online already! With each passing day, it makes progressively less sense to have digital material that is not available over the internet -- like CDs, for example -- unless you're talking about huge, ultra high-definition, top-modern media formats.

But on that note, remember that we sell FLAC, too...

In a press release issued earlier today, Apple announced that the iTunes Music Store is now the second-largest music retailer in the country.

This isn't entirely surprising -- pretty much everyone was shocked back in 2005 in a fairly similar manner when it was revealed that iTunes was beating Tower Records. All reports since then have pointed to the rapid growth in digital download sales, albeit not enough to offset the drop in CD sales and save the floundering record industry.

The only brick-and-mortar retailer able to best iTunes was Wal-Mart, which possesses an almost legendary amount of influence in the record industry due to their position as the sole music outlet in many rural markets -- in fact, they were even able to score exclusive distribution rights for the latest Eagles album. Apple has been getting into this territory as well by asking for exclusive tracks in exchange for lucrative placement within the store's user interface. Interestingly enough, Rolling Stone reported a while back that despite all this, Wally World would still like to see CD prices drop -- much to the chagrin of many record labels, I'm sure.

Even if that comes to pass, one has to wonder how long it'll take for Apple to pull into the #1 slot -- remember, the store launched only five years ago, so if you take a step back and view things in macro mode, we're actually witnessing a rather fantastic coup d'etat here. The wild cards here include the ongoing abandoning of DRM -- which has in turn allowed the first strong iTunes competitor ever in the form of the Amazon MP3 Store -- and, to a lesser, extent, the fact that Wal-Mart also runs their own music download store which is also benefiting from the lack of DRM. Still, it's not unreasonable to expect the crown to be handed over to iTunes within a few years, especially when you consider that Wal-Mart has many other more lucrative revenue streams and probably won't really give a damn about keeping up.

By some sheer stroke of luck and/or force of fate, I happened to be present at the closing of the last Tower Records location in the country when the company shut down for good in late 2006 -- the store was gutted to the bone, with everything from signs to chairs to CD racks offered up for sale to the public (I picked up a huge red plastic shopping basket for about two or three bucks myself) and they started playing Don McLean's "American Pie" as they flipped the light switch for the last time ever -- "the day the music died," indeed.

The scary thing to consider in all this is that even though iTunes made headlines when it leapfrogged its way past a store which had been a pillar of music retail for decades, Tower was still within the top 5 or so retailers nationally at the time. Obviously Monkeyclaus wholeheartedly embraces digital music sales in a way that Tower didn't, but it's sobering to realize that being one of the biggest retailers in the country -- even if that was a step or two below Apple -- wasn't enough to save them. This business is trickier than ever, for sure.