New picsound by Kaveh Ardalan! Check it out here.

Last January Kaveh sent me a picsound that had been inspired by an SF blackout about three or four years prior. I didn't want to post it until I did a little housekeeping with the rest of the picsounds (they've all been broken since last January, too). Anyway, apologies to the K.A. and to denying the world from hearing/seeing it. Wicked stuff.

You may also note that the rest of the picsounds finally work too! Some of them haven't been loading right, or don't load, etc.

Even Max's Day Off works now, which for the past 3 years has stopped playing halfway through!

Thanks for those who showed support at the BTE loft show. Rahul is takin' off tomorrow so it was great getting a chance to play before he left. We might try and continue the BTE tradition with some new members, I'll be sure to keep you all posted. We definitely need to create a myspace or something for BTE.

Black Tie Elephant will be opening for Pet Lions this Friday at Mike's loft at the intersection of Milwaukee and Wabansia! Come check out our set which will include some BTE classics as well as some new jams. This will be the last and only show with Rahul before he moves out of town. Don't miss it!

Since this is a house party show, I'm not exactly sure when we will play. I will update with the time we'll play when I find out. To be safe, come around 9:30 and hang out for a bit.

TIME:
9:30 to be safe
LOCATION:
1742 N. Milwaukee Ave.

Once upon a time I lived in half of a garage in Champaign. Rent was $260, utilities included and I had a stove, refrigerator and a bathroom with a concrete floor shower. I did stuff like throw boomerangs with Mike and Onur and give myself bad haircuts. When it rained all the ants would try and stay dry by trying to invade my place. I think the entire room was 10x12.

This was the first place I lived by myself after graduating from college and at the time my priority was to save money - mostly because I wanted to hang around Champaign to keep playing music with Black Tie Elephant, a trio made up of myself, Rahul Barua, and Brendan Finucane.

The best thing to happen while I lived in that insane garage space was being contacted by Mike Brosco via myspace. Mike used to part of an avante garde art rock band in the late 80s called Proof of Utah, who were signed to an obscure overseas label and gained a small cult following for their colorful, avante-garde noisy-zappa-esque-yet-insanely-poppy songs (p.s. they are writing new songs!). Mike's solo stuff is mostly ambient, eno-esque material. Anyway, Mike somehow heard some of my tracks on myspace and invited me over to his home studio, trusting me enough to eventually mess with his equipment and rearrange all of his things.

Seriously though, Mike is definitely one of the most generous and sincere guys I've ever met. After letting me tinker in his studio, he even invited the rest of BTE members over and we messed around a bit. However, we never really got a chance to develop much in the studio, as Brendan and Rahul both left town to pursue worldly adventures. Mike and I did end up working on a few ambient pieces for a friend's film project, which was cool.

A few months ago Brendan and Rahul both moved back to Chicago and we started playing again. We've written a few new songs and since Rahul is leaving for Scotland in two weeks we had to get something down on tape. So on a whim we decided to head down to Champaign and do an all day session with Mike Brosco in his studio, aiming to lay down two solid, well developed tracks. We just got back from Champaign a few hours ago and as I listen to the tracks, it was totally worth it - I think they came out fantastic.

Also, BTE is working on putting together a mini-performance before Rahul leaves. I'll be sure to keep ya'll posted...in the meantime check out the new PoU material!

Since the CD poster sold out, I added the option to buy a burned CD-R on zirafamusic.com for those that still want a physical hard copy.

I had a lot of fun making the music for Hipshooter, and making the CD poster was an experience in and of itself. But due to the labor intensive process of making each one by hand, they are now sold out. I might start making more in the future, however only if enough people request it to warrant the effort. I'll post some pics later of the process, but roughly it goes like this (each step was done in batch):

1. Buy supplies
2. Cut out 8x11 square of foamboard
3. Go to Kinko's to make color photocopies of artwork
4. Glue artwork to foamboard, trim edges
5. Write on back of foamboard with paint marker
6. Use computer to make a copy of the CD
7. Spray paint CD, masking off section for later drawing
8. Let CD dry, don't let anything fall on wet paint
9. Draw outline of TV and lettering with black sharpie
10. Color the inside of the TV with red, green, blue sharpie
11. Take CD center plastic piece, attach it to foamboard
12. Put CD in CD holder
13. Wrap finished CD Poster in crumpled newspaper
14. Insert into addressed manila envelope
15. Go to post office and mail it

Altogether I estimate that it took me 110 minutes to make each CD poster. If this was a real job I would've gotten paid less than $1.50/hour, haha. I definitely didn't think it'd take so long, and I also didn't anticipate the number of orders I got all at once. Along the way I ran into a number of problems: getting all the supplies took some time, I'm a pretty bad drawer, and I ran out of spray paint which meant taking a trip to get some more + signing to get it (selling spray paint in Chicago is illegal).

Part of my drought in releasing CDs is that it seems like a pretty boring format to me, disposable. I buy a CD and listen to it a few times, inevitably the CD case and artwork get lost and then I misplace the actual CD itself for a few months - only to rediscover it later with joy. But even then, I don't listen to music much on a CD player anymore and will search for a digital copy (I'm too lazy to even rip CDs!).

So it would seem weird to me to give/sell something to people that didn't have much worth to me on its own. So to try and remedy the situation, I decided to try out this CD poster idea, and so far I like it. I like the idea of flipping the format to something else (i.e. poster) and then affixing the CD to that. So instead of having a CD with some artwork, it's a poster that has a CD attached. As a bonus, the CD won't get lost in a pile and itself is part of the visual work.

I also wanted to package everything online in a way that was easily accessible and embodied the sense of what an "album" means to me, a package of something: ideas, artwork, music. Stream it now, or download it for later. Buy the CD Poster if you want. Read the notes and contact me, learn more. The only limitation is that my hosting company is pretty bad and sometimes people's downloads wouldn't work. Hopefully that didn't happen to the majority of people though...there isn't a way for me to track this that I know of.

More important than all of this though, is that I feel energized to make more music. Black Tie Elephant has been playing some, and we have a recording date this Saturday. Which is great, because I love BTE and the songs we've composed, but we've done such a terrible job documenting and recording the songs that I'll bet at least 2 albums worth of material have either been forgotten or are just sitting in our heads. That ain't right...

A website surveying how much people payed for the new Radiohead album has released their results.

Check it out at What Price Did You Choose.com

Average price per download: £3.88 ($7.93)

(Average price per download, excluding discbox buyers*: £3.55 ($7.25))
28.5% of respondents said that they had decided to pay £0.00-0.01 ($0.00-0.02)
56% said that they had paid between £0.02 ($.04) and £10.00 ($20.43) for the download.
2.5% paid between £10.00 ($20.43) and £39.00 ($79.68) for the download.
13% said they had paid £40.00 ($81.72) for the download (which came free with the discbox)

Amazon has just opened their new Amazon MP3 Store. So far it looks like a promising alternative to iTunes.

PROS:

1) You can browse songs on the web, no need to download a client like iTunes.
2) The interface is very simple, and works the same way as other parts of Amazon.com.
3) The single song prices are variable.
4) Some bands (Radiohead) only want to sell full albums, with no single downloads available. iTunes doesn't support this, but Amazon does. I really, really like this.
5) No DRM.
6) It's not iTunes.
7) It's an actual STORE. I can buy other things like shoes.

CONS:

1) They only sell MP3s. I still can't convince myself buying lower quality music is worth the money. When will these stores start selling high quality audio? They could set multiple price points based on quality.

TO BE DETERMINED:

1) What's the price breakdown of a sale? iTunes gets .30 for every .99 cents. Will this be variable? Fixed? Set by the seller, or Amazon?

2) Openness of the system
What I'm hoping happens is that Amazon can open the doors of this system to any Joe that wishes to sell their music on their store, even if they don't have a label. Amazon already lets you stock your independent CD directly with them, so it seems like a natural progression. If, however, they go the route of iTunes and only deal with labels, that will be a mistake and they will broil in the fiery pits of hell.

Open up the goddamn floodgates already!

From someone who has never bought an MP3 in his life, and shuns the concept of third party vendors selling an overpriced, lower quality product, the Amazon store seems interesting.

I'll still always support artists selling directly on their website first. But having fair and decent alternative methods is important too.

To be continued...

--
Hey yall,

Booked the very first solo zirafa show Monday, Sept 3rd at the Elbo Room in Chicago. It'll be an opening slot right at 9 o'clock sharp. Probably will be a mix of electronic tracks, live performance, and some sort of random surprise. Thanks to Johnny Twenty Three for hooking up the show!

Zirafa
Paid Pilots
JohnnyTwentyThree
Autumn In Analog

Sept 3rd, 8:30 pm @ Elbo Room (2871 North Lincoln Ave)
$5 cover

At my job we build websites for people. I originally got into website design not to pay the bills, but because I really felt passionate about what websites could do for musicians (including myself). I envisioned that an artist would put up their website and immediately have the tools to publish audio, video, images, news, email lists, flyers, communicate and sell directly with their fans and visitors.

Somewhere along the way I think the hype got to me. Sites like MySpace.com, YouTube.com, Imeem.com, and catalog sites like Rhapsody and iTunes made me rethink this scenario. I began to think that a centralized service site for artist tools was the answer - a site that would provide the capabilities in the first paragraph but one which would be free and ad-driven. The site owner would make tons of money off ads to run the site, the artists would get lots of eyeballs and ears and as a result would sell more music, with maybe a percentage cut given back to the host site for handling the sale. There are already many retail services attempting to do this: Snocap/MySpace, CD Baby, and iTunes come to mind. But the problem with these centralized services is that they essentially own the content you produce or have potentially sticky licensing contracts once you use the service. I started to realize that in order for a centralized site like this to work, it would essentially have to exploit its very users to stay afloat. (This site explains this concept in more detail, although I disagree with the conclusive predictions the author makes.)

Recently I've been involved in some discussions that have made me rethink things and go back to my original concepts about how music could work on the web.

Going back to the most basic questions:

a) How do musicians publish their work and support themselves?
b) How do listeners find new music?

To answer the first, I would argue that any semi-professional musician that wishes to build a career off their work should establish their own unique website. It is more work but the benefits are tremendous - the artist maintains complete control over their work and can determine exactly how their work is published, distributed, licensed, and sold (even setting up their own storefront). The idea should be that this site is the *exclusive* method for updates, downloads, and sales of music. Why? Because having one strong website identity will mean the artist will maintain more control over their work. Online retail stores and social networking sites are a waste of time and should be avoided as much as possible unless they are able to ultimately drive more traffic to the artist's core site. Put the minimum amount of effort into these third party sites, and maximize the effort into making the core site kick ass. The web is a giant time sink and people make money off of this fact...your time is literally making people money. It's something to keep in mind when browsing the web.

The cost of building a website is becoming less and less as hosting gets cheaper, and the technology keeps getting better and better. This means that it is now possible for an artist to setup their own website with the capability for direct online sales, downloads, blogs, forums, email lists, tour schedules and much more. Instead of using Blogger for blog posts, you can run your own blogging software. Instead of uploading music to MySpace, upload as many tracks as you want to your own site. Instead of depending on these third party companies which can change their policies, you can do it yourself and have more control over everything.

To answer the second question, I think people will discover music the same way they always have - friends, music blogs, email threads, shows, music aggregators, radio, search engines, magazines, and review sites. I doubt that any automated system can really compete with a trusted friend recommending their favorite band, or a good DJ playing their favorite music. What the web *can* do is streamline these sorts of organic interactions. It can also organize the immense amount of music that is out there. It's amazing to me how many new sites pop up which try to build centralized music catalogs. The web *itself* is an enormous decentralized music catalog, it just needs to be indexed and organized. Search engines work this way - there is no reason internet radio, or Last.fm can't work this way too. One of my favorite sites that treats the web itself as an endless catalog of music is the Hype Machine. This site essentially scrapes quality music blogs for any MP3s and then lets you immediately listen to a stream of new music. You can narrow down by artist or song name. Simple, trustworthy, decentralized, scalable and powerful. Another site that supports this concept is Del.icio.us, where you can bookmark MP3 files you like and other people can listen to your "radio station". A link to an MP3 file should be all it takes to publish your work to the world - it's the job of these sites to find, index, and organize them.

Here is the point - if an artist has the capability to publish their work directly, then other music sites can literally just link to the original artist when talking about them. Music blogs and review sites will be more inclined to trust and link directly to an artist because the quality of content is higher and more trustworthy. The result is increased traffic to the artist's core site where they can build a fan base, get people on their email list, get a street team going, or sell music CDs or downloads. Contrast this with a music review site linking to an artist's MySpace site, where there are a limited number of things that can occur. Aside from adding somebody as a friend and previewing some tracks, there isn't a whole lot else that can happen. As an artist you want to provide an honest and enveloping experience for potential fans, and with sites like MySpace you just hit a brick wall.

It may sound like I'm putting down social networking sites, but I'm not. They work very well for their intended purpose - connecting people. When it comes to music publishing however, I don't think these sites work very well because ownership, licensing, sales, and distribution of the work gets complicated. Plus, it is just hard to maintain content across five different social networking sites.

By publishing directly on their own site, an artist can specify the license of their work explicitly. Probably the best approach would be to give published works very loose distribution licenses so that the music can spread freely across the net and other music sites can pick up and distribute it.

I don't think I'm making any sort of astounding discoveries - I'm just trying to take a step back and think about things. Just think about it next time you buy a song on iTunes. Why are so many middlemen involved in that transaction? How much is the artist really getting and who decides how it is licensed? Or the next time you visit a MySpace page, think about who really benefits more from you visiting the page. That band you are checking out, or Ruport Murdoch?

It just seems so much simpler for an artist to publish and sell direct and sidestep all of the bullsh*t while simultaneously earning more money and decreasing the amount of time spent managing their website(s). Less time dealing with this crap means artists have more time to focus on what they do best: make music!