Tag Archive - Music

SXSW Bit Torrent File

March 14, 2005 in Uncategorized with 2 Comments

If you are looking to get all of the musical experience of the South By Southwest music festival without taking that pesky trip to Austin (not Boston), I have your answer. Check out the festival website and clean off your broadband connection, because they are offering a sweet little sampler of 750 songs for F-R-E-E.

Using BitTorrent, you can grab this 2.6 GB (good god man) file for no money down, and all on the up and up. If you are a complete pussy, you can also opt for a package containing 30 second clips of the songs as well which is decidedly easier to download at just 345 MB.

Enjoy.

Colin Meloy And Jake Brennan At TT’s

February 22, 2005 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment

So i got a chance to check out a show I had been looking forward to since sometime back in November when I first got the tickets. The show was scheduled for January, but was postponed by the giant blizzard we had. The show was Colin Meloy of the Decemberists playing solo, with an opening act of Jake Brennan (of Jake Brennan and the Confidence Men) also playing solo at TT the Bear’s in Cambridge.

Jake Brennan – I had heard a lot about this guy and figured since he was opening for one of my favorite artists, that he must be solid. Apparently he has a decent following in Boston, but you wouldn’t know it based on the crowd’s complete lack of interest during his set. He sang crappy love songs with trite lyrics while the crowd literally had full conversations amongst each other, ignoring him on stage for the most part. The only saving grace was a mandolin player named Jimmy that accompanied him and helped bring intolerably crappy songs to a moderately listen-able level. Brennan looked and sounded like Ray Pruitt (Jamie Walters) and seemed seconds away from bursting into “How Do You Talk to an Angel” or bringing Donna Martin out on stage just to smack her around a bit. At least that would have been somewhat entertaining.

Colin Meloy – Playing the yin to Brennan’s yang was not difficult here, and Meloy raised the game to a completely different level when he took the stage. Those who had previously seen him perform live, fully expected this unassuming Montana boy with the incredibly powerful voice to take total command the room and leave the audience mesmerized and silent, which he did. All eyes and ears were fixated on the stage, and each person became fully absorbed into each intricate lyric and wandering storyline stirring only to stomp along with the beat or to join in on some of the more infectious refrains. Being the last stop on the tour, Meloy belted out somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 songs over an hour and a half covering everything from Decembrists favorites to Morrissey covers and even some random folk tunes in between. The only disappointment was not being able to get my hands on the 6 song, tour-only, Morrissey cover disc that he was peddling at each stop. Only 1,000 were pressed and they were only available on tour stops….unless you want to shell out upwards of $60 on eBay.

2005 Grammys – The Earliest Coverage Ever

February 13, 2005 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment

Ok, so it is five minutes into the Grammys there are two things on my mind. First, I am amazed and pleased that they were somehow able to cram every crappy band on to a single stage all at once for one giant clusterfuck performance. I feel like I am ahead of the game already knowing now for sure that I will be spared full performances from each of these artists, and that is a giant relief. It really was a very impressive setup. They even had everyone playing/singing at once providing a glorious 5 minute one-hit-wonderfest that sounded like a weird grammy version of elimi-band.

Second, when is that god damned Black Eyed Peas song (Let’s Get It Started) going to be retired once and for all from opening every sporting event, political rally, and awards show? Isn’t there some sort of statute of limitations on things like this? I feel like this song is getting dangerously close to National Anthem territory in terms of it’s predetermined spot in every event ever.

Ok…one more thing. I hope this doesn’t turn into a huge Ray Charles love-in. Look, you never bought his albums or really listened to his music before. Please don’t jump on the dead artist bandwagon and start jerking him off publicly because he died and the guy from living color is up for an Oscar for his biopic. Gag me.

iTunes Fails With RSS and Affiliate Program

December 7, 2004 in Uncategorized with 4 Comments

ItunesSometime in the next two months I will be launching music-post.com as a side project to my 9-5 job in the internet marketing world. I am starting this site mainly because I like music, but also, launching a site like this  gives me the chance to try and make a few bucks while  messing around polishing my tech  and marketing skills.
There is no substitute for good old hands on, trial and error learning.

One of the technologies I am fascinated in is RSS,
and more specifically the ability to use RSS to have a constantly updated site such as music-post, teeming with fresh content daily whether I decide to manually add something or not. Among other things such as mp3 hardware reviews, album reviews, tour schedules, and forums, I wanted to have iTunes power my top albums and top singles lists through their RSS feeds. In addition, I figured that as long as Apple was going to feed me content daily, and that content linked to a music store, they could pay me each time someone decided to click through and buy a song that they saw listed on my site. To do this, I logged into my Linkshare account and got hooked into the iTunes
affiliate program which would pay me 5% of all sales generated. A nickel per song and 50 cents per album isn’t much, but I am guessing that once a person downloads and begins using iTunes, they will spend upwards of $100 on music through iTunes over the lifetime of the program. Obviously in some cases more, and in some less, but there is potential to keep on earning as it seems unlikely for someone to purchase a single song and never return.

The RSS feeds are robust and very easy to customize by genre, category, etc and I was pleased at the ease with which they were spit out of the Apple system. I plugged them into my site and it was instant content with a revenue stream (albeit a small one) back-ended right into it. BRILLIANT. Then….horror. I tried some of the links on the site generated by the feed while I was on my machine at work and was given an error saying that "itms" is not a registered protocol. In short, the links are useless unless you have a working version of iTunes already installed on your machine. If you don’t, linky no worky.

What is Apple thinking? Through this awful execution of the affiliate/rss program they are cutting off what must be nearly 50% of possible revenue and 100% of new customers that could be had via affiliate links. If Apple and Linkshare were smart, they would at the very least bounce out those that did not yet have a working version of iTunes to a page where they could download the program and purchase the song that they were looking for. In addition, an affiliate program that tracked the clickers purchasing activity over the life of their iTunes download and then rewarded the affiliate who initiated the download would be fantastic. A compromise would be for Apple to determine what the revenue generated is over the lifetime of an average iTunes download and then pay affiliates a flat fee per download initiated similar to the way many many other pay per download programs work.

No matter what the solution, they need to do something. I can’t have links on my site that go dead if the user doesn’t have iTunes already installed. I am all for pushing business to iTunes, but they need to meet me halfway here and provide some tools that make my making them money a bit easier.

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