So my beloved Muxtape is off line, whether by RIAA fiat or money troubles or both or whatever, I know not. That news kinda sucked although it was not unexpected, being and how the illegality of it was more or less blindingly obvious.

But a great idea and great for the music industry whether it knows it or not. But hark! In the dust of Muxtape, a new service launched called 8tracks which claims to do the same thing but -- gasp! -- legally. I've seen it called "Stracks" too, but I think the squiggly thing is offically an 8. I've signed up but haven't made a mux-er, a ... mix yet. There seem to be more restrictions that with muxtape -- you can't see the whole list before listening for instance -- which are presumably to keep it within the legal requirements. It does look like you can officially create multiple mixes and have them all up at the same time. Which is good, although I was kinda digging the zen-like process of destroying your mux before you could create a new one.

I'm encouraged that it looks uncluttered and simple, but also adds some functions muxtapes lacked -- I like the simplicity of "following" a user and also the ability to add comments to mixes. Will try and maybe get one up tonight.

Update: Did my first 8tracks mix. Painless process and one improvement on Muxtape is you can queue up all your songs to upload rather than have to do them one by one.

I'm back, but you didn't even know I was gone. Been unable to log into Movable Type since Thursday, but finally the long blogial nightmare is at an end. I feel like James Stewart at the end of It's A Wonderful Life, running through the streets of Bedford Falls.

This made me laugh.

However, I no longer have a working computer and since pretty much all my music is on my computer ... sigh.

So I have done a stupid meme instead. This is called Your Debut CD I got it off the Whirlpool forums.

1. Go to Wikipedia random page. The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2. Go to Random quotations.
The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3. Go to flickr's "explore the last seven days"
Middle picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

My Band: Claribel Alegría
My Album Title: Liberties than standing armies.
Album Cover: Cool pic but a bit tween punk album-cover wise.

Have at it yourself. Or not.

The band title/album is very post-rock. I don't do "post-rock." A friend once tried hard to get me into Godspeed You Black Emperor, Sigur Ros, all that stuff. Didn't take. At all. Write some godamn melodies, why don't you. And get to them in under 15 minutes. I'm doing a Schembri I realise. Shame on me.

But, I don't do post-rock. Pre-rock, of course. Peri-rock, always. There is nothing post-rock for me.

Subject line stolen from Phineas. It is too good not to be mine. Mux had a meltdown and my most recent one was lost. But it only nuked the last three weeks of stuff which means my last second account mux is still there. Second accounts breach the TOS, so hush. IMHO, it's rather a tasty collection of country, soul, funk -- old skool, yo.

In addition to Richard Shindell, another muso with his thinking cap on is David Byrne. It has pie charts!

I've made money, and I've been ripped off. I've had creative freedom, and I've been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will. It saved my life, and I bet I'm not the only one who can say that.

What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that's not bad news for music, and it's certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists.

The following is mostly a plea to Zoe on account of her awesome new food blog.

I don't require musicians I like to be rational, sane, compassionate, intelligent, thought provoking and in general good people. But it's awfully nice when one of them turns out to be so. The superb singer/songwriter Richard Shindell has some thoughts here and more here on being an artist in the age of illegal downloading. He speaks sense.

While I think a lot of anti-piracy measures and attitudes have been hamfisted, insulting and obnoxious (and I don't use P2P myself), I don't make my living from music so I can't begrudge those who do their strong feelings on the matter. Still, when he talks about the "better angels" attitude, and respect between consumer and artist, that makes sense to me. I think there are lots of things that can be done to turn pirates into people who support artists -- not least of which is "the passage of time" and "embiggening of musical tastes" since (IIRC) it's teens/uni-aged kids who do it on the grandest and most unthinking scale, and it's mostly directed towards the more top 100 end of things. eMusic's corporate line has long been that it pitches the long tail and independent acts to "mature" music fans who are vastly less likely to fileshare. This was actually borne out when Random House tracked piracy of it's eMusic DRM-free audiobook files and found ... none. (can't dig up the thing I read about this, will add link later.)

Richard still thinks it's important the artist gets paid (in this case, him) but he's actually doing some constructive, realistic things about it. Go, Richard!

Thanks to Chris Bertram and Tim Dunlop for sending me this piece on the environmental movement, country music and class. That's like the Chris blogged it. Wouldn't it be fun if I had platoons of bat-winged monkeys like some other blogs who would hoon over there at my command. Mwuh-ha-ha. In a different week I might find something to say about it myself.

Am off to see Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings tonight at the Enmore. In the Dance-2 section, say hi. I will be the one not dancing. Hopefully I can get some far away blurry shots mostly of people's heads (there's a Dance-1 section) to put up later.

I may be able to tie the two themes of this post in one Sharon Jones song:

07 This Land Is Your Land.mp3

Crossposted at Hickory Wind.

This post goes on, like a certain essential muscular organ of some musical fame. In the knowledge clicking on is too much trouble for many, here is your take home message: There is a book called Céline Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson, part of the Continuum 33 1/3 Series. You want to read this book. His blog is here, one of my favourites for years. Here are lots of reviews and interviews. AFAIK it isn't released in Australia so you can buy it here. If you buy me a glass of house red I will lend it to you, I will probably be too-aggressively pimping it to you even if you don't. You want to read this book.

You want to read this book.

Got it? Ah, but I have trapped you because now you want to know why you want to read a book on Céline Motherfrakinggoddamnareyougoddamnfrakkingkiddingme Dion. Sucked in. Onwards over the fold ...

MP3: Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly -- 2-05 From Little Things Big Things Grow.m4p

I wrote a whole goddamn essay about this last night. I deleted it.

What Kevin08 says today, that's from me -- personally -- too.

And then some.

I sampled a couple of the lesser legal digital download services last week. OK, I sometimes grab a single song from an MP3 blog and sometimes augment my own posts with music. But I never download whole albums or just go grab whatever I want from bittorrent. Although as this article shows you could P2P every minute of the day for the next thirty years and still not be a fraction of the thief the major record labels have been, I still think you have to support the models that are adapting to the real world. And no, I don't include those dodgy Russian sites. Anyway. I already have two accounts on eMusic for 190 tracks a month and there's nothing out there that competes with it for price and range, but have found some interesting things.

First up, WE7. The model here is that each song can be downloaded free but has a short ad at the beginning. After a month you can go back and download the songs (still free) without the ad, to a maximum of 20 songs a month. Like all these services offering DRM-free tracks and trying to shake up the models, the problem is getting content, especially from the majors or bigger indies. WE7 has a very sparse country selection but a pretty good blues one. My first 20 downloads are below. I really don't get Patty Griffin in any deep way but I'm told the fault is entirely my end so I'll keep trying.

The number of downloads is unlimited, but you can only ad-strip 20 a month. CNET says it's doomed. I don't mind the ads, and they seem a lot shorter than 10 seconds to me. However all the ads thus far are for ... WE7 itself which makes me wonder how they're travelling in the whole "attract advertisers" side of things. Last week they made a show of promoting the capital they have raised so we'll see. Another obvious problem is that it's extremely simple to snip the ads from the tracks yourself. How to assure advertisers they're even being heard? But that is for counters of beans other than my own. Meantime: music free and legal.