Undead and Loving It I'm fascinated by the complexity of this. Every time I think about just staying in the financial comfort of corporate marketing (screw the useless Radio-TV-Film...
While Radiohead gets all the love for experimenting with the distribution and business aspect of selling music online, Paul Westerberg has taken the next step and released an album that simply wouldn’t exist without the ability to go directly to his fans. “49″ is an entire album in the form of one-long MP3, a noisy, self-recorded burst of rock n’ roll energy that violates the traditionally accepted structure of the “album,” and you can download the entire thing for $0.49 from Amazon.
Westerberg’s site contains the following message:
WARNING: DO NOT LISTEN WHILE OPERATING A MOTOR VEHICLE
THIS PRODUCT IS NOT FAULTY - ALL SOUNDS ARE INTENTIONAL AND VALID AS A WORK OF ART
There’s no track listing, some parts are snippets of music cut together with other songs, crashing in and out of each other, it’s chaotic and charming, brilliant and maddening all at the same time. Darren Hill, Wetserberg’s manager, was quoted in The Guardian:
“He finished it on Monday, sent it to me on Tuesday and it was out this weekend,” Hill explained. “It’s just wonderful that you can actually do this. The freedom an artist can enjoy these days is fantastic. Can you imagine me pitching this idea to a label?”
Because its not just full songs, it’s also song snippets. Then its two songs playing at the same time, and excerpts from cover versions that fade in and out, and then, suddenly, I’m in love, what’s that song?
No really, what’s that song?!?
It’s all a bit of a mess, really. But that’s OK, because it only costs forty-nine cents. In a strange way, Westerberg has used the internet to bootleg himself.
Because it’s such a mess, you might wonder who is going to listen to it more than once, and then you realize that because it’s a nice big digital file, what will eventually happen is that his fan base will come up with consensus names for all of the songs, and song snippets, and the time codes for everything.
And that’s exactly what’s happening on thediscussion boards at PaulWesterberg.com, where the new album is receiving overwhelmingly positive response from his fans, who are dissecting and discussing every minute of it.
Best of all, it’s rumored that Westerberg doesn’t even own a computer.
I love baseball. It’s the perfect blend of nuance and number-crunching. GDIP, WHIP and BABIP. Deep flies to left field to score a runner from third, long leads off first that draw a throw from the catcher.
And then I catch the Home Run Derby last night. All sizzle and no steak, the marketing equivalent of a :30 spot in the Super Bowl. Sure, it’s fun to laugh at anthropomorphic animals, beer-hungry fools, and women who bathe in peanuts to make men swoon. But I still prefer more compelling entertainment: the complex conversational sell, the pitcher who can induce the double play, the brand story infused with character and nuance, VORP over HRs.
So let’s enjoy Josh Hamilton’s epic performance (he really was mashing the ball!). But let’s also remember that his team, the Texas Rangers, still can’t pitch a lick and haven’t made the playoffs in nearly a decade.
For more interesting baseball content, check out this DIY segment from My Home 2.0. It features Ryan Howard of the Phillies (a monumental slugger) and a bat we hacked to measure his swing speed.
This truck was spotted making deliveries on White Street. I’m not accusing anyone at Campfire of being a vampire just yet, but I honestly can’t recall the last time I saw Brian Cain out in the daytime…
There are two things I want to do build: cool inventions in family’s homes — and ride roller coasters. There is a guy in Indiana, John Ivers, that built his own roller coaster and I have been dying to meet him, as my goals in life are to build a backyard amusement park with a working roller coaster!
I would love to interview him and talk to him about his invention. Go to his site to get his info and look at what this dude is currently doing — he’s building another one!
Rob Norman wrote a fascinating piece on his On Demand blog, taking a stab at how we’ll create, consume, and measure media in the future. From where we sit, his “Work of Fiction” doesn’t seem all that fictional at all.
We know that content is migrating to smaller and smaller screens, that distribution channels are expanding faster than the content creators’ ability to fill them, and that looking at small screens the same way we look at TV and movie screens is a fatal flaw.
As we’re hearing from our friends on the brand side and on the entertainment side, everyone is gearing up to deliver entertainment to mobile phones, computer screens, digital readers, etc. in the ways that people are consuming content today. The real issue–and what makes Rob’s post so prescient–is predicting how we’ll leverage all these platforms to tell brand and entertainment stories tomorrow.
Wayne Gretzky’s cliche’d aphorism applies here: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Yoda couldn’t have said it any better.
Music has always played an important role in my life, and one of the draws of moving to New York was the opportunity to experience brilliant artists live. Tonight, Mark Eitzel played with his band, American Music Club, at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, and the show was amazing. There may be more popular bands in town, but there aren’t any as great as AMC at their best.
Here’s a little AMC mixtape for those of you in the dark, and if you regret missing tonight’s show you can catch them at Mercury Lounge Sunday night — look for me there!
Something has happened to PBS favorite “Charlie Rose.” The erudite conversations and sober intellectualism have been replaced by an absurd world where illogic, inane dialogues, and open hostility rule.
This is a fantastic conference. Everywhere you go you meet smart, inspired thinkers from diverse backgrounds. The panels have been generally excellent, but this afternoon’s Social Media Metrics panel took a dive when the moderator didn’t um… join the conversation. About 30 minutes in, the discussion, advertised as intermediate level, was still covering the same old “you need to be engaging social media” ground when someone from the audience stood up and asked the panelists to get onto the metrics portion of the program. The moderator responded “we’ll get to that in a little bit,” and this was after trying to push his question off to the end. How very old-media.
The audience soon turned on the panel, and the energy in the large room turned dark. I had no idea what was going on until just now, reading through the back channel meebo chat log. From here on out, I’m bringing my laptop to everything.
Later this evening, I schooled Jeremiah in foosball before ducking into the World Premiere of Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie. The organizers wrongly placed it in their midnight section, but this isn’t a goofy cult oddity. Bigfoot is a touching character study of two best friends who are passionate about Bigfoot research and crave legitimacy for their work. It’s a fantastic documentary and worth seeking out at your local film festival. Check out the trailer below.
Tomorrow I plan on more panels, meetings, and BBQ!
OK. The Giants won the Superbowl. They deserved it and everything. I’m not a huge football guy but it was still a bummer to see Boston lose one to New York (finally.)
Because of the victory, the city is throwing the team a parade which, of course, means streams of grown men dressing up like professional athletes by wearing absurdly over-sized “official” game jerseys and getting drunk by 10am so they can serve up better chest bumps. Not that I’m criticizing, as I did the same thing when the Sox won the Series in ‘04 (minus the game jerseys and chest-bumping.)
This morning, following my activity of responsible citizenry (i.e. voting) I jumped on the PATH in Jersey City to head into the city. This involved roughly six minutes on a train packed with Giants fans and a 15-block walk to work against a steady stream of dude-guys. Hand-blistering high-fives and rumbling chants of “18 and 1″ were common place. Given the losing battle that AM sobriety was fighting coupled with the fact that it is ALSO Fat Tuesday, I don’t envy the city’s sanitation crew.
Oh yeah. Go vote. Voting today will likely have more of an impact than in November.
Top 10 artists played by Campfire employees for the week of January 28 - February 3, 2008:
The Shins again? Really? I always thought of them as hip elevator music — they sound great over the speakers at Whole Foods, but c’mon! Worse yet, we follow up with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, another generic indie bland. Not even a Miles Davis or Coltrane busts through this week! At least Party Ben makes a showing to mash things up a bit.
Okay gang, let’s fire up something a little more inspiring this week, mmmkay?
