The Wilderness Downtown – The Arcade Fire

Flash vs. HTML5 – who will win? If the Arcade Fire promotional website (The Wilderness Downtown) is any indication, HTML5 all the way. Ad Age recently included the Creativity’s best ad “Arcade Fire: The Wilderness Downtown Trailer” in their morning newsletter, and the ad is amazing. It’s essentially a trailer for the music video. The whole concept was designed by Chris Milk from @radical.media and Google’s Aaron Koblin from the Google Creative Lab.

Basically, it’s an interactive music video for the song “We Used to Wait” that utilizes Google’s Chrome Browser and HTML5. You type in the address that you grew up in, and it takes you on a journey incorporating Google Maps. It is way cool and the functionality is amazing. You even get… [Read More]

This is a phrase I hear all too often.  For some reason, this has been ingrained into our heads throughout the years…  The idea that doing something wrong is fine if you do less of something that is wrong is preposterous to me.  That is like thinking that speeding in your car is OK if you only go 10 miles over the limit rather than 15… speeding is speeding and copyright infringement is copyright infringement.

The proper legal term for this is “de minimis” use.  Or in the long form latin, “de minimis non curat lex” -meaning the law does not care about trivial things.  This is in fact a common defense to a law suit (much like it’s more overused big brother Fair Use).  This is not a RIGHT… but a DEFENSE.  There is a big difference in these two words.

De Minimis VS  Infringement

photocopying a… [Read More]

File this one under too good not to mention.

If you don’t already read Digital Music News, you should.  This is the brainchild of Industry pundit Paul Resnikoff.  Established in 2004 (I think) this is one of the places I go for my up-to-date music industry info…  Today’s post (excerpted below) is just a taste of the daily fodder.  Also featured daily is a Job Board for all of those looking for a gig.  Overall a pretty great resource and a good excuse to re-post the following:

The 10 Most Disastrous Music Industry Deals

(1) Terra Firma’s acquisition of EMI, $4.7 billion (2007)

Even Guy Hands admits he made a colossal mistake on this one.  One of the last super-leveraged buyouts before the bust, EMI has now become a $4.7 billion-plus toxic mess for Terra Firma.

(2) CBS’ acquisition of Last.fm, $280 million (2007)

Scrobbling is… [Read More]

Music has a way of cutting deep into a persons soul, so deep that it can bring back memories long thought forgotten. Sometimes it’s good memories, sometimes it’s not but either way it causes us to reevaluate those things & in the end we’re always made better for it. Americana music stirs my soul like no other and with the wealth of great Americana artist coming out of Nashville I don’t see that love dying anytime soon. Andrew Combs is one of those musicians whose music stirs my soul & renews my love for Americana music each time I hear it.

Andrew Combs comes to TN via Texas. Since moving to Nashville Andrew has been working on his songwriting with another great local songwriter Heidi Feek who is also a guest vocalist on his newest album “Tennessee Time”. “Tennessee Time” is… [Read More]

Full disclosure: I have been a longtime hater of Autotune.

For years, I have found Autotune to be repulsive… in pop music it makes up for singers’ inadequacies and in rap music it creates “music” for those who have no such talent.  This disdain has been only further flamed by artists like T-Pain and Lil Wayne who have built entire careers around this technology (much like Zapp and Roger did on the back of the Talk Box (which at least required the singer to be able to hold a tune)).

Well now it is apparent.  There is a fine use for this technology.  Enter Autotune The News (@autotunethenews on twitter).  I have know about these guys for a while as their antics using news footage of congress, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and the other list of Washington talking heads have brought about the random office chuckle, but not… [Read More]