Boom!

david-noel:

soundcloud:

The Everybody (members of The Pixies), SoundCloud and Topspin Media call for remixers.

That’s pretty exciting:

The album is being made available exclusively at The Everybody website as a Creative Commons licensed, royalty-free package of lossless stems. The band are selling this package for $40 (via our friends at Topspin), which might at first sound like quite a bit but in fact you’re actually getting a lot. The stems are licensed and royalty free which means you can make your own version and (as long as you’re providing attribution back to the band) you can in theory make lots of money selling whatever you’ve created. We think that’s pretty badass!!

Read the full story here.

Cool concept.  For aspiring producers who have trouble creating songs when starting from scratch (e.g, those who lack formal musical training), purchasing royalty-free stems could be a good way to go.

Or, for rappers who don’t compose intrumentals, how many of them would buy a collection of royalty-free Timbaland beat stems for $40?  A lot.

Wow.

MySpace didn’t bother to open up a transition period, or nudge imeem accounts into MySpace accounts, or even force an account conversion:  they straight-up turned imeem off.  (imeem.com now redirects to this landing page.)

I saw the writing on the wall, but I didn’t expect anything like this.  I can’t explain how glad I am to have migrated RRR’s song players from imeem to SoundCloud in September.

staff:

We now extract album art from uploaded music!

Developers can even add this art to Tumblr themes with:

{block:AlbumArt}
    <img src="{AlbumArtURL}" />
{/block:AlbumArt}

And access Artist, Album, and Track information like this:

{block:Artist}
    Artist: {Artist}
{/block:Artist}

{block:Album}
    Album: {Album}
{/block:Album}

{block:TrackName}
    Track: {TrackName}
{/block:TrackName}

Now we’re talking.

On another note, this is much different, but to connect Tumblr more properly to artists:  it would be sweet if artists could maintain a list of their songs and the preferred click-through URL of each one.  (Only after getting authorized as the actual artist or label, and afterward, only for songs under their umbrella.)  If Tumblr finds a match in a song post, the author would then have the option to check a box to have the song’s click-through link set as the artists’ preferred page, both on the art and the [artist - title].

That sounds overly complicated, and it is, but maybe somewhere in there is a simpler way of achieving the same sort of connection.

(Updated)

Dear Bowery Ballroom,

Could you please ditch Ticketmaster? For $15 tickets they charge over 20% for a “convenience charge” ($3.10 per ticket), then charge between $14.50 and $19.50 to print and send you your tickets, then charge a $4.10 processing fee.

If you want real tickets, the price jumps from $30 (original) to $59.80. So for a company that handles massive quantities of printing and shipping, mostly electronically, they make over 2/3 (after UPS charge) of the what the venue, crew, equipment, label, and traveling band take in—combined. Robbery.

Old news, but still.