Jeff Albert's blog and podcast home
This NYT article is about a new angle on the rock band business model by the band Korn.
Korn Sells a Stake in Itself – New York Times
I see some positive in having each entity on the band’s “team” sharing in the success (or failure) of the other members of the team. Woring together for a common cause usually works better than “I got mine you deal with yours.”
Religion is not one of the usual topics here, and neither is network TV, but this salon.com article written by a preacher about a TV show is right on. If those things interest you, click the link.
Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | Sinfully bad TV
BTW, salon.com has a premium service, but you can watch a short ad and still get the content for free (well, except for the 30 secs you spent watching the ad).
Well, here it is, the first Scratch My Brain podcast.
This first episode has has music from Jesse Lewis Union and a track from the Jeff Albert & Ed Barrett album Duets Vol. 1, as well as some discussion of other podcasts that have influenced and encouraged me, a bit about Creative Commons, some ideas on DRM (Digital Rights Management), a mild dose of self-promotion, and wisdom from a four year old.
Another story about the ever evolving new music business.
Buying Music From Anywhere and Selling It for Play on the Internet – New York Times
…the economics of online stores is changing the financial calculations of the music business, making it profitable to sell a relatively small number of copies of a song, as long as a compact disc is not manufactured and distributed.
The place where I am seeing the implementation of this get sticky is when you hit a niche market that is audiophile heavy. There is a notable percentage of free jazz listeners that are into audiophile experiences, and digital distribution is still lacking in that area. Hopefully the bandwidth and lossless codecs will catch up soon.
Legitimate music downloading enjoys dream week | CNET News.com
…a dramatic rise in the tide of authorized download sales in recent weeks suggests that changes may be afoot in the consumer’s relationship to digital music.
The important question for the music business is whether 20 million downloads represents the new baseline for digital track sales. A year ago, a 33 percent pop in download sales in the week following Christmas permanently raised the bar on weekly download volume by 2 million tracks.
The future continues to arrive.
See, art is good for you.
Guardian Unlimited | Arts news | Stressed workers enjoy art for heart’s sake
Today, in the car, my four year old daughter told me that she is going to be an artist because she likes to paint and draw and make stuff. She figures if she becomes an artist she can continue to paint and draw and make stuff. Then she tells me that she is going to “go to work” too. She’s four and she knows that artists often need day jobs. This is comforting in that it means I am less likely to have to give her rent money when she is 40.
A few months ago I was working on a piece on arts financing. I never got it off the ground, but her comment today spurred me on. Let’s discuss this. There are generally two types of artists (in the financial sense). One is the artist that is totally art driven in artistic pursuits and usually does sometthing else to pay for living expenses (or has a very supportive spouse). The other is the artist that wants to do only their art (and its associated crafts), and ends up doing a lot of work that is in their field, but not necessarily in their artistic vision. Much of my career I have fallen into the latter category, and have the memorized horn parts to “Brickhouse” to prove it (although the therapy s helping).
Is one better than the other? Does one allow freer art? Do you have different perceptions of one’s work over the other? Please comment.
I had been meaning to post again and remind everyone about the very cool cc:365 project from indieish.com. Every day in 2006 they are posting a new Creative Commons licensed song. January 7th’s tune is one of mine, from my recent CD One.
Indieish: Remixing Pop Culture » Day 7: Jeff Albert – Lunch is the Question
Subscribe to the feed and get a free tune every day this year. Pretty cool, eh?
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Soul singer Rawls dies of cancer
I had the pleasure of backing Lou Rawls once. What a voice! He was cool and treated the band well too. Spin a Lou Rawls side today in memory.
This is an interesting article in which 8 UK artists swapped iPods, and then were asked to comment on the music and guess whose player they had.
Guardian Unlimited | Film & Music | ‘What? You call this music?’
The interesting tell in it for me was that the three that made references to whether or not they would acquire the type of music on the iPod they got, all used the word “download” instead of “buy”. “That’s not the sort of thing I would download” or “I would download that.”
Interesting…