paul schreiber

This year’s SXSW Music festival has joined the 21st century — they now have an interactive panel picker. That means you can vote for my panel Why Your Tour Needs House Concerts.

Here’s the official description:

Find out why house concerts make sense for your next tour. Learn how to successfully approach established house concert series, book and promote shows. Discover the key differences between a house concert and a club gig. We’ll show you what it takes to make each house concert a memorable experience.

I’m not much for mashups (the Grey Album didn’t do a thing for me), but this one is amazing: Beyonce vs the Andy Griffith Show theme.

Ever wished you could tell iTunes to stop playing your music after a little while? Here’s how to make a sleep timer with AppleScript:

display dialog “How many minutes until I pause iTunes?” default answer 10

delay ((text returned of result) * 60)

tell application “iTunes” to pause

Following up on the booking agent and singer, we have the guitar player and entrepreneur.

Jukebox the Ghost’s Tommy Siegel and Citizen Agency’s Chris Messina:

Apparently they have a triplet, Josh Roth.

Great work, Samantha!

San Francisco* has all kinds of interesting events going on. Here are some of my favourite off-the-beaten-path activities:

Storytelling

Porchlight

Science

Ask a Scientist
Down to a Science (haven’t been yet)

Music

Paul’s San Francisco House Concerts (yes, that’s me)
Drew Pearce’s House Concerts 
Songwriters in the round, hosted by Heather Combs

Literature

Writers With Drinks

Talk Show

The Heather Gold Show

Tech

SuperHappyDevHouse
BayCHI  

* Okay, so a few of them are just out of town. 

I somehow forgot the Long Now’s Seminars on Long Term Thinking. These are excellent, and I’m even a Long Now charter member.

Enric Teller shared a video of Sam Shaber goofing off at my most recent house concert.

Eric Carter and Enric Teller posted some photos of last month’s fantastic Anya Marina house concert.

Did you hear Bob Dylan is releasing an album of Sarah McLachlan covers? It’s called Mumbling Towards Ecstasy.

While the big four record labels are still stuck in the previous century, technology continues to democratize the music industry. Not only do we have cheap multitrack recording software and online distribution, but we’re seeing some interesting funding models as well.

In September, Wired covered Nettwerk’s return to good-guy status, helping the Barenaked Ladies break free of their label (and make $6 per CD instead of under $1).

TechCrunch ran with news of SellaBand, a German company that brings the distributed funding model (of, say Prosper or Kiva) to music.

And this week, my friend Travis reminded me of Amie Street, which introduces demand-based pricing (get in early to get cheap music). And it’s all MP3s, no DRM.

(See also my previous post on recommendation services.)