blog.shrub

Cary Sherman weasled an op-ed out of the Post-Gazette where he spread the usual BS. CMU Professfor of Computer Science and art Roger Dannenberg told the RIAA where to go:

Mr. Sherman, you say that stealing “is not OK,” and yet I have musician friends who cannot get RIAA members to pay them the royalties they are due. While you are asking universities to address your problems, please don’t forget that you too can be a “powerful leader in curbing theft of copyright materials on campus.” If you’ll stop your members from stealing from my friends, and then study some history, maybe I can help you.

heather combs had a gig at the hotel saturday night. they were impressed:

Somewhere between the new songs and the old favorites she was strumming so strong that the G string went flying. Noticing that, the crowd came alive encouragingly clapping to the conclusion of the song. Then, to the amazement of everyone, in one motion she reached into her guitar case and pulled out a pack of strings opening it with her teeth while removing the broken string with her hands. In the next instant she plucked on the E string a couple of times then broke into the John Prine classic “Angel from Mongtomery” a capella, singing two of the three verses while simultaneously stringing up the guitar and tuning it. All this, without skipping a beat! The guy sitting next to me, a regular at this popular club, said, “Not that’s somethin’ I’ve never seen before.”

Vienna Teng played the Ann Arbor Folk Festival. They liked her. A lot:

By the end of her quietly breathtaking 20-minute set that night, she was a star.

“We got up there and the response was just stunning, overwhelming, really,” said Teng, who brings her hushed, meditative, piano-based songcraft to The Ark for two shows on Friday (the first is sold out). “You could really feel the audience.

“I’d never experienced anything quite like it.”

Nor, apparently, had the sold-out Folk Festival audience, which roared its approval with an ovation that exceeded those offered even to the night’s headliners, The Blind Boys of Alabama and Indigo Girls.

“I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve been going to the festival for more than 20 years,” said Eric Nunamaker of Ypsilanti…

Michael Weiss, CEO of Morpheus:

A victory for StreamCast will ensure that Americans won’t have to live in a society where every file is fingerprinted, every user is tagged, every search is monitored and every result is filtered.

glen has put together really short audio clips from 20 cover songs. can you guess who/what?

The BBC checked out what was on George Bush’s iPod and invited readers to suggest songs for him. Among the picks:

• I’m a Loser, by Beck
• Criminal, by Eminem
• Lawyers, Guns and Money, by Warren Zevon
• I Want It All, by Queen

i spent a day and change putting together a web site for my house concert series. it’s pretty spiffy, if i do say so myself. among the reasons why:

• valid XHTML and CSS
• RSS and iCal feeds
• clean interface
• nice URLs (REST, perhaps?)
• creative commons-licensed

moses runs the numbers:

There is only one logical integration of all these statistics with the recent Soundscan data: even though actual point-of-purchase sales are up by about 9% in the US - and the industry sold over 13,000,000 more units in 2004 (1st quarter) than in 2003 (1st quarter) - the Industry is still claiming a loss of 7% because RIAA members shipped 7% fewer records than in 2003.

Forget the confusing percentages, here’s an oversimplified example: I shipped 1000 units last year and sold 700 of them. This year I sold 770 units but shipped only 930 units. I shipped 10% less units this year. And this is what the RIAA wants the public to accept as “a loss.”

The Economist, fresh off their SemaCode scoop, rips in to the music industry’s legal “strategy”:

But even if the entertainment business manages to coax more users into paying for legal downloads and succeeds in court against Grokster and StreamCast, its problems are unlikely to go away. True, a Supreme Court ruling in the industry’s favour would put paid to other P2P services. But it is not clear that curbing illegal downloading will translate into extra sales for the music business. A rush into legal downloading would hardly be good for sales of CDs: some cannibalisation is inevitable. And perhaps the decline in global sales is indicative of a far greater problem for the music industry—consumers simply think that many of its products are just not worth paying for.

i’m often asked for the names of venues for musicians to play in. i have a small list of my own, but it hasn’t been maintained lately. however, there are several great resources out there:

• venues in San Francisco from the Red Devil Lounge
• venues along the west coast (CA, OR, WA) from BAB News
• The Ultimate Address Book and its California clubs page.
• Few’ll Ignite Sound has fantastic database of venues, media contacts and promoters