Category: Music

where does StumbleAudio get their music from?

I saw a post today on TechCrunch about StumbleAudio, a Pandora-like service for finding music. I gave it a try, I entered “Godspeed You Black Emperor” into the search field. The first track it decided to play was “Uniform Random Variables” from the Intonarumori “Material” album. MY ALBUM. This was especially funny because my major complaint with the TechCrunch article was the assertion that Pandora tended to play music that you already knew and StumbleAudio did not. Not only did I know the first song, I WROTE IT.

While I like that SumbleAudio is recommending my music, I’m a bit concerned. You see, I didn’t license it to StumbleAudio. As far as I can tell, neither did CDBaby (my digital distributor). So where are they getting their music from? In their “AboutUs” they claim to pay the artists whose music is played. If they aren’t pulling tracks from other services and they aren’t pulling them from CDBaby, that isn’t going to be true in my case.

Interestingly enough, if I put “Intonarumori” into their search box, I get no matches found.

Also, interesting is that their is very little info on their site and their WHOIS is private, so no way to contact them.

We’ll see what develops with this company, but they better get way more transparent very fast…

blast from the past – fellini outtakes videos

Rob from 29 Live has been posting videos from the show and I came across these from the Fellini Outtakes when we played on the show in 1998 (geez was that 10 years ago?). It’s kind of embarrassing to look at myself now, and I honestly had totally forgotten these songs. It is cool to see Ray again though. The band was me on bass, Eveline Mueller-Graf on drums, David Fullweiler on guitar and Luray Hodder singing.

Adios Crocodile, I’ll miss you…

The Crocodile Cafe in Seattle unexpectedly shut down over the weekend.

Word is filtering out quietly. Even the Croc website doesn’t have any info. It seems like they ran out of cash now that Peter Buck isn’t helping to pay the bills. This is truly a sad day for Seattle Music. The Croc was a great place to play and a great place to see live music. It was one of the last of the old generation clubs still around. As Belltown has yuppified around it, it was still a beacon of the live music that put this city on the map before Starbucks and Microsoft. While there are other venues in town, there are fewer and fewer places where bands can turn their amps to 11 and their audience can be close enough to them to see the expressions on their faces.

bummer.

[Update: 12/18/07]
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an article on  the Croc’s closing today.

Dear Radiohead and the rest of the music industry

I applaud you, Radiohead, for doing such a forward-thinking experiment with your distribution for InRainbows. However, you’ve unfortunately made sure that any data you receive from this experiment will be useless. Why? Well, because your website and ordering process are HORRIBLE. I had so many problems getting your website to work that I almost gave up. I’m now concerned that I paid for it at all. I’m scared for the safety of my personal data. Really, it is 2007, get a web designer who knows what they are doing.

Secondly, you also seem to have gone out of your way to make sure that the downloaded tracks themselves are sub-standard. I’d heard that the mp3s you are distributing were at 128 kBps, which would have been ridiculous. I see now that they are at 160 kBps which is just lame. How about 192 kBps or higher? I would have gladly paid $10 for this record at a higher bitrate. Given the bitrate you are distributing it at, I decided only to pay $5. Also, where is the cover art? How about tossing a jpg into the zip file with the album cover? Maybe a text file with some liner notes. Just because you aren’t shipping shiny plastic discs around, it doesn’t mean that all previous ideas with the album were bad.

Hey, here’s an idea. Give the album away for free at 128 kBps, charge a nominal fee ($5-$10) for a 200 kBps or higher bitrate.

How about an optional survey section at the end so that I could have told you this instead of posting it on my blog?

So Trent, and other artists considering following in Radiohead’s footsteps (although they weren’t the first to do this honestly), try downloading the tracks yourself and see how much easier it would be to do something much better for your listeners.

I may just do this with the next Intonarumori album…

Amazon’s new MP3 stores has some onerous restrictions

High quality non-DRMed MP3s cheaper than iTunes! Amazon’s store has really been getting a lot of people excited (including me). While they aren’t DRMing, they have created some pretty crazy legal restrictions in their terms of use. Is this a problem? Not really. Unless they start trying to enforce them.

Amazon’s contract says you “may copy, store, transfer and burn the Digital Content” for personal use. But then it goes further and specifies restrictions, saying you “agree that you will not redistribute, transmit, assign, sell, broadcast, rent, share, lend, modify, adapt, edit, sub-license or otherwise transfer or use the Digital Content.”

Concerned that I was being paranoid, I floated this past Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, a public-interest advocacy group.

He was surprised by the language and said it appears to enable record companies to pursue a breach of contract if, for instance, you loaned your mother an iPod containing MP3s bought from Amazon.

“It’s sort of like they’re adding another layer of restrictions potentially above and beyond what copyright law would restrict,” von Lohmann said.

Here’s the article from Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times.

LuRay Hodder Kuca: Rest In Peace – 1968-2007

Portland family of three dead in apparent murder-suicide – OregonLive.com: Breaking News Updates

This kicks me in the teeth. I heard about it when the Oregonian called to get my thoughts and, at first, I thought they must have the wrong Ray. I couldn’t believe it. I played with her for years in Vassily and The Fellini Outtakes. She was on the first Intonarumori record. I lost touch with her after she left Seattle. I didn’t know she got married. I didn’t know she had a child. I didn’t know that she moved back to the northwest.

This is all manner of fucked up.

If there is a memorial service for them please contact me here. There are a lot of friends and former band mates in Seattle that would want to be there.