One Post Fits All

I never rose from the haze, so one post to get some announcements over with and them I’m off to work and maybe write in a more private place. Fortunately I have lunch with one friend and coffee with another today, so that will distract me from my farce of a life.

  1. I had a lot of personal emails in my inbox this morning, and my emotive response to the love tells me two things: I should stay offline for longer than 12 hours at a time more often, and I was wrong when I said this online thing isn’t community. It is. Not so much it is as it is another public space, a meeting place, a civil hall that transcends time and distance. And honestly, with all my best friends in other cities scattered all over, I don’t know how this globetrotting Foreign Service thing would be possible without it. I guess that’s why FSO’s in the 50’s had, like, 7 kids and very insular families.

  2. This is totally hillarious (via scott) i.e.:

God Fearing Fundamentalist Baptist Customers who bought this book also bought:

Christ-Related Auctions, Jesus Shop sellers and our other Christian stores recommend:

Customers who bought titles by Pastor Deacon Fred also bought titles by these authors:

  1. mp3.com, which has hinted at its {not to sound like George W. or anything} evilness in the past with some policy changes and really, really nasty Flash popup ads, finally proved that it has indeed sold its soul to the devil. After tomorrow, mp3.com artists not paying for the “premium” service will be limited to 3 active songs on their mp3.com pages. So today I will be downloading a lot of songs that up until now I’ve streamed, knowing that I could get the CD’s either from mp3.com or from the artists’ distributers later. I suggest if you have any fav mp3.com artists that you do the same. (I have to prioritize, my top choices will definately be trancenden, bill mallonee, rocking horse winner, and the innocence mission.

There are quite a few problems with this ploy of theirs…First, I just saw this, they brag of Register here and get access to over 1,500,000 songs and more! I guess they’re looking forward to a more humble {guessing} 100,000-500,000.

Second, they are going to lose ad revenue, which is obviously a big part of their budget, now that we have less reason to visit and hunt around their site, knowing that most artists will only have three songs on their page.

Third, they will disenfranchise artists, such as myself. I am going to have to move my music page to IUMA (whom have always been more artist-friendly) (I already have a page there, but I only ever got one song up because I was already entrenched over at mp3.com), and I doubt I’ll have a reason to return, for any reason, to mp3.com. Even if they change their policy, I won’t know. I’ll have long since forgotten about their site. I was going to do my next CD project through them, but now I’ll have to move to some other service (cafepress is starting to do print-on-demand CD’s, DVD’s, and books). I really believed in mp3.com and what they were doing and the services they were providing (doing my CD through them wasn’t going to be free, obviously…I’m not saying charging for certain services is bad at all), but this is the straw that has broken the proverbial camel’s back. They’ve betrayed their original audience and clientelle, turned on their mission of helping unsigned, independent musicians. They’ve let the bastards that sued them a couple years back (I think it was the RIAA, I can’t remember off the top of my head, point is it was the industry) not only defeat them, but assimilate them.

Finally, I can’t see any financial reason to do this, besides to coerce people into signing up for the “premium” service! Surely the tiny bit of bandwidth that artists like myself use up because of our 10 songs isn’t more significant than from 3 songs! Storage is cheap, we know that, and in fact they are not removing the songs from their servers, they are just limiting the number on the artists’ pages. Even so, I’ll be removing my songs from their server before I find the intellectual material itself somehow co-opted by the Machine.

Whew. Well, it was fun while it lasted.

  1. I’m trying to write better (XHTML) markup in my posts, and I can do <em> instead of <i> but <strong> is just too many more letters than <b>.

  2. I decided this morning that if I do a full-length CD for The Americana Project, that I will do my version of OtR’s Latter Days (awesome new intro image at their site). I’m also going to start covering their Rhapsodie, for reasons obvious to me at this time.

Cheers. If you got this far, thanks for listening. I promised myself to not post again today. I’m not even going to go look at my feeds. Time to DO something.

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