March 28, 2004

Waffles of Thought - Bleep. Weblog: Waffles of Thought Source: Bleep Link: http://blog.chadbrandos.com/archives/2004/03/28/bleep/ Music CDs are going to obsolete within the next five years. Today I have made my first digital music purchase at Bleep, the digital download store of Warp Records. I bought the the album ”Sheath”* by LFO. That’s eleven songs for just $9.99. Payment and downloading was quick and painless. It gave me the option of downloading each track individually or all at once in a contained .zip archive. Very nice. Bleep is set apart from other music download services such as iTunes and Napster because they do not use Digital Rights Management (DRM) on any of their tracks. Each song is encoded in a very high quality, variable bitrate MP3 file. More information about the lack of DRM and file quality is available in their FAQ.* They are being fair to their customers and to their artists. I am not limited to the number of CDs which I may burn. The music artists get 50% of profits after bandwidth and site maintanence fees. That’s quite a chunck when you consider that with iTunes, the artist may only get 10% of total price. I will no longer have to pay outrageous prices at the small, overpriced stores with little selection. Sure, Bleep won’t have it all, but with Aphex Twin, Plaid, Beans, Squarepusher, Boards of Canada, Red Snapper, Luke Vibert, and Nightmares on Wax, I will be busy for a while. *The Bleep site uses embedded iframes, which makes linking to an exact album or artist difficult. You’ll have to navigate in through their homepage if you want the full pages. [PubSub: DRM-Digital Rights Management] 8:48:54 PM     DeadBase is coming. As some of us well know, the Garteful Dead helped craft landscape when it comes to amateur recordings of live performances.  For years - the Dead allowed anybody to tape their shows. Rumor has it that there's a database of all those shows being uploaded and stored at the Internet Archives.  There's no official word, but lately these shows have been showing up in the RSS feed of all the recent Archive postings, which is public. So several times now I've clicked on these links, only to be told that music is not available. Bummer. Grateful Dead: 1979-12-26. Live at Oakland Auditorium Arena [Internet Archive] So here's an image to think about - a social net built up around this database of live recordings, with the ability to leave notes and annotate shows and even songs themselves.... all within the context of a private/public page kind of social network.  "this is when I learned to do the whirling dervish" "looking for the angel that made me a miracle and gave me two tickets out in the parking lot, I've been looking for you for 24 years." "oh man, I remember this show - it rocked....." "this is the show where my wife and I met" My friends (real friends) and I have been waiting YEARS for these kind of collaborative social network apps.  The DeadNet is already happening, so they'd eat this up.  But think of the common experiences rug that would be weaved with this sort fo social net.  Many people's lives changed while at Dead concerts or on the scene - and being able to have access to a definitive DeadBase - which would not just be a list of the songs played, but recordings of those shows, and sync that to a message board/social net.  Oh man, oh man. [Marc's Voice] 11:17:07 AM

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