1FPS|by David Chartier

I’m really digging Styrofoam’s music which I found on Amie Street, my favorite new digital music store. I bought Styrofoam’s “A Thousand Words” album first (when it cost only $3.36. now it’s up to $8) and loved it. Yesterday I bought “Nothing’s Lost” and it’s another overall hit. Favorite song so far is easily “Make it Mine,” which costs only 32¢ right now (Amie Street music prices start low and gradually increase according to popularity and recommendations. How cool is that?). A sample is embedded below:

The stepped and rolling melody, the accompanying piano, the hint of what I think is a flute, the dancing beat, and repetitive vocal melody all make for a fantastic, contemplative song. Be sure to listen all the way to the end where the song trails off and it’s just the piano, hints of the rhythm, and the trailing vocals. Love it.

I wrote about Amie Street, a DRM-free music shop, earlier this week, and I just made my first purchase, “A Thousand Words” by Styrofoam. After getting to know its site better, I have to say this company has some great ideas, and I really hope it goes places. The site is a pleasure to use, and incentives like “recommending” songs to earn credits for buying music, social features, and a pricing model that is friendly to both consumers and artists all top off a great store that I plan on spending more time discovering new music at. In fact, check this out:

Above you should see an embeddable Flash music player for the artist and album I bought. You can preview everything right here, as well as each song’s price which increases with popularity.

Keep up the great work Amie Street.

LOVE IN THIS CLUB from ( *_* ) on Vimeo.

Usher’s “Love in this Club” programmed into a Rock-a-Fire Explosion set. Hah.

via Ryan J. Budke

Here’s more info on what a Theremin actually is.

via Kaylow Media

That Ghosts film festival on YouTube that Trent Reznor announced for the band’s instrumental album of the same name already has nearly 200 submissions. As with anything like this on YouTube, not every video is high quality, but I took a look through to see a few that stood out. Videos here, here, and here were pretty interesting.

I’m excited to make some time to sit down and watch some of the submissions, though I must admit a part of me wishes NIN had created its own video pieces for the album as well. However, considering the amount of influence the band’s own creations would have had on a film festival like this, I’m glad they didn’t.

A couple weeks ago, Nine Inch Nails released “Ghosts,” the first 36-track installment of an instrumental project. The album is available in a number of formats including high-quality, DRM-free MP3 downloads, CDs, DVDs with rich audio arrangements, etc. It’s a pretty impressive offering as well as a great album if you are a big fan like I am of the dirty, industrial sounds of “Downward Spiral” and “The Fragile.”

Now, NIN just announced that they’re about to unleash a Ghosts film festival on YouTube (I would directly link the announcement itself, but there is apparently no permalink). Since the album is conceptually an “experiment with us using sound as a means to describe visuals,” a film festival is only a natural evolution of this project.

There’s no contest, though, and no prizes. It’s just another open experiment from one of the most prominent bands that are blazing the interactive trail for artists in the 21st centruy. NIN’s other ongoing projects like the release of full tracks in editable GarageBand formats and the remix.nin.com community are great examples of this.

More details will appear on NIN’s YouTube channel.

It isn’t about sharing or consumer’s supposed thirst for wild new business models. The problem boils down to the fact that, given the chance, most people‚Äîor in this case specifically, more than 80 percent of them‚Äîsimply will take what they want without paying for it. Reznor charged nothing more than five fucking dollars‚Äîfive‚Äîfor this album, and just 18 percent of the people who downloaded it could be bothered to pay for it. Says Reznor:

“I’m not sure what I was expecting, but that percentage‚Äîprimarily from fans‚Äîseems disheartening.” [From Ars Technica: Will fans pay? Reznor opens books on ‚ÄòNet music experiment]

The innovative new stuff that some artists like Radiohead are trying is wonderful and all, but these incredibly unique situations don’t mean shit to real world applications or trying to make money‚Äîlet alone a living‚Äîas a musician. Sure, Radiohead was able to make “more money than every other Radiohead album combined” from its In Rainbows experiment, but I dare any indie band who has even 1/100th the popularity of Radiohead to try the same experiment and come out with enough revenue to even pay for the food eaten during their time in the studio. Never mind money to pay for studio time (whether it’s a real studio or something home-brewed), instruments, rent, clothing… y’know, even just basic necessities.

For better or worse, Radiohead was only able to make a lot of money due to the popularity they’ve garnered after all the marketing and promotion that the labels did for them. Let’s also not forget all the free press they got from simply embarking on the experiment in the first place. How much press will the next mainstream band to do the same thing get? The one after that? Will the news vans show up when Billy’s Little Band from Nowhere, NE tries the smae thing?

The fact that Radiohead isn’t speaking about its numbers only leaves us with the statistics from Trent Reznor’s similar experiment, and I’ll bet real money Radiohead’s numbers were more or less the same. At least in the same ballpark.

People are jackasses, and they just want stuff for free. Piracy isn’t about some wild new business model or revolutionary social frontier. It’s about people who don’t give a shit and don’t want to pay for anything.

Period.

I would genuinely love to see what would happen if these same people’s paychecks were to start getting pirated. Hell, most of these people are probably the same ones to get their panties in a bunch when they see how much their government takes out for taxes.

Reznor’s right; this is a genuinely saddening problem, and one that isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon. Not while people are able to steal anonymously and continue not giving a shit without any repercussions.

I always liked this section because there’s a lot of great advertising out there that’s showcasing some great music. I’ve found artists that I genuinely love and follow via some of this stuff.

Check out the the full 41-song album.

William Shatner voiced the mayor in Lil’ Pimp (iTS link), apparently the first feature-length movie made in Flash. If it didn’t look so terrible I would already be downloading it; Shatner is otherwise doing surprisingly great work these days. His Has Been album that Ben Folds produced is fantastic.