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The only other candidate I liked was Jon Huntsman Jr. ... He also declared a "Dream Theater Day" in Utah.

Holy fucking shit, I looked it up: that's actually true, and it really is about the band Dream Theater. Didn't expect that from a Mormon governor! Awesome.

How do casual music fans find out, for example, that Dream Theater has a new album coming out in June? Do you think it's going to get a giant Wal-Mart display?

Yes, actually, it's possible; I've seen one of those. Dream Theater is much more mainstream than you think. When they came out with their Greatest Hits album, I remember seeing an in store display at (of all places) Circuit City. Their Train of Thought and Octavarium albums were also popular enough to make it into the top releases rack at Best Buy. There are still some albums by DT, though, that you won't find unless you know about their own label.

Still, I understand what you are saying. For small progressive metal acts, like Hourglass, getting the word out about a new album can be a challenge. Even for bands that are very popular worldwide, like Symphony X, there is hardly any traction in the U.S.

How about Images and Words

Word-of-Mouth and actual sampling were the only way I ever discovered music, especially since my tastes evolved beyond the confines of commercial radio as much as commercial radio devolved beneath the tastes of anyone who takes it seriously.

The Internet has made this much easier for me (as has the recent renaissance of progressive music and instrumental and compositional virtuosity.

Whereas in the late 80's I thought my days of discovering new music was limited to haunting used record stores and reading obscure buyer's guides, I now find that there is more information out there than I know what to do with.

This incredibly granular democratization is true for all forms of culture, whether it's music, movies, politics, TV, religion or any other bizarre interest you might find.

And as far as Red Dwarf goes, it's apples and oranges. Comparing the Red Dwarf books to the HHGG books isn't fair, you should probably compare the TV show to the original HHGG radio show. I enjoyed the books, but they're definitely different. Besides, I think Terry Pratchett's Discworld books are better than both.

Or you can spend $1000 on getting microphones and $0 dollars for the software.

Believe or it not it is possible to produce decent music cheaply. Equipment is another problem...a good eight track sound card (e.g. Midiman Delta 1010-LT) will run you around $250, more if you want something fancy (e.g. the Midiman Delta 1010 which has the connections in a rack mounted breakout box instead of the back of the computer--much easier to use). The cost of a reasonable workstation has gone down a lot--my Dual AthlonMP 2800+ machine cost around $2000 total (including all of the equipment I got to upgrade my old 500Mhz k6-2 that ended up in this box and my used 24" SGI Monitor).

The microphones are what kills me. I use my live sound stuff to record occasionally. An SM58 will run around $85 for vocals, an SM57 $75 or $80, and a set of drum mics...I have a cheap $140 set of Samson drum mics with a pair of weird overheads I got from a guy for $20 and it sounds OK but in reality they suck. A good set of Shure drum mics (for live sound) would cost around ... $600. Add a second kick drum (grr, stupid Brent) or a fourth tom and you'll add another $200. It's cheaper to buy a cheap drum machine than to get mics for a real drum :)

Recording demo quality material is cheap and easy nowadays if everyone in the band has mics for live performances. Recording studio quality stuff is still expensive for a bunch of college kids making subs all day. Sure, maybe the guy with a good tech job and lots of money to waste can do it but the people actually making music all day can't. The important part is that it is a lot cheaper now to maybe record at home and trick your friend in the college music program majoring to be a mastering engineer to master your recordings cheaply and then get some CDs pressed with a small booklet to send to the labels.

There are still labels that accept new music. Even the big five do--InsideOut is an imprint of EMI and carries only progressive rock/metal bands like Symphony X and Transatlantic. Relapse Records consists entirely of Grindcore (well, most people wouldn't think of Grindcore as music...), SPV carries a lot of metal now; everything from Hair to Black to Progressive. Koch records also has quite a few excellent bands (e.g. Opeth).

Lastly, life is not all about records. It is easy to book a tour if you don't care where you will be playing or whom you will be playing with. Hell, I am planning on doing vocals for Recently Vacated Graves on a two week Canadian tour at the end of July. Look at the lyrics...there are a week worth of shows booked so far for three weeks worth of time spent contacting venues. Every band should tour a few times before they release a real record (that's how people get to know who you are when you don't have a huge marketing machine behind you).

The above is based on the experiences of several friends who are in bands which are mildly successful (successful enough to be on tours, one in Europe and to have actually gotten signed to real labels with DIY demos).

P.S. Are you planning on going to a show on the Dream Theater and Yes tour? I'm afraid of how much those tickets will cost.

Ironically, on iTMS you can only buy them on a single-only basis and one or two tracks from each is not available.

But it still takes studio time and that costs money. Sure, you can use Pro Tools and a Mac to make a recording, but without a proper studio, natural instruments (drums, pianos, guitars) will sound like crap.

What the record label system does allow is people to make albums. I'm a Dream Theater fan. They are in the studio for months making their albums. Do you think they would be able to make that album without the record label advancing the costs? They only sell about 100,000 per album, and they tour to relatively small arenas (5000 capacity). Where do they make their money?

Damn you Rob! Have your party tomorrow night!
--

I read your interview from earlier this week on www.artistdirect.com in which you state that you are standing up for the right of the artist. You were not asked by Napster for permission to trade freely your material online. Napster.com is backed by big money and tries to play their side of the story as if they are doing something pro bono, for the good of all people, when they are really a corporation of paid employees hoping to strike it rich with an IPO.

I agree with on those points. I also applaud your efforts and look down the road and see that even though Napster is not having a significant market impact now, five years down the road it will, and it will take five years to get laws passed to protect musicians.

My concern regards the material that Napster is used to trade. It seems to me that if I turn on the radio, I regularly hear the same songs. For instance, I know that my local rock radio station (which sucks) is playing Marilyn Manson's "The Beautiful People" right now, for the 3rd time today. Before the hour's end, I'm confident they will play a song of yours that they play everyday, such as "Hero of the Day". They will probably follow with Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to make sure that they get their daily quota of 5 plays of that, then Santana's "Supernatural" for the 7th time today followed by Kid Rock.

Now, the radio station plays some of your songs, which I hear for free, but the selection is limited; they rarely play more than two songs off any given album. So I could tape a subset of your songs off the radio, albeit at somewhat lower quality than an MP3.

I do own one of your CD's, but my favorite band is Dream Theater, and I own every album, plus several bootlegs, plus several t- shirts. The band's drummer has his own web page on which he has placed concert recordings, demo recordings, and "material from back when the concert audiences were smaller than the band" in mp3 format.

My question is: once you win the lawsuit or at least make your point, do you plan on releasing some of your material in MP3 format? Since people can record a certain subset of your songs from the radio already, why not right now make those songs available in MP3 format from an official Metallica web page and/or encourage Napster users to only trade your songs that make radio cuts? That way, you have free publicity provided by the internet and Napster, but can still rest assured that people who like your music will still buy your CD's in order to have those songs that didn't make singles, and contributing to the recording costs and putting food on your table. This is similar to the philosophy of several software companies including Eudora, which releases a free, good email program with basic features, but charges for the advanced version with the most and best features.

Hypothetically, if there were a piece software that allowed people over the internet to freely trade those select songs that were normally played as radio singles (the songs played repeatedly on the radio), would Metallica release its radio singles and perhaps other special material to be traded by that mechanism?

I would also like to point out that I have both chosen to buy and chosen not to buy several bands' CD's based on songs I download via Napster, bands that I only learned of through internet mailing lists because they would never get air time on my local radio stations, radio stations which suck so bad, they suck the "metal up your a$$" (in 1980's Metallica terminology).

Signed,
Someone who believes free software and free music both have their places alongside commercial software and at-cost music.

Anyway, I gotta say something that was sort of left out of the interview. From reading what Paul said, it sounds pretty much like the LSDVD project is all about taking all the pieces related to a DVD player and glueing them togeather. This might be an initial goal, but let me assure you that the groups final goal is to produce a complete, stable, open sourced (as much as possible) DVD player for linux. This would include support for various MPEG decoder cards as well as a software decoding module (which is what I am working on now). The AC-3 audio encoding might have to be written by us as well, I'm not sure about the licensing issues with that.

One question that wasn't really asked was: What have we written so far? Well, we're attacking it from two different sides. 1) we have code to parse all the nasty VOB blocks and headers, but we can't get to the straight MPEG stream because of the encryption, so 2) we are working separatly on code to read the DVD implementation of the MPEG-2 standard. There's plenty of code, but it doesn't do much more than print numbers to the screen.

And what about the time frame? Well, the three of us are all in different places right now, and development is lagging because of it. But next month we all return back to the old skool and that's when the project will begin to bear fruit. We hope to have a usable (or at least demonstratable) program by April 2000 (after we've all dropped out of school or died because of sleep deprivation).

Carpe Diem,
-Dave Klint

new Dream Theater Oct 26. Giddy!