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Anything Box Releases An Album To Share
cats writes "Anything Box, the synthpop band from the 80's who had a hit with 'Living in Oblivion' have released an introspective albumn in mp3 format under a 'freeware' style license. Anyone who has ever seen these guys perform know they are just a bunch of nice people trying to make ends meet as musicians. I had the opportunity to hang with Claude before his show in NJ at The Pipe back in 1998. He had some interesting asides about how the music business in general operates. They manipulate the artists' work as well as take huge cuts of musicians' profits. The album is available via download as one big zip file including artwork and is in mp3 format. Very cool."
So now does that make them a one download wonder?
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
but anonymous login to download the file is denied. Anyone know if this is just temp to deal with the /. effect?
A band from the 80's, just trying to make ends-meat, and you link them to slashdot. Hopefully the publicity will skyrocket whatever profits they can make, instead of just incuring heavy ISP costs.... looked like an independent site.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
You get what, an extra 1% compression? Sheesh.
Not my kind of music, but if you like it...this is they way we've been hoping thigs would start to go. If there's anyplace on their site where you can donate a couple bucks to help support the band, it would be a good idea.
We DO want to encourage this kind of thing, and the only way to do that is if they can make a little profit from it.
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
I don't know their music to say just how introspective their songs may be, but since this is a collection of previously released songs I think it's fair to say the word you're looking for is "retrospective."
There are less than 10 of us on Slashdot, right?
*cough*
Mirror, mirror, who's got the mirror.
But this has been available for 6 months. The first track is probably the best of the lot.
SNACKS ARE AWESOME
There has been some "free anti-war" music recently.
:)
http://www.marchofdeath.com/ & http://www.beastieboys.com/
Dont whine, its free!
When I hear the music I'll examine it as well and see how I can use it to create and mix with my own tunes.
This sort of thing much appreciated.
Could do with a few mirrors though eh? If only BITTORRENT/similar came with http/tcp-ip!?
A blog I run for the wealth
So... can I give them money then or do I just download it? Where is their ROI? Despite what many Slashdotters seem to think on these threads you can't make a (good) album just by clicking a mouse over some menus a couple of times, it does take time, skill and talent. Just like coding, even with point-and-clicky IDEs.
So maybe they don't want to make any money but I can just see a whole bunch of people using this as a precedent to force all musicians to give their work away for free.
Put it this way, if they choose to do it, that's great, but if they do it for a full-time job they are not earning money for as long as it takes to the record. Who pays the bills during that time?
This is exactly how software works, I don't see why it should be different for music.
Again, great that we can get this album for free, but that doesn't mean *every* album *must* be free as well.
Build your own website - full service homepage system your m
Tar is available on every modern computing platform
Unlike zip, tar is not bundled with Microsoft Windows ME and Microsoft Windows XP operating systems.
and doesn't waste time trying to compress uncompressible files.
Neither does zip -0.
Sometimes it's easy to forget there's more to packaging utilities than ZIP.
What other packaging format is supported by a program that comes bundled with the standard distribution of Microsoft Windows operating systems?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ok, I just downloaded six of their songs from another source(ends with lite)
Six songs should be enough to pass judgement.
Listening to this makes me feel like I am the loner in a John Hughes movie that has been forsaken by the popular crowd but I am about to become cool and prove that even the geek can get the girl/friends/car/LAID/ scholarship, papal dispensation.
It has the poppy vibe of the Pet Shop boys and the whininess of Morrisey after he has spent a night crying on his 'platonic' male friends shoulder(Michael Stipe, anyone else remember their fling, ewwwwww)
I am an 80s child and love music and went to many concerts(BauHaus, SugarCubes, Cure, Smiths, Escape Club) And Black Flag, Femmes, Dayglow Abortions, Vandals. Did the whole punk thing, and no the Offpsring and Green Day are not punk bands. And the Police were doing ska before most you them were born.
Cannot remember this band, I remember Kajagoogoo.
Just when I thought I would never hear another whiney voice like Morrisey, I listen to this and wow, I am back in a dark bar with with everyone all dressed in black eating X and grinding up on each other. Smoking marlboro lights and pretending I am Andrew Macarthy in Less than Zero.
Honestly it is better than the dance music you here in clubs today, it is soft on the ears and you can shake a leg to it. I could see being in a crowd and bopping to it, and maybe putting the moves on the old lady, kindy scmaltzy and sexy at the same time.
As for buying it. Dunno, as I write this and I am listening to it and it grows on me. I might order it, cause it brings back some memories, and every now and then the old krewe and I embark on nights out fueled by memories, music, and other remnants of the 80s, and it would be a good cd to slip in.
I give it an 8, cause you can dance to it. Denny Theriot, theres a man!
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
post a link on slashdot to a FTP site with a 10 user max? I'll be waiting months to download this.
ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved
An FTP authentication failure occurred while trying to retrieve the URL: ftp://ftp.anythingbox.com/pub/album.zip
Squid sent the following FTP command:
USER anonymous
and then received this reply
Sorry, the maximum number of allowed clients (10) already connected.
Your cache administrator is root.
Generated Mon, 24 Mar 2003 00:41:47 GMT by localhost.localdomain (Squid/2.4.STABLE7)
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
tar is far better for that kind of thing than zip
Even if 90 percent of users will see nothing but an error message? "Click the program you want to use to open 'foo.tar'. If the program is not listed, click Other."
Will I retire or break 10K?
...that basically, as I have been led to understand it, the record companies make virtually all of the money on record sales. The money made by the artists truly comes from doing tours and other live performances.
It seems to me that these guys are actually on to something. If they give the music away free, it does NOTHING to discourage anyone from coming to see them live. In fact, it goes a long way to encourage it with all the extra "good will" and generosity the band will be perceived with. THIS is the move bigger artists should experiment with at this point. I think it could at least be educational to test the notion.
Forget about secure digital formats and all that DRM crap, let's share the art and go see their shows if we love'm! Let the band publish their own CDs and sell'm themselves from their web site using paypal as a convenient means of payment.
Independent is the only way to keep the artists from being screwed, I think...
For a minute I thought this article was about an X-Box hack. Maybe one that would allow games from any other vendor to be played on the X-Box.
Guess not.
Huh?
Rather than trying to make their album available on their own site, they should have been led by their chief techie to the P2P networks. In fact, I suspect the folks at Sherman Networks would have loved to help promote this as another Legal use of Kazaa.
So, anyone who's already posted this around and has the song list to look for?
Well, kinda anyway. It was called Revolverlution. They put some tracks out, including the title track and a lot of other old loop tracks that you could sample and mix. There was some deadline, and at the end, Chuck D. and Flav listened to all the tracks and took a couple of them on the album. Not a bad disk, worth getting. If for no other reason the track "Gotta Give The Peeps What They Need" was banned from MTV for the the words "free Mumia and H. Rap Brown". MTV said no, too political. PE said no editing, it goes out as is. Then MTV said "well, if you cut out the word 'free' then it's cool". Chuck said you gotta be crazy telling a black man he can't use the word free, and it never will get aired.
They're very comfortable with the online stuff. They released their previous 2 albums online. They had a remix album called "Bring the Noise 2000". Def Jam didn't want to release it, didn't think there was a market. So Chuck and Flav said "hey we did the work already, let them hear the music" and released it on MP3, some server somewhere. Def Jam said no, said "even though we're not gonna release it, we OWN you, and you can't release it". Chuck got pissed, didn't like being owned by anyone, pulled the tracks (though a lot of people including me already had the tracks) and released the song "Swindler's Lust" with some pretty harsh elbows thrown at Russel Simmon's chest. This track and a few others got compiled to "There's a Poison Going On" which was released on MP3. Was $8 for a download, $10 if you wanted them to send you a disk - Chuck autographed those. Problem is, this was released on AtomicPop.com, which has since gone under. Was weird having an album you could get from Chuck and Flav for $8 (or like mine, for $10 with autograph) with all the money going to the artists, being sold at Virgin Megastore for $17.99, with maybe a buck going to them. No autograph even, such a gyp.
Check out http://www.BringTheNoise.com/ for some of the history and some live rap feeds. http://www.PublicEnemy.com/ well, for Public Enemy.
Didn't Information Society (Kurt Harland, et al) get them signed? I saw them open up for IS back in the mid 90's; and they were a really great band/show.
Haven't heard anything from InSoc in the past few years, but I'm glad that there are still some 80's synth-pop-pro-techno's still around making good music and advancing the music industry with advanced distribution methods....
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
In that case, if you claim that the operating system in use on 95+ percent of the audience's computers is not a "modern computing platform", then whether or not tar is bundled with a "modern computing platform" is not all that relevant now, is it?
.tar .
95+ ! Hah - more like 90% and falling.
Windows is marketshare in servers, desktops and developers keeps on sinking. It's will always be a somewhat viable choice for new-users, but the days of it's dominace are over.
Microsoft has since released Windows XP Home Edition based on the NT kernel, which has fixed many of these issues.
XP is a good effort against Microsoft's old operating systems, but against to other vendor's - it's a sad joke. Fuck - Apple makes a better Windows-compatable file-serving OS than the people who make Windows. That should tell you somthing.
No super-computer runs Windows.
No root domain server runs Windows.
No satelite runs Windows.
No large-scale database runs Windows.
No cave system runs Windows.
No militaty flight simulator run Windows.
No bank runs it's federal transations on Windows.
Of all the important thing that computers do - hardly anthing important runs Windows. There's a reason for this.
Sure, MS has most the desktop video-game market, most of the simple spread-sheet market and simple document creation market to itself - but nothing really of importance.
What percent of the band's audience uses a "decent OS" by your definition?
10%. One in 10. Enough, that they should have a
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Let's post an ftp site with a 10 user limit to a website known for sending hundreds of thousands of connections per minute.
I'd be willing to bet this link was even unavailable for those TotalSlashdot subscribers.
I'd love to hear this music. if anyone is mirroring the zip file, please let us know.
- Created in a boardroom by suits
- Sex symbolism more important than musicianship
- Underdog in engineered, artificial controversy
- Willing to change fundamental values to increase profit
- Cannot write their own music
- Inane, cliché-filled lyrics
- No innovation
What is bad for the music industry is that this makes my purchasing activities as limited as my listening activities. Because so many of today's alleged artists can answer "yes" to one or more of the above points, I simply don't buy very much music. I know many people who feel the same way. Certainly, we are outnumbered by consumers of the "fickle sheep" variety, but I do wonder how much money the industry loses because it refuses to address my wishes as a listener.One of my favorite quotes addresses this subject. It is from the Rush's "The Spirit of Radio" (words by Neal Peart (the drummer)).
I also like what Pink Floyd's "Have a Cigar" has to say about the music industry.Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Only on Slashdot...:
Only on Slashdot. This is why I read Slashdot.