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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
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
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.
There are less than 10 of us on Slashdot, right?
*cough*
Mirror, mirror, who's got the mirror.
There has been some "free anti-war" music recently.
:)
http://www.marchofdeath.com/ & http://www.beastieboys.com/
Dont whine, its free!
It makes sense to zip multiple uncompressible files in order to package related files. This simplifies the download process for someone who wants to receive all the .MP3 files and artwork files in a single download. This practice goes back to the early CP/M BBS days and such utilities as LU the "Library Utility."
ZIP utilities can also be used to control the presentation of a download. In a previous job, I packaged software updates for download. I often created self-extracting archives with an explicit recommended decompression path. This made life a lot easier for the person downloading the file. This also made it easier support person who had to walk someone through a software upgrade.
Manually FTPing in reveals that there is a 10-user limit to the server.
What are the odds you or I will be one of them?
That's what I thought. I'll be back in a few days.
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
...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?
I don't believe windows come with a zip utility.
As the parent post mentioned, zip functionality is bundeled with WinXP and WinME. It's not a separate utility, but its integrated in Windows Explorer. In explorer, zip files open as normal directories (and by right clicking files in explorer you can zip them).
So you don't need WinZip to handle zip files. But Windows doesn't know about tar or gzip files, so you still have to use WinZip for those.