"Thursday, March 06, 2003 12:34 PM
RE: addl info for transcript rrequest
Your student ID # is your SS#.
When requesting transcripts:
Full Name
Purdue Student Identification number
Date of Birth
Dates of Attendance at Purdue
Where you would like the transcript sent
The number of transcripts being requested(maximum 10 per request)
Your written legal signature
Our fax number is 765-494-0570, or you can mail in a request.
"
gee
my first job was during the xmas season donkey kong country for snes came out. i worked for nintento as a demonstrator inside a toysRus. i beat the game the first day, and had 45 more on my feet to go. got to wear a fun vest and hat.
I don't even play the game, but am always making jokes about how I or one should ravage the environment in context. ex: "GTA Downtown Naperville. " "GTA Kmart."
Independent music distribution
by Joe Hahn
In the five years I worked with K-Rad, I masterminded the majority of different methods we came up with to distribute our music. Initially we had some friends at Reckless Records and spread out 100 copies of the first K-Rad album, each of which had a different name (re-released as "Lithograph"). They were constructed of lithographed paperboard that we colored with Pantone markers, and then lined the insides with strips of old T-Shirts. The CD-Rs were burned by a third party. Things were still 1x and 2x back then. Overall, they took forever to make, confused a lot of people, gave us somewhat of a name with no other info to relate, applied some mystery to "K-Rad", and made about zero dollars. It was a lot of fun, though.
Our next step up was getting our own cd-burner. I came up with an idea to spray-paint the CDs and jewel cases with stencils, or objects used as stencils. Over time we had faster burners, vellum inserts, and had the process pretty refined to which we could make up to thirty CDs a day, but it was still very time consuming to burn each one by hand, one at a time. Fans were very excited about the custom spray jobs, but over time, it became too difficult for us to keep up the pace (which didn't increase much) . Also, spray-paint is pretty expensive, especially for the better brands, and often CDs would be ruined by getting a little spray-paint on the bottom which became discouraging. I remember the morning we got a box in the mail a made the jump from 2x to 8x CD burning. "Now we can make thousands of them!!"
While we were making the spray-painted albums, we had a few methods of distribution. We could sell directly from our website using Paypal, or people could get our info and send cash, checks or money orders. I still have some currency from the Yukon that "Currency Exchange" won't exchange, as well as a money order from Sao Paulo that my bank keeps sending back to me. We also were on consignment at a bunch of Chicago record stores, and would distro 20-50 at a time around the world with Choked Distribution who was also in Chicago (www.choked.com). These methods worked pretty well, but still it became difficult to keep manufacturing and painting all the CDs. Still, although we were becoming pretty popular, no actual money was being made. It was all going into the process of makng them: Ordering the CDs and jewelcases, driving to Home Depot in rush-hour to buy Krylon, cruising out to the burbs to get the correct vellum. The best option beyond that was to do a real CD rather than handmade CD-R, but most places will only let people do 1000 at a time, and we were more into doing smaller runs of all different things, because we constantly made new music. We did however press 1000 records on our own, and Someoddpilot Records (www.someoddpilotrecords.com) did a real CD release of our latest album, "Deli Mood Spot".
Both the SOPR CD and our 12" took 300% longer to get done than expected. About 1.5 years average. By the time the product was ready, the music was ancient to us. However, having the record to sell encouraged online sales of our handmade CD-Rs. I am not sure how the SOPR CD "Deli Mood Spot" is doing, because I have not yet seen $$ for any sold so far. Around the time of the SOPR release, other members of K-Rad decided to stop selling CD-Rs because they were afraid it was too inferior of a product, and led to people thinking we were not a "real band."
Amidst all the spray painted CD sales (1998-2001), I also put together some different ways to distribute our music online.
Aside from our website, which at the time for K-Rad was my domain www.protman.com , but later swapped to its own www.padk-rad.com (which also involved a lot of turmoil with the www.k-rad.com guy who runs a site for Mazda RX-7 tweaking), the first way we widely distributed our music online was an FTP I set up at my job with 21stCentury (Late 1999). It had free, anonymous access to MP3 versions of about 200 of our various tracks and live shows. It was especially cool to have the live recordings up there, because we weren't really inclined to release those as albums due to audio fidelity issues and misc screwups, but fans typically preferred the live recordings over the albums. The server had a ton of bandwidth allotted to it, and it created a frenzy of high speed downloads. These were all people that knew about K-Rad and had an active interest in getting the music.
We were a little concerned about all these people being able to get all the music for free, even though it was a lower quality format than 16bit 44khz uncompressed, but whatever, we were "K-Rad". Eventually I got canned from 21stCentury for being insubordinate and the high speed FTP was gone. This was also around the same time Napster was becoming most popular and other p2p / gnutella software was coming to be.
At the pad (networked apartment we all lived in) we always had cable modem from one provider or another. We had low-bandwidth clips of music on our website to encourage people to an FTP we had set up there, but its bandwidth was quite low compared to the previous, and people became less impressed with it. Most of the fans we had downloaded everything already anyway. However, we did make a strong effort to keep recording and putting our live shows on it for download. This was still all for free, hoping to encourage people to buy the CD-Rs of our sprayed albums.
At a later job that allowed me a high speed connection, I set up another FTP, but this one had a public and a private section. I set it up so people could pay $1.11 a month for user/password access to the private section. The public section had all our live recordings, and some misc. tracks, while private section had all our official albums, some other special tracks, as well as everything in the public. About 10 people went for it. Several of them cancelled their subscription after a month because they just queued it all up and mirrored it in a matter of days or hours. Some cancelled over time for whatever reason. Some still pay. The concept intended more to keep updating it with new tracks to keep the pay access valuable, but K-Rad's creative process had slowed down a bit.
I also did some guerilla marketing from that server using some different Gnutella clients like Bearshare and Limewire. We actually renamed a bunch of the K-Rad tracks to the same Artist_Album_Title_Track format as many of the current uber-pop hits, applied our own contact info to the ID3 tags, and cause a bunch of unsuspecting people to download and advertently yet inadvertently wind up hearing K-Rad music. They downloaded gigs and gigs which was many times more than the FTP logged. After a while, I put it to an end, because I felt sort of dirty and foolish, but it seemed to be somewhat effective though some people emailed us aggressive complaints about faking them out.
We did keep everything on Gnutella with the real K-Rad track names. The most popular tracks were the ones with insinuating words in the titles like "gay" or "piss". Those were typically Mark or Chris's tracks.
The subscription thing sort of fizzled so I tried my best to just keep the FTP+Gnutella and also Soulseek (www.slsk.org) online and free with a donation box in plain view on the website. Bandwidth isn't free and I had to restrict it some so people wouldn't keep the pipe constantly pegged. It would make my supervisor mad when he would see the little bandwidth graph as a big green rectangle rather than some nice wavy lines and blips.
Once the real K-Rad CD came out on SOPR they decided to kill off the CDRs completely. Around the same time and for additional reasons, I quit K-Rad and proceeded as my pre-K-Rad pseudonym, "Protman". It's not as cool of a name as K-Rad, but it has much sentiment dating back to when I first got "into music".
Toward the end of K-Rad, I had invented an online application called the "Ghettoblaster". The ghettoblaster consists of a database of 24kbps 22khz mono mp3s that can be randomly streamed from a website without any special player or plug-in. The sound quality is pretty low, hence "Ghettoblaster", but a lot of people would tune into it and let it run all day like a radio. If you leave the browser open, it will just play random tracks from a selection of hundreds. Some are completed pop tracks, some are just ideas or bits of audio. Now, as Protman, I am integrating more functionality into it. Each track-name will link to a database entry that will give more info about the track, as well as a link to album it's on, which will later link to an online store catalog. Not all tracks are officially on any Protman releasable album, and there will be about 400 to choose from. Oy vey. (*Joe groans about the audio mastering work he has placed ahead of himself.) I plan to make the unreleased tracks available somehow. The best way to implement that is to allow people to compile their own CDs, but it would need to be automated somehow to keep it fast and cheap.
What I hope to eventually have with this is a complete catalog of all worthy released and unreleased music, that the end-user can poke around in, be impressed with, and then wind up ordering a CD or two directly from the site. I own some cd-duplication equipment that allows me to automate the burning and printing process, and I also do some custom packaging. The new process is nowhere near as time-consuming as making K-Rad's spraypainted CD-Rs, and just the fact that I have automated the burning process kills 90% of the tedium, so I may opt for other more creative printing/packaging on certain projects. The printer is a thermal process that winds up looking like dual or mono screen print, and can be done on any type/color of CD-R (www.donerecords.com).
I do make all of my music available for download from Soulseek which allows me to interact with the people downloading it. I think FTP is at its end for now. FTP was kind of evil, because I had no real idea what was happening on the server without messing around with the logs, and it provided no way to communicate with the users. Soulseek is cool, because I can get feedback about the music, announce new things to people on the list, chat with people about what they like or recommend tracks to them. Sometimes users have questions like "What was that one track where it like sounds like and like.." I am happy to oblige, and encourage them to get the album. There are also some other sharing apps I want to try out like KDX (www.haxial.com) which is totally cross platform (Mac, PC, Linux), and possibly another purely user-based FTP for special people.
In my current mode, I don't really intend to try to do any consignment or mini-distributions. I feel I am too busy at my job and with other projects to deal with a third party to sell and promote my music. For now I just want to sell to people directly at my shows and/or from the website. This also lets me sell them for $5/ea rather than the $10-$15 they would go for in stores. I saw the K-Rad SOPR release for sale online for $29. Want the MP3s? Check Soulseek.
In the the past 5 years, many different distro approaches have become more viable while others have been murdered or died on their own.
I think a problem with most people's approach and arguments about they new ways people can share(steal) and distribute music is that they consider the artist as a single type of object that is homogenous throughout the industry. At the most they exclaim two; the super duper pop-icon, and the little guy who just wants to be heard. However, there are dozens of types that all rely on different ways to try and profit from their talents. Some different ways to make money with music are live shows, commercial scores (ie. Videogames, tv, radio, websites, rollercoasters), and cd/record sales. Some artists thrive on playing live gigs at a lot of small places, others less frequent at larger venues. Some are strictly studio musicians that never play live and rely completely on commercial gigs or cd/record sales. A lot of older jazz artists that I have seen perform at the Green Mill have no records to sell, but they play out all the time. I doubt many of them even have computers, but then take a handful of home-studio electro-pop artists, and you'll find their music all over the net, none of it for sale, and they may have never even left their basements except to get a taco or something. Then there's Britney Spears and a mariachi band killing the Aragon, and the Elvis Christmas album at Target, and the pre-release of Drukqs on Kazaa in 320kbps mp3. Also, what works at first for a startup-band may not be suitable later on. As K-Rad, initially the FTP was great to spread our sound around, but as we became more popular, we disabled it because we feared its access was too free and it's availability was too high. Some fans wound up disappointed. How can artists make a good transition from "free trial" mode to "pay $29 for our import CD" mode? Should that transition be made at all?
Next issue, I am going to document what some other bands have gone through, get their opinions on the state of music sharing, and bounce off of them some of the new middleman distro attempts a few larger commercial organizations are attempting to get off the ground. Some combine the wasteland of MP3.com with an e-comm gumball machine where the gumballs lose their flavor after a few chews. Others are more promising and help one to feel less mortal.
My previous email host banned and deleted services for my entire domain, because I forwarded a spam to Spamcop, and one of the technicial recipients of the Spamcop fwd read ME as the spammer and not the one complaining about the spam.
If you are a homeowner, and your kids have an underage drinking party while you are on vacation, its the parents paying the fine and the parents' names in the local paper.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.protman.com/p00p/oops.jpg
My podiatrist is named Frank Zappa.
They fail to mention that its native resolution is 640x480.
We Use Boogers
I don't feel tardy.
www.ghetto-blaster.com
what If I need to replace some tattered monopoly money?
and release it on the net.
cancerantibody
gnarly little solar vehicle. designs havent seemed to change much for many years.
Right on, but who now should star in the sequel?
I'm about 3mi from there. I rule!! Great for xmas shopping.
I was going to buy it, but didn't because I heard about the boot sector nonsense.
"Thursday, March 06, 2003 12:34 PM RE: addl info for transcript rrequest Your student ID # is your SS#. When requesting transcripts: Full Name Purdue Student Identification number Date of Birth Dates of Attendance at Purdue Where you would like the transcript sent The number of transcripts being requested(maximum 10 per request) Your written legal signature Our fax number is 765-494-0570, or you can mail in a request. " gee
my first job was during the xmas season donkey kong country for snes came out. i worked for nintento as a demonstrator inside a toysRus. i beat the game the first day, and had 45 more on my feet to go. got to wear a fun vest and hat.
I don't even play the game, but am always making jokes about how I or one should ravage the environment in context. ex: "GTA Downtown Naperville. " "GTA Kmart."
im sure being inside an air-lock re and depressurizing 10-times-per-second will change one's mood.
Independent music distribution by Joe Hahn In the five years I worked with K-Rad, I masterminded the majority of different methods we came up with to distribute our music. Initially we had some friends at Reckless Records and spread out 100 copies of the first K-Rad album, each of which had a different name (re-released as "Lithograph"). They were constructed of lithographed paperboard that we colored with Pantone markers, and then lined the insides with strips of old T-Shirts. The CD-Rs were burned by a third party. Things were still 1x and 2x back then. Overall, they took forever to make, confused a lot of people, gave us somewhat of a name with no other info to relate, applied some mystery to "K-Rad", and made about zero dollars. It was a lot of fun, though. Our next step up was getting our own cd-burner. I came up with an idea to spray-paint the CDs and jewel cases with stencils, or objects used as stencils. Over time we had faster burners, vellum inserts, and had the process pretty refined to which we could make up to thirty CDs a day, but it was still very time consuming to burn each one by hand, one at a time. Fans were very excited about the custom spray jobs, but over time, it became too difficult for us to keep up the pace (which didn't increase much) . Also, spray-paint is pretty expensive, especially for the better brands, and often CDs would be ruined by getting a little spray-paint on the bottom which became discouraging. I remember the morning we got a box in the mail a made the jump from 2x to 8x CD burning. "Now we can make thousands of them!!" While we were making the spray-painted albums, we had a few methods of distribution. We could sell directly from our website using Paypal, or people could get our info and send cash, checks or money orders. I still have some currency from the Yukon that "Currency Exchange" won't exchange, as well as a money order from Sao Paulo that my bank keeps sending back to me. We also were on consignment at a bunch of Chicago record stores, and would distro 20-50 at a time around the world with Choked Distribution who was also in Chicago (www.choked.com). These methods worked pretty well, but still it became difficult to keep manufacturing and painting all the CDs. Still, although we were becoming pretty popular, no actual money was being made. It was all going into the process of makng them: Ordering the CDs and jewelcases, driving to Home Depot in rush-hour to buy Krylon, cruising out to the burbs to get the correct vellum. The best option beyond that was to do a real CD rather than handmade CD-R, but most places will only let people do 1000 at a time, and we were more into doing smaller runs of all different things, because we constantly made new music. We did however press 1000 records on our own, and Someoddpilot Records (www.someoddpilotrecords.com) did a real CD release of our latest album, "Deli Mood Spot". Both the SOPR CD and our 12" took 300% longer to get done than expected. About 1.5 years average. By the time the product was ready, the music was ancient to us. However, having the record to sell encouraged online sales of our handmade CD-Rs. I am not sure how the SOPR CD "Deli Mood Spot" is doing, because I have not yet seen $$ for any sold so far. Around the time of the SOPR release, other members of K-Rad decided to stop selling CD-Rs because they were afraid it was too inferior of a product, and led to people thinking we were not a "real band." Amidst all the spray painted CD sales (1998-2001), I also put together some different ways to distribute our music online. Aside from our website, which at the time for K-Rad was my domain www.protman.com , but later swapped to its own www.padk-rad.com (which also involved a lot of turmoil with the www.k-rad.com guy who runs a site for Mazda RX-7 tweaking), the first way we widely distributed our music online was an FTP I set up at my job with 21stCentury (Late 1999). It had free, anonymous access to MP3 versions of about 200 of our various tracks and live shows. It was especially cool to have the live recordings up there, because we weren't really inclined to release those as albums due to audio fidelity issues and misc screwups, but fans typically preferred the live recordings over the albums. The server had a ton of bandwidth allotted to it, and it created a frenzy of high speed downloads. These were all people that knew about K-Rad and had an active interest in getting the music. We were a little concerned about all these people being able to get all the music for free, even though it was a lower quality format than 16bit 44khz uncompressed, but whatever, we were "K-Rad". Eventually I got canned from 21stCentury for being insubordinate and the high speed FTP was gone. This was also around the same time Napster was becoming most popular and other p2p / gnutella software was coming to be. At the pad (networked apartment we all lived in) we always had cable modem from one provider or another. We had low-bandwidth clips of music on our website to encourage people to an FTP we had set up there, but its bandwidth was quite low compared to the previous, and people became less impressed with it. Most of the fans we had downloaded everything already anyway. However, we did make a strong effort to keep recording and putting our live shows on it for download. This was still all for free, hoping to encourage people to buy the CD-Rs of our sprayed albums. At a later job that allowed me a high speed connection, I set up another FTP, but this one had a public and a private section. I set it up so people could pay $1.11 a month for user/password access to the private section. The public section had all our live recordings, and some misc. tracks, while private section had all our official albums, some other special tracks, as well as everything in the public. About 10 people went for it. Several of them cancelled their subscription after a month because they just queued it all up and mirrored it in a matter of days or hours. Some cancelled over time for whatever reason. Some still pay. The concept intended more to keep updating it with new tracks to keep the pay access valuable, but K-Rad's creative process had slowed down a bit. I also did some guerilla marketing from that server using some different Gnutella clients like Bearshare and Limewire. We actually renamed a bunch of the K-Rad tracks to the same Artist_Album_Title_Track format as many of the current uber-pop hits, applied our own contact info to the ID3 tags, and cause a bunch of unsuspecting people to download and advertently yet inadvertently wind up hearing K-Rad music. They downloaded gigs and gigs which was many times more than the FTP logged. After a while, I put it to an end, because I felt sort of dirty and foolish, but it seemed to be somewhat effective though some people emailed us aggressive complaints about faking them out. We did keep everything on Gnutella with the real K-Rad track names. The most popular tracks were the ones with insinuating words in the titles like "gay" or "piss". Those were typically Mark or Chris's tracks. The subscription thing sort of fizzled so I tried my best to just keep the FTP+Gnutella and also Soulseek (www.slsk.org) online and free with a donation box in plain view on the website. Bandwidth isn't free and I had to restrict it some so people wouldn't keep the pipe constantly pegged. It would make my supervisor mad when he would see the little bandwidth graph as a big green rectangle rather than some nice wavy lines and blips. Once the real K-Rad CD came out on SOPR they decided to kill off the CDRs completely. Around the same time and for additional reasons, I quit K-Rad and proceeded as my pre-K-Rad pseudonym, "Protman". It's not as cool of a name as K-Rad, but it has much sentiment dating back to when I first got "into music". Toward the end of K-Rad, I had invented an online application called the "Ghettoblaster". The ghettoblaster consists of a database of 24kbps 22khz mono mp3s that can be randomly streamed from a website without any special player or plug-in. The sound quality is pretty low, hence "Ghettoblaster", but a lot of people would tune into it and let it run all day like a radio. If you leave the browser open, it will just play random tracks from a selection of hundreds. Some are completed pop tracks, some are just ideas or bits of audio. Now, as Protman, I am integrating more functionality into it. Each track-name will link to a database entry that will give more info about the track, as well as a link to album it's on, which will later link to an online store catalog. Not all tracks are officially on any Protman releasable album, and there will be about 400 to choose from. Oy vey. (*Joe groans about the audio mastering work he has placed ahead of himself.) I plan to make the unreleased tracks available somehow. The best way to implement that is to allow people to compile their own CDs, but it would need to be automated somehow to keep it fast and cheap. What I hope to eventually have with this is a complete catalog of all worthy released and unreleased music, that the end-user can poke around in, be impressed with, and then wind up ordering a CD or two directly from the site. I own some cd-duplication equipment that allows me to automate the burning and printing process, and I also do some custom packaging. The new process is nowhere near as time-consuming as making K-Rad's spraypainted CD-Rs, and just the fact that I have automated the burning process kills 90% of the tedium, so I may opt for other more creative printing/packaging on certain projects. The printer is a thermal process that winds up looking like dual or mono screen print, and can be done on any type/color of CD-R (www.donerecords.com). I do make all of my music available for download from Soulseek which allows me to interact with the people downloading it. I think FTP is at its end for now. FTP was kind of evil, because I had no real idea what was happening on the server without messing around with the logs, and it provided no way to communicate with the users. Soulseek is cool, because I can get feedback about the music, announce new things to people on the list, chat with people about what they like or recommend tracks to them. Sometimes users have questions like "What was that one track where it like sounds like and like.." I am happy to oblige, and encourage them to get the album. There are also some other sharing apps I want to try out like KDX (www.haxial.com) which is totally cross platform (Mac, PC, Linux), and possibly another purely user-based FTP for special people. In my current mode, I don't really intend to try to do any consignment or mini-distributions. I feel I am too busy at my job and with other projects to deal with a third party to sell and promote my music. For now I just want to sell to people directly at my shows and/or from the website. This also lets me sell them for $5/ea rather than the $10-$15 they would go for in stores. I saw the K-Rad SOPR release for sale online for $29. Want the MP3s? Check Soulseek. In the the past 5 years, many different distro approaches have become more viable while others have been murdered or died on their own. I think a problem with most people's approach and arguments about they new ways people can share(steal) and distribute music is that they consider the artist as a single type of object that is homogenous throughout the industry. At the most they exclaim two; the super duper pop-icon, and the little guy who just wants to be heard. However, there are dozens of types that all rely on different ways to try and profit from their talents. Some different ways to make money with music are live shows, commercial scores (ie. Videogames, tv, radio, websites, rollercoasters), and cd/record sales. Some artists thrive on playing live gigs at a lot of small places, others less frequent at larger venues. Some are strictly studio musicians that never play live and rely completely on commercial gigs or cd/record sales. A lot of older jazz artists that I have seen perform at the Green Mill have no records to sell, but they play out all the time. I doubt many of them even have computers, but then take a handful of home-studio electro-pop artists, and you'll find their music all over the net, none of it for sale, and they may have never even left their basements except to get a taco or something. Then there's Britney Spears and a mariachi band killing the Aragon, and the Elvis Christmas album at Target, and the pre-release of Drukqs on Kazaa in 320kbps mp3. Also, what works at first for a startup-band may not be suitable later on. As K-Rad, initially the FTP was great to spread our sound around, but as we became more popular, we disabled it because we feared its access was too free and it's availability was too high. Some fans wound up disappointed. How can artists make a good transition from "free trial" mode to "pay $29 for our import CD" mode? Should that transition be made at all? Next issue, I am going to document what some other bands have gone through, get their opinions on the state of music sharing, and bounce off of them some of the new middleman distro attempts a few larger commercial organizations are attempting to get off the ground. Some combine the wasteland of MP3.com with an e-comm gumball machine where the gumballs lose their flavor after a few chews. Others are more promising and help one to feel less mortal.
My previous email host banned and deleted services for my entire domain, because I forwarded a spam to Spamcop, and one of the technicial recipients of the Spamcop fwd read ME as the spammer and not the one complaining about the spam.
I want to install it on purpose now to see what happens.
it would be 15sec long.
May I use the M$ JVM if I like?
If you are a homeowner, and your kids have an underage drinking party while you are on vacation, its the parents paying the fine and the parents' names in the local paper.
Metroid Prime will give me a boner way before anything gratuitous like Eve Adams or GTAnnnnn.
so.. let us say that 1 out of every 9,000,000 users of email are libiterian homicidal psychopaths just waiting for a cause..