Believe it or not, about half of my music income comes from iTunes (available when you sell CDs at CDBaby). I don't claim to understand that one. I do hear from a lot of people who say "I want to support your music, but I didn't want/need a physical copy, so I bought it on iTunes." And more and more, people are discovering my music without ever even seeing my website. One big vehicle is iLike, which is an iTunes sidebar plugin. You might be listening to Death Cab, and over on the right side, you'll see a "Hey, check out this similar song from Josh Woodward" link. It's one of the best promotional vehicles available to indie musicians, and is highly recommended.
I've got a general overview of my equipment and production process, as well as specific production notes for every individual song (see the "Read More" links). It's kinda my attempt at an "open source" model for music. The new model for indie music is great, but it's really hard to learn to produce on your own, so I always appreciate it when other musicians I admire share their dirty little production secrets.
"Free does not work long term"? Define "doesn't work". I'm an indie musician with over 130 songs and 5 albums, and they're all available free as high-quality MP3 downloads from my website. Because of this, I've had over a million MP3 downloads from my site alone, and iLike reports that I'm on one out of every 140 of the iPods they track.
Granted, I'm barely breaking even financially when you factor in the cost of my gear, but why is everyone obsessed with measuring success with dollars? I'm probably happier with my music "career" than most major label artists, mainly because I'm doing it totally on my own terms, and yet people are hearing it and enjoying it. I have no doubt that my music wouldn't have spread beyond my immediate friends if it weren't for releasing it as Creative Commons.
It's not a big deal that I have to work a day job to pay the bills. You'd be surprised how many signed artists have to do the same.
Buy green (unroasted) coffee beans (see SweetMarias.com). They stay fresh for at least a year until roasted. Yirgacheffe is my favorite.
Roast them yourself with a popcorn popper. Since you're using quality coffee, you can roast much lighter than Charbucks.
Grind the beans coarse with a burr grinder right before brewing.
Brew one mug at a time using a french press. There's no filter to strip out the "body" of the coffee. It's rich and sweet, but not bitter.
I've been doing this since 2002. The only disadvantage is that every coffee you drink in cafés and restaurants tastes like junk after you get spoiled with this.
I'm using two computers: one Linux and one Windows. I have them hooked up to a KVM and a 21" CRT. On both, I use virtual desktops.
Is anyone out there using two monitors for two computers, but with the ability to juggle them between the two screens? In other words, is there a super-KVM switch that can do AA/AB/BB?
As much as I'd love to speculate that it's part of some grand evil scheme, the website's probably just got a DDoS attack running against it from mostly outside the US, and this was the quickest way to keep the site online.
As much as I'm a die-hard Linux fan, there's no way I'd consider ditching Windows for recording my music. It's all about the software, and Linux just isn't there. Even if there were a reasonable and easy-to-use multitracker, all of the pro effects are for Win/Mac.
And don't even get me started the absurdity of using tiny 2G memory sticks to record on, and doing it to solve a problem that doesn't exist (hard drive noise). I record a lot of acoustic stuff with very expensive mics and preamps in the same room as my computers, and I don't even bother shutting down my Linux box when I record. It's just not loud enough to worry about if you're set up a few feet away.
Sounds like you had some crappy ad copy. They don't ban you for "too few clicks", they ban you for "too low of a clickthrough percentage". They'd rather show an ad with more people clicking it, rather than waste their ad space on something that nobody ever clicks. Write something more relevant and you'll get a whole lot better than 0.5% (some of mine are in the 10% CTR neighborhood).
You're confusing criminal law with civil. Companies can find you guilty of violating the contract at their discretion. You have the recourse of suing them if you feel that they didn't live up to their end of the deal, but they can do pretty much whatever they please.
This is nothing compared to what Adwords did to all of their advertisers a couple months ago. It used to be where the default type of keyword matching was to take your exact words, and match them in any order across a user's search term. They changed this so that it expands each search term to "related" words, called "broad matching". These related words are usually anything but relevant. Even words which are spelled closely to your target word are included. Worse yet, they don't give a way to opt out of it, and they don't offer a replacement for the old style of matching.
The net result is that you have more people competing on obscure keywords (read: higher cost per click), and these new-found competitors don't even *want* to be competing with you!
And I thought their motto was "don't be evil". Hmm.
Hey, Mr. President, you can have my civil rights just leave me one or two to use when I go out Friday night. There's lots of evil doers out there who hate democracy so we must give up our freedom to preserve our liberty
You might wanna question my neighbor, search his place, take him downtown. He's either Buddist or he's Muslim, I forget, but hey, he's brown. Either way, what I'm trying to say is he ain't like me and you and, listen here, why should I fear, everybody loves the Jews.
Well, stop me on the highway, search my car and my cavaties, delve into my past like I'm a supreme court nominee. If I don't got nothing to hide, then why should I complain? And if I don't like it, I can always live with Castro or Hussein.
Well, I'm a real american. I bought a little flag to prove Ii ain't no commie, fascist, muslim, pinko fag. I hang it from my window to show how much I care - just don't ask me if I owned it when them big buildings still stood there.
I'm an atheist so I won't get pissed if you take away amendment the first. And freedom of the press? Well, who do i look like? William Randolph Hearst? Peacable assembly? Redressin grievances? Boy, that sounds like hippie talk. We don't need your words, man, ain't you heard? All the doves have turned to hawks.
bridge Well, I love the constitution, but we need a new edition, not a total demolition, just a small redefinition. Let's commit now to the mission, make a couple small additions - like the use of intuition to declare the opposition.
As I'm thumbing through the articles I offer admonition at the dangerous omission of a law against sedition. You needn't be a politician or a nuclear technition to make a requistion for a couple new submissions.
I heard Mr. Bush say, "There's a new kind of war out there!" Apparantly it's the kind you don't gotta get congress to declare. I heard Mr. Lott say, there ain't no minority, then he glared at Mr. Gephardt, who nodded sheepishly.
I have a blog that I built around my own content management system. In order to thwart comment spammers, I take away their incentive. Most of them spam because they want GoogleJuice(tm). When they post their URLs, my software rewrites the address bounces them through a filter. The filter page takes their URL, and uses Javascript to redirect the user to the address. The net result: browsers click the link and get to the destination, while search engines will never know the difference.
Combine this with a well-placed notice that there's no reason to spam, and now my comment spam is next to nothing.
Coffee roasters tend to make a huge profit on their wares. It's one of the most profitable places in the chain, which is why you see so many of them. Mozilla is probably getting a decent chunk out of the sale.
Coffee addicts: You can get the same beans at half the price, roast them yourself with a popcorn popper at home and end up with fresher coffee. Sweet Maria's is a wonderful thing.
This wouldn't work, though. Even if you do "bite the bait", you'll be downloading a file which the copyright owner is giving to you. Whether it's fake or not, you have every right to download a file if the copyright holder is offering it to be downloaded, P2P network or not.
I never really thought you could fill a book about regular expressions, but this one manages to accomplish this while at the same time being very interesting. This is absolutely required reading if you know "enough to get by" with regular expressions. Chances are, until you read this, you're making a ton of common mistakes and you don't even know about it.
What a great idea to redesign currency every 7 years, at least for the counterfeiters. I don't know what the new bills look like, or any of the other permutations they've released recently. Nothing like flooding the brain with a bunch of different designs to keep the identity of what is a "real bill" in question.
> They still can't touch a medium priced CAb from > Sonomoa or Napa.
In price, you're certainly right. Napa cabs are second only to French Bordeaux in the "ridiculously overpriced" category. It's not to say these wines aren't good, or great at their best, but you can find wines that are just as good for a third of the price. I'm not sure I agree with you about Sonoma cabs, either, it's not the right area to grow a top-notch cab. It's better suited for whites, Zins, Pinots, etc.
Unless you're a millionaire who can afford to spend obscene amounts of money on faddish wines, there are much better options out there. Try a Malbec from Argentina. Or a good-quality Aussie Shiraz. And even California Zins are still a decent value for an amazing wine.
The real question is whether Slashdot itself will be included in this. I don't see how Google will determine if a given website is a blog, and if so, which parts of it are. Slashdot looks like a blog. It has stories posted by humans. Stories can be commented on. It offers an RSS feed.
Then there are sites like mine, which is part blog and part my website as a singer/songwriter. How would Google determine which parts are which? I'd be pretty peeved if the whole site was tagged as a blog.
I'm getting a 10% CTR with some of my Google AdWords text ads. Try that with your popup ad. Text ads are great because they're non-intrusive (read sustainable), hard to block, typically very relevant, easy to create, and they fit in with the page better. Text ads are no more dead than banner ads (ok, bad example).
Slashdot Mirror
What are your thoughts on Performing Rights Organizations? Do you collect royalties, and if so, how does it interact with Creative Commons licensing?
Believe it or not, about half of my music income comes from iTunes (available when you sell CDs at CDBaby). I don't claim to understand that one. I do hear from a lot of people who say "I want to support your music, but I didn't want/need a physical copy, so I bought it on iTunes." And more and more, people are discovering my music without ever even seeing my website. One big vehicle is iLike, which is an iTunes sidebar plugin. You might be listening to Death Cab, and over on the right side, you'll see a "Hey, check out this similar song from Josh Woodward" link. It's one of the best promotional vehicles available to indie musicians, and is highly recommended.
I've got a general overview of my equipment and production process, as well as specific production notes for every individual song (see the "Read More" links). It's kinda my attempt at an "open source" model for music. The new model for indie music is great, but it's really hard to learn to produce on your own, so I always appreciate it when other musicians I admire share their dirty little production secrets.
"Free does not work long term"? Define "doesn't work". I'm an indie musician with over 130 songs and 5 albums, and they're all available free as high-quality MP3 downloads from my website. Because of this, I've had over a million MP3 downloads from my site alone, and iLike reports that I'm on one out of every 140 of the iPods they track.
Granted, I'm barely breaking even financially when you factor in the cost of my gear, but why is everyone obsessed with measuring success with dollars? I'm probably happier with my music "career" than most major label artists, mainly because I'm doing it totally on my own terms, and yet people are hearing it and enjoying it. I have no doubt that my music wouldn't have spread beyond my immediate friends if it weren't for releasing it as Creative Commons.
It's not a big deal that I have to work a day job to pay the bills. You'd be surprised how many signed artists have to do the same.
Ahhh.. the good old days, when Poop.com was a shop for fossilized dinosaur dung. Endangered feces, indeed.
- Buy green (unroasted) coffee beans (see SweetMarias.com). They stay fresh for at least a year until roasted. Yirgacheffe is my favorite.
- Roast them yourself with a popcorn popper. Since you're using quality coffee, you can roast much lighter than Charbucks.
- Grind the beans coarse with a burr grinder right before brewing.
- Brew one mug at a time using a french press. There's no filter to strip out the "body" of the coffee. It's rich and sweet, but not bitter.
I've been doing this since 2002. The only disadvantage is that every coffee you drink in cafés and restaurants tastes like junk after you get spoiled with this.I'm using two computers: one Linux and one Windows. I have them hooked up to a KVM and a 21" CRT. On both, I use virtual desktops.
Is anyone out there using two monitors for two computers, but with the ability to juggle them between the two screens? In other words, is there a super-KVM switch that can do AA/AB/BB?
As much as I'd love to speculate that it's part of some grand evil scheme, the website's probably just got a DDoS attack running against it from mostly outside the US, and this was the quickest way to keep the site online.
Don't forget about Spam as Music.
As much as I'm a die-hard Linux fan, there's no way I'd consider ditching Windows for recording my music. It's all about the software, and Linux just isn't there. Even if there were a reasonable and easy-to-use multitracker, all of the pro effects are for Win/Mac.
And don't even get me started the absurdity of using tiny 2G memory sticks to record on, and doing it to solve a problem that doesn't exist (hard drive noise). I record a lot of acoustic stuff with very expensive mics and preamps in the same room as my computers, and I don't even bother shutting down my Linux box when I record. It's just not loud enough to worry about if you're set up a few feet away.
It's too late. Google's already getting greedy with AdWords.
Sounds like you had some crappy ad copy. They don't ban you for "too few clicks", they ban you for "too low of a clickthrough percentage". They'd rather show an ad with more people clicking it, rather than waste their ad space on something that nobody ever clicks. Write something more relevant and you'll get a whole lot better than 0.5% (some of mine are in the 10% CTR neighborhood).
12 drummers drumming costs $2,147.60? I could get that for the cost of a few cases of beer and a mop to wipe up the drool on the floor.
> guilty until proven innocent?
You're confusing criminal law with civil. Companies can find you guilty of violating the contract at their discretion. You have the recourse of suing them if you feel that they didn't live up to their end of the deal, but they can do pretty much whatever they please.
This is nothing compared to what Adwords did to all of their advertisers a couple months ago. It used to be where the default type of keyword matching was to take your exact words, and match them in any order across a user's search term. They changed this so that it expands each search term to "related" words, called "broad matching". These related words are usually anything but relevant. Even words which are spelled closely to your target word are included. Worse yet, they don't give a way to opt out of it, and they don't offer a replacement for the old style of matching.
The net result is that you have more people competing on obscure keywords (read: higher cost per click), and these new-found competitors don't even *want* to be competing with you!
And I thought their motto was "don't be evil". Hmm.
From Uncivil Rights by Adam Brodsky:
Hey, Mr. President, you can have my civil rights
just leave me one or two to use when I go out Friday night.
There's lots of evil doers out there who hate democracy
so we must give up our freedom to preserve our liberty
You might wanna question my neighbor, search his place, take him downtown.
He's either Buddist or he's Muslim, I forget, but hey, he's brown.
Either way, what I'm trying to say is he ain't like me and you
and, listen here, why should I fear, everybody loves the Jews.
Well, stop me on the highway, search my car and my cavaties,
delve into my past like I'm a supreme court nominee.
If I don't got nothing to hide, then why should I complain?
And if I don't like it, I can always live with Castro or Hussein.
Well, I'm a real american. I bought a little flag
to prove Ii ain't no commie, fascist, muslim, pinko fag.
I hang it from my window to show how much I care -
just don't ask me if I owned it when them big buildings still stood there.
I'm an atheist so I won't get pissed if you take away amendment the first.
And freedom of the press? Well, who do i look like? William Randolph Hearst?
Peacable assembly? Redressin grievances? Boy, that sounds like hippie talk.
We don't need your words, man, ain't you heard? All the doves have turned to hawks.
bridge
Well, I love the constitution, but we need a new edition,
not a total demolition, just a small redefinition.
Let's commit now to the mission, make a couple small additions -
like the use of intuition to declare the opposition.
As I'm thumbing through the articles I offer admonition
at the dangerous omission of a law against sedition.
You needn't be a politician or a nuclear technition
to make a requistion for a couple new submissions.
I heard Mr. Bush say, "There's a new kind of war out there!"
Apparantly it's the kind you don't gotta get congress to declare.
I heard Mr. Lott say, there ain't no minority, then he glared at Mr. Gephardt, who nodded sheepishly.
I have a blog that I built around my own content management system. In order to thwart comment spammers, I take away their incentive. Most of them spam because they want GoogleJuice(tm). When they post their URLs, my software rewrites the address bounces them through a filter. The filter page takes their URL, and uses Javascript to redirect the user to the address. The net result: browsers click the link and get to the destination, while search engines will never know the difference.
Combine this with a well-placed notice that there's no reason to spam, and now my comment spam is next to nothing.
Coffee roasters tend to make a huge profit on their wares. It's one of the most profitable places in the chain, which is why you see so many of them. Mozilla is probably getting a decent chunk out of the sale.
Coffee addicts: You can get the same beans at half the price, roast them yourself with a popcorn popper at home and end up with fresher coffee. Sweet Maria's is a wonderful thing.
This wouldn't work, though. Even if you do "bite the bait", you'll be downloading a file which the copyright owner is giving to you. Whether it's fake or not, you have every right to download a file if the copyright holder is offering it to be downloaded, P2P network or not.
I never really thought you could fill a book about regular expressions, but this one manages to accomplish this while at the same time being very interesting. This is absolutely required reading if you know "enough to get by" with regular expressions. Chances are, until you read this, you're making a ton of common mistakes and you don't even know about it.
What a great idea to redesign currency every 7 years, at least for the counterfeiters. I don't know what the new bills look like, or any of the other permutations they've released recently. Nothing like flooding the brain with a bunch of different designs to keep the identity of what is a "real bill" in question.
> They still can't touch a medium priced CAb from
> Sonomoa or Napa.
In price, you're certainly right. Napa cabs are second only to French Bordeaux in the "ridiculously overpriced" category. It's not to say these wines aren't good, or great at their best, but you can find wines that are just as good for a third of the price. I'm not sure I agree with you about Sonoma cabs, either, it's not the right area to grow a top-notch cab. It's better suited for whites, Zins, Pinots, etc.
Unless you're a millionaire who can afford to spend obscene amounts of money on faddish wines, there are much better options out there. Try a Malbec from Argentina. Or a good-quality Aussie Shiraz. And even California Zins are still a decent value for an amazing wine.
Then there are sites like mine, which is part blog and part my website as a singer/songwriter. How would Google determine which parts are which? I'd be pretty peeved if the whole site was tagged as a blog.
My rocket sled gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!
I'm getting a 10% CTR with some of my Google AdWords text ads. Try that with your popup ad. Text ads are great because they're non-intrusive (read sustainable), hard to block, typically very relevant, easy to create, and they fit in with the page better. Text ads are no more dead than banner ads (ok, bad example).