@allan
sorry allan some of your posts have been getting stuck in my spam filter for some reason. i need to check it more often!

So much so that he did his own cover.

I wouldn’t say it’s the best cover ever of it, but the fact that at least some people are responding to my music helps me sleep easier at night.

http://downloads.unbrokenpictures.com/Half%20A%20Boy.mp3

Looks like I’m not the only follower David picked up from Mesh!

@David

I tend to subscribe to the Long Tail philosophy of things. There will still be stars, though a little less so, but the niche markets are and will continue to gain relevance so that non-hits continue to become increasingly economically viable.

I’m a huge Dispatch fan. They’re a band that rose during the days of Napster, never had a major label or any major distribution or radio play or anything. They broke up in 2002, but when they reunited in Boston for a free concert, 110,000 people showed up from 20 different countries. Then, last summer, they sold out Madison Square Gardens THREE nights in a row for a string of charity benefit reunion concerts for Zimbabwe. Absolutely unheard of for an independent act, nevermind one that hasn’t really released any new music in seven years. They still aren’t stars in the same sense as most people use the word, but… Madison Square Gardens? That’s big. The fan base they built up through grass roots means is so much more dedicated and continues to grow even long after the band broke up.

@Rafe

Yeah, another reason I… strongly dislike MySpace. It has even crappier import features than it has export features. With Facebook, you can easily import your RSS feed from another blog with the Notes application (on a page or profile). And full text feeds, for that matter (which I don’t think MySpace offers).

My approach to my MySpace profile right now is to use it mostly as a gateway to my other web properties, and to cross-post significant things. If I have a significant post that’s music related, I’ll most likely cross-post it to my personal blog and MySpace. (I already do this with a few other blogs, but my own blog on my own domain that I have full control over always has priority.)

Hmm… a quick Google search reveals there may be some ways to simplify this a bit. There’s a WordPress MySpace Crossposter Plugin, for example, lol.

Hey Blaise … cool running into you here. Look forward to catching one of your gigs in Toronto … keep us up to date.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LzgYWCgkZk

That kid is charting number 49 on the Canadian Itunes Charts. He’s not even Canadian. No label, no tour, no radio. Number 49.

ya, I know that’s definitely a problem about potentially being locked out, but the problem is, what do I do. Start a blog and stop blogging on my myspace? Copy the blog to both places? What I like about the myspace blog is people can find my blog, and then immediately hear my music.

CRUSH CREATES R.E.M.’S LATEST VIDEO ]
June 23, 2008 | By Associated Press
Michael Stipe thinks the music video is a “dead medium”—but the R.E.M. singer still wants the band’s songs to be accompanied by some kind of visuals.
So instead of hiring a top video director to create a clip for their new song “Man-Sized Wreath,” they hired a Toronto-based advertising agency, Crush Inc.
And rather than debut the finished clip on a music network, they took it directly to their fans last Thursday night and previewed snippets for a sold-out crowd at their concert at Madison Square Garden.
Stipe said it’s just the latest way the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band is trying to create new ways to connect to its audience.
To promote the release of their latest album Accelerate, the group has stepped up their Internet presence, starting websites that allowed their audience to see the band as it created their songs and others that gave fans a chance to take R.E.M. footage and use it in their own video creations.
“It’s what I call invisibility of process. Basically we’re allowing everyone who cares to kind of peek in on all of the process of creating something, rather than just being handed the finished product at the end, or the finished piece at the end,” Stipe said.
Though R.E.M. has made some award-winning videos in the past, including “Losing My Religion” in the early 90s, Stipe said the time of the traditional video has passed.
“It is what it is, and I think anyone who refutes that is an idiot in 2008,” he said. “We can all agree as a medium music videos really found their place in pop culture in the 1990s, [and have been] replaced by the Internet in the 21st century.”
It’s one reason the trio hired the Canadian ad agency to create the visuals for “Man-Sized Wreath.”
“The music video is a dead medium so I didn’t want to go to that industry to create a piece,” he said.
But while Stipe is adamant about videos being over, he’s not quite sure about what will eventually take their place to promote new songs.
“That’s the itch that we’re trying to scratch, or the question we’re trying to answer,” he said.
Originally published in Marketing Magazine, June 2008