So Dr Dre has teamed up with Monster Cable to make a pair of headphones. First, since Monster Cable is one part of this alliance, don’t expect them to be cheap (their cables are amongst the most overpriced things on this side of the galaxy). Second, they are not. $400 is what you’ll have to shell out.

While Future Music do everything they can to bad-mouth this product, it’s not actually a ridiculous price if they’re top quality. While they are right in that the press release don’t talk about specs, I still think Future Musics attitude makes them come out the losers. For some reason they seem to believe that Monster Cable have been crawling around begging Dre to put his name on these phones. I don’t know their sources, but Gizmodo obviously have others. From what I can read there, it seems like Dr Dre had planned this with Jimmy Iovine and that they found Monster Cable.

Who cares. I won’t buy them anyway.

You can’t have missed the stunt that Trent Reznor and Saul Williams pulled on “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust”. You could either download it for free, or pay $5 to download a higher quality version of it. Some people have put hope in this system, but now, as NIN.com (via Barbarism Begins at Home) have released the figures, my own dark expectations are somewhat confirmed.

Saul’s previous record was released in 2004 and has sold 33,897 copies.

As of 1/2/08,
154,449 people chose to download Saul’s new record.
28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning:
18.3% chose to pay.

18.3% payed? Not even one fifth? That’s pretty lame in my book. Let’s hope that these people just didn’t like the album instead of being cheap and don’t want to support the system they exploit.

Alright, so if you really want to see this from a brighter side then consider this:

Many, many more have probably heard the new album. That’s a good thing. It says something about this particular album – or publicity stunt if you will – it doesn’t, however, say anything about the model itself. First let me say that I realize that ‘publicity stunt’ is slightly condescending wording. It’s not really meant like it, as it’s no doubt a very interesting research as well, and I don’t pretend to know Trents or Sauls true intentions, but in the end it got so much attention because of it. Well, more about marketing later. So why doesn’t it tell us much about the model itself then? Because it’s a ‘publicity stunt’ pulled by a few people. It’s my guess that if this would actually be the model most bands would use, even fewer would pay! Now it’s attracted a lot of people who scream out “Free! Yeah!” and probably do their part in supporting it. That’s fine. But if this model was the norm, isn’t it possible that an equally large group of people would scream out “I want the high quality free! I won’t pay for that!”?

Keep in mind not one cent was spent on marketing this record. The only marketing was Saul and myself talking as loudly as we could to anybody that would listen.

So says NIN.com. Well, that might very well be true, but they got so much exposure for doing this anyway. Every other website I have in my feed talked about it. Probably because a) Trent Reznor was involved and b) it’s fun the first times, but when Billy Bob down the street does it alongside 2000 other bands no one will care.

I wonder how much error are in those stats based on people who downloaded it for free first and then came back to pay the $5

Says Barbarsim Begins at Home. That’s an interesting thought. I wonder if they were smart enough to look at the actual downloaders instead of the downloads. I think it’s the important thing to do, as it is with websites. To me page views are irrelevant while actual unique visitors are of great importance.

Also keep in mind that while you could download this for free legally though the official portals, that doesn’t mean that everyone did. We don’t have any numbers about how many copies have been spread through file sharing. We can however be certain that these copies were not paid for regardless of quality.

I’ll conclude with Trents final words in that article

So – if you’re an artist looking to utilize this method of distribution, make of these figures what you will and hopefully this info is enlightening.

And a ‘thank you’ to Trent and Saul for doing this and sharing the numbers.

… Is how we say “merry Christmas” here in Sweden. Basically it means “merry jul”. “Jul” (sometimes spelled “yule”) being an old word predating the arrival of Christianity in Scandinavia. In other words “jul” have been celebrated for a very long time. I’m happy to say that Sweden today, along with Norway‚ is among the most de-christianized countries in the world, and while men of the cloth might differ, to Scandinavians “jul” is a time of drink, food and feast. Yesterday we took a bite of the traditional ham, which some scholars believed to once be a sacrifice to the old Scandinavian god of fertility Freyr (pictured above). There have also been discussions on regarding the Christmas tree (and even “Santa”) is actually from old Scandinavian/Germanic tradition. But that’s a whole other post.

Today is the big celebration however. The eves are always the big thing here, and not the days. I.e. Christmas eve is more important than Christmas day and so on. In other words, I won’t be spending much time online today.

Anyway, a “god jul” to you all. Take the time to propose a toast to Freyr today regardless of your faith.

The fairly talented musician and wife beating Ike Turner is dead. Can’t say I’ve listened to a lot of his stuff. This article got me thinking about a whole other thing however.

It was this small comment that made me react:

Turner, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, is credited by many rock historians with making the first rock ’n’ roll record

As someone who’s very interested in music history, but without calling myself a “rock historian”, let me say that these types of comments are often nonsense. Not talking about Ike’s record, but the type of comments in general. Let me give you an example.

For a long period of time I bought into the myth that’s very much alive today and continues to grow because of musicians and “historians”, that Robert Johnson is some kind of a father for the blues. While being a great musician (the gods know that I’m very much inspired by him) it’s very obvious that most of his compositions are borrowed or downright stolen from earlier musicians.

Another example would be lead guitarists. As a guitar player myself, and as someone who truly enjoys old music, even pre-war music, I’m very interested in discovering lead guitar as played before the likes of Van Halen. I don’t know how many people I’ve heard that by some self-proclaimed historian (most likely a journalist writing linear notes for a remastered CD) is the first lead guitarist.

Same with rock & roll actually. This guy was the first rock & roller, that guy was the first rock & roller, or maybe this third guy.

Perhaps they’re all right without getting it themselves, despite being full of shit. After all, music isn’t created in a vacuum, it’s inspired by something else or someone else. It’s not without reason that early rock & roll is very similar to blues and boogie or that many Robert Johnson songs sound like Kokomo Arnold, Skip James or Son House. In that regard, you could actually consider 400 people to be “the father or rock & roll”, but the mrs. would have to be one sexual active lady.

Beat looping guide

Beats at Hip-Hop Crunch

I also made the theme music for the Hip-Hop Crunch Show by the way.

I was hired by Devlounge to do a jingle for use in podcasts that they are giving away for free.

It’s a hot one so go get it!

Back in the day – that is before PCs had hit every home and Macs were ugly as hell – I was a true follower of Commodore. The Commodore 64 was of course great, and has recently been dubbed “coolest gear” by M3 (in Swedish). While I loved the C64 so much that actually two of them passed my hands, my greatest memories of “the Commodore years” is the Amiga.

What a great computer. Great graphics, amazing sound, multitasking and a OS with drawers opening when you clicked on them instead of the ridiculous folders of today. My first encounter with programming was on these machines, in a language called E (never heard of it since), my first encounter with music making as well with the two classics ProTracker and Bars & Pipes… And then of course there was the games… How can you not love a game like Cannon Fodder where the intro music was actually sung! Not in a Nintendo kind of way as unrecognizable mumbling, but really sung! “WAR! Never been so much fun!”.

Then Commodore went bankrupt. I was seriously close to tears for days. I felt like my whole world had been rocked. I grew up with PCs as well, I’ve used old 286:s, 386:s and shit that even didn’t deserve names. Nowadays I can stand a PC, I really want to like Linux and I am very grateful for my Mac – but in the end they are nothing more than tools and toys. The Amiga was something very different.

What’s up with all this soap-like nostalgia drama then? Well, Amiga got bought a few times after Commodore went down the drain and development actually kicked off again. There were new computers built as well as a new OS. Unfortunately, because of legal issues, the two could never be sold combined.

A interview with Bill McEwen of Amiga Inc. have been posted at AmigaWeb. It’s not a very good read as Bill don’t answer many questions, but there is promises of a new Amiga OS (OS5) will be announced in Q4 this year. Great… Or maybe not. Actually, no. I don’t want that. I don’t want a new Amiga OS that looks like a ripoff of Linux and OS X that only two developers support. I don’t want a new Amiga OS that runs on PPC processors (please! they suck!). These things should have happened 10 years ago! We don’t want it now, there’s no market for it and you’d be better of letting Amiga die.

After all, it’s not like we’re going to get to open drawers in Workbench again.

Two articles (1) from Ars Technica (2)

While I am far from being the dirty scoundrel salty dog smelling pirate that are circling the waters of the web today, and I actually work as a professional musician, I have no real issues with music being free.

There are restrictions to this however. If you care about an artist then I find it pretty odd that you won’t pay for the product he offer you to buy. The situation today is that it’s not OK to steal other peoples music. Now, now calm down there pirate and Polly. I don’t care about your arguments, that’s the situation today. Savvy?

One of the more likely potential future scenario that I see is that music indeed will be free to the listener, but not to the broadcaster (i.e. the web). Kind of like radio and TV. You see, you, as a listener, can listen to radio and even record what you hear there for listening back at a later point and this will still give the owner of the piece compensation. That’s a possible solution for the web as well.

There would still be the problem of Pirate Bay and what not, since that would still be a place for music haters who don’t want the musicians to be compensated, but hopefully people would turn to the legit websites.

What other options are there? Perhaps sue them of the face of the planet, or make people love the album again?

Alright, I admit it. I’m a dinosaur when it comes to TV and pictures. I like sounds, not images. While I have cutting edge music and audio software I wouldn’t spend much money just to get a new TV. With that said, we have the old fat TVs at our house. After looking at two different flat digitals, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

There is something about change that makes people cringe. There’s something about change from analog to digital that makes people downright hostile. In the music biz it’s obvious. Old tape decks are still used, and in some circles you’ll actually get looked down upon if you record to and mix on a computer. Can you believe that? With all the advantages that the computer have.

I don’t know how the talk goes in the video biz, but I was surprised to find out that the digital TVs didn’t impress me as they do many others. A couple of things I noted:

• The picture was more clear. This is the good thing that anyone will say.
• The lines were sometimes horrible and big areas of one color with slight differences in saturation looked really bad. A black coat could look like it had squares of grays on it. They just didn’t smear out nicely
• The backgrounds looked really fake. I guess this was mostly in american-made series, since they have a habit of building outdoor sets indoors.

Point three was a little annoying, but point two was downright ugly. Remember, I looked at two different TVs, both fairly expensive. Can someone knowledgeable chime in? Is it that digital TV just isn’t there yet and just plain sucks?

Today music is manufactured in three ways: as a single, as an album and as a 3 GB zipped folder in a torrent file or a file sharing network. Me? I’m a music lover, so the decision for me is really simple.

No, not the 3 GB folder. “Why not, ol’ matey” I hear an english-australian crossbreed cry out in the far right corner. Well sir, it just won’t let me enjoy the music.

The reason to not pick the single is obvious. I think I’ve came across only a handful of songs that I can play on repeat a whole night without getting bored. But the album… That’s where the money is.

If I download the 3 GB folder I’ll listen to the latest Alice Cooper album which I know will be great. After that I’ll grab the old Rory Gallagher album from ’75 that I know will be great and perhaps a Mayhem album that I know will be great. Wait a minute! What the hell did I just listen to?

If I go with the album, I’ll go to the used vinyl store (vinyl rocks man!) browse through a hundred or so albums before I finally decide on one, two or three of them (could be the same one as above!). I go home, fire them up and BAM! Smacked in the face! Blown away as I sit in the couch listening to it.

Wait a minute! Where the hell did the MP3s in the folder go wrong? To start with, MP3 sounds like shite compared to vinyl (and not very good compared to CD either). The other part is mainly psychological. The whole “ritual”, if you will, around picking out the album, the anticipation when you look at the cover, putting it on and then sitting down and listen to it. Downloading 3 GB of MP3s and listening to them is not the same thing.

Nonsense you say? Then you’ll never know. Sorry boy, but the pick is easy for a true music lover.