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  Stii 11:08 am on March 16, 2010 | Comments: 2 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Music, nokia (3), piracy (2), record labels (2)

  If music executives sold bottled water, they’d be calling for a ban on tapwater downloads. But their industry is proving resilient

  

  Source: guardian.co.uk

  A great article found via Twitter (thx @afairweather and @janniemom). How true is this? In my opinion, this is the point record labels miss. Yes, you can find music for free anywhere. Yes, you’ll probably loose money when people download the pirated copied music.

  You could effectively argue “This is a crap analogy since there is a big difference between bottled water and tap water”. Sure, you could argue that, but then you’re missing the point completely. Essentially bottled water is still just water. Some bottled water being sold here in our shops are in fact filtered tap water. So how then can they be so successful? Simple, they sell the improvements. You won’t hear of bottled water that is “straight from the tap!”. Record labels need to find that single value-add that would make people that wouldn’t normally pay for music, want to pay for the music.

  What is also very interesting and important to note is the fact that they estimate that during the recession the sales of singles grew a whopping 33%! Why? The accessibility of single tracks. We can suddenly buy single tracks through iTunes and don’t have to buy entire albums. This opened up the market to kids and we all know they LOVE to spend money.

  This makes me think that Nokia’s “Comes with music” strategy could be more successful than we imagine.

  Welcome back! You should subscribe to my RSS feed here.
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  I wish I was this creative with an iPhone

  Stii 9:18 am on March 5, 2010 | Comments: 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: creative, everyday looper, iphone (6), iphone apps (3), Music

  Check out this video. It is a song made with an iPhone App called everyday looper. What is amazing is how this guy just do it on the fly and it sounds DAMN good!

  It always without fail amaze me how good some people are at doing random things like this.

  This truly is one of the best things I’ve seen someone do with an iPhone.
  
   
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  A little respect for the Record labels and Radio Stations

  Stii 2:05 pm on July 30, 2009 | Comments: 4 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Music, radio, record labels (2), recording industry

  To change the future, we need to look at the past. Learn from its mistakes and success stories. Work together in some form or another. Let us not forget that these folks shaped the music industry. They made music in general as popular as it is today. Without them, we might not have had so much music today. We certainly would not have had this much exposure to it. They lured musicians into producing more. They offered them the one thing that makes the world go round. They had a fantastic way of doing it and at the time it was a brilliant idea.

  Radio stations is still the best way for an artist to get noticed. Apparently there are more than 2 billion radio sets in use worldwide, or about one radio for every 3 persons. The reach is phenomenal. They introduced me to a lot of music and for that I am thankful.

  

  I have sympathy with the record labels and radio stations. I do not think they are evil per sé. I think they’re trapped within a capitalist system and there are no easy way out. They have serious investors that demand returns. They cannot simply say “Oh, please bear with us. Give us about 10 years so we can sort out a new business model”. They can see the world changing leaving them behind and it must be a shit feeling.

  Suddenly their brilliant business model is under extremely serious threat. They stand to lose EVERYTHING. We stand to lose a few new/future artists. Yes, granted, they became a little greedy. There are some labels that exploit their artists. There are horror stories. As we all know, you only hear the sensational horror stories and hardly ever hear about the good these guys do for their artists. Believe me, they do a lot of good for the artists. If they didn’t, you’d hear a LOT more noise from a LOT more popular artists. You simply don’t, because artists are generally happy with the way things are going. They commercialized music quite successfully, both to our delight and detriment.

  If I were in their shoes I cannot categorically state that I would not do the same. That I would not try and protect my revenue stream. God knows, we all do it in one form or another. The short and easy route is to be ruthless and try and kill everyone threatening their livelihood. It is a quick fix for now. In the long run, it would kill them. Maybe they are simply buying some time. I hope that is their true intentions since they should know, their current model is going down the drain. The world is moving forward while they are standing still and the ties that binds us together will break at some point. They are big. We are bigger.
  
   
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  The future of music

  Stii 8:39 am on July 30, 2009 | Comments: 3 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: internet (2), Music, piracy (2)

  As a small child I often wondered when would we have heard it all? There are a limited number of octaves and notes, so there must be an end to it. We’ll reach a stage where there is no melodies left and every single combination of notes have been used. Then what?

  Thirty years later and we still hear something new every single day that is both original as it is beautiful. Along the way, I was taught Math and learnt that the number of combinations are astounding and that we’ll probably never see the end of it. :P Yes, I was a simple child who loved (and still do love) music and a stupid, ungraspable mathematical equation were my biggest worry. I often wondered what the music in the future would sound like, and today I can honestly say, it is beautiful.

  

  Once again, I worry. The music industry is STUPID. It is stupid that the one thing made for sharing could land you in jail if you do it. It is illegal to share music. I worry, but I’m also quite excited since there is a revolution happening in the music industry. The monolithic record labels worry. They are unsure of how to capitalize on this culture shift happening. Who could blame them? Their very existence are under threat. They are not prepared to change, but would rather fight to protect it. It will change though. I has to change. There are simply not enough jails in the world to stop the people.

  Where will this go? I don’t know. I don’t even want to try to predict the future of music. All I want to do is to share my love of it. I want to be able to share my taste of music with others who may have a similar taste. It is a journey of discovery. That is what it is all about.
  
   
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  Michael Jackson 1958 - 2009

  Stii 3:38 pm on June 26, 2009 | Comments: 7 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: michael jackson, Music, rip mj

  If you asked me yesterday what I thought of Michael Jackson, I’m afraid to say, I’d have nothing good to say. Lots of other people, I assume, would say the same. In fact, if you asked me this morning, even though I knew he died, what I think, it wouldn’t be much different. If you ask me now, I’d say it is a big loss. Huge loss. All day, the only thing you hear is either MJ jokes or his music. His music is what changed my attitude. I kind of forgot, until today, what an immense influence his music had on my life. Mine and everybody else who grew up with his music.

  I’ve never witness quite anything like this. I’ve never seen such a reaction to any topic on Afrigator as I’ve seen today.

  Yes, I find the jokes hilarious. Thats just who I am. I rediscovered old memories and completely went nostalgic once the music started playing. Forget that he had a dark cloud hanging over his past. Forget that he was broke. Forget that he looked like an alien. Forget all the bad stuff. Play the music. After all, he was all about the music.

  Michael Jackson’s death made a lot of the world population older today. A brutal reminder of our own mortality.

  

  So like the rest of the world, I’ll say: Hamba Kahle, Michael, Rest in Peace.
  
   
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  Using Bash to update Twitter with the current playing track in iTunes

  Stii 5:15 pm on March 2, 2009 | Comments: 5 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bash (4), curl, itunes, Music, osascript, perl, twitter (16)

  Bash can do everything. From curing cancer right up to making you look cool :) I wanted to update Twitter when I listen to something very, very cool like Tom Waits.

  This Bash script gets the info of the current playing track from iTunes using the osascript command (osascript executes AppleScript, so naturally, this is for OSX ;-) ) and tweets it using curl. I had to use Perl to encode the update string since characters like & was not behaving kind! :) Here it is:

  #!/bin/sh
  
  state=`osascript -e \
  'tell application "iTunes" to player state as string'`;
  if [ $state = "playing" ]; then
          artist=`osascript -e \
          'tell application "iTunes" to \
          artist of current track as string'`;
          track=`osascript -e \
          'tell application "iTunes" to \
          name of current track as string'`;
          album=`osascript -e \
         'tell application "iTunes" to \
         album of current track as string'`;
          msg="Listening to $track by $artist from $album";
          curl --basic --user "username:password" \
          --data-ascii "status=`perl -MURI::Escape -e \
          "print uri_escape('$msg');"`" \
  
  http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json
  
  fi
  

  I saved it in a script called tweettune and

  chmod 755 tweettune
  

  to make it executable. If you run the script it will return the update in JSON format.

  It works great. If you are cooler and your Bash is hotter than mine, please send/leave me the code to try!

  PS: remember to replace username:password with your Twitter login credentials.
  PPS: Yes, I know OAuth for Twitter is out. This is not about using OAuth, but updating your Twitter status with the current track playing in iTunes.
  
   
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  6 pop songs covered by heavy metal bands

  Stii 4:21 pm on January 16, 2009 | Comments: 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: coversongs, heavymetal, Music, numetal

  Here is 6 old pop songs being covered by Heavy Metal / Nu-metal bands. Five of them are pretty awesome and one is just ridiculous, but still lots of fun. Enjoy! (if you can… this might not be everyone’s genre of music ;-) )

  1. Depeche Mode – Everything Counts covered by In Flames on their Whoracle album

  2. Seal – Crazy covered by Mushroomhead on their XIII album.

  The video is out of the movie Transformers.

  3. Tears for Fears – Shout covered by Disturbed on their The Sickness album

  4. Pink Floyd – Another brick in the wall covered by KoRN on their Best of album

  The video is one of their live performances. Totally cool!

  5. Britney Spears – Oops I did it again covered by Children of Bodom on their Are you dead yet? album.

  This was meant as a parody song. Pretty insane!

  6. Billy Idol – Rebel Yell covered by Drowning Pool on their Full circle album

  This is quite a popular cover song amongst Metal bands and have been covered a couple of times. It was also covered by Children of Bodom.