Lives of The Artists features freeride snowboarder Xavier de Le Rue in the incredible, untamed wilderness of Greenland before moving on to the World’s ‘most perfect’ wave, a simply awesome force of nature; Teahupoo in Tahiti with big wave surfers Tom Lowe and Fergal Smith, along with photographer Mickey Smith. Finally we get under the skin of an abrasive and dramatic tour across the US with British hardcore punk band Gallows.

Three diverse domains, with a collection of seemingly diverse personalities but all united by uncompromising integrity, and a willingness to push and suffer for their art as they search for fulfillment.

It is 79 minutes long, so I suggest you bookmark it and watch it when you have time. It is not quite your Youtube tea-break type of clip :P

Some things are just like that because that’s the way they are.

Click here to watch the movie or if you’re not sure, watch the trailer below, THEN go watch the movie.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.