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Stats on the BBC’s Beethoven downloads. “Live performances of Beethoven’s first five symphonies, broadcast as part of The Beethoven Experience on BBC Radio 3, have amassed an incredible 657,399 download requests during a week long trial.”
A man’s letter to the music industry detailing what he’s stolen from them and why. “I refuse to pay you to play these pointless games with arbitrary dates and obsolete borders.”
Drawing Restraint 9 is the first collaboration by super-couple Matthew Barney and Bjork.
A visual history of sampling; who’s been sampled and who’s doing the sampling.
The first five mp3s of Beethoven’s symphonies are available for download on the BBC site. The site is really slow though…does anyone have a mirror or a BitTorrent available?
BBC Radio will be offering mp3s of all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies. “All the symphonies are performed by BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda.”
“The problem with mash-ups is that once you get past both ‘oh, that’s unexpected’ and ‘that must have been difficult’, what you’re left with is a dj with really fucking terrible taste in music”. IMO, few mash-ups have gone beyond the novelty stage.
Improv Everywhere played a fake U2 concert near Madison Square Garden last week. The Edge was played by an Asian guy and the “band” got arrested during their final song.
Someone made an unsolicited mix tape for me: “Songs to Hyperlink To: Kottke Mix #1”.
50 Things to Do with Your iPod. Besides listen to music with those white earbuds.
Whatever happened to that baby from the cover of Nivana’s Nevermind?.
Video for a kids version of Since U Been Gone. There’s nothing awesomer than this. The slow-mo crowd reaction shots, a tiger doing a David Lee Roth jump split, kids shouting during the chorus….are you kidding me? None more awesome!
iTunes 4.8 does video. An interesting development. Why is video in iTunes and not iPhoto? (Update: iPhoto 5 does video. Hard to breathe with my head in the sand here…)
Yuri Lane demonstrates his beatbox harmonica technique. Saw this guy today at GEL…fricking great.
Video of New Order performing Love Will Tear Us Apart on Jimmy Kimmel’s show.
Nine Inch Nails is offering a GarageBand file with the complete mix of a forthcoming song. Can’t use the remixes commerically, but still pretty cool.
Explicit Content Only, NWA’s Straight Outta Compton edited to contain only the swear words. The full version makes it seem like my laptop has Tourette’s and the edited version is pretty funny.
Is some of the music on Bush’s iPod stolen?. This is “exactly the kind of behavior the music industry characterizes as theft”.
The Since U Been Gone-nomenon reaches Howard Stern. Stern: Ted Leo “sounds like Tiny Tim.”
The Binary Bonsai Approach to Copyright. Right on, brother. Preach it.
Quite enjoying Fischerspooner’s new album, Odyssey; reminds me of Postal Service in parts.
At 4 minutes ‘til midnight, they started playing Prince’s 1999, just like I had predicted. And I didn’t mind….even though I thought I would have. The dance floor was packed and everyone was jumping and swaying and screaming the words to the song.
“Gonna party like it’s 1999!”
Actually, it was probably the most fitting venue for the song, the very same First Avenue nightclub where Purple Rain was filmed and where Prince himself used to play.
I did a small piece for {fray}: my resolution for 1999.
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