Don’t Leave Me Sunshine was recently featured on Indie Music Sampler!  Check out this great podcast to hear some excellent independent music.

Want to help promote Christopher Joel in less than a minute?  Head over to BandRadio.com and request “Don’t Leave Me Sunshine”.  It’s currently on the playlist, but they only play songs that are requested.  So go here, scroll to #261, hit the request button, and share the love!

I got a notification this week that Don’t Leave Me Sunshine is being played on the Royalty-Free Music Network, which is a web radio network based in the UK.  Thanks RFMN!  Check out their site and their station, they obviously have good taste!  http://www.rfmradio.co.uk/

My world was completely rocked this week.  Monday morning at 5:33 am, my baby girl was born.  She’s my first and I’m madly in love.  We’ve nicknamed her Gigi.  You can fully expect that she will become the inspiration for songs in the future.  Here’s a few pics to share the adorableness:

I was invited to participate in a group blogging event hosted by Musicianwages.com, the title of which is “Dear 1999: If you could go back to 1999 and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?”.  Here’s what I would tell myself, circa 1999:

You gotta start practicing and playing out asap!  You can’t expect to get better when you’re not working on it every day and not playing in front of a crowd.  It’s really not that hard and you have tons of friends who come see you play.  Figure it out!  You’ve got the talent, you’ve got the equipment (and while I’m at, quit buying stuff on credit cards!!!), just get off your a$$ and do it!  Quit making excuses and quit waiting to magically become Jeff Buckley overnight.  Jeff didn’t get as good as he was by pretending and dreaming, he played and played, put everything on the line, and then played some more.  You’re in the perfect position to make it happen, right now!

I found the fictional DreamOn Pro software package through David Kusek on the Future of Music blog and it cracks me up!  They should add a “Suck” knob with “less” on one end and “more or less” on the other.  Enjoy:

This looks like a fascinating documentary that PBS is airing on January 19th, and it’s further proof that our current system of copyright is broken.  We need to return to a constitutional copyright.  The one that recognizes that copyright is a balance between the good of the public and the rights holder, but primarily for the good of the public.  We need to get rid of this ridiculous “lifetime + 70 years” and return to a sensible 28 years.  Let’s face it, if you can’t figure out a way to make money from your work in 28 years, you’re probably not going to figure it out, so let it go.  If you do figure it out, there’s little to stop you from continuing to make money from it for the rest of your life.  Plus, you should be saving some of that money (if you had a hit) and you should be creating more hits so you won’t be a pauper in your “golden years”.

People will argue that creators (musicians, authors, etc) will still have popular works after those 28 years (case in point: “I Feel Good” by James Brown) and they should be allowed to profit from them as long as they can (read: infinity).  If this creator is good enough to have one popular work, shouldn’t we expect them to create more?  Wouldn’t that be better for them and the public?  But what about the work that would then be released to the public domain, the creator wouldn’t be able to profit from that any more, since people could get it for free.  Really?  So you couldn’t re-master it and put out a higher quality version than the original you did 28 years ago?  And you think people wouldn’t pay for that difference, especially coming directly from the source and supporting your career?

The reason we have our current disaster of a copyright system is due to Disney.  The squeaky-clean mouse peddler copyrighted its first iteration of Mickey Mouse in the 1928 movie Steamboat Willie.  Once Walt realized Mickey was his cash cow…er, mouse…he began to protect it in every way possible, including manipulating Congress to extend copyrights so Mickey Mouse for forever be the property Disney Inc.

While I understand the desire to protect what makes you money, the purpose of copyright was to give the copyright holder a limited, government-protected period of time when they exclusively manipulate their work for profit, then it would be released to the public domain and anyone could use it as they wished.  This way, the creator gets to make money from creating, they get credit for their creation, they are forced to create more due to the “limited” time, which in turn promotes the “useful arts” and enhances the public good through the creator’s creations.

Without copyrights altogether, it would be a free-for-all!  The creator wouldn’t have any incentive to work, since there wouldn’t be any guarantee they could get paid for their work and/or get credit for it.  The public might get enhanced by creators’ creations, but the creators wouldn’t have any motivation to create, so creating would become a hobbyist industry and the public would be the losers since they wouldn’t have the benefit of well-done art created by people who can concentrate their time and effort on it.

Copyright systems work because of that balance.  Let the creators make some money, then give it over for public use.  The creator gets paid and gets credit, the public gets a steady supply of art, everyone wins.  The current system has been skewed so far to the creator’s side of the equation that the public no longer gets their due.  Thus, dead grandmothers and children getting sued for “infringing copyrights” and works being protected long past any usefulness of the protection or the art.

I could go on for days about this, and I’m sure I’ll write more.  A sensible, constitutional copyright is desperately needed in the US, I hope I live long enough to see it come about.  Until then, check out this trailer for “Copyright Criminals“:

I’ve known about this great band from the Bay area for a while now. I found them while checking out electro-harmonix pedals; member Jack Conte does all the official demo videos for EHX. Here are few thoughts to ponder while checking out these insanely catchy covers of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” and Earth, Wind, and Fire’s classic “September“:

Arrangements. They make use of everything in their arsenal, including toy pianos and running the vocals through guitar pedals, to make sounds and arrangements that are very unique. Are you using all the tools at your disposal?

Creativity. One of my favorite sections in “September” is when Jack uses his cheeks as the drum fill, brilliant! Even though you don’t own every instrument known to man, you can still use what you have creatively. I’d never considered using a flanger pedal before, but these videos have inspired me to investigate how to use one on my songs.

Limitations. They don’t have a great studio and I don’t know that Jack even really plays drums (notice all his drum parts are done one hit at a time). Creativity is enhanced by limits. Something I’ve been debating for my next recording: use a particular sound no more than five times on the entire recording. While this will be a pain in the butt, it will force me to be more creative and use sounds that I wouldn’t have tried without that limitation.

Video. Jack and Nataly videotape everything they do while they’re doing it. This gives them piles of material to use to promote their work and they create amazing music videos from all of it, on a budget that fits any ramen-crunching band’s income.

“Single Ladies”:

“September”:

This seems to be the week for finding great artists.  I’ll be sharing a few more videos and links this week cause I keep finding such great stuff!  This first one is from Kseniya Simonova, a Russian sand artist who lives in the Ukraine and who won the 2009 Ukraine’s Got Talent competition; the Ukrainian version of America’s Got Talent.  It’s a representation of the German invasion of the Ukraine during World War II.  Absolutely amazing.

Are you doing anything with your art that’s amazing?  If not, it’s time to step it up a notch…

My post from yesterday about Square from Jack Dorsey got republished (by permission, of course!) on Hypebot, one of my favorite blogs about music industry news.  Check it out!

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2009/12/the-square-more-mechandise-sales.html