All of this has nothing to do with the bands, the music, or the consumer; it is simply another way for a large corporation to illustrate that they can influence governments, other companies and organizations and continue to siphon money out of everyone's pockets. The RIAA sues people without computers, 12 year old kids and dead people, while claiming to represent the interests of the artists. With Apple firmly in the sites of this ship of fools, they have decided that the revenue from the 500 million or so downloads is not enough. It's pretty easy to do the math here too, .9 cents per song, times 500 million; so I guess 45 million bucks is just not enough money.

I know I have said this before, but the Recording Industry as a whole is making it virtually impossible for people to want to get songs legally. Every time they screw over another company or consumer, they push more people into the realm of downloading music via nefarious means. It's an endless cycle of incurably retarded behaviour that seems to have no end.

If Apple is forced to absorb this rate increase, and shuts down iTunes I don't know what I will ultimately do. I have hundreds of albums that I have purchased through iTunes. What I do know is that if Apple actually kills iTunes, they will not be able to pass it off and divert blame and all of the associated rage that will follow that decision. Steve jobs is heralded as being a shrewd and intelligent businessman, so I would suspect that this is just chest pounding since a move like that could quite easily send Apple into an unrecoverable downward spiral, alienating potential buyers as well destroying relationships with their core group of zealots.

I'm sure this isn't then end of it, but this war on music isn't doing anything but making it harder for good musicians to get folks to buy their music.

I am just about up with my week at Summerfest and getting ready to come on on this Tuesday and I have to say this is the coolest music festival I have ever had the pleasure of attending. So far over 200 bands have played on the various stages in the festival park, and a lot fo the bands are top-notch bands. I have seen Sevendust, The Old 97s, Katie Todd, Theory of a Deadman, and a boat-load more that are just on the Zippo stage which we are facing the 12 hours we are there every day. The days are long, and my dogs are barkin' by the end of it but it is a blast and I enjoy just about every minute of it.

As with any concert, part of the attraction is always people watching – and this is no exception. the crowd of folks ranges from young to old, yuppie to redneck, and often includes a variety of drunkards from every stage in between. The only thing that really tends to get meworked up is the selfish jack-witts who bring their 6 month old babies to a music festival where my ears are ringing when I leave evry day. I make the choice to go and endager my eardrums – a baby doesn't have that choice and these folks are screwing with the hearing of very small children and doing far worse damage to their ears than have been done to mine over the 2 decades and hundreds of concerts that have put the hurtin' on my ears. If it were my festival, I would make it so that kids would have to be a certain age – and be made to wear hearing protection – infants do not belong at a death-metal concert.

I have met a ton of cool people, rocked out to some cool bands (of course some not-so-cool bands too), and shot around 12 gb of images over the course of the last few days. It's going to take me a while to sort through them, but since I was posting – I put together this panaramic using DoubleTake. Milwaukee is a really cool town too – makes me miss the city as it reminds me quite a bit of Portland. There is a river running right through the middle of the city – the Root River in fact. As I was walking down to the park on Friday, I ran across a stray Catfish just sitting on the sidewalk. It looked like it could have just jumped right out of the river and landed on the sidewalk, except for the fact that it was 300 meters from the water…. Random. I wish I had more time to roam around and see the city, but alas I am here to work – and I only get 1 day off.

See ya when I get home….

Trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, I figured maybe they're just too old (Hetfield turns 45 this year) and simply don't get the web. It's possible, some people just don't grok the whole interweb thing; how to use it, what it's for and the implications of working with it. No matter how much you try and explain it to them, their cranium will simply never absorb how this whole thing works and how to embrace it to make things click.

As it turns out, this wasn't Metallica's WTF moment at all, it was the jack-wit managers of theirs, Q Prime. Take a look at their website and then tell me that it all just doesn't make sense? These guys have an impressive list of artists, but they are the ones who lack the technical grok-how to fully implement a webs trategy for anyone – even themselves. I usually will say any website is better than no website – but not in this case. These guys are with no doubt pullin' back some serious scratch, and yet they have a 1991 style frontpage website? WTF?!

I'll be interested to see if the review ever comes back, and what they have to say about the upcoming album. I hope it's better than the last one, or I might come to the conclusion that the Metallica goodness left along with Jason.

**Update: The reviews are back up before I could even double check the post…. check em out at The Quietus. And I have to say it's an excellent review and while I can see why some would say take it down, what they should be saying is "is it true?" While I don't agree that St. Anger was complete and utter shite, i would say it is by far the worst Metallica album, with Reload coming in a close second.

Mr. Mulhouse you are right sir;

Staying loyal to them after this many years isn’t easy….

The only thing I can see folks complaining about right off the bat is the download, but it’s tiny and non-intrusive. I also have to say at least it works on my Vista desktop, my FTP program doesn’t, so I started using FireFTP, and that works great – plus it’s a Firefox plug-in and free. Just like iTunes, it creates a new folder in your Music folder, and is aptly named Amazon MP3. The best thing is they are DRM free MP3 not the MP4 or Real Audio or Windows Media files that limit how they can be used unless you rip them to another format – which I wouldn’t ever do of course.

They have done a good job of getting some popular albums (they have the new Feist album, The Reminder - which is a great album) online already, and honestly are right on par with all of the other services when they were still a bit younger – so I would expect it expand the available selection quickly. The songs are good quality (from the few that I have downloaded so far), they are as little as .89 cents (most are .99) and Amazon incorporates your existing account information just to make that much easier. Right off the top they have a lot of bands that I like, Relient K, Fall Out Boy, The Stones, Weezer, Pink Floyd, Kanye, just to name a few. There are plenty of bands that they don’t have yet, it’s just a matter of time though. If they would have had Hawthorne Heights, I would have bought it – but back to iTunes I go.

I’m not sure if I will ultimately switch – but there’s a good chance I will start buying music from Amazon and branch out from iTunes now that they have this available. I love iTunes, and my iPods; but let’s face it, the fact that I have hundreds of songs that I can only play on my machine and only on iPods is a bit of a pain in the jar. It’s not like I am likely to switch to the Zune – but I’m not a huge fan of being pigeon-holed into a single decision. But no one is twisting my iPod laden arm into buying from Apple either – so feel free to blah blah blah me….

Any way, check it out – you’re bound to find something worth buying.

Papa Roach, (hed) p.e. & Stealing December tear down Mr Small’s

Last night Jeremy, Amanda and I went to the Zippo Hot Tour show in Pittsburgh (actually Millvale – but Pittsburgh is a bit more accurate), and I have to say it was awesome. Being the trio of coolness that we are, we got the VIP treatment, including some swank badges. The line up is Papa Roach, (hed) p.e., and Stealing December. All of these bands are awesome and they tore this place down!

See what you’re not getting here is Mr. Small’s is a converted Church – so it is indeed Small. Tiny actually. There is no backstage. There are dressing rooms and the like up stairs, but it was all they could do to get all of their gear and lighting crammed onto this tiny stage that would about 1/3 the normal size of even a small venue. The place could probably hold no more than 1,000 screaming freaks, and that’s hemorrhaging people.

So we meet with the tour manager, Jodi, and she takes us back early, shows us around, and swag’s us up. Nice! Everyone likes free $h1t! So we kick it for a while, and just hang while we wait for Jacoby to show. In the mean time Brandon, Stealing December’s Lead singer, rolls out and we chat it up a bit. I also got to hang with Michaelangelo a bit at the swag counter. These guys are great, this couldn’t have happened to a better bunch of guys – I mean come on! Who gets this chance so young in life and career? So after a bit more hanging out look like a bunch of old guys at a concert, we meet Papa Roach along with some other folks for the meet and greet. These are cool, I mean, I’m not sure what I was expecting – but it wasn’t at all what I was ready for. After the meet and greet we went upstairs and hung out a bit. These guys are really down-to-earth normal dudes – and great musicians. I don’t care what anyone says – these guys freakin’ rock! Oh yeah, and you! That crazy b!otch impersonating Jacoby’s wife on myspace – get a life of your own you psychopathic trogladite.

The show was awesome, and I’m not sure how anyone could have asked for a better show. Stealing December tore it up and kicked the night into gear with a great selection of tunes, and I can’t wait to see what else these guys come up with in the future – this is a good band. They had a great stage presence and put on an excellent show – much better than a lot of some of the so called big-name bands I have seen in the past.

So (hed) p.e. takes the stage next, and I had not heard these guys before last night, and they are impressive. They go from punk, to regee, to I don’t know what. It’s like having 3 bands rolled up into one. The all tore it up, and Jahred has an amazing range – this was a totally unexpected result for what I thought they were going to be like. I got to meet Jahred briefly after their set, and he too, is just a great guy. They started their set with a rendition of Everybody Look What’s Going Down  [Originally by Buffalo Springfield) – and it was awesome. In retrospect I should have sprung for a mic for my iPod and recorded the damned show!

Thanks to everyone who facilitated this evening, Jodi you rock! If you haven’t checked the bands, do it now! Either on MySpace, or their actual websites, especially Stealing December – those guys are awesome and I wish the best of luck!

I just finished watching Invincible with Mark Wahlberg. First off, this is a great movie and I highly recommend anyone to see it. It’s PG, so take the kids and have a good time. Wahlberg does a great job, and for the most part it is an accurate representation of Papale and his time spent with the Eagles.

It started me thinking though, some of the music really took me back to when I was kid. Jim Croce’s I Got a Name opens the movie, and I started thinking about what my kids will listen to when they are in their 30′s and go, "damn! This reminds me of when I was kid." It’s funny, because I don’t even remember being interested in music at all until after the 3rd grade, and my brother started listening to AC/DC (the real AC/DC too, before Bon Scott died) while we lived in Florida. We lived in this big-damn housing development called The Meadows, in Sarasota – cracks me, they even have a website now. Hell, here’s our old freakin house in fact. Not exactly, but we lived on Ringwood Meadows, in a white house, tile roof – okay that’s 90% of Florida. Just look at the damned map, okay?

Still, I will be interested in what my boys will remember that I listened to all of the time when they were growing up. Will it be David Gray, Nickleback, Sting, or something else entirely? Who knows. I’m just glad I’m past the butt-rock stage of musical evolution, so I won’t have to be remembered as a Def Leopard, big hair-band fan….

Remember, information is not knowledge; knowledge is not wisdom; wisdom is not truth; truth is not beauty; beauty is not love; love is not music; music is the best.
Frank Zappa

His name is Tony Royster Jr. Check him on Google videos.  This video is about 9 years old now, and the guy has his own site. He has photos, MP3′s for download and the usual stuff. Too bad his website is crap though, he would get more attention on the web if his website was better.

The talent this guy has is astounding. He is better than almost every drummer I have heard in a really long time. Most of the big name bands can’t hold a candle to this guy, even some of the big name idiots like Tommy Lee.

I might have considered buying the DVD it it was $40! Ouch! I wonder who the idiot who sold him on that price was? Why would I pay 2 times what I get a movie for? That’s easy. I wouldn’t. I’ll link to it anyway….

Amazing, keep rockin’ man!

So, in a world wind of complete and utter abandon, Sony began to place rootkit software on some CDs, check the list here, which would place malware on your machine to make it so you cannot rip MP3s of CDs on your computer. WTF?! I’m not exactly who they think they are. If they are not careful, someone at Sony could wind up in jail. In fact, they may be sued for illegally using LAME against the LGPL. Ha! Serves them right.

I have been a big fan of Sony electronics for greater than a decade, but this is about as ignorant as it gets. If it is legal for Apple to sell an iPod, then it is legal for me to RIP MP3s and put them on my iPod. So for someone to try and stop me, by placing some sort of spyware/malware on my machine is not only unconscionable but border (if not flat out) illegal.

Sony has received so much crap over this that they have reversed their stance, stopped putting out the CDs altogether, and have issued a statement that they will supply MP3s to folks who own these CDs. Sounds like they are hemorrhaging customers faster than money at this point. Full-on, get down damage control. Even some dude at Microsoft condemns it:

• Rootkits have a clearly negative impact on not only the security, but also the reliability and performance of their systems.

Jason Garms
Architect & Group PM
Anti-Malware Technology Team
Microsoft Corporation

The real travesty is that some folks in the IT dept. are the ones who will take the heat on this. Not the idiotic Execs who demanded this be done.

So Sony, what exactly does Crow taste like?

I was sitting in my ever-comfortable hospital bed the other day – being stuck there and surfing the boob toob, I ran across CMT, so I paused. Bad idea. What desecrated my poorwittleeardrums next was purely horrible and will most likely make to a future VH1 show. Trace Adkins should be stoned and exiled from Country Music, sort of like a musical annulment, remove every Trace of his existence from Country Music. Why?? Honky Tonk Badonk Adonk. That’s why. It’s retarded, just to start off. But it’s far more than that. It’s a juvenile, ill conceived, poorly written and played with less musical precision than the sounds of a cat being skinned. This is a prime example of why kids should go to college. I could go on and on – but I won’t, I leave you with a sample of the alleged lyrics.