I’ve been listening to so much new music this past year, and I realized recently how much I really miss sharing it with folks. Back during my highfiber days, we’d have a weekly featured download with a short writeup of the artist. I doubt I can pull off a weekly effort, but I think I can at least manage to keep this semi-regular. We’ll call it “Viva Pirateria” because my first choice, “Download Free MP3s at Guttervomit.com,” seemed a little too much like search-whoring. (As always, these tracks will be deleted after 30 days. I can’t really afford the bandwidth costs involved in keeping them up indefinitely.)

Our debut batch of MP3s is all fun-rock; catchy toe-tappers you can play in the car with friends.

Spoon – The Underdog
From one of last year’s best albums. Spoon wrote a good two-thirds of the soundtrack to my favorite Will Ferell movie, Stranger than Fiction, back in 2006, and are the vanguards of indie rock.

Orson – Broken Watch
Orson isn’t the world’s hardest-working indie rock band, but they’re probably in the top ten. “Broken Watch” is from their 2006 debut. The whole album is full of sugary pop confections; perfect for a summer trip to the beach.

Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin – Modern Mystery
SSLYBY (and man, even the acronym is long) is oddly-named, but they’ve got a great jangly-rock guitar sound that’s reminiscent of Rogue Wave and Maritime. Their choice of name pretty much prevents them from ever going mainstream, so if you are a fan, you are 100% assured that these guys will never sell out.

Nada Surf – Weightless
I’ve been listening to Nada Surf since “Popular” back in 1996 (which is pretty much when everybody else started listening to them), but the recent two albums have exhibited a kind of growth to their musicality that has been both fascinating and off-putting for older fans. “Weightless” is very similar in technique to an older song “Killian’s Red,” but it’s got a much more fleshed-out outro.

In case any of the direct links above don’t work, ol’ Apache will hook you up.

A bit of music-related geekery today:

Ubuntu Linux has made something of a tradition of christening each release with an alliterative animal name, perhaps as a both an homage to and parody of Apple’s own feline operating systems. The current release is "Gusty Gibbon," while the upcoming April distribution is referred to as "Hardy Heron."

Last week, a list was published that itemized all of the upcoming release names, thusly:

* 9.04 - Jovial Jackal
* 9.10 - Kissy Kipunji
* 10.04 - Loyal Lemur
* 10.10 - Modest Mouse
* 11.04 - Nifty Nematode
* 11.10 - Open-minded Ostrich
* 12.04 - Petulant Porcupine

"Modest Mouse." Well. Clearly someone on the Ubuntu team is an indie music fan. Now when I first heard the news, I thought it was quaint and all; pop-culture crossovers always are. After a little bit more thought though, I imagine that this particular name would hurt both Ubuntu and the band, at least from a search perspective. It’s already happening right now: typing "ubuntu modest mouse" on Google gives you a weird mishmash of music-related and Linux-related links. What happens when Ubuntu actually releases "Modest Mouse," or when Modest Mouse releases a new album? Absolute chaos, folks, absolute chaos.

In Rockista Craze, Janette Toral wrote a piece about the impact of piracy on our local music industry. It’s well-researched, as usual, and has some nice factoids previously unbeknowst to me. Check it out then come back here for my unscientific response:

This debate is nearly as old and tired as the one about abortion, so i’ll just add a couple of thoughts from the opposing camp to round out the discussion.

1) there’s a logical leap in the observation that piracy is at fault when it comes to the poor success of the record industry. nobody has data that proves this, and the statistics listed above are beside the point. why? because in order to say that piracy is hurting the music industry, you have to first assume that all of the people who pirated music would have otherwise _bought_ those CDs had piracy not been any option. that’s a huge assumption, and it’s the cornerstone of all anti-piracy arguments. the truth of the matter is, people who pirate consume more music because it’s free. if they had to pay for everything they listened to, they would consume less, or not at all.

2) CD sales are going down worldwide, so this is not a phenomenon that is local to us. there are many reasons for this, and piracy is simply the most convenient scapegoat. the biggest reason in my mind is that the CD is an obsolete technology, and it is going the way of vinyl and VHS. (I’m sure the 100m+ iPods out there have something to do with this.)

3) there’s a sea change going on in the music industry right now, and piracy is a syndrome, not a cause. the real cause is that digitization has reduced the cost of production to near-nothing, and consumers know it. they understand that the true cost of a CD is tiny, and that the Internet makes major record labels irrelevant. let’s not kid ourselves about how piracy is stealing money from the artists. _labels_ are stealing money from the artist; they take over 80% of the cost of each record sold. if you removed (or reduced) the role of labels in the distribution process, artists would be more appropriately rewarded for their work, and the price of music would still go down.

4) which brings me to another reason for weakening music sales: the Internet, in general. music delivery over the net is near-instantaneous depending on your connection, and the variety is truly overwhelming. people are awakening to the fact that there is more music out there than their local industry or record store can provide, and they are finding new alternative venues that cater to their maturing tastes.

My "In Rainbows" boxed set arrived at my doorstep today, after waiting nearly a full month. I took half-a-dozen images of the packaging and various inserts here, for anyone who wants to see how much music-geek-ware 40GBP can buy you these days. (Answer: apparently, quite a lot if you don’t have a record label to split profits with.)

*iPod Touch not included, of course. Just wanted to show how huge this thing was.

**Oh yeah, and the second disc has about 150 photos and artwork by the band and some guest artists. Jesus, it’s a fanboy’s dream!

Time is slowly trundling 2008-wards, which usually means, among other things, scads of link-bait "Best of 2007" lists. Everyone from Google to Random Blogger #1290485093 (yours truly included, of course) will be throwing together zeitgeists with varying levels of success in an effort to drive a little bit more traffic to pre-archive content.

There are a handful of these that I look forward to though: Popmatters‘ "Best Music" list is usually really good (see their 2006 picks here), as is Rotten Tomatoes‘ "Annual Golden Tomato Awards" (2006 was their 8th year running). The coolest one for me though, is the fan-powered Gummy Awards, sponsored by music-blog extraordinaire Stereogum, which I just submitted my votes to this morning. Indie fans plug in their top 3 albums of the year, and optionally, their favorite music video, favorite live act, etc. People who are interested in the indie music scene will already know what the favorites to win are. This year has had some incredible contributions, but a handful of albums have really stood head-and-shoulders above the rest. I’ll be writing a lengthier entry about this within the next two weeks as I finalize my own "Best of 2007" list, but the short list of finest albums includes:

1. Radiohead’s "In Rainbows"
2. Band of Horses’ "Cease to Begin"
3. Klaxons’ "Myths of the Near Future"
4. Sunset Rubdown’s "Random Spirit Lover"
5. The Shins’ "Wincing the Night Away"
6. Animal Collective’s "Strawberry Jam"
7. Blonde Redhead’s "23"
8. Miracle Fortress’ "Five Roses"
9. Modest Mouse’s "We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank"
10. The National’s "Boxer"
11. Besnard Lakes’ "The Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse"
12. Menomena’s "Friend and Foe"
13. Feist’s "The Reminder"
14. Beirut’s "The Flying Club Cup"
15. Battles’ "Mirrored"

The first 4 are the albums that I listened to the most this year, and each one has their own unique charm about them. Radiohead’s electro-rock sound is majestic and minimal at the same time, Band of Horses is folk-rock if folk-rock could grow Wolverine claws and stab you in the heart with each song, Klaxons is the triumphant rebirth of unapologetic new wave/rave, and Sunset Rubdown is, quite simply, what insanity sounds like.

After some consideration, I decided to vote for Radiohead, Band of Horses and Sunset Rubdown at the Gummy page. I skipped the other optional voting fields, but did pick "Spencer Krug" as Mr. Indie Hottie 2007 and "Leslie Fiest" as Ms. Indie Hottie 2007. (My first instinct was to go with Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley, but their album wasn’t quite as good as Feist’s. Chan Marshall is still hotter than both of them put together though; if only she had actually released something this year.)

So after listening to nothing but "In Rainbows" for the past 48 hours (I downloaded the album last Friday), I think I’ve had sufficient time to digest Radiohead’s long-awaited 7th album. I’ve been a fan since a little after The Bends was released, although honestly, I didn’t really come to understand their music until I hit college and had sufficient experience with other bands to make adequate comparisons. It’s a bit early to be calling In Rainbows the "Alternative Rock Album of the Year," but it’s so far trounced everything I’ve listened to over the past 10 months. 

I guess it’s a real testament to Radiohead’s genius then, that this is still only their 3rd or 4th best album. Why only 3rd or 4th? Well, you have to consider that The Bends (which would be my pick for best Radiohead album ever, and possibly best Alt Rock album of all-time), had such anthemic tracks as "Fake Plastic Trees," "Just" and "Street Spirit (Fade Out)", and Kid A featured genre-bending songs like "Idioteque" (my personal favorite), "How to Disappear Completely" and "Motion Picture Soundtrack." I would place In Rainbows somewhere alongside OK Computer, which would have been the 3rd album on that list. They are both equally tight and beautifully written, although obviously the older album was significantly more ground-breaking.

What I love most about In Rainbows though, is how extravagantly passionate each song is ("All I Need" packs a hell of a wallop in its last 45 seconds, and "15 Step" and "Bodysnatchers" are electrical storms). Emotional without being emo, each song walks a fantastically thin line between restraint and overindulgence, and it’s a real joy listening to these masters at work.

Check it out if you haven’t already. The whole album is available donationware-style at InRainbows.com.

[ FAN TRIVIA: One of my favorite tracks on In Rainbows, "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" is actually a remake of an older song called "Arpeggi," which was written back in 2005 specifically for the Ondes Martenot, a strange French keyboard from the 1920’s that Jonny Greenwood had taken a liking to (and has since used frequently on many Radiohead tracks). A lot of the sounds we mistake for electronica in the last 3 albums comes from this contraption. Check out this Youtube video featuring Thom and Jonny performing the original with the Nazareth Orchestra. ]

I was musing today, about how quickly Shelfari has caught on with my bookworm friends. This little network launched in October 2006 and is a product of Taste Makers, Inc., a company that I’m assuming will quite soon be targeting areas like movies, music, food, and any other consumer products that people can be enthusiastic about. The shopping giant Amazon allegedly invested about a million into Shelfari earlier this year, and that’s a fairly good indication of how you would possibly make money from an idea like this.

It’s interesting because this was roughly the idea I was operating under with gibbity, filmcrowd, and a third booklovers’ community site that I never got to properly sink my teeth into, back in 2005. The social media space is exquisitely deep if you know where to look and there’s so much online activity surrounding the Harry Potters and Da Vinci Codes of the world that it’s impossible to ignore. Of course, I had no idea how to properly make something like this work back then, so both attempts eventually just faded. That’s fine though, at least I know now that the idea itself was sound.

My original strategy was to hit gamers (http://gibbity.com), movie lovers (http://filmcrowd.com) and then bookworms (never settled on a name, but was leaning towards http://bookcrowd.com), in that order. Gamers came first because there was only one other social-review competitor in the game space back then, and I was an ex-gamer who was seeing his game-time slowly being eroded by his work-hours. Movie lovers came next because I personally loved writing short reviews of films and comparing them against other people’s. At the time, Rotten Tomatoes was the only other place online where average people could do something like that in a structured fashion (of course there were movie blogs and forums, but there was no real way to see users’ contributions side-by-side).

And I wanted to target the booklovers last because I felt that it was going to be very challenging, and here’s why:

The problem with any social-media site is that you operate on the assumption that you always have something to review. Take movies, for example. On the average, the US sees over 350 minor/major releases every year, about 7 new movies per week. The average person will probably see a new movie once a month, but the enthusiast will be spoilt for choice all year round, and that’s not even counting the foreign-film crowd. From a social-media perspective, this means that a loyal user will have a reason to come back to the site all the time, because they will constantly have new content to contribute.

Games are similar, in that there are over 500 game releases in various formats (PC, console, portables) every year. You would technically never run out of stuff to write about. Here’s the difference between movies and games though. It takes you two hours to appreciate a movie in its entirety. It takes days, with most PC or console games. The duration of consumption is vastly different between the two industries, which is why I saw very slow turnovers with gibbity relative to filmcrowd.

Let’s take that distinction one step further: consider that it only takes about 4 minutes to appreciate a song in its entirety. Is it any wonder that your average Last.fm user has over 5,000 tracks scrobbled, which is probably more movies than the average human will watch in their entire lifetime?

Now let’s take the reasoning in the opposite direction, with books. Where it takes the average human 2 hours to appreciate a movie and a couple days to appreciate a game, it takes over a week to appreciate a full-length book (Harry Potter fanatics notwithstanding). Most booklovers will take their time, reading several books at once. I’ve personally always got about 5 or 6 different things I read simultaneously, and the whole exercise takes me over a month to finish. What does this mean for the ye olde booklover site? Well, possibly that there will be a very marked slowdown in user-contributed content, once your users have gotten over the initial hump of building their personal bookshelf.

Also, consider the relatively miniscule size of the collections: very few people on Shelfari will have more than a thousand books in their shelf, and those are the hardest of the hardcore. I could trounce any of these people with the number of songs in my 16gb iPod, never mind the 15,000 or so songs in my whole collection. (And I’ll bet anything that the real average site-wide would be about 3 dozen books or less, per user.)

And that right there is the other important difference between booklovers and musiclovers. Virtual bookshelf management is friggin’ hard work. You have to type in the book title yourself, decide which of the search-results matches the item you mean, then you have to rate the book manually (and never mind writing a review for it; that’s a different level of commitment all together). In Last.fm (or I should say, AudioScrobbler), all of that is done for you; all I have to do is login and take credit. The scrobbler watches your iTunes/WMP 24/7, as you use it, automatically updating your Last.fm profile in real-time. My handful of Last.fm friends know that I’m a renewed Radiohead fanboy before I do.

Where am I going with this meandering analysis? Nowhere, really. Just pointing out the various pitfalls that each social-review community will eventually have to face and figure out a way around. I love looking at these applications and thinking about how they work, not just from a technology standpoint, but also from the perspective of the content itself. I have no doubt in my mind that Shelfari will continue to grow its userbase over time, but I do think that the level of activity will be very challenging to keep up.

There’s certainly something to be said for simply getting more and more new users to join up, but that results in width, not depth. You need to motivate the users in the middle — not the hardcore loyalists and not the newbs — to be constantly discussing stuff that they have a personal interest in, otherwise there’s a definite danger that the whole thing will degenerate into a glorified NYTimes Top 10 list. Case in point: can you make a guess what the most talked-about books on Shelfari are? I’ll give you a clue: 7 of them start with the initials H and P.

Hooray for productivity! I finally got my workstation at home back to its nominal state today, after about 3 weeks of having an empty desk. The gang’s all here: HP TC1100 TabletPC running Windows XP on the left (back-from-the-dead too, I might add; I thought I’d never get this thing working again), 2nd-gen Macbook Pro in the center (notice the battle-damage all over the wrist area) and a big wonking Samsung 226BW panel on the right. There’s also an iPod Hi-Fi outside of the frame that has not been connected to an iPod for nearly 6 months, and is currently being used as an overpriced speaker system (it does make for a rather interesting centerpiece though, so I guess from an interior-design perspective, it has its uses).

In other news, I’m seeing Switchfoot(!) tomorrow at Araneta. I’ve been boning up on their 5-album 6-album (thanks, Larry) discography over the weekend, and I have to say, I’m really looking forward to it. Switchfoot’s live performances are supposed to be pretty good, and I’ve decided that instead of watching discopunk sellouts Fallout Boy later this month, I’d rather be waving my lighter to a bunch of god-fearing, Christian boys. Hey, if they were good enough for Mandy Moore, they should be good enough for me. (Check out this kickass AOL live session, for the newish synthesizer-enhanced Switchfoot sound. And this Yahoo!Music performance where they throw together an awkward cover of Beyonce’s "Crazy in Love.")

Rilo Kiley
Under the Blacklight

Cutesy indie-rocker Jenny Lewis returned with the rest of her Rilo Kiley cohorts recently with an album that was both poppier and safer than anything they’d produced prior. Some of the tracks here have the same kind of smoldering blues mystique that was so alluring about Cat Power’s 2006 album The Greatest while others employ riffs that would’ve been right at home in a Rock Kills Kid album. My current favorite is the wonderfully catchy "Breakin’ Up"  which — in a cute moment of wry wit — compares breaking off a relationship to a failing cellphone conversation (am i breaking up? / is there trouble on the line? / did your heart break enough? / did it break enough this time?)

There’s great stylistic breath in this album, and you’ll immediately notice how blindingly polished everything sounds. Hardcore fans will definitely be put off, but for people (like me) who have always thought of Rilo as "that cute indie band," it’s a really cute indie album. (3.5 out of 5 stars)

Patrick Watson
Close to Paradise

I stumbled on to this little gem while checking out the short list for the coming Polaris Music Prize this September. Apart from being featured once on Grey’s Anatomy, nobody has ever heard of this guy, and I personally believe he’s the scion of Jeff Buckley. (He doesn’t have the cherubic vocal range, but he’s got that same flair for dramatic falsetto.) Close to Paradise veers well away from Buckley’s R&B underpinnings though, employing Rufus Wainwright-reminiscent piano and strings. The entire album is damagingly brilliant, but "Luscious Life," "Drifters" and "Man Under the Sea" are standouts. (4.5 out of 5 stars)

This year’s Polaris is going to be crazy-tight. With big names like Arcade Fire (again) and Feist, the newer artists like Watson and (my pick) Miracle Fortress have the work cut out for them. Still, Final Fantasy took the prize home in 2006 against competition like Broken Social Scene, The New Pornographers and Wolf Parade, so miracles do happen.

(And check out Watson’s awe-inspiring performance at the 2007 Junos.)

Miracle Fortress
Five Roses

Did I mention that I secretly wish I were Canadian? A good 75% of everything I listen to these days hail from that perfect, perfect musical landscape.

Miracle Fortress is the one-man-band project of Graham Van Pelt, another Polaris contender. Five Roses is the perfect summer indie album, and there are tracks in this collection that could put the brakes on a typhoon just by their sheer euphoric warmth. My favorite cut by far is "Hold Your Secrets to Your Heart," which is a cascade of shimmering synths and a melody worthy of Brian Wilson. Definitely on my "Best of 2007" list. (5 out of 5 stars)