.Evolving Music.

Self-proclaimed “one man band with no fans”, Brad Sucks (Brad Turcotte) is one of the pioneers of “open source music” and the Free Culture Movement. By waiving all the rights to his songs and giving fans access to the source of his songs for remixes, Brad has not only built a huge following, but his songs have been licensed for commercials and many of his fans choose to pay for his music.

This serves to further reinforce the school of thought which maintains that giving fans access to free music (whether for listening or download) actually results in increased sales in the end (of CDs, digital music, concert tickets, merchandise etc.)

Here is one of my favorite Brad Sucks songs (in a fan-made music video done as a film project and editing test):

Carefully, Correctfully Wrong has an interesting way of describing Brad’s sound: “…a smooth mix of indie rock and electro, mixed with sardonic lyrics and pounding disco beats. It’s what the Scissor Sisters would sound like if they weren’t trying to be the Bee Gees.”

Brad Sucks is a great example of a DIY musician who has taken full advantage of the tools available to artists online. Other than his official site, you can find him on MySpace, CD Baby, ccMixter, Last.fm, Magnatune, iLike, Sellaband, Jamendo, MOG and Twitter to name a few. Not only does Brad Sucks encourage remixing of his songs, he invites fans to submit their remixes so he can post them on the site.

I love the simplicity of his site and the plethora of options he offers his fans for how to enjoy his music. On the home page you can view the progress of his next album, view his upcoming gigs (you can also “demand” to see him live…), buy the album there (or Amazon, iTunes, CD Baby etc). On the music page, you can listen to songs, download them for free, buy them on a number of sites, or make a donation etc.

Also. Is it just me or is this guy a freaking marketing genius? With a self-deprecating artist name like “Brad Sucks” and an equally likable album name, “I Don’t Know What I’m Doing”, and the simple almost child-like branding style, he gets your attention immediately and is not easily forgotten.

Brad Sucks genuinely understands the power of encouraging direct artist-fan interaction by giving his listeners what they want, when they want it, and how they want it. And by letting them have a voice.

And he definitely does not suck.

Last week I wrote here about the IFPI including a musician in their lawsuit against Pirate Bay that never wanted to, nor was asked about being included. Well that was pretty bad…but in a further nuisance to the case against file sharers, it turns out that one of the expert witnesses brought on behalf of the IFPI as a prosecutor’s witness to help quash Pirate Bay was actually a former employee. Of course, this conflict of interest wasn’t revealed by the IFPI to the court, nor by the witness himself. Why would they intentionally tell the court something that might hinder their case? In a brilliantly ironic case of Web 2.0 and technology undermining a legal case seeking to stop file sharing and technology, the conflict of interest was discovered on the witness’ LinkedIn account. If this entire case doesn’t get chucked out of court, I’m going to have to assume that something is broken in the Danish legal system…

If ever there was a web browser for the Web 2.0 crowd that loves the idea of mixing and matching everything, Flock is it. I’ve been an avid Firefox user for about a year and a half now after finding it following numerous problems using Safari. Flock took my Firefox and pumped it with steroids. It also took all the new and socially connected web ideas and put them in one place. For starters, it imported all my saved bookmarks and passwords from Firefox, making the transition easy and painless. But all browsers are pretty good at this, right? What does Flock do for you?

Social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter are getting larger by the day. More and more people are intent on finding out what other people are up to. On Flock, you sign into your various social websites and it automatically keeps a sidebar of your friends’ updates. No more need to head to the site for the news feeds.

People love sharing pictures and video on the internet. Sign into YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, Piczo or Picasa, add friends, and open the streaming media sidebar that allows you to easily email or share links, pictures and videos without leaving the page you’re on.

Obviously, when you bring in the videos, pictures and friends, there’s usually going to be some blogging involved. Flock remembers all of your blogging accounts on Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, Typepad, WordPress and Xanga, and lets you post to any of them from a simple pop up window on the side. It’s rough pulling together all the photos, links and articles for a blog post some times, which means that the WebClipboard sidebar where you can drag and drop things before adding them to blog posts makes things easy.

Don’t worry, Flock will handle your del.icio.us, Magnolia and Gmail and Yahoo Mail, allowing you to email webstyle or through your default mail application on your computer. Then, it compiles all of this into a “My World” tab that has all of your feeds, friends, blogs, and media streams at a glance. Don’t worry about finding things…in addition to the Google search bar, you can type in and search automatically to Ask, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Facebook and Amazon.

Below, you can see a picture of the window I’m working in right now. It’s got my facebook/youtube feed to the right, a media feed above (with Flickr search engine), tabs and bookmarks. Above the people sidebar, you can see where you click into the news feeds, media streams, blog posts and web clipboard. The ease of use is incredible…before, I would have had to upload this picture to the blog site and link it in. I took this screenshot on the computer, uploaded it in Flock and dropped it into the web clipboard. From there, I just dropped it into this blog box and here it is.

It should come as no surprise that people are still trying to get free music on the internet. Piracy and file swapping happens daily on massive levels that would probably turn a record executive green if they were fully aware of at least 50% of the volume. Luckily for the rest of the new and frontiersman-like recording industry, record executives are like mushrooms…they eat shit and grow in the dark, and in the end, you’re never sure which one is going to poison you or take you on a funky and psychedelic expedition. Similarly of good fortune for all of us…eating mushrooms isn’t mandatory or necessary anymore.

While the ultimate fate of DRM in general and player/company identified DRM specifically is still up in the air, there are a number of companies out there attempting to torpedo the industry by offering free mp3 downloads. Through deals with the major labels that tie-in to ad revenue generated by the site, these sites are offering songs, sometimes DRM protected, sometimes not. One of the big players that was geared to take the internet music download scene by storm this week was QTrax, a French based company that held a gala event this past weekend as a launch party. Apparently, they didn’t get the memo that the Warner group has not authorized the site to provide music from its label. Universal and EMI have also announced that they had no licensing deal ready yet and were still working on it. Not sure how a “free” music download site got to the point of throwing a launch party before it had wrapped up licensing and distribution sales with the major labels, but somehow they did. Guess it speaks to the necessity of having a solid business plan in place.

What I find more interesting is that not only is this site trying to provide music for free with the labels’ consent, but they’re allegedly trying to take a bite out of Apple, claiming that their music files will play on iPods. This would indeed be a big step as the only current music files that can play on the pod is either DRM-free or Apple FairPlay DRM tracks. How QTrax figures their DRM songs will make it onto the iPod is beyond me, but it will certainly be worth watching if and when the company starts allowing downloads.

For months now, you, the devoted and kind, have followed this blog with a sense of excitement and expectation. Ok, maybe you haven’t, but that’s certainly how I would have followed it if I were you! And in all these months of posts, you’ve probably noticed both my subtle and blatant references to MMM, mixmatch, MixMatchers, mix match music and the art of mixing and matching. And for all these months, those terms have been, for the most part, largely theoretical, as they spoke to a mindset and practice that had yet to be launched. While I am merely a voice among voices here on a blog about evolving websites and hence evolving music, sponsored by the folks at MMM, I have no direct interaction with the process they have been going through to bring you the product that I so clandestinely promote.

Well “the time has come,” the rabbit said, “to talk of many things!” No longer is the idea of MixMatchMusic theoretical. No longer is the soul and thought behind such a great task and opportunity some shiftless, vaporous entity floating somewhere in the ether of cyberspace. No, my friends, the time has come when we can truly, without reservation or hesitation, throw our hands to the sky in exultant triumph and scream those magic works, “¡Viva La MixMatch!” Now you can create a profile and start right in using the innovative MixMatch sequencer and 1,000s of mBits to make your own music on your home computer.

Mixmatchmusic.com has finally opened its doors for beta testers. While it cannot yet take the full force of users that it will one day soon support, it can be opened to you now by request. If you’re a friend of the makers of MixMatch or a musician that is looking to get involved early and help out with the process of cleaning it up before a full scale public launch to assault all conventional musicians and label executives everywhere, we’re looking for you! So if you’re one of these people, and the MixMatch project is calling your name, shoot me an email here and we’ll get you set-up for the beta test and your first steps into the new and exciting world of MixMatchMusic.