justInCaseYouMissedIt

The new action is over here.

Please make a note of it.

movinThisParty

Cross town.

Sorry to do this already. I'll probably keep posting here as well, but I'm going to dive into WordPress now, and whatever I do eventually come up with developmentally will be hosted over here, too.

Chapter1b

Step 2. Learn to program

Here's the thing. Computers don't think like you and me. They think in 1s and 0s. Every programming language ever invented has basically been a way to translate what a human wants to have done into a stream of 1s and 0s to be read by the computer. The translation into binary can happen at a couple of different points along the way from programmers head to users computer screen, but there are basically two different methods for how different languages do this. Some languages, especially the older (pre-1990) ones are "compiled". That's a really byzantine process that basically involves taking the code that you have written, translating it into some 1s and os, linking it with other files in your code, and wrapping it up into an "executable" - a program that you can execute on your computer or whatever. The advantages of this method are thus:

Some larger applications can have bazillions of lines of code to execute (think about a Windows installer disk). If all of these lines of code were translated into binary at the time you run the application, the app would run so slowly that it'd be useless. This was obviously a big deal before CPU speeds got to be what they are now. Back in the day, the act of compiling was in itself a very time consuming procedure, and still can be today, so by doing it beforehand you save that much time and effort on the part of your computer. You also have the advantage of tuning your application on a lower level with regards to interaction with the Operating System (we'll get to that), thus making it possible for your app to perform much more nimbly. So basically, most of the benefits of compiled languages are in the performance arena.

The disadvantages of compiled languages have mostly to do with portability. Since the code has already been bundled into binary, the only machine on which the executable will run is the one for which it was written. That's why you have Mac and PC versions of the same software on the shelves. They had to be written and compiled separately since the two different computers have different methods of operating at the OS level and thus need different sets of instructions to accomplish the same task. C is the mother language from which virtually all other languages are descended, and the perfect example of a compiled language. iPhone apps are written in a language called Objective-C, descended from C with an OO twist. Since iPhone apps are written for one device and one device only, and since application performance on a phone really matters (think battery life), compilation makes perfect sense.

The other side of the coin, and I've been looking for this side for a while and have only recently found it, is an "interpreted" language. HTML is the perfect example of an interpreted language. HTML is only lines of code, just like an iPhone app or the Windows executable. The difference is that you leave the code alone and don't compile it. The code is instead "interpreted" at the time it's run, in the case of HTML by the browser that you're working in. The pros and cons of interpreted languages are exactly the opposite of compiled languages. You only write the code once and it works for every machine out there. It's left alone until that particular section of code is needed at "runtime", at which point whatever is doing the interpreting, be it the browser or the server on the other end, crunches your code into binary and spits it out into whatever the application needs at the time. As computers have gotten more and more powerful, this method seems to be gaining a lot of traction as the preferred method of writing new applications. Some examples are JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby - languages that get chewed up into something actionable at runtime. In the case of Ruby on Rails, which is the hot-shit dev platform at the time of this writing, the code actually gets interpreted twice - once on the server side where the code is translated into HTML, and again on the browser side when the HTML is translated into something that you can read and work with.

Twitter was originally written with Ruby on Rails. If you think about it, Twitter is just an application that communicates over the internet. It really only does that one thing. They don't even display advertising (yet). Many of the traditional features of a commercial website are not there, so why write it in HTML? Especially when you have this vast database of information that gets displayed uniquely on every different computer screen out there, it's a perfect solution. Parts of Facebook are written with PHP, another interpreted language. PHP is designed to interact with info in a database - users and their profiles, pictures, text, whatever - and to write the HTML to display that info on the fly at the time of the page request.

Pretty cool, huh? Comments? Suggestions?

chapter1a

Quick bio - The difference between

As in, the difference between your brain and your computers CPU. The difference between how you think and speak and interact, and how your computer does. The difference between languages, be they interpreted or compiled, object oriented or procedural. This first chapter will hopefully assist in the process of the first few days after the moment where it first occurs to you that you want to learn how to develop software, be they games or business or iPhone apps. The real difference for me was the the one between what I thought the process was going to be and what it's actually turned out to be.

The moment occurred for me in a car. I had bought an iPhone a few months after it first came out. It was the first such early adopter move that I'd made, technologically speaking. I knew as soon as I started screwing around with it that this was a tool that could really help you get your life organized, something that I'd managed to get around doing for the previous 30 years. All of the built in applications that Apple provided for their first tier of users were most helpful in that task - email everywhere, calendar, internet, maps, oh yeah, and a phone. The real fun didn't begin for me until they (Apple) released the 2.0 software update. This was the update that heralded the opening of the AppStore, where there were now hundreds of apps available from 3rd party developers that could extend the usefulness of your phone. Anyway, to make a long story no less long, the first long car ride I took after updating my phone was the one where the real potential of mobile computing dawned on me.

I came home that weekend determined to figure out what it would take to learn the art and craft of building my own applications, as this was clearly a vast and uncharted territory for creative people to make things that could affect the lives of huge numbers of people (and maybe even make a living doing it).

I got home that week and started Googling. A search on Computer Programming turned up a mountain of information that was so staggeringly huge as to be almost useless. I did learn a few things - Wikipedia can be your best friend; there are many different ways to program computers; there are endless amounts of information on programming computers, most of it written by computer programmers with no conversational or literary ability whatsoever.

I was able to discern a few important pieces, however. One was something called "compilation". I wasn't sure what this was or why it was important, but hey. Another was that if you're going to develop software, and you're used to working in a more or less standard Windows environment, you're in for a ride. Another was that there was something called Object Oriented programming, that supposedly is some kind of elevated way to program. iPhone apps are written in an OO manner. Oh, and if you really want to develop apps for the iPhone, you have to buy a Mac. That's some clever marketing, and the push over the cliff that I'd been waiting for for years. The bonus was that once you bought the Mac, all of the tools to develop apps, as well as an enormous user community was there to help, for free. Step 1.

preface

It occurred to me last night during the show (where I do all of my best thinking) that of all of the thousands of websites that I've pored over in this quest, of all the books that I've perused, of all the tutorials that I've read and followed through, the one thing that was missing was the square one explanation of what the hell we're doing here in the first place. Everything I've read so far assumes some sort of foreknowledge or education to prepare oneself for the task of learning software development. I have no such education. A few very basic concepts have to be put into place before one can train oneself to think like a computer (or more likely, to train your computer to think like you).

As I've said before, software dev is a new thing for me, so if anyone has any corrections or additions to anything I write, please send them to me. I am now attempting to write the complete and utter morons guide to learning software development. I want to be factually correct, of course. And without further adieu..

RoR

Oh, yeah... The Holy frickin Grail. The MVC framework that's sweeping the land fell under my text editor yesterday.

I hacked my way into Ruby on Rails.

I built a website yesterday in two hours that does more than anything I've done in the last nine months. Granted, it doesn't look that great, but it's functional. Also granted, it took me nine months to put the conceptual pieces together, and to find the technical resources to do something with the RoR framework that I downloaded 6 weeks ago, and to figure out how to install all manner of seriously deep Unix command line shit, but so help me, it's an exhilarating feeling.

Okay, so RoR isn't the Holy Grail, iPhone apps are, for me. iPhone apps are written in a language that's not Ruby, but the MVC architecture is the same. What I'm hoping that this means is that all this cool stuff that I'm learning about building Ruby stuff will translate nicely to building Obj-C stuff. The work that I've done over the past 2 weeks with PHP was heavily informed by the one class I took on straight C, so I'm optimistic.

I'm in Davenport IA right now. It's cold, but the sun is shining. Sorry I've been out of touch, but touring really does kinda wear you out. I'm not saying it's hard, but it does wear you out.

Peace...

standingWaves

Sitting here in the surprisingly nice Richmond VA airport, so I thought I'd check in. Cool cabby on the ride here. He saw my big PHP book and started asking me about what I was doing, so that pretty much filled up the 20 minute cab ride.

Last night's show was kinda just alright for me, personally. It's funny because Phil and Stacy both thought it was the best show of the weekend. It's just goes to show, you never know. I've learned through the years (you never let me down..) that I have absolutely the most subjective opinion about the quality of any given show of anyone in the listening world. It's the double edge sword that keeps us from putting out more LiveDownloads. Typically for me, the quality of the experience that I have on any given night is directly proportional to the frequency distribution between 40 and 150 Hz in the location on the stage at which I'm standing. That's a pretty specific requirement, but last night it just wasn't that happening. The theater we were playing in last night was Very Big. Very Big means a lot of air that you have to get moving before the entire room starts to feel right, which is what makes it sound good between 40-150 Hz wherever I am on stage.

I suppose that we probably wouldn't be as subject to the peculiarities of a given rooms acoustics if we were a more electric band. Let's just take my bass for example. My bass is a giant wood box that's designed to resonate. I stand next to a drum set. If you were to solo up the signal from my DI during a show and listen to what is making my bass resonate, you'd hear the notes I'm playing, but also the kick drum loud and clear. You hear a good bit of fiddle, or God forbid the electric guitar, and the rest of the stage, muffled. This makes my bass essentially the biggest microphone on the stage, with a frequency response that tapers off at about 100 Hz.

What this means to me is that if the room is shaped just so, and you never know until you start playing, there's the possibility of a 'standing wave' on certain notes. A standing wave is one that has a wavelength that's some multiple of the dimensions of the stage we're playing. Suppose I play an open D. Suppose that D vibrates at a frequency of 65 Hz. That means that 65 times every second that string is going to return to more or less the same place in space on my bass (nice). While that string is vibrating it's sending a signal to my amp and to Mikey out in front. That string is going to cause air to be pushed out of the speakers 65 times a second. The air being pushed out of those speakers is going to travel at the speed of sound and bounce off of hard surfaces and dancing bodies alike. The hard surfaces reflect the sound much better, and those soundwaves bounce off and travel back toward me. Meanwhile, other soundwaves have been continuing to come out of my amp and the PA. If the note that I'm playing at the time lines up in a certain reinforcing way with the note that's bouncing back toward me from the wall and the PA, you get a standing wave. That's when feedback begins, and my night starts to go downhill.

Other nights it's the exact opposite, and the note that's bouncing off the wall is totally out of sync with the note that I'm playing at the time. That's when you get 'phase cancellation', which means that the soundwaves are canceling each other out. That's even worse than a standing wave for me, because then there's really no balls to the sound. Phase cancellation is what makes outdoor concerts sound weird when the wind is blowing and you're about 100 yards away from the stage and the sound kinda shifts around and sounds, well, phasey..

And then some nights, the PA and the amp and my bass are all playing nice with each other and you get that nice even low end. A nice even low end means ceasing to consider the sound and actually listening to what my bandmates are playing. That's a good night.

And then some nights, the PA and the amp and my bass are all playing nice with each other, but we still can't get it sounding right. That was last night. It usually happens in a Big Room because the Big Room swallows sound waves and doesn't let them come back to you in time to be useful. It sends them back to you much later so that it sounds like a delay on your entire band being blasted back at you.

And then some nights the sound is so God awful that you just say fuck it, and those are usually really great nights. Blacksburg was one of those. It was in a tiny little basement of a club, my bass was acting up all night, but the crowd was blazing. You can't possibly have a bad time in that situation.

Now boarding. Later...

iDidIt

I pulled the trigger. I am now an official iPhone developer. I can put apps on the app store, just as soon as I figure out how to write one. Had to tell somebody...

busyBusy

Alright! I finally have some time here. I apologize for the dearth of interesting verbiage from this blog over the last week or so. I'm still getting the hang of this whole thing, of course.

One thing that I've realized on reflecting over the past week is that the whole method that I have of getting all fired to write and then putting out four things at a time is probably not the most effective means of running this blog. I guess that's why none of the blogs that I've been reading do it that way. So, I'm going to try and keep this to a more or less daily occurrence. We'll all see how well that works out.

So to catch up -

I've picked up a second job here that has been working for me very well. I more or less started last fall and it started as a one-off consulting gig that snowballed into more or less a full time thing. The consulting gig was to help this marketing company/call center up in NJ get set up with a computer recording system. They wanted to be able to do hold music or messaging for their clients for whom they provide an answering service. It went well. Spending other peoples money on recording gear and computers is the perfect job for me, but alas, they only needed one system to get the job done. That led into another freelance gig rebuilding some old crappy computers that they had laying around into Citrix clients, which led into some more involved networking and pretty much whatever they need, which is alot. The head of IT at this place is a friend and fan of the band who keeps throwing me random jobs that I either already know how to do or can figure out with less babysitting than expected. Their network guy is completely swamped at this place, so I've been learning a lot from him about Windows networking. This is what has kept me away from the computer for 2 weeks now. I've been pulling the 6am-3pm shift, and on my feet basically the whole time, so it hasn't left much time for writing, even if I did have something interesting to say. I haven't though.

In the few in between times that I have had time to screw around, I've been doing some tinkering around with RRE's web presence. Check out our Facebook Page, specifically the Boxes page, as that's the place where I've found the first foothold on the mountain that I've been sizing up for the last 9 months as far as this whole software/web development journey goes.

I also got the codes to RRE's web page and promptly learned why you don't do direct work on a live web page! That was fun! I got the site back up, fortunately, but there are a few broken links that I'll be fixing, on the local copy of the website, of course. Stay tuned for those as well. Now that I have the access, I intend to see what I can do with the RRE site as it is before I launch into my wet dream of a band website.

Got a good Dummies book on a website framework called Joomla, which seems very, very interesting. It's what's known as a Content Management System, or CMS for short. Joomla is an open source framework which is supposed to make it really easy to do exactly what I had the big idea about a few months ago. It's a modular system for building, updating, and maintaining your web site with new content, new features, etc. It's a cool idea, but also pretty mature and full featured. This is good because it means that many of the bugs have been worked out for several years now. This is bad because it means learning a LOT of stuff that I probably don't really need in the context of doing what I want to do. I guess it's not so bad, since I like learning new stuff.

Learned a little how LiveDownloads runs their operation from a content management standpoint. I'm not gonna say, though, that'd probably be rude.

Found another framework called Drupal, which is actually what led me to Joomla. It's another CMS, with a different paradigm. We'll see which one I figure out first.

Started grasping the concept of web servers and managed to get Apache up and running on my system. I'd suggest if you're a brand newby to web design and aren't working in a Windows VB environment, you might want to check out Xxamp, as it bundles together basically every single open source gadget you're going to need to build and maintain a web site.

Bought a domain, which will be the place I launch the early versions of all of this stuff to submit for your tinkering and inspection. I'll let you know where it is when there's something there to look at.

Sooooo, it's been a busy week. Fortunately I'm back on the road now, in the sense that now I can catch up a bit on everything I have to do. I only wish that I'd had this idea a few years ago. I feel like I have an absurd amount of catching up to do. Last night's show kicked ass, by the way...

theFollowingDisclaimer.

So where was I? Oh yeah:

I am not an expert. I will spout endlessly as though I am, and often I will be right in my own mind, but often I will also be full of crap. Never has this made me more uncomfortable than now, since I just followed a link trail over to the website of a UK music website called the Guardian. I'm quoted over there, courtesy of a new buddy named Tim who is apparently in a kindred band to my own. So I felt excited and frightened as one must feel the first time that he realizes people are reading (and propagating) his drivel.

I am a musician. I have had a full and remarkably balanced set of life experiences so far, but everything that I write on this blog is an opinion, unless otherwise stated. Quote me at our mutual peril. If I write about perceived stupidity in the music business, odds are good that I can back it up. If I write about software, I don't have much of an idea what I'm actually talking about. That's the point of this blog for me - the exploration of new methods and ideas. So carry on...

justAnotherReason

So Eminem's old producers sued Universal over royalties. For those of you who have never been signed to a record contract, they are shadier (pardon the pun) than you probably imagine. The whole point of getting a record deal is to try and make some money off of selling your recording, right? Well, over the last decades, the industry (and by industry, I mean the lawyers and label heads in charge of finding ever more inventive ways of scamming inattentive rock stars (which is generally easier than shooting fish in a barrel)) has come up with some novel ideas about how your royalty rate should be calculated. They subtract the cost of all manner of promotional charges for the posters you see in the window of the record store, and then things like "breakage" (which hasn't been a real issue since records were made of shellac), and then just arbitrarily lop off another 10% for this, and 10% for that, until by the end you're not getting paid for the 1 million records you sold, you're getting paid for maybe 500k of them, if you're very lucky. Then they charge you back for some more (usually bogus) stuff. The whole game is to keep you, the artist, in the hole. It's easy. Oh, the label is sending a limo to pick you up at the airport and take you to the Grammy's! Great! Do I need to tip the driver?

Add into this that their lawyers have seen fit to jump on digital distribution by making your royalty rate 75% (again, if you're lucky) of what it would be if there were a physical medium being sold through a store (and this is in addition to subtracting for "Breakage", etc.), and the margins for the artist get even lower. It's pathetic, honestly. Even more pathetic is that artists are usually in a big hurry to sign these pieces of shit.

So, when I read things like this, it really makes me wonder. To sum up, Em's old producers sued over the fact that there were so many absurdly non-justifiable, pre-royalty charges added up before they got their cut. They argue, and rightly so in my mind, that since you can't "break" a digital download, and the distribution costs are virtually nil, and that the labels aren't paying for in-store promotional material to market the download, that those charges shouldn't apply to their royalties. They argued that the deals should work more like commercial and movie licensing agreements work. That'd bring their cut up, as producers. It'd also bring down the labels' cut, obviously. The jury found for Universal, unfortunately...

So when I read articles like the one that I posted earlier today, I wonder why music label execs think we're all so stupid. By "we", I don't just mean artists because there's plenty of empirical evidence that we are in fact, but the entire music listening populace. Why do we want to consume the crap that they sell, ripping off artists in the process, ignoring or suppressing good music along the way?

Time to get back on my musicTech thread...

atLeastThere'sThis

If not one more good thing happens during Obama's presidency, and I am an eternal optimist, the Data.Gov project sounds like a ball, and a huge step forward pretty much any way that I look at it.

Link.

theEnemy

This cannot be allowed. There is a definite whiff of opportunity here...

goodWebsiteExample.

At least these guys get the clean thing. There's a raft of interesting content up there, and all you have to do is sign up on their page to get access to it all. "Inbound marketing" I believe the savvy would call it. Applause, please..

theBandWebsiteThingCont'd.

Here's a band with the resources to do something cooler than they are. Is it just me or is this front page totally overstuffed with info, rendering it almost impossible to glean the useful bits at a glance? Are the links at the top of the page really 2003 looking? Are there an obscene amount of links on the right border that take forever to load?

Or is it just me?

Edit: I count 16 banners of equal size and flashiness (90% of which point to the same merchandise page) on the right margin and 30 or so news items. I'm all about having interesting content on the front page, but this looks like our shoe closet. And we don't wear most of the shoes that we own....

Another edit: I wrote this post the week before the Hampton victory frothing ceremony. They've obviously had a recent injection of motivation capital and have gotten their web game back together a bit.

holyCrappoli.

http://280atlas.com/

It's only going to get easier to build software. Brilliant.

twitterAndHope.

So RRE finally signed up on Twitter, right about the same time I succumbed to my curiosity on the same subject. In case you could tell by this blog, I'm completely fascinated by Web stuff like this. I mean, what a stupid concept, right? A micro-blog so that people can talk about what they're doing at that moment. As if I need to know what Scotty Baron had for lunch today! But wait...

The tech media is positively foaming at the mouth over this thing. Every marketing site I go to is praising it, every music business blog is blathering about how to use it, in 10 parts no less. So what is going on over here? I see this journalist over here mentioned that when the plane went down in the Hudson the first place he heard about it was on Twitter. He cruises around to some of the blogs he follows and none of them mentioned it until much later (in journalism time). Okay, so this could be a journalism tool. Outblog the bloggers. But wait...

Part of what I personally find so thrilling about technology like this is the potential that it has to become, at it's furthest extension, a tool for shining a light on the kind of evil that can only take place in the shadows. North Korean gulags, Egyptian or Saudi repression, Israeli actions against the Palistinians, Darfur, Kenya, Afghanistan, China, not to mention whatever the American gov't has been up to over the past hundred years in terms of shady foreign policy wherever.

I firmly believe that world harmony is at hand, and that once everyone has a cell phone and access to Twitter (or something like it), evil will have nowhere left to hide.

success.

I've just imbedded my first YouTube video into a thingy-whatsit. Welcome to 2005!

test.

recordingTechnology.

Now, this part won't be any news to anyone, but will mainly serve to help organize the thoughts in my brain. First, the old way:

The old way involved the "record industry". The record industry used to exist because recording was very expensive. It was expensive to record a song, it was expensive to reproduce the recording of the song, and it was really expensive to warehouse, distribute, and sell the recording of that song. Thus a whole industry cropped up to take advantage of the fact that the barrier to entry for your average recording artist, say Ma Carter out of the hills around Bristol VA, was so astronomically high that nobody really thought about releasing their own music. Show up, play my tunes, get paid for them? Okay! This worked great for long enough for the basic oligarchic framework of the major label system to rise to power.

A moment now to reflect. It's extremely popular to bash record labels, and with good reason. Let us now take a moment, however, to reflect on the cultural purpose that they've served...

I take it for granted that America is, on balance, the coolest nation on the face of the earth, in the history of humanity. Citizens from other countries would doubtless dispute this claim, but I would submit to you that even those societies that profess to hate everything America stands for only hate so strongly because they don't enjoy the liberties and luxuries that Americans have long grown accustomed to. Now, imagine if the record business never existed, that there was no such thing as an LP or a CD, and the only way to enjoy music was to go listen to it live. There were no Beatles, except for those of you lucky enough to be in the Cavern Club, no Elvis, unless you went down to the BBQ shack to see him in Memphis, no Chuck Berry, no Led Zeppelin, no Pink Floyd, no Eagles, no Neil Young, no Bob Dylan, no Coldplay, no U2. I know, a lot of these bands are from the UK, but I consider the give and take of the UK and the USA to be part of the competitive exchange that has pushed the limits of musical creativity for the better. And we can safely lump all these bands into the category of Western Music. Now, imagine if Western Music never existed. How would we export our culture abroad? At gunpoint, probably. How would generations of kids be incited to stand up and make change happen? At gunpoint, probably. My point is that exactly at the moment in human events that the USA and the UK became 2 of the dominant political powers in the world (1946 or so), rock and roll made an appearance. It moved legions of Japanese kids just like it did American kids. The cultural service that the major label system provided these kids and us to come later is therefore immeasurable. And the world danced together...

Now, back to the point, to be covered in another blog, because really long blogs are fucking boring...

preamble.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all websites are not created equal, yet they are endowed by their creators with the potential to be entertaining, informative, and even useful in a utilitarian sense. That to secure these ideals, most bands stumble blindly about with no technical idea of what's involved in actually building a modern website, that the layout and information contained in your average band website has been virtually untouched for several years in a field where technology is changing every day. That the potential for truly democratizing the music industry has never been more at hand than it is today. That nobody in the business of selling records is interested in seeing a better system devised. That the only way forward for the record industry is via the ubiquitous distribution system present in every one of your homes. That the only way to achieve such independence is to fight for change, to take up development tools, and to learn what bands and the music business are doing wrong, and to right these wrongs.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that those of us yearning for change learn as much as we can about the technologies available, so that we may make best use of them and not stumble where so many of our brethren have before. This blog shall henceforth detail my quest to overhaul the sorry state of affairs that is the music recording industry, so that it may brighten all of our lives forevermore...

introduction.

When in the course of your bands business, it becomes necessary to cast off your old, crappy website and the confusing, unnavigable interface which you present to the world as your first impression, and to assume the powers of PHP, CSS, XML, RoR, and other technologies not yet invented in the pursuit of a highly compelling online experience, a more meaningful dialogue with your fanbase, and the glorious rewards of possibly higher merch sales, a decent respect to the opinions of webmasters everywhere requires that I should declare the causes which impel me to dream of a better way....

AIG.

This is a nice little explanation of how AIG got into the mess it's in, if you're interested in that kind of thing...

SaaS.

Ever heard of it? It stands for Software as a Service, and it's a little sector of the software/tech business that everyone is keeping an eye on right now. One of the leading vendors of this service right now is a company called SalesForce.com. My brother in law is actually their director of recruiting for the midwest region. What SaaS does is remove the need to buy software for your business. It moves the important stuff to the "cloud", which is another name for the internet, and charges a monthly fee for the service. It's the same concept as Gmail, except that enterprise software is big, big business. Software companies don't just make a bundle when they sell it, they make a bigger bundle from selling the support contracts that every business inevitably needs to keep their company moving along.

So, SaaS removes the expense of buying, and instead rents you the software, along with the support, for however long you want it. I'm not in the market right now, so I don't know how long the contracts last, but the point is that companies probably won't continue to buy enterprise software if this model works out like SalesForce.com hopes it will. So far it's working like gangbusters. They're projecting about $1.3B in revenue for 2010.

The correlating service in the music business would be something like Napster, I guess. You pay a monthly fee and you get access to their whole database of music. Services like these haven't taken off for crap, mostly because iTunes already owns the market and it's still just too easy to rip music off for free. iTunes has proven such a success because they really do make it super easy to get what you want, the prices are reasonable, and they don't even insist on that DRM crap anymore (which was only there in the first place because the majors insisted on it).

What if a band with a pre-established fanbase wanted to try this out on their own? What if there were very regularly updated music, video, whatever on a site dedicated to the band, and the only place you could get that stuff was from that website? What if it were super simple for anyone to use, and super affordable for anyone to join? In other words, what if it were worth it?

Would people try it?

Would bands try it?

If the other option is to put out another CD that you can only buy at the merch table, or maybe online somewhere and even then only if you're already looking for it, I think this could be a way forward for a really motivated band.

Language.

This is a table I found that shows relative current interest in different computer programming languages. This was put together by measuring the book sales of books covering a specific language as compared to their sales from the year before. The size of the box tells their relative market share, and the color their relative market traction. You'll notice the really bright green one at the top, up 965%, is for Objective-C. Mac OS X applications, and iPhone applications are written in this language. I have personally contributed at least 2 purchases to that square over the last year...

iPhone as PR tool.

So, if you're in a band and you don't have a website, you're not really a band, right? If you own a business and you don't have a website, your business doesn't really exist, right? If you ran a festival, could you see how you could get by without having a website?

The iPhone, and the mobile platform in general, is going to be the means by which info is spread, by which content is delivered, by which people are entertained and kept in the loop. The portable website, but better. Can we all agree on that much?

The road.

It wears you out. All the stories about how road eventually grinds good musicians into dust may be partially true. I'd suspect that it has more to do with drugs and alcohol on the road grinding musicians into dust. I don't have that problem, so mainly it just wears me out.

Exhaustion is a state that usually lends itself to some good playing, at least for me. Last night I was so tired I think my brain went into some kind of alpha dream state during the second set. That's when I do my best thinking when I have the energy, but not last night. Just laying down with the roots...

Computers.

Let me just say this, and I was a big PC defender/Mac smack-talker for many years. The adjustment period, when I bought my Mac last summer, was about an hour long. I just had to get used to closing windows in the left side of the screen instead of the right. Since the adjustment period has ended, and working on this thing has become sort of an extension of my arms, I gotta tell you - Macs just stay out of your way. It's that simple. I don't fight with it. i don't have to reboot or reinstall. I don't even have to think about it. When I got my iPhone a year and a half ago, I knew that this was a tool that would allow the most unorganized person to have a ball getting their shit together. That person is me. I'm pretty sure if i take the time to plot out some sort of productivity index for my life, it's going to start showing some serious upward movement around July of 08.

Health.

I started running about this time last year. I hadn't exercised regularly since college, where they gave you gym access along with your tuition. I spent the rest of my 20s gaining about 2 or 3 pounds a year, and not really doing much in the way of taking care of myself. It had occurred to me that the only exercise I was really ever going to be able to afford was running, but I hate running. I kept up this hope that some day I was going to be able to at least join a YMCA with a pool or something, as that was much more my speed.

I had a big winter last year, with the birth of my baby boy right in the middle of it. I had the same realization that I had had in college 11 years earlier - that one simple little thing that I could that would make me feel better was to start getting some regular exercise again. So I dug my running shoes out of the closet, as I had tried this before, and got started. The first mile isn't as hard as the second mile. And it must've taken me six months of plugging away at just running those two miles without stopping, but once I got over the hump, I really got over the hump.

My short run around where I live is right at 4 miles long, and I try to do that every other day when the weather allows. I start getting really antsy if I go more than a week. Without a shadow of a doubt, I'm in the best shape I've ever been in. I lost the pounds and then some, and haven't really relapsed at all as far as bad eating habits. My wife Michelle is a veg, so it's easy when I'm home, but I've managed to keep at it on the road with greater and greater success. I got up yesterday at 7:30 and went for about 3.5 with my buddy Matt, and then did another 3 or so here in Charleston. As you can tell, this is about nothing in particular, but if you hate running as bad as I did, there's a very good chance that you could love it as much as I do now...

Band meetings.

Generally suck. You want to know what happens when 6 musicians get together to discuss running their business? Not much, usually...

Just in case.

I know you know this already, but can we keep this off the Earthboard until I figure out what this is going to be about? I'm self conscious enough already. Danke...

Toward the point...

Okay, so this blog is gonna be really boring if I do it in chronological order. I want to make sure that my two readers so far have something to look forward to besides cleaning out my mental closet.

I had an idea for a business that would be really cool if someone started.

I'm in a band that gets virtually no love from the mainstream media, the major record labels, the world at large...Yet, we've been together for 8 years now. I've been in the band for 6. When I first joined the band we were buying a van from a liquor store parking lot so that we could get around the country more comfortably and reliably. That van turned 300,ooo miles last weekend. We played Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. In February. "This is ridiculous" we thought to ourselves. Yet, we sold out the little place we played in ME, and the huge place we played in VT. Turns out cabin fever is a good thing for your band. But we do this all the time.

You take your average artist that's on a major label, that's on the radio or MTV, and we draw more people to any given show in any given town than probably 90% of them. That there's something going on here is plain for anyone to see. That we're impossible to "market" in the traditional sense, in the traditional way is equally plain, to me at least. I don't even know how to answer the question "What kind of music do you guys play?" and I've been looking for a straight reply for 6 years. So I don't get frustrated when we put out a new record and it doesn't sell, or get the media response that I'm sure it'll get, or when the good radio play we're actually getting for the first time doesn't actualy translate into any hard numbers. Okay, so I do, but does it really matter? If you're a fan of RRE, how did you find RRE? Was it seeing an article in the paper, or a magazine? Was it by hearing us on XM/Sirius?

It may have been, but I'd say chances are pretty strong that either one of your friends turned you on to us, or that you stumbled across us on the internet. That tells me something.

Numero Uno

To speak into the void.

So I've had this idea simmering on the front burner of my brain for several months now. But first, I should probably introduce myself, or do a bio, or something. Maybe this will take several parts, because I've never tried to write a bio, and I feel like I've done a good job living unconventionally with my first 30 years here...

I was born in ATL, Georgia, that is. No brothers or sisters. Great parents. Always totally behind me for some reason. I got pretty mediocre grades at the private school they sent me to, and spent most of my time getting in trouble. Nothing big ever, no real cause for concern, I just didn't really feel like fitting into their mold over there. I realize now in hindsight that I left high school with pretty low self esteem after being told for half of my life what an underachiever I was, how much potential I had that if I just "applied myself". I had some really good friends, though, and at some point found music.

I'd been in the school band since 6th grade, trombone. I realize now that I never knew how to read music. I think I learned the parts by listening to whomever I was sitting next to. That amazes me in hindsight, but nobody picked up on it, least of all me. I was that into the trombone anyway, I was much more into the drums. I used to get on my band directors nerve because as soon as we got into the room I'd be back in the percussion section, not learning the trombone parts.

"Why didn't you just switch to percussion?" you might ask..

"Because we need trombones" was the answer I got for years and years whenever I asked to switch to percussion.

There was one time that I was really into building model planes. I didn't use plastic cement, for some reason I used a hot glue gun. It was messy and my models turned out looking like crap, but that's not the point. One time I'd set my glue gun down, with it pointing into my glass of water. It had dripped some hot glue into the glass, apparently, right before I took a sip. I burned the crap out of my top lip and had a huge ugly scab for weeks. The band concert was coming up that week. I couldn't play the trombone. I got to be a percussionist for a week. It was like heaven. I couldn't read music for the bass drum either, but I damn sure could make the part up. Nobody ever knew, and I never told them. I totally forgot about that until now.

Anyway, I forget why, but at some point I got more or less kicked out of the band. I think I skipped a mandatory concert to go on a youth group trip with my church. I asked them if I could skip the concert to go on a youth group trip and they said "no". This would've been a reasonable answer, except that five minutes before my best friends James had asked them if he could go on the exact same trip that I was asking to go on, and they told him "sure". So I went anyway. Now I remember why. Amazing this blogging...

Anyway, now I'm in a band, and right now I'm on a tour bus heading to the GA theater in Athens. I've got some time to kill, so I'll keep catching you up, whoever you are. At this rate, I'll get to my big idea in another 20 posts or so.