YouTube user JoshuaMutter, who makes a lot of Minecraft machinima, created this video that mashes up the gameplay from Deus Ex: Human Revolution (which I still have to get) and Men Without Hats’ 1982 dance-synth-pop classic, Safety Dance. All it needs is the little minstrel from the original music video.

No tech workshop is complete without a little goofing around on an accordion, and I certainly didn’t want the MeshU day of workshops (which preceded the Mesh Conference) to be incomplete. I did a quick interview with Anita Kuno in which I performed a classic computer programmer song parody and promoted The Empire, which you can see in the video below:

CNN/Fortune hated the idea so much that they listed it in their 101 Dumbest Moments in Business article. In 2007, Radiohead made their album In Rainbows available for download before physical copies were available in stores. You could choose to simply download the album or voluntary pay an amount of your choice. Radiohead didn’t reveal any statistics related to the download; the known data comes from comScore, who reported that:

• 62% of the downloaders chose to pay nothing
• The remaining 38% voluntarily paid an average of $6 for the album

Based on these numbers and Radiohead’s silence, the CNN/Fortune article inlcuded the sneering line “Can’t wait for the follow-up album, In Debt.”

It turns out that Radiohead’s experiment was actually a success. Techdirt points to a report on Music Ally that says that Radiohead’s publisher Warner Chappell will tell all about the In Rainbows experiment at the “You are in Control” music conference now taking place in Iceland.

The “success” of which they speak isn’t the hand-wavy “artistic”, “critical” or “proving a point” kind, but the sort of success that bottom-line thinkers like: In Rainbows made more money before the the album was physically released than the total sales for the previous album, Hail to the Thief. Even when preceded by a free or “pay what you can” downloads, In Rainbows has still sold 1.75 million copies of the CD to date, and it’s still in the top 200 selling CDs in the U.S. and U.K..

The Music Ally article has more details and includes these statistics:

• After being made available online for free for 3 months, In Rainbows hit number one on both U.S. and U.K. charts.
• 30,000 copies were sold on iTunes in its first week.
• 1.75 million CDs of the album have been sold since its release.
• 100,000 box sets have been sold through Radiohead’s sales and merchandising site, W.A.S.T.E..
• 17 million plays on last.fm.
• 1.2 million fans will see their tour.
• The digital income from the experiment made a material difference to Warner Chappell Music’s UK digital revenue this year.

U.S. album sales plunged 9.5 percent last year from 2006, continuing a downward trend for the recording industry, despite a 45 percent surge in the sale of digital tracks.

I remember watching an interview with William Gibson in which he talked about the 1992 L.A. Riots and the Digital Divide. He remarked that while many stores were looted, it was notable that a store that had laptop computers in their window display went untouched; he looters simply saw no value in them, whether for themselves or as things they could “fence”.

Looking at tech devices that people are stealing is a pretty good indicator of their mainstream appeal. Had the riots taken place today, the laptops would probably be among the first things taken by the looters. Here in Toronto, GPS navigation systems have replaced car stereos as the must-steal items.

As for console games, Rock Band has now been established as the most in-demand game, if you’re using theft as your yardstick of tech popularity. A truck carrying more than 1,000 copies of the XBox 360 the game — which includes a guitar, drum and mic controller — was hijacked in Long beach, California last weekend.

According to the L.A. Times article on the theft, “Thieves are increasingly targeting the nearly $260 billion of goods that move through the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports each year, especially targeting high-priced electronics shipped from Chinese factories.”

Meanwhile, we Canadians still have to wait — Rock Band’s Canadian release date has been delayed until the 17th.

Back in the 1980s, I was a regular reader of Keyboard magazine. I always rolled my eyes at the two-page ad spread usually near the middle of the magazine that bore the headline “Don’t let them do DAT”, a campaign whose purpose was to keep DAT — that’s digital audio tape — recorders out of consumers’ hands. The worry was that giving consumers access to technology that could produce recordings that could be duplicated perfectly would kill the music industry (you young’uns would laugh at the audio fidelity of compact cassettes). The ad looked like a contest — in exchange for adding your name to their list of musicians who wanted to keep technology out of people’s hands, you’d get a chance to win some nice musical gear. Needless to say, I never participated in that silly campaign, which these days seems as quaint as Ned Ludd and his followers.

That’s not the first time that there’s been tension between musicians and technology. Back in the late 1920s and early 1930s, movies with sound were still new. Most films were “silent films” with the dialogue appearing on screen and music performed by live musicians in the theatre, a la Vern and Johnny, the vaudeville duo from Family Guy:

Here’s an ad that talks of the dangers of using recorded music in movies instead of musicans from 1931 titled The Robot at the Helm:

Image courtesy of the Paleo-Future blog. Click the picture to see the source article.

Here’s the text of the ad:

Here is a struggle of intense interest to all music lovers. If the Robot of Canned Music wrests the helm from the Muse, passengers aboard the good ship Musical Culture may well echo the offer of Gonzalo to trade “a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of ground.” Are you content to face a limitless expanse of “sound” without a sign of music?

Monotony of the theatre — corruption of taste — destruction of art. These must inevitably follow substitution of mechanical music for living music.

Millions of Music Defense League Members cordially invite you to join them in putting the Robot in his place. Just sign and mail the coupon.

As neat as having live musicians performing in sync to films would be — and hey, there’s room for that sort of thing — if anything is killing art, I’d say it’s Hollywood’s lack of creativity.

[Image from the Paleo-Future blog. Cross-posted to The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.]

Here are a couple of shots from a presentation made by Harmonix founder and CEO Alex Rigopoulos in which he talks about the pros and cons they considered when trying to decide whether or not to make a guitar game:

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

The “pro” argument is all you’d need to convince me!

Update: It looks as though Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood beat me to the punch and has even more details. Damn you, Atwoooooood!

The latest videogame to get featured on South Park — and lampooned a little to boot — is Guitar Hero, in an episode (in)appropriately titled Guitar Queer-o. The episode guide has this brief summary:

Stan and Kyle are hooked on Guitar Hero. But Stan’s superior skills on the video game damage his friendship with Kyle.

Here’s a quick snippet from the opening act, in which Stan and Kyle play Kansas’ Carry On Wayward Son, one of the songs featured on Guitar Hero II:

Can’t see the video? Click here.

When Randy saw the kids playing Guitar Hero and tried to impress them by actually playing Carry On Wayward Son on a real guitar and singing as well, only to be told “that’s gay, Mr. Marsh”. Not only does the real guitar fail to win the kids over, but later that night, Randy finds out that real guitar-playing skill does not translate into Guitar Hero skill. The bit where Thad, the professional backup player, played Guitar Hero without a console — “acoustically” — was a laugh-out-loud moment. I don’t want to spoil the story, so I’ll just simply say that the “real vs. virtual” and “rock star” themes get pushed farther, to hilarious results.

The episode aired last night and won’t air here in Canada for a few more weeks, but it doesn’t matter — the entire episode is online at South Park Zone.

I’m working on an article (working title: Walled Garden…or BEER Garden?), so here’s something to keep you amused in the meantime…

My Obsessions, Circa 1980

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

The “Star Wars Trumpet” Video

Well, I can’t make a reference to Battlestar Galactica (the 80′s version) without making one to Star Wars, can I? How ’bout the video that’s making the rounds right now — this so-bad-it’s-good performance of the Star Wars theme on trumpet for the “talent” portion of an old beauty pageant?

Can’t see the video? Click here.

Remind me to tell you folks about my worst on-stage music performance ever sometime.

The description of the video on its YouTube page is as follows:

I work in TV Sports, this tape has circulated amongst our tape rooms for years, I figured it was only natural to be on YouTube. I’m of the understanding it was a statewide beauty pagaent, and Stacy is Miss Douglas County. I have no idea who she is, or if she even knew there was a talent portion of the contest.

It’s believed that the tape has origins in the Kansas City area, and I thought it was a Nebraska beauty pageant.

Obligatory Star Trek Gag

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

You’ve probably heard of Radiohead’s latest album, In Rainbows. They’re bypassing the record industry, and you can buy it directly from them, either as an audio CD or as downloaded MP3s. For those of you who have downloaded or ripped the album, here’s the album art for your enhanced listening enjoyment!*

Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

* May not be the actual album art.

A refrain we use quite often here at Global Nerdy is that Microsoft’s consumer offerings make you feel as though you’re dining from the table scraps from the dumpsters of the customers they really love: corporate drones running Office, Exchange and SQL Server. However, there are a couple of bright spots in their more recent consumer items:

• The XBox 360, which despite the “red ring of death” issue, has proven to be a great console for the hardcore gamer,
• and just now, the fact that the first-gen Zune can have all the new features being delivered in the second-gen Zune through a free software upgrade. Engadget puts it best: “This is how you treat your customers”.

This move isn’t just uncharacteristic of Microsoft, but in light of the recent Appledickery — that is, Apple’s war against its own fans — it’s downright inspired:

• The iPhone’s “early adopter tax” — dropping the price of the 8GB iPhone a mere two months after its initial release and Steve Jobs’ initial brush-off of angry users with the line “That’s what happens with technology”.
• iPhone “bricking” — Apple’s disabling of modified iPhones.
• The “gimping” of the iPod Touch. Despite the fact that the iPod Touch is running on the same OS as the iPhone, some of its software is a crippled version of the iPhone’s.

Twenty years ago, the portable music player of the time — the Walkman — could only be a Walkman since it was a single-purpose hardware whose sole task was to play cassette tapes. That era’s video players, cellular phones and handheld electronic games also faced the same mechanical limitation — each device could only perform its intended task. Under the hood, each of these device types was quite different.

These days, there isn’t much that separates music players, video players, phones and handheld electronic games. While the user interfaces are different, they’re all just general-purpose computers that vary in processing power and memory. This fact is not lost on the vendors, but many are hoping that consumers are still stuck on the mechanical-era “upgrade treadmill” mindset. Apple seems to be thinking this way, but Microsoft apparently isn’t. Kudos to Microsoft for treating their early adopters properly.

Screenshot from Rock Band. Click to see the screenshot on its original page at full size (it’s huge).

Let me get the tiny bit of disappointment that I have with the upcoming game Rock Band out of the way first: What? No keyboards? They’re the most computer-ready interface devices to make! You suck.

That little gripe aside, I’m looking forward to Rock Band, the next step in the evolution of the Guitar Hero game. While Guitar Hero let one player at a time “play guitar” and Guitar Hero II let a single player “play” either guitar or bass, Rock Band offers, Rock Band lets up to four people play simultaneously, each one taking the role of guitarist, bassist, drummer or lead vocalist. As you can see from the screenshot above, gameplay looks like a hybrid of Guitar Hero for the instrument roles and Karaoke Revolution for the vocalist role.

Joystiq has just published the news on Rock Band’s release date and price. Rock Band for the XBox 360 and the PlayStation 3 will hit the shelves in the U.S. on Friday, November 23rd, with the PlayStation 2 version following on December 10th. November 23rd is “Black Friday” — for our non-American readers, this is the Friday of the American Thanksgiving long weekend. Being the last holiday before Christmas, it’s the biggest shopping day of the year and a day which puts a lot of stores “in the black”, hence the name. Shopping malls in the U.S. open ridiculously early on that day (we’re talking hours before sunrise) and the crowds are insane. Occasionally fights break out; perhaps the makers of Rock Band want shoppers to have the full rock concert experience — the Woodstock 1999 experience, that is.

The full Rock Band bundle will sell for the following consoles:

• XBox 360: $170
• PlayStation 3: $170
• PlayStation 2: $160

The bundle will include:

• The game itself (regular price $60 for the XBox 360 and PS 3, $50 for the PS2)
• Guitar controller (reg. $60, but wired on Xbox 360, wireless is separate and $80)
• Drum controller (reg. $80, wired)
• Microphone (reg. $30, wired)

According to Wikipedia, the following songs have been announced for the game:

• “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” – Jet
• “Black Hole Sun” – Soundgarden
• “Blitzkrieg Bop” – Ramones
• “Brainpower” – Freezepop
• “Celebrity Skin” – Hole
• “Cherub Rock” – Smashing Pumpkins
• “Creep” – Radiohead
• “Dani California” – Red Hot Chili Peppers
• “Detroit Rock City” – Kiss
• “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” – Blue Öyster Cult
• “Enter Sandman” – Metallica
• “Epic” – Faith No More
• “Gimme Shelter” – Rolling Stones
• “Go with the Flow” – Queens of the Stone Age
• “The Hand That Feeds” – Nine Inch Nails
• “Here It Goes Again” – OK Go
• “Highway Star” – Deep Purple
• “I Think I’m Paranoid” – Garbage
• “In Bloom” – Nirvana
• “Learn to Fly” – Foo Fighters
• “Main Offender” – The Hives
• “Maps” – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• “Mississippi Queen” – Mountain
• “Orange Crush” – R.E.M.
• “Paranoid” – Black Sabbath
• “Reptilia” – The Strokes
• “Sabotage” – Beastie Boys
• “Say It Ain’t So” – Weezer
• “Should I Stay or Should I Go” – The Clash
• “Suffragette City” – David Bowie
• “Tom Sawyer” – Rush
• “Vasoline” – Stone Temple Pilots
• “Wanted Dead or Alive” – Bon Jovi
• “Wave of Mutilation” – Pixies
• “Won’t Get Fooled Again” – The Who

I think this is a pretty good collection of songs; a number of them are either in my accordion repertoire or were on the set lists of bands with whom I played keyboards.

Most of the tunes listed will use the original master tracks. I suspect that the game will use the bowlderized lyrics for Radiohead’s Creep (“You’re so very special” rather than “You’re so fucking special”), and I hope that Don’t Fear the Reaper has a special “cowbell” mode. I also think that The Perfect Drug might’ve been a better Nine Inch Nails tune, even if only to give the drummer a challenge (there’s a killer drum solo near the end of the song).

The inclusion of a tune by Boston-based synthpop band Freezepop seems a little odd — they’d fit better in a game that offered keyboard controllers. This may be a prank by a Wikipedia contributor.

Well, tomorrow’s the big night — the second annual bowling tournament where Atlanta-area Furries take on Atlanta-area Klingons takes place at Midtown Bowl (1936 Piedmont Cir NE, Atlanta, Georgia). A hearty Qa’pla! and Meow! to all who are attending!

Someone set up a poll at Poll Boutique where you can vote for your favourite team. As of this writing, the Furries and Klingons are dead even, each with 50% of the vote.

In honour of this weekend’s event, I would like to share the most appropriate music in my collection for this event: the ever-lovin’
Star Trek Fight Music [1.8MB MP3]. Enjoy!

That’s the answer, courtesy of an Engadget interview with Apple VP Phil Schiller. Strangely enough, some thanks goes to those enemies of fair use, the RIAA:

Well, the RIAA wanted to be able to distribute ringtones of its artists without having to pay them big money to do so (surprised?), and it won a decision last year before the Copyright Office saying that ringtones weren’t “derivative works,” meaning they didn’t infringe on the copyright of the songwriter. It’s a little more complicated than that, but essentially, if the RIAA hadn’t won, ringtones would cost even more, since no one would be able to make them without a license from the songwriter.

Everything has a catch, and ringtones are no exception:

• If you’re making a ringtone from an MP3 file that you’ve ripped from a CD you’ve purchased, you’re in the clear. Just don’t sell or distribute it.
• If you’re making a ringtone from a file you purchased from the iTunes Music Store, you’re breaking the law! Here’s Engadget’s explanation:
  

  Judging from the fact that the iTMS EULA prohibits the use of downloaded files as ringtones, we’d say it’s more than likely because Apple’s contracts with the various labels represented in the iTMS specifically forbid it. We haven’t seen them, but we’d bet that ringtones — and the licenses for using songs as ringtones — have their own lengthy section in Apple’s contracts, and that Apple isn’t allowed to sell files for use as ringtones without coughing up more dough. Steve has said as much, after all. Otherwise the selection would include more than just the 500,000 songs you can get right now.

While we at Global Nerdy stress that you should obey all local laws, who’s going to know if that ringtone you made came from a ripped CD or an iTunes purchased tune?

Here’s an infographic explaining how a record gets leaked from a Spin article titled Days of the Leak:

Click the image to see it at full size.

According to the infographic, there are a number of opportunities for an album to make it into the public’s hands between its completion and release:

• At the studio: 4 months before release — As soon as a record is finished, anyone from the producer to the engineer to the band members can spoil the fun.
• At the label: 3 1/2 months before release — Labels send albums to companies like Sonic Arts to add a digital encryption code that can identify evildoers…but not necessarily stop them.
• By the press: 3 months before release — Considered to be the most common source of album leakage, watermarks or not. Oops!
• At the plant: 1 month before release — While in the process of being manufactured, a CD is ostensibly secured under lock and key, but sometimes copies fall off the back of trucks.
• At the warehouse: 2 weeks before release — Once CDs await shipping to retailers, it’s virtually guaranteed that a copy will find its way online.
• At retail: And of course, once an album is for sale online and in stores, all bets are off.

A Brief History of Payola

See the gentleman on the left? That’s Alan Freed, the “Father of Rock and Roll”. As a radio DJ and music television show host in the 50′s, he popularized the term “Rock and Roll”, turning it from an obscure euphemism for sex into a household phrase for a music genre. He helped break the color barrier in music, introducing America to acts like Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

His career and reputation were destroyed in the (painfully-named) Payola scandal, in which he accepted bribes from record companies to give their records more airplay. Dick Clark’s career was almost destroyed as well, but by cooperating with the authorities and selling off his share of a record company, he was able to have the charges against him reduced to a slap on the wrist.

(Freed, unable to find much work in the wake of the scandal, turned to alcohol and died of cirrhosis in 1965.)

Payola still exists today, thanks to a legal loophole. Rather than going directly to radio stations, record companies hire “indies” (independent promoters, not independent labels) to promote their albums — and by promote, I mean “provide payment as inducement to play their albums”. For more on the relationships between record companies, indies and radio stations, see this How Stuff Works article.

Radio: Bad for the Recording Industry?

Here’s a report from Techdirt earlier today:

Remember a few months back when the RIAA started asking the government to get radio stations to pay up for promoting their music? This seemed pretty ludicrous (especially when you add in the fact that record labels for years have paid radio stations via payola to get them to play their music in the first place). Well, the group organized by the RIAA to push this plan has found a professor to publish a study saying that radio actually makes people buy less music. This way, they can claim that radio actually is not a promotional medium for music.

Techdirt asks the question and I repeat it: If radio is bad for music as the RIAA says, why have record companies been bribing radio stations all these years?

Click to see the comic on its original page.

Trust me, kids: learn to play a musical instrument reasonably well before college.

As for accordion playing, the “coolness graph” looks like this:

The machinima videos that people have made for Jonathan Coulton’s geek anthem Code Monkey haven’t impressed me; unlike the Red vs. Blue series of animations, the visuals feel poorly matched with the storyline.

Better by far is this video, which does an excellent job of repurposing clips from the Japanese animated TV series Black Heaven. If you watch only one fan-made video of Code Monkey, watch this one:

[via Amber Mac]

Jonathan Coulton’s Code Monkey was the catchy nerd-friendly rock tune of last year. This year, the crown could very well be johnnyOnline’s Love Two Point Oh, which features lyrics like:

You’re prettier than fine CSS
You’re finer than http://del.icio.us/

as well as the “09 F9…” HD-DVD code as whispered backing vocals.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, here it is:

I was 12 when the 80′s began and 22 when they ended, so the music of that decade is pretty much seared into my consciousness. Hence my jumping for joy when I found out that a new Guitar Hero game featuring 80s rock is due on July 17th. Here are the tracks known to be included with the game:

• Asia – Heat of the Moment
• Billy Squier – Lonely Is the Night
• Bow Wow Wow – I Want Candy
• Dio – Holy Diver
• Eddie Money – Shakin’
• Extreme – Play With Me
• Faster Pussycat – Bathroom Wall
• Flock of Seagulls – I Ran (So Far Away)
• Poison – Nothin’ But A Good Time
• Police – Synchronicity II
• Quiet Riot – Bang Your Head (Metal Health)
• Ratt – Round & Round
• Skid Row – 18 And Life
• Twisted Sister – I Wanna Rock

As far as I can tell, it’s a PlayStation 2 exclusive. Since I am the owner of a PS2 (a Christmas present from my lovely and very understanding wife), I am left with one complaint: Where the Hell is the AC/DC?!

Party at my house on July 17th!