Spacedmonkey

Jonathan Coulton is singer, songwriter, new father, and ex software designer, but what makes him interesting compared lots of other artists out there is that he released all of his music for free. His story is an amazing one, in 2005 he left his rubbish day job writing software for a small database company to pursue music full time. He worked out that it was really hard to get signed onto a record label so he decided to try something different. He created a website called Thing a Week and released (for free) a new song every week for a year, which is no mean feat.

He created a A few of those songs became big internet hits, including folky cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back“, a funny video called “Flickr“. My personal favorite song called “Code Monkey“, with the classic line

“Code Monkey think maybe manager oughta write goddamn login page himself !”

This was made all the funnier for me while listening to this song as writing a login page at the time, give it a listen. It is nice to have a nerd writing songs about stuff I can really relate with and even sometimes make me laugh. One song that touched me personally, was a Future Soon, which tells of his problems as a teenage nerd.

The most interesting thing about him is the he makes his money purely from donations and live
performances and manages to make a living out of it. So if you like his music, go donate. If you want to listen to his free music, his podcast can still be downloaded for free. Give it a go!

I am sure that many of you are starting to think about Christmas, as the adverts seemed to have already started on TV. Many of you will be thinking about getting yourself a nice shinny new 5.5G IPOD that were released a month or two ago. But have you heard about the Red IPOD Nano?

Choose the iPod nano (PRODUCT) RED Special Edition and Apple will give $10 of its purchase price to the Global Fund to fight AIDS in Africa.

The IPOD is the same price as the other IPODs, at time of writing, £129, from the Apple store. I mean, if you are going to be treating yourself to an IPOD this christmas, you might as well, cut into Apple’s profit to help a good cause. There is more info of the Apple website.

I wrote a post a while back about a research paper I did for A-level media studies. I discussed some of the interesting research matterials I found when writting the paper. I thought that it could be interesting to upload a draft of the essay I found. It is a draft, I haven’t read through it myself, so in place it may be hard to read. If the title of the essay doesn’t interesting you, I advice you not to read it. I hope you enjoy it, and if you have any thoughts, please comment. If you enjoyed this, please check out the blog.
What is the effect of MTV on music promotion and music artist representation?

With the inception of MTV in 1977 as small TV network, it has now grown into a multi-national, multi-billion pound global machine. The effect of the creation of MTV on television, the music industry and the world, is a reflects of active audience of the teenager music fan of the early 80s. At the beginning, many artists used the new music platform to promote their music on an international level and continue to this day. This new platform allowed music artists to promote on a mass scale that made never been seen before. But unlike before the artist would judged on the mainly on the musicality of their song (even though this it is still a factor) or the style of the artist playing live but on the visual shown in their music video. Marketing the video became key because videos were the main focus of MTV because it was easy to show them and quickly becoming a leading source of new music. My hypotheses is that given though MTV has done much good to the music industry as a whole, it?s net effects has been a negative one. In this essay I will descise the negative effect on audiences and artists.

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On my search through the internet I find many things. I spend lots of time on Youtube, most of the time it is a waste. Most of the YouTube is full of jackasses in front of their computer singing along to some 90’s pop like backstreet boys. But sometime you find something that is worth it. You find a clip of a comedy club or a unknown band. This blog is about the later, a great unknown band. The band is called, Ok Go. The video is extremly cool and it is inpressive that is all seems to have been done in real time. It is basically four guys on treadmills dancing around.
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Mtv has changed the way that we all look at music. I did much reading up on the subject a research paper for I did in A-level Media studies. For this research paper I asked myself this simply question.

What is the effect of MTV of the music industary and aritst promotion?

I did lots of research and even setup a blog, to get feedback with like minded people on their thoughts on the true effects. When doing this project I found out some interesting facts.

The following quote was from http://www.mediafamily.org/facts/facts_mtv.shtml

When Static-x release their fourth studio album, Start a War February, 2005 I was amazed, it really rocked. But after Tripp Eisen was arrested in a sex scandal involving minors and thought that was in the of Static-X. Start a War was finally released June 14, 2005.

The static-x site, http://static-x.com/ is really nice site. It has lots of free music and couple of their videos. Static-x is note every’s taste, it is what many would call heavy but if you give the a change you may learn to love them.

The band is now preparing for creation of new record which they plan to work on in Autumn 2006. New album should be available in the first half of next year. It is said that new album is going to be heavier than anything Static-X has already done. The ablum Star a war is can still be bought from amazon. Watch the video for “I’m the one” on Youtube. Remember to check out thier web site.

Queens of the stone age is an amazing band. They went away for a while, 2003 to 2005 and came back with the amazing album. Most people only know the song, little sister from this album through, which is a real shame as there was some really good tunes on there . Personally I think that song “In my head” (which was released after little sister) is the best song from the album, but was completely forgotton after the success of the first single. It is a good song and the video is very interesting. This song has been in my head, (mind the pun) for the last couple of days and I was reminded of it by chance by something that was said to me. I would share this great song with others.The video can be displayed in full screen and thanks to the nice people you tube for hosting it.