Freeloader Friday: Nada Surf, Grand Duchy, Yellow Ostrich, Xray Eyeballs, Zambri, and Paper Bag Records

Ladies and gents, it’s official: Friday is here! Let’s celebrate with a little jam session, shall we? This week we’re bringing you tons of free goodies.

Check out a video from Nada Surf’s album release show and free singles by Grand Duchy, Yellow Ostrich, Xray Eyeballs, and Zambri. Then, finish it off with an awesome sampler from Paper Bag Records.

Nada Surf: Live from Bowery Ballroom, January 24th via YouTube
The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy out now on Barsuk Records

Grand Duchy: “Silver Boys” via Rolling Stone
Let The People Speak out April 10th on Sonic Unyon/Cooking Vinyl Records

Yellow Ostrich: “Marathon Runner” via SPIN
Strange Land, out March 6th on Barsuk Records

Xray Eyeballs: “X” via Noisey
Splendor Squalor out February 28th on Kanine Records

Zambri: “ICBYS” via Stereogum
Debut Album House of Baasa out April 10th on Kanine Records

Paper Bag Records: The Paper Bag Sessions Vol. 1
Featuring Austra, PS I Love You, Elliott BROOD, Cuff the Duke, and The Rural Alberta Advantage

Enjoy!

Ready… Set… Not Just Yet: RACES’ LP “Year of the Witch” Out March 27th

The story behind RACES, the band who brought us Big Broom EP [Frenchkiss Records], is a poignant one, and the kind that always makes music better.

RACES exists as a result of artistic rebirth and personal rediscovery, but it all started at a point in Wade Ryff‘s life where motivation was at its most scarce. Disillusioned with music, beset with the bitter ending of a relationship with a real life witch and faced with the overwhelming stagnation of being a 23-year old in the sleepy suburban outpost of Van Nuys, Ryff wrote the pleading lyrics of “Big Broom” in the bathroom of his parents house. He explains the song’s message as “accepting that every ending is a new beginning, and even if we may have no control over when things are given or taken from us, we can always choose how to respond.”

Whether he realized it or not at the time, it would serve as a mission statement for a handful of musicians in the area who were also idling through their 20′s and desperate for a new beginning. Breanna Wood, Garth Herberg, Lucas Ventura, Devon Lee and Oliver Hild knew each other prior to RACES‘ first show, played in bands together, and oh yeah, either had dated or were currently dating each other. Still, no one would have expected it all to come together for Year Of The Witch, a life-affirming project forged from the pain of a time when life feels most uncertain, and for everyone involved to come out of it renewed.

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Foursquare’s ‘Arrivals’ App Takes Tips from Airport Terminals

Foursquare is constantly looking for ways to innovate their popular social media platform and may have struck another milestone. ‘Arrivals’ is a Foursquare app which allows users to see friends’ locations displayed on a separate screen. Its design, inspired by airport arrival boards, was created to be informative without being intrusive.

The screen updates with the locations of your friends, allowing for constant awareness of where they are all day. Developer Dan Williams created ‘Arrivals’ based on a concept by Toby Barnes, creator of ‘Where’s Dad,’ a small display for his son that shows his current location when he travels.

‘Arrivals’ keeps privacy first. There is no timestamp, name of the person or other private information; just the name of the venue and a profile picture. While a small addition to the Foursquare universe,  ‘Arrivals’ may strike a chord with veteran users looking for another way to check out their friends’ daily activities.

For more information on this development, go to the app website or check out “Arrivals for Foursquare” on Dan William’s blog.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user ‘iamdanw’.

Shall We Learn from Piracy and Listen to Users?

To start with, let me state that I am not a piracy advocate. I do however believe that things are not always as obvious as we would like them to be, and the case of MegaUpload has many lessons we can learn from.

Without a doubt, MegaUpload‘s closing-down is good news for the content industry. I still can’t understand how some people can defend MegaUpload, when its business model was making money — a lot of money — on the back of producers and rightful beneficiaries. It’s not about freedom of the Internet, it’s about robbery. This said, MegaUpload shutting down won’t be the end of piracy; there are already 10 new MegaUploads-copycats ready to go, and new technologies and piracy models will always be around the corner… an endless fight, you might say.

So what can we do? Continue to spend billions of dollars for this fight? Continue to upset Internet users and make them more and more distrustful of content industries?

I don’t think that the Internet user’s request is “We want content for free.” I think it’s closer to  ”we want a great user experience and maximum choice for an affordable price.”

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Newsflash: People to Pay for Digital Music; But What Does “Pay” Mean?

“Give people a choice, and they might pay for digital music, after all.”
— Peter Kafka, All Things D, January 23, 2012.

Damn, that Peter Kafka at the Wall Street Journal is fast. He beat me to the much-anticipated IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) 2012 report on the state of digital, er, phonographic music. Sorry IFPI. But, phonographic? Really?

Kafka’s thoughtful piece is titled Digital Music Sales Grow Worldwide, but Big Music Still Frets About Pirates and is about, well, that. I decided to avoid a re-hash and use his piece as a jumping off point…

His opening line struck me. “Give people a choice, and they might pay for digital music, after all.” Not to get all Bill Clinton but it depends on what your definition of “pay” is. As an industry, we spend a lot of time slicing up pie charts, demonstrating how much of the digital business is represented by download for pay, streaming music services, hybrid outlets such as YouTube and other models. Always lurking just off-slide from the aforementioned pie chart are the pirates. Ahhh, the pirates. Big week for them last week…

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