January 2008

Jon, my friend and the guy behind spiritofsalt.com and the Phree Musique Blog just launched his online catalog using DJ Edna with the consulting and hosting services of djedna.com. The first release is a greatest hits album to honor the completion of his 2000th Song of the Day. Here’s a sample:

I’m pretty damned amazed that I know anyone who’s written 2000 songs, let alone doing so in 2000 days. Go check out some of the best as chosen by the artist himself.

If you want to follow real-time updates about DJ Edna, djedna.org, or djedna.com, be sure to follow our twitter account, @djedna.

Last night I finished hooking up Anonymous Permits functionality into DJ Edna. This means that users of DJ Edna can now make some or all of their music publicly available to download, stream, and/or play. Along with this functionality, I’ve also added “embed code” on the track detail pages so that your fans can promote the music by putting it in their blogs, facebook, or myspace pages.

Here’s a couple of examples from theskullcranes.com:

I believe that embedded tracks like this represent the future of the “single”. Having artist chosen tracks appear in fans blogs and social media sites will eventually replace radio airplay as the preferred method of releasing songs. Especially if the RIAA succeeds in killing internet radio.

Following up on my last post about why artists should, in most cases, simply ignore most violations of their recorded music copyrights, here is a site that bills itself as “A Clearinghouse For New Ideas About Copyright.”

This post in particular is an excellent summary of who copyrights actually benefit (hint: it’s not the artist).

Another interesting article that explains why artists shouldn’t worry about copyright violations of their recorded music. Unless it’s a big time ripoff where the violator is making a ton of money off your work, don’t sweat it. And don’t expect all the web 2.0 companies you’ve put your content onto to look out for copyright violations either. That will only raise their costs, be ineffective, and reduce the number of players in the market. That, of course, will result in fewer choices for you, the artist, and cost you in the end.

So, what’s the moral of the story? Just distribute your own material yourself (using something like DJ Edna). If someone is ripping you off to the degree that you should do something about it, you’ll know (because if you don’t, chances are it wasn’t popular enough to matter anyway) and be able to hire a lawyer to go get your money. Or, for free, you can publicly shame the violator on your artist blog.

As with all things in life, fear can make you do silly things.