Brad Barrish

Madonna released her new album yesterday (Tuesday), though it was available for several weeks on the Infosuperweb, if you looked hard enough. Perhaps you’re one of the people that went hunting, only to have an MP3 of Madonna saying, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing,” which I thought was pretty funny. But what the fuck did she think she was doing is my question. So she made it a little more difficult for people to download her album, but let’s be honest, anyone who wanted the album got their hands on it. It was all over the place. Hell, I even downloaded some of it just to get the phoney decoy tracks and came up with the real thing.

I don’t know how many times I have to explain this, but the labels cannot win. The kids are smarter than you, they’re ten steps ahead of you and if you fuck with them, they will get you back. During these tumultuous times that the music industry is going through, it would behoove you to spend your time thinking up ways to embrace the technology, rather than fight against it. Make it real pretty and real easy for people to purchase (yes, you read that correctly) what they want, when they want it and see what happens. You may just find a business model in there somewhere. I won’t even charge you for the idea.

In somewhat related news: A couple of the major labels are getting creative with their lawyers.

If you’re one of the many who thought that The Beatles’ White Album should have been released as a single album (George Martin amoung [sic] them), then you will find this rather amusing. It’s pretty cool too.

Some fancy-pants kids at Caltech and Harvard came up with a pretty cool new plug-in that actually pays attention to what you listen to, learns from your listening paterns and then generates streams of music that you will like. I think that’s how it works. I can’t be sure until they come out with an iTunes plug-in. For now it’s only available for WinAmp.

Nina Simone, one of the finest female artists of the last century has passed on at the age of 70.

One of my personal favorites, in her honor, for your listening pleasure.

Salon posted an except of All The Rave by Joseph Menn. I thought it was an interesting read. Perhaps I’ll expand later, but for now we’ll just leave it at that.

There’s something charming about someone who likes to pick on Dave Eggers and has “A page a day. Anything less is unacceptable you punk-ass-bitch-motherfucker. Anything less is unacceptable” on the front of his iMac. I just like that. I like all of it.

Back when I wasn’t so employed, entering a rock critic contest would have been fun. I guess it would still be fun, but in case you hadn’t noticed, I have trouble keeping up with this site.

is coming up right around the time that Radiohead is taping a speical performance for MTV. Feel free to get me a pair of tickets. Airfare would be great too.

Umm…I…Uhh…Oh My God!

You go, Dean Woodbeck!