JedFonner.com

According to this article on C|Net News, Led Zeppelin songs are finally going to be available online for legal music purchase.

As C|Net notes, “Declining to sell music online hasn’t made Led Zeppelin’s songs unavailable; they are regularly traded on unauthorized file-sharing services.” So the real question is whether this will matter or not. Have too many years gone by without a legal option for downloading Zeppelin songs? Does everyone who wants Zeppelin music already have it?

I think it will matter, and here’s why.

In the short term, there will be a brief spike of sales people completing their collection or opting to spend money for higher quality bitrates. Then I expect sales will drop off substantially. But the real target audience is the massive numbers of soon-to-be fans. These are kids, probably younger than 13, who’ve yet to be exposed to the awesomeness that is Led Zeppelin. More and more radio stations are switching to “Jack” programming which every so often does include popular Led Zeppelin songs. This means there’s a greater chance now than before that people will hear “Stairway” or “The Lemon Song” or “Whole Lotta Love” and decide to check out this crazy British band they’ve heard about but never really listened to before.

The best way to reach these fans is to make the music easily accessible. No matter what anyone says, the reason legal music downloads work is because they’re easier than finding the music illegally. No one can argue that it’s harder for the great unwashed masses to use iTunes than bittorent.

Of course, whether they decide to use DRM is a different matter. Let’s hope they follow the trend towards DRM-free music and go with one of the DRM-less music providers like iTunes Plus or Amazon Mp3.

But overall, I say, “good on ya” to Led Zeppelin.

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Kanye West has a new song out called Stronger. Basically he remixed the Daft Punk song “Harder Better Faster Stronger” and added his own vocals and made a weird music video out of it. But the song is awful. I mean, it’s painful to listen to if you know the original.

Just in case you are not familiar with the original, watch this. Seriously. Although if you like the Kanye West version, maybe you shouldn’t, because you won’t be able to listen that song ever again without wincing.

This is actually just part of their anime rock-opera Interstella 5555. You can watch it online via Google Video (after weird Japanese intro), but keep in mind its over an hour long.

If you’re not a fan of this style of film and prefer to watch “live action” like the Kanye West video, check out Daft Punk’s new movie instead.

My friend Ben of the bentropy blog sent me a link to “post-punk laptop rap artist MC Lars’ page on purevolume.com (of course MC Lars is also on MySpace, YouTube, etc etc). After listening for a day, I’ve got to say I’m hooked.

“MC Lars is a member of what he dubs the iGeneration, a group born and raised in the time of the Ninja Turtles, cassette tapes and new wave music, who now live in the age of Desperate Housewives, Sidekicks and screamo bands. These are the kids who have grown up using the Internet as a part of their every day life. They can conveniently carry 5,000 songs in their pocket, but are faced with the glooming fact that the worlds oil supply and Social Security will both run out in their lifetime. MC Lars is the hero of this new generation, addressing their thoughts and every day struggles in his music.” (from his Purevolume page).

One of his tracks, “Download This Song”, is freely available to download (as the name implies). It’s a pretty catchy tune and speaks to the an issue that lots of us feel strongly about, namely that there’s a growing dissatisfaction with the current music distribution method. MC Lars isn’t just complaining about the issue - he’s making a successful career out of producing and distributing his own music. Checkout this analysis on copyright.corante.com and this one on the Future of Music blog.

Watch “Download This Song” below:

You can find a free download of this song on his Purevolume page, where you can also stream many of his other songs. Pretty quickly you’ll be a fan too. Strangely, on his MySpace page, this track runs $0.99. So start with the purevolume page.

His myspace page also has a bunch of videos and other crap (as most myspace pages do) which I haven’t had time to watch, but if you have more free time, go for it.

By the way, I think “screamo bands” is a hilarious phrase. Can’t wait to slip that into a work email somehow.

Some are calling this nerdcore, which I think is incorrect. Now this is real nerdcore.

The more I watch, the funnier I think this is. Apparently I’m not the only one - it’s got 3.8 million views. If you haven’t seen this yet, hit play but before he starts singing, imagine what you think his voice will sound like. Then sit back and be surprised.

Chocolate Rain:

If anyone knows what in the world the lyrics mean, please tell me!

This is a little old, but still awesome:

Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo

And it raises the question, how do we get our workplaces to be fun like this? Of course maybe encouraging people to rage against machines wouldn’t be smart in a software company…