Staff Memos

One of the side interests I have when the Hookers aren’t kicking out the jams, as they say, is writing music for films and theatre.

This week, I’ll be providing music for another RJ Downes / K. Malek production Death to Dating appearing in Alumnae Theatre’s New Ideas Festival. continue

Podcasting has been good to us and we here at Parkdale Hookers International enjoy the many podcasts streaming into our iPods everyday. No sorry, that’s inaccurate we’re ADDICTED to podcasts.

And I thought books were bad…
I just checked my iTunes podcast count and I have about a day and a half of podcasts lined up for listening. Everything from The Advertising Show and the The Marketing Edge, to The Mac Observers Mac Geek Gab, to the incredible Insomnia Radio Podcast. It’s almost as bad as my book addiction — ‘cept they’re free and even easier to get a hold of. Good thing I have my iPod on most of the time!

Radio over the last few years has gotten pretty stale, whereas the quality of Podcasting just keeps on getting better. And not just the sound quality – the quality and choice in the music programming itself has surpassed anything I’ve heard on radio for a long time. Take a listen to Insomnia Radio some night and see what radio should be, and should start to pay attention to if it knows what’s good for it. continue

Canadian Heritage has just released their Report on the Canadian Music Industry and finds (surprise) that things are quite a bit different from the imminent collapse of civilization routinely predicted by the major label sock puppets at the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

It is nice to feel vindicated by this report. Although being a nobody in the music industry, I take a certain pride in having made certain calls about where things are going and being right about it.

A long time ago I said:
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While walking around town I usually have my ipodShuffle crammed into my ears. Either I’m working on some new TPH tunes (a great way to write lyrics – if you can’t remember them between walking trips, then they usually are worth forgetting) or listening to one of the many business, advertising, marketing or music related podcasts available for free.

On the Advertising Age podcast “why it matters” the host was mentioning that American Idol made 2.5 Billion (yep folks – that’s a billion with a “B” – I just checked the podcast again). continue

Direct from the band and just in time for the holidays, feast your ears on Have A Parkdale Hookers Christmas, think Motorhead fronted by Bing Crosby.

We recorded this song at Green Door Sound, where we started practicing this year. John Critchley, who runs the studio, was behind the board and we have to say, we’ve never been happier. This is probably the best sound I have ever come out of a studio with. Sounds like I had a wall of Marshalls in my pocket.

Anyway, have a Parkdale Hookers Christmas Time and enjoy.

Noise once pointed out during practice that the music for Song About a Girl was really just a loose ripoff of Pachebel’s Canon in D Minor (if you’re not sure what that is, go to a wedding where there’s a 90% chance you’ll hear it, or keep reading). That didn’t bother me cause I always liked that song and even thought myself a bit clever for reinventing a classical piece.

One of my employees forwarded me this with the question “is this guy actually playing this? ”

Near as I can tell, he is. It’s pretty amazing.

Absolutely brilliant via Boing Boing:

P2P insurer will pay your fines if RIAA sues: $19/year!

“Apparently, a company in Sweden is offering file-sharing insurance – they’ll pay your fines if you’re sued by the RIAA. The /. submitter translates the link as follows: ‘For a mere 140 SEK ($19 USD) per year, they will pay all your fines and give you a t-shirt if you get convicted for file sharing.’”

We got podcasted on Insomnia Radio #45 again, I'm listening to it right now. I always enjoy the company we keep when Jason includes us in his podcasts, it's quite flattering. Really liked the Fredalba lead-off track.

Jason, if you're getting this: yes, we are compiling material for the new record so we'll get you something as soon as it's ready.

This page explains why Harvey Danger is releasing their new album Little by Little in it's entirety, for free, over the web. And this is the page you can download it from (which I'm doing right now).

Their reasons seem to echo the emerging sentiment from the indie fringes of the music scene:

we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is…

They see it, we see it. The RIAA doesn't. This is becoming a bigger deal now than it was in the past. It used to be about simply watching dinosaurs sinking into the tarpits with amusement, chuckling as they launched a flurry of lawsuits at the manufacturers and distributors of tar. But since the stakes have been ratcheted up by the RIAA takedowns of bitorrent sites this is becoming a bona fide struggle.

Who will the RIAA sue when all the artists start distributing directly over the web?

I've been dutifully ignoring the hysteria around “Broadcast Flag” until now, chalking it up as some problem a bunch of foreigners were going ballistic over and I really didn't care. Today there is a lot of buzz around the net that its going to get snuck back into legislation as an attachment to some other Bill (I never understood how US politics worked in that respect, they can pass legislation on duck hunting and somebody can sneak in a rider to nuke Switzerland).

So today I got curious enough to actually look it up. What the hell was Broadcast Flag anyway? Its a simple binary digit that is supposed to mean “you can't tape this”, save it to any non-volatile media, skip commercials, etc.

The ramifications are that hardware and software vendors are supposed to start complying with this at some point and suitably neuter their offerings to respect the flag.

The situation came up here in Canada last year when XM Radio sued Scott McLean for his TimeTrax software which could record satellite radio broadcasts for later consumption.

Suppose for a minute I am the original artist behind this graphic (which I'm not):

And then I sell it to you, but I tack on a EULA: You agree that you will ONLY look at this image and see a vase or a candlestick. You WILL NOT see two faces when you look at this picture. If you do, you are in violation of the EULA. I will sue you.

Sound nonsensical? It is. Similar to the fact that the picture is nothing until the light bounces off the canvas or the screen, onto our retinas and is parsed by our brains, if I pay you for a bitstream, all it is is 1's and 0's until it hits my processsor and my operating system. What I do with it at that point is my business, not yours.

I believe the marketplace will ultimately reject any technology that embraces this approach and 12 year olds will crack anything that tries.