Category: Music

(This article was cross-posted to Global Nerdy.)

Here’s an infographic explaining how a record gets leaked from a Spin article titled Days of the Leak:

Click the image to see it at full size.

According to the infographic, there are a number of opportunities for an album to make it into the public’s hands between its completion and release:

• At the studio: 4 months before release — As soon as a record is finished, anyone from the producer to the engineer to the band members can spoil the fun.
• At the label: 3 1/2 months before release — Labels send albums to companies like Sonic Arts to add a digital encryption code that can identify evildoers…but not necessarily stop them.
• By the press: 3 months before release — Considered to be the most common source of album leakage, watermarks or not. Oops!
• At the plant: 1 month before release — While in the process of being manufactured, a CD is ostensibly secured under lock and key, but sometimes copies fall off the back of trucks.
• At the warehouse: 2 weeks before release — Once CDs await shipping to retailers, it’s virtually guaranteed that a copy will find its way online.
• At retail: And of course, once an album is for sale online and in stores, all bets are off.

In case you needed yet another internet distraction, allow me to point you to the 120 Minutes tumblelog — that’s a weblog for very short entries — that features a sizable collection of videos from MTV’s alt-rock video show, 120 Minutes during its heyday (the early 90’s).

Here are five videos featured in the tumblelog for songs that were on high rotation during my DJ shifts at Crazy Go Nuts University’s Clark Hall Pub .

Loser by Beck

Kill Your Television by Ned’s Atomic Dustbin

Here Comes Your Man by the Pixies

Ana Ng by They Might Be Giants

Stop by Jane’s Addiction

There’s something about Filipino culture that makes every Filipino, deep down, want to be a game show host or entertainer. Think about that for a moment and suddenly my schtick — accordion-playing mixed with blogging and technical evangelism suddenly makes sense.

Take this cultural tendency and mix it with the general preference in the Philippines for R&B, funk and soul music and our fondness for line dancing. With that in mind, getting 1500 inmates at a Filipino prison (the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in Cebu, Philippines) to do the dance routine from the Thriller video doesn’t seem unexpected:

I’ll bet you could never coordinate this in a North American prison.

The machinima videos that people have made for Jonathan Coulton’s geek anthem Code Monkey haven’t impressed me; unlike the Red vs. Blue series of animations, the visuals feel poorly matched with the storyline.

Better by far is this video, which does an excellent job of repurposing clips from the Japanese animated TV series Black Heaven. If you watch only one fan-made video of Code Monkey, watch this one:

[via Amber Mac; cross-posted to Global Nerdy]