Wow, talk about a labor of love. Someone was just commenting to me about how long it’s been since I added new projects to this site. Well, long story short, there are two top-secret projects that have taken up the past few months of my life. While you’ll hear more about the later in a few weeks, today I can officially announce the launch of Coachella Digital Magazine.

A next-level publication for the good people over at Goldenvoice, I had the pleasure these past few months to work this them designing and coding their new digital magazine. In short, its just like your favorite mag, only filled with fantastic little goodies like videos, mp3s, and animations. It also includes some Coachella line-up additions after the announcement.

So click here and check it out! I’ll do a full case study for the site in a few days when things are less hectic.

“Social Marketing is the use of marketing principles and techniques to influence a target audience to voluntarily accept, reject, modify, or abandon a behavior for the benefit of individuals, groups, or society as a whole.” - Social Marketing: Improving the Quality of Life (via Engaged Consumer)

Lawrence Lessig is the founding father of the Creative Commons License… one of the most radical and influential ideas in the history of copyright. A staunch supporter of the idea that sampling, remixing, and creating new art from existing art is the lifeblood of modern creativity (aside: look into the works of Pablo Picasso, Roy Liechtenstein, and Andy Warhol for while this should not be a new idea).

Lessig has recently released a new book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy,  as a “final” opus on the subject as he moves away from 10 years of copyright activism and into a discussion of the corruption of our political system (note that I did not say corruption in our political system) .

This video, above, is from a recent interview between Lessig and Haight Street’s The Booksmith in San Francisco. For the uninitiated, this recent interview with Lessig is a nice introduction to the plague of copyright in the digital age. For those familiar with the Stanford Law professor’s thought patterns, it’s a nice introduction to his future endeavors.

Bonus: You can watch the whole interview here, here, and here.
Also: Check out the Eclectic Method remix of Lawrence Lessig’s interview on The Colbert Report.

Just squeezing this one in under the wire for January. It’s actually been sitting on my desktop for a while but I’ve been on-site a lot this month (aka out of my studio doing covert work for mega-corporate clients) and did not have a chance to wrap up the loose ends.

This month we trade the nu-funk for some classic electronic dubby downtempo. Warm tones for these cold months for sure. The rest is traditional studio fare, lots of new piano and shoegaze composition work that I’ve been into as of late. Throw on your headphones and enjoy!

TRACKLIST (links coming soon):
As it Were - Hans-Joachim Roedelius & Tim Story
Two Sides - Mark Springer
Andover - Francesco Tristano
A Last Meeting - Bliss
Clementine - Pink Martini
Paper Smile - Fragile State
Arrival of the Birds - Cinematic Orchestra
Loaf - Sounds from the Ground
Leaving Babylon - Blutech
Contact - Telepath
Teardrop (Mad Professor Marazuni Vocal Mix) - Massive Attack
Things are Gonna Get Easier - Slow Motion Disco

 

 Sound Sketches - January 09: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Click here to download in full 320k glory

A lovely piece of information popped up in my inbox today in regards to my beloved Roku Box:

First, you can now watch, in high definition (HD), the hundreds of movies and TV episodes offered in HD instantly by Netflix. Second, an incredible 40,000 movies and TV shows from Amazon Video On Demand will soon be available to choose from on your Roku player.

Why is this important? Beyond the foreshadowing that my credit card bill will skyrocket with microtransactions from Amazon the same way it currently does with Beatport and Apple, this news puts another nail in the coffin of the “why would I want to buy an Blu-Ray player” argument.

Let’s face it, with the exception of the printed word (sorry Kindle, I’m still holding out), there is no experience at this point - beyond nostalgia - from physical media that digital media does not trump in cost effectiveness and ease of delivery. I’d rather download an album instantly for $10 than wait for the weekend, go to the store and buy one for $20. And now I can rent/buy an Amazon movie in HD for $15 rather than spend $20 for the physical version. In our age of instant-satisfaction, there’s really no competition.

But the best part - beyond satisfying our inner Veruca Salt - are the capabilities of the video once we release it from a physical, hard coded format. Look out this year for the rise of and - of course - experimental “buy it now” features. Needless to say, things are not looking so up and up for the good people at Blockbuster either.

Open source software mavens Mozilla (makers of the wonderful Firefox browser amongst other things) launched the first official release of their free music player, Songbird, today to mixed reactions. It seems that the media is touting Songbird as some sort of open source iTunes killer. Doug DeLong writes for Macworld.com today:

It’s here to free us from our evil iTunes overlords or something. The biggest selling points seem to be that it’s open-source and that it’s not the established players.

But while, yes, Songbird will handle all your at home audio goodness, it also does something much more valuable. Songbird makes web media - specifically audio - really friendly and accessible. Armed with a fantastic built in web browser (take that iTunes), Songbird quickly scans every website you visit for available audio and builds a nice, neat playlist for you. You no longer have to search countless page links for song references, open them in new windows or use pop-up media players. In fact, you can listen to an entire webpage seemlessly without having to click from song to song. And downloading is a breeze with the built-in… er… downloader that queues all your selections and limits your simultaneous download for added efficiency. It’s also pretty handy with ZShare and some of the other file sharing sites.

So is Songbird going to make me throw iTunes in the virtual trashcan ? Not at all. It’s still a bit clunky of a program with a really long startup and less-than-instantaneous reaction times. But there’s a lot going on under the hood and this is only an initial release. What Songbird may do, however, is make your multimedia web experience a little more enjoyable.

Click here to download Songbird for free.