I just got back from Google’s “Discover Music” launch and…wow. This is a big one.

Real writers have done a great job of documenting what it all means, but the gist of it is this: when you Google a band, album, song title, or lyric snippet, a little player is now going to pop up in the search results, allowing you to listen to either a 30 second clip or the whole song, courtesy of lala, iLike, MySpace, and/or Pandora.

On the one hand, this is awesome. In a lot of ways, standardization is the working musician’s friend – for better or for worse, MySpace has sort of become the de facto “electronic press kit”, and this partnership legitimizes what was otherwise an increasingly outdated website that somehow still does what it does better than anyone else out there.

On the other hand, nothing good ever comes from this kind of consolidation. </hyperbole> My pet theory, which I stole from Aaron Wall, is that they’re going to wait for this to gain critical mass, then change up the terms so that bands/labels who don’t want to pay for placement get disappeared or bumped way down in the search results. “Extortion”, is what they call it where I’m from.

If their overall goal is to take on iTunes (which I’m assuming it is, because no one said so much as “Apple” during the 90 minute seminar), more power to them. I love a good fight, and it’s about time iTunes’ “here’s every band in the world, have a listen and/or buy” interface was replicated on the web proper. As the dude from OneRepublic said, this isn’t going to get rid of the torrents, it’s going to help you cut through the noise and find what you’re looking for faster. And the prominent links to buyable MP3s & Wikipedia bios make everybody on the supply side feel good.

And yet, I can’t help feeling like this is the beginning of the beginning of the end. In both my day and night jobs (webmaking & songwriting, respectively), I’ve come to love the “long tail” of the internet, and consolidations like this always make me a little uneasy.

But whatever. We’re all going to die in three years from giant Aztec meteors – might as well enjoy the ride down.

From Wikipedia:

In January 1948, Paul was injured in a near-fatal automobile accident in Oklahoma, which shattered his right arm and elbow. Doctors told Paul that there was no way for them to rebuild his elbow in a way that would let him regain movement, and that his arm would remain permanently in whatever position they placed it in. Paul then instructed the surgeons to set his arm at an angle that would allow him to cradle and pick the guitar. It took him a year and a half to recover.

Like Josiah Wedgwood, it’s hard to exaggerate the depth and breadth of this man’s legacy. Also, what a badass.

In case you’re somehow visiting this site but still in the dark about where to vote today, click here to find your nearest polling place.

This is literally the least we can do.

Sights were seen, things were done, parasites were brought home and hosted for a while. Misha’s grinding away on his half of our latest secret project, while I have a couple of solo shows coming up. Summer continues apace.

We realized this morning that roughly half of our incoming email is now guitar tab requests, so we’ve vowed to start putting better ones online soon. Like, real detailed, down and dirty, “Someday all this will be yours, son, so here’s how you milk a cow” style tutorials that will leave your metacarpals humming and the rest of you ready to take over in case Misha or I somehow simultaneously break all of our hands. Please let us know if you have strong feelings about which songs we should do first, as it’ll potentially take us a while to get through the whole catalog.

Cheers,
Dave

There’s a really good article by David Byrne in this month’s Wired, about where the music industry currently is and where it’s headed. I get articles like this forwarded to me by friends and family on a seemingly hourly basis, but this is one of the better ones.

To add our $0.02 to the discussion – Speechwriters LLC is and always has been a self-distributed band. It’s a model with more than its fair share of attendant headaches, but on balance we’re pretty happy with the way it’s been working out for us. It’s forced us to learn things like HTML, graphic design, audio engineering, contract negotiation, orienteering, and ground combat, all of which have made us better, more interesting people. It’s given us the freedom to take breaks when we need to, without worrying about violating the terms of our contract or having to produce a sub-par album under duress. It’s given us closets and closets full of t-shirts and CDs.

That said, there are a lot of times when we feel like it’s Thanksgiving 2007 and we’re still at the damned kids’ table. As great as it is to own all our own masters, we tend not to play the same caliber venues as our major-label friends, and the extra $0.33 we get for every song we sell on iTunes loses a bit of its luster when we realize how few we’re actually selling relative to, say, J-Gro.

But, for us at least, the pros have definitely outweighed the cons, and often in ways that aren’t readily apparent to those outside our immediate circle. It’s a topic we love talking about, to the point where we’ll hijack unrelated conversations if left unchecked, so we’re probably going to start peppering the band blog with Hunter Thompson-esque anecdotes from our not-so-illustrious past, in hopes that any would-be DIY rockers among you can learn a thing or two from our successes, failures, and outright disasters.

Happy New Year,
Dave