J5’s Blog

From Matt Asay’s interview with our new CEO:

Tell me a little bit about yourself. What are the last three bands you listened to on your iPod?

I don’t have an iPod (or a Zune). It won’t play Ogg Vorbis files.

This is from a guy who knows a thing or two about generating profits and value. It is an exciting time to be a Red Hat employee.

Getting in touch with my Italian roots while running around Florence was great fun.  Thank you Dorothy and Karl for getting married and sharing the moment with all your friends and family.  I’m busy uploading all of the photos which I managed to save after my camera started corrupting the memory card.  More on my time in Italy later. Now it is time to go and check out buzzgrinder.com - a music blog one of the guests at the wedding maintains.

Before I became a Frontman for the Drooling Macaque Band I headlined for an independent band out of White Plains, NY called Torque. Fresh from being digitized on YouTube, footage from the White Plains High School battle of the bands where Torque took home gold in 1994 is now online. This includes our grand entrance, the crooning original rock balad Hour Glass and rocking rendition of Come Together. Looks like my friend and fellow band mate Aaron is posting the whole show piece by piece so check back on his YouTube page for more.

Ahh, now I can laugh and cry any day of the week. Crazy kids.

Jon Lech Johansen has an interesting take on the iTunes music store

It should not take Apple’s iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM. This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users.

In a market where both DRM and DRM-free music is available via easy legal purchase from the same location and assuming there are enough content providers who would release without DRM as to reach critical mass, which side would generate more money over the long haul? It is an interesting question. Would we see market forces pulling people to more indie labels willing to release non DRM material which would cause pop labels to follow after losing sales? Or would trafficking in unauthorized copies of non DRM music cause more artists to flock to DRM?

I say let the content creators decide which way they wish to license their content and let the market sort it out.

One of the D-Bus developers, Matthew Johnson was asking about the Drooling Macaque Band in refrence to packaging up Frets on Fire. Frets is very much like DDR, Guitar Hero, or any other of those games in which you hit buttons in time with a beat or music. Unfortunately the songs it uses I hear are in some way in conflict with distribution.

There are a number of people in the community who already record studio quality songs. It would be great if they would contact the author and offer their songs. What would also be cool is if we could get the Drooling Macaque band together sometime before GUADEC to write and record a few songs.

This would take a bunch of logistics to pull off, including finding instruments and cheap or free studio time which is why I am throwing the idea out there now to see who is interested and what kind of resources we can pull together.