First of May Remix
Warm up your cease and desists. I made this today using Ableton Live, Sexy MF by Prince, Why Don’t We Do It in the Road by The Beatles, Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and the raw vocals from the original recording of First of May. Happy Spring everybody.
And oh yeah hey, come see me on tour, would you?
And here’s a download link: FOM Remix
Artificial Heart Tour
I know, this album has already been out for around 15 years, but there’s no new one yet. So this is the official Artificial Heart tour, I just decided it.
Listen, as much fun as it was traveling with and opening for They Might Be Giants, the 30 minute set created a lot of rockus interruptus for me and the band. We’re really looking forward to getting back out there with luxurious amounts of time on stage so we can play all the songs we know. And then I will also play some songs solo that only I know, perhaps on the acoustic guitar. IT WILL BE A REAL SHOW AND WE WILL DO A GREAT JOB. You should come. (There will be some sort of opening act too, details soon I hope.)
Hey, look at all these dates! Tickets on sale now!
The Paradise – Boston, MA
Friday June 1, 8 PM
Tickets: http://bit.ly/art-heart-boston
Gramercy Theater – New York, NY
Saturday June 2, 8 PM
Tickets: http://bit.ly/art-heart-nyc
German House Theater – Rochester, NY
Tuesday June 5, 8 PM
Tickets: http://ticketf.ly/art-heart-rochester
The Mod Club – Toronto, ON
Wednesday June 6, 8 PM
Tickets: http://bit.ly/art-heart-toronto
Rex Theater – Pittsburgh, PA
Thursday June 7, 8 PM
Tickets: http://bit.ly/art-heart-pittsburgh
The Birchmere – Alexandria, VA
Friday June 8, 7:30 PM
Tickets: http://bit.ly/art-heart-alexandria
World Cafe Live – Philadelphia, PA
Saturday June 9, 8 PM
Tickets: http://bit.ly/art-heart-philly
The Ark – Ann Arbor, MI
Friday June 15, 8 PM
Tickets: http://bit.ly/art-heart-ann-arbor
Double Door – Chicago, IL
Saturday June 16, 9 PM
Tickets: http://ticketf.ly/art-heart-chicago
Guthrie Theater – Minneapolis, MN
Monday June 18, 7:30 PM
Tickets: http://bit.ly/art-heart-minneapolis
Great American Music Hall – San Francisco, CA
Wednesday June 20, 8 PM
Tickets: http://bit.ly/art-heart-sf
The Aladdin Theater – Portland, OR
Thursday June 21, 8 PM
Tickets: http://bit.ly/art-heart-portland
Showbox at the Market – Seattle, WA
Friday June 22, 8 PM
Tickets: http://bit.ly/art-heart-seattle
Venue – Vancouver, BC
Saturday June 23, 7:30 PM
Tickets: http://bit.ly/art-heart-vancouver
JoCo Cruise Crazy 2
Oh my, am I tired. This year has had a crazy beginning, in a very good way. It’s taken me this long to post about the cruise because I’ve had my head down doing things, but also because it’s taken me this long to process HOW AWESOME IT WAS.
Whoa daddy! Success! Victory! Being on a giant cruise ship in a sunny place with a bunch of great people is obviously a recipe for a good time, so that part did not surprise me. We all knew we were going to laugh a lot and have fruity drinks together and hear great music and meet wonderful people. That’s assumed. The thing that I wasn’t prepared for is the extent to which all of you Sea Monkeys have simply begun to OWN this event. Again and again I was struck by this notion that you were primarily there in order to be with each other. You assembled yourselves into a Voltron of fun. The open mic night, the a cappella group, the ukulele fest at Molly’s show, the insanely great sand castles on Half Moon Cay, and the many other numerous things that I DO NOT EVEN KNOW ABOUT because I couldn’t be everywhere all the time, much as I wanted to – they are proof of what an amazing bunch of people you are. Two years in, and JoCo Cruise Crazy has this wonderful community-fueled momentum to it that we never in a million years could have created ourselves. Thank you.
We had a fantastic bunch of performers of course, a couple of whom were relatively new to this scene, and they were similarly impressed with everyone. Many thanks to all of them for their time and talents. Everyone looked really great in formal wear! I ate too many tacos from the taco bar, and somehow failed to have free ice cream EVEN ONCE! I drank too many pina coladas at JoCo Karakaoke! And I do want to give a special shout-out (Yeep!) to Paul, Storm, Dammit Liz and Scarface (not to mention all the Sea Monkey volunteers) who put in an amazing amount of work – the cruise simply could not happen without them.
Oh also, some people got married.
And oh yeah, some other people got engaged.
WHAT?!
If anyone got conceived, I haven’t heard about it yet (and don’t want to).
We’ve put a read-only archive of Twit-arrr up so you can what, read it? Do data analysis and word clouds? Whatever, knock yourselves out! There is also an enormous Flickr group filled with too many great shots of too many great things. We are already planning JoCo Cruise Crazy 3, and as you may have heard by now, are offering this fantastic pre-registration discount to those folks who pre-register for it by the end of today. We hope to have actual dates and itinerary for you very soon, hopefully in the next couple of weeks.
Thank you one and all, I have the greatest job in the world.
MegaUpload
Uh oh, he’s blogging. What happened?
I wrote this thing on Twitter this morning about the MegaUpload shutdown, and it’s gotten some crazy traction on the old internet. In addition, I’ve just done a couple of interviews for NPR on the subject, and I think I may have said some crazy, provocative things. There are many comments and questions out there already with more to come, and rather than have a bunch of separate discussions on a bunch of different social media platforms, I thought I would put some of my thoughts here.
First of all, I was being sarcastic. I did not see an uptick in sales because one piracy site got shut down, nor do I expect to.
Second, this was a tweet, so it was <=140 characters of ha ha, and not designed to be a thorough discussion of all the issues. I recognize these things are complicated. Obviously none of us knows the complete truth, but I'm guessing that the people who ran MegaUpload were knowingly profiting from the unauthorized download of other people's intellectual property (including mine). Probably they were making a lot of money that way. That's certainly illegal, and it doesn't exactly give them the moral high ground either. In fact, it's kind of a dick move. Essentially, they did bad things and they got in trouble for it. Here are the issues that, for me, make this complicated. Along with all the illegal stuff happening on MegaUpload was some amount of completely legal stuff. People used MegaUpload to send large files around. Some number of those files were personal files owned by the people sending them. I have no idea what the ratio was, and probably it would be impossible to figure that out with any certainty, but let's stipulate that it was a very large percentage of illegal activity, and only a very tiny percentage of the users were there for anything other than downloading content that they didn't buy. Still, today that tiny percentage had something taken away from them, without warning, maybe just a service they liked using, but maybe a piece of digital media that belonged to them - if they uploaded something and didn't keep a copy, that thing is now gone. Them's the breaks I guess, but in evaluating whether this shutdown was a net positive for us humans, you have to take that into account. Even some of the illegal usage was likely the kind of activity that approaches what I consider to be victimless piracy: people downloading stuff they already bought but lost, people downloading stuff they missed on TV and couldn't find on Netflix or iTunes, people downloading stuff they didn't like and regretted watching or hearing and never would have bought anyway, people downloading a Jonathan Coulton album (oh let's say, Artificial Heart, the new Jonathan Coulton album, which is an awesome Jonathan Coulton album called Artificial Heart) and loving it so much that in a year they decide to buy a ticket to a Jonathan Coulton show and walk up to the merch table and hand me $20. I know not everyone will think all of those things are victimless crimes, and even I can admit that some of them maybe kinda sorta have victims, but my point is that you can’t easily say that every illegal download is a lost sale, because it’s a lot more complicated than that. So when you evaluate the “damage” that a site like MegaUpload is causing, you have to think about these things too. The grand jury indictment against them says they’ve caused $500 million in damages to copyright owners. Given the complexity of actual usage on a site like MegaUpload, how can they possibly know that?
The real question in my mind these days, and what I was trying to get at with my little tweet, is: how much does piracy really hurt content creators (specifically, me)? Professional smart person Tim O’Reilly posted something that made me think about this question again in regards to SOPA/PIPA. He points out that any proponent of SOPA/PIPA starts with the assumption that all this piracy is causing great harm to lots of people and companies. Here’s his pull quote, taken from a recent statement about SOPA issued by the White House:
Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders.
Is it really as dire as all that? It’s an emergency is it? Tim points out that he and a lot of other content creators have been happily coexisting with piracy all this time, and I’m certainly one of them. Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan. The big content companies are TERRIBLE at doing both of these things, so it’s no wonder they’re not doing so well in the current environment. And right now everyone’s fighting to control distribution channels, which is why I can’t watch Star Wars on Netflix or iTunes. It’s fine if you want to have that fight, but don’t yell and scream about how you’re losing business to piracy when your stuff isn’t even available in the box I have on top of my TV. A lot of us have figured out how to do this.
So if you can stand me sounding a little crazy, listen: where is the proof that piracy causes economic harm to anyone? Looking at the music business, yes profits have gone down ever since Napster, but has anyone effectively demonstrated the causal link between that and piracy? There are many alternate theories (people buying songs and not whole albums, music sucking more, niches and indie acts becoming more viable, etc.). The Swiss government did a study and determined that unauthorized downloading (which 1/3 of their citizens do) does not create any loss in revenue for the entertainment industry. I remember but am now too lazy to find links to other studies that say the same thing. I can’t think of any study I’ve seen that demonstrates the opposite. If there is one, please point me to it. So I have a lot of trouble with the idea that the federal government is directing resources toward an ultimately ineffective game of piracy whack-a-mole (with some unknown amount of collateral damage to law-abiding citizens), when we are not even sure that piracy is a problem.
And if you can stand me sounding even crazier, here is this: making money from art is not a human right. It so happens that technological and societal blahbity bloos have conspired to create a situation where selling songs about monkeys and robots is a viable business, but for most of human history people have NOT paid for art. I don’t want this to happen again, and I would be very sad if this came to pass, but it’s not up to me to decide. We are constantly demonstrating through our actions what we believe to be the norms for acquiring and consuming content. Right now a lot of us think that it’s OK to download stuff through illegal sites under certain circumstances, and a lot of us think it’s totally fine to use those things to make videos and put them on YouTube even though YouTube profits from it. That’s not ME saying that, that’s US saying that – we’re a nation of pirates and infringers. Based on our behavior, you would not be wrong to deduce that some of us think funny videos on YouTube are more important than honoring intellectual property rights. This kind of thing has happened before. Entire industries rise and fall as the world changes and our priorities shift. Sorry.
I believe in copyright. I benefit from it. I don’t want it to go away. I love that we have laws and people to enforce them. But if I had to give up one thing, if I had to choose between copyright and the wild west, semi-lawless, innovation-fest that is the internet? I’ll take the internet every time.
Now you may comment. I’m going to watch this thread and respond when I can, and we’re going to have a nice discussion. We’re not going to have fights and call each other names, and if you’re a jerk, I’m going to delete the jerky things you say. (And if you infringe on my copyright I’m going to send federal agents to your home and throw your computers IN THE GARBAGE.)
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