mom_surfing wrote:

i need to also. i was going to pick one up at the
convention and didn't. do we get it directly from you
or through a distributor?

Heya Carol! You can buy directly from our website:
http://secretsamurai.bigcartel.com/

Sorry for the hijack folks....

Ryan
The Secret Samurai Website
The Secret Samurai on Facebook

i've downloaded alot of music but also bought alot of music. i'll download the whole prince discography but i'll buy all albums from people on this board. i think there is something about buying an album and knowing where the money is going.

i'm pretty bored of CDs, I always buy them, rip them and they technically never get played. I'm trying not to buy them anymore. They aren't quite as fun to listen to and hard to get excited over before you put one on to listen to. i think we live in a world where attention span has been reduced to a split second and putting on a vinyl album feels like an escape from it all and forces you to relax instead of deciding whether or not you should skip the track or listen to something else.

out of curiousity, how do you feel about napster and rhapsody? i just got a napster subsciption and love it but i've been wondering how artists feel about it.

-Pierre
The Obsidians! (Ottawa surf)
The Obsidians debut EP

I love Napster and Rhapsody and Amazon and iTunes and all the rest! Nothing like getting paid for sales, no matter what format they're in. If you're not taking advantage of digital distribution, you're missing out on potentially lots of sales. And since there's no physical product, it's like free money.

Ted James
Deep Eddy Records http://www.deepeddy.net
The Nematoads http://www.nematoads.com

Well said, Rev.

That was excessively violent and completely unnecessary. I loved it.

Live Long & Prosper

Rev

Canadian Surf

http://www.urbansurfkings.com/

revhank wrote:

el_camello wrote:

i'll download the whole prince discography but
i'll buy all albums from people on this board. i
think
there is something about buying an album and knowing
where the money is going.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the money for
Prince albums go to Prince. He, and other major
artists, had to start out like the bands on the this
board. If everyone stole their music in the early
days, then they wouldn't have viable careers. Should
we rip Prince & others by stealing their music just
because they are successful. Where is the line of
success drawn? 100, 000 albums sold then it's OK to
steal? Or is it 10,000? 1,000, 1,000,000? If we
don't want to steal from the bands on this board (and I
applaud that), what makes any other artist different?
We complain about people who steal our music as they
think it's a faceless crime. I don't think it is on
any level. My 2 cents.

Rev

i don't think you're wrong on the whole, but I doubt much money from 20 year old records go to Prince. i guess the line i draw is how old the record is and how available it is.
i don't think it's "right", but damn it's too easy.

that being said, i bought purple rain and the first album after downloading the discography, so out of 10 albums downloaded i bought two instead of zero. all the profit went to the local used record store instead of prince. as a good gesture to prince i'm also redownloading his entire catalogue through napster for him to get royalties.

if i didn't download alot of music there's ALOT of music i wouldn't have bought. people have been making tapes and ripping/burning cds for a long time.

has anyone read any of the comments on the john m. site? some are pretty intense! i have might dust off my mahavishnu cds... if i can find them. or else i'll just download them.

-Pierre
The Obsidians! (Ottawa surf)
The Obsidians debut EP

Double-Crown-Records wrote:

The
people running the blogs say it's free promotion, and
say that most people that download music end up buying
the CD if they like it. Well, either thousands of
people think our music sucks after listening to it for
free, or what these bloggers are saying is BS.

What the bloggers are saying is BS, mostly, in my opinion. There may be a small percentage that go and buy after downloading, there may be a small percentage that think the music sucks after previewing it, but the great majority would have bought it, if they hadn't had the opportunity to get it for free.

http://www.reverbnation.com/spaceparty4

We recently had a discussion about this. All of our music is free, you can download it from our site. Still people insist to buy CDs. Most bands I know order like 500-1.000 CDs and do the typical CD release parties. When you ask these guys how many CDs they sold it's never more than 30%, which means they have like 700! CDs sitting in a box in the practice room and then they record the next album. CDs imho (and LHR's) are quaint artifacts of the last millennium.
People want more today. I remember buying a Shellac album. It came in a big box containing the album on vinyl, a booklet, a sticker and the album on a blank CD (the CD didn't have a cover and was thrown in the box like a piece of trash - not even a logo printed on it). So we decided not to put our next recording on CD. We will order USB sticks (2GB) and have our logo printed on them. The sticks aren't ordinary sticks, they are also a bottle openers. And of course the album will be on it in mp3 format. So what will they get? Our album (and maybe a video), a bottle opener and a USB stick they can use for whatever they want - for the price of a regular CD. I think it's time to step out of the closet and do something different. I love my vinyl albums as you can put the covers on the wall. 4-6 album covers look like a picture on the wall. Neat. What I'm trying to say: maybe we should stop thinking that anyone wants to buy a piece of plastic without gimmicks. Most of us won't earn a living by selling CDs anyway. Big artists complaining about illegal dowloading (I remember Lars Ulrich almost crying and speaking about his children won't have any butter on their bread when you download Metallica albums) should STFU and go on tour! They don't have regular jobs anyway. On the same article (an article about napster when it first was released) Curtney Love was the only one saying something true. "There's a program that allows people all over the world to listen to my music? That's great!" I still don't listen to her music at all, but she's right.
Just my opinion...I could be wrong.

The Hicadoolas

I hope it works. The USB sticks are ~5.00$ each. Putting mp3s on it only costs time. Then you can sell them for 10.00$...which is a reasonable price. And you get a bottle opener!

The Hicadoolas

Great idea with those USB sticks, but just wondering- why not put a lossless (WAV, FLAC) version as well as MP3? You got 2Gb after all, why lose the only advantage CD's have to offer (uncompressed digital).