Lone Gunman

Fol­low­ing on from the (not so) shock­ing news that stars from Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ were paid a small for­tune to smoke on screen, I came across the slightly more shock­ing news that musi­cians are get­ting paid sim­i­lar amounts for prod­uct place­ment in their lyrics.

The prac­tice itself doesn’t sur­prise me as prod­uct place­ment in music videos has been going on for as long as music videos have existed – this is just an evo­lu­tion of that prac­tice. What sur­prises me is that the lyrics for these songs are obvi­ously writ­ten after an adver­tis­ing agree­ment has been made. Disappointing.

For the amus­ing back-story to this, head to Wired’s Lis­ten­ing Post and read about how com­pa­nies pay artists to include brands in lyrics.

In the e-mail, Kluger (who has rep­re­sented Mariah Carey, New Kids on the Blog, Ne-Yo, Fall Out Boy, Method Man, Lady GaGa and Ludacris) explained via e-mail that for the right price, Dou­ble Hap­pi­ness Jeans could find its way into the lyrics in an upcom­ing Pussy­cat Dolls song. Crouse posted the e-mail on his blog at the Anti-Advertising Agency, an art project of sorts that’s basi­cally the philo­soph­i­cal mir­ror image of a tra­di­tional ad agency.

When Gueguen et al. manip­u­lated the music vol­ume in a bar in the west of France, their sus­pi­cions were con­firmed: louder vol­umes cor­re­late with higher alco­hol con­sump­tion.

[T]urning the music up so loud that peo­ple are forced to shout at each other doesn’t have quite the same ben­e­fi­cial effect on social inter­ac­tions. Because every­one is shout­ing, the bar becomes even nois­ier and soon peo­ple start to give up try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate and focus on their drink­ing, mean­ing more trips to the bar, and more regrets in the morning.

Now I’ve got a good excuse for those hang­overs: the psy­chol­o­gists made me do it.

via Mind Hacks

This list of band names that make online searches nigh-on impos­si­ble reminds me of McSweeney’s list of inaudi­ble email addresses (via Link Banana).

• !!!
• A
• The And
• The The
• The Music

On a large num­ber of ‘best of’ or ‘books that changed my life’ lists I always spot Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB), the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Dou­glas Hofstadter.

When my copy arrived at my door recently I was taken aback by this tome and realised that it was going to be a dense read that will need—and hope­fully reward—all of my atten­tion. As with sim­i­lar books, I will under­take back­ground research and read­ing first so that I can fully appre­ci­ate all the con­cepts con­tained within.

This is when I found MIT’s ‘spe­cial pro­gramme’ specif­i­cally based on the book. While it doesn’t pro­vide a wealth of use­ful, sup­ple­men­tary mate­r­ial (much like the Wikipedia entry), it does men­tion some good Bach pieces to accom­pany your reading.

10 years ago I made the deci­sion to shy away from using ID3 tags with my MP3s; at the time they were new, cum­ber­some, and not really that use­ful if you already imple­mented good file-naming con­ven­tions. Then my library grew.

A year ago I realised that my archaic way of think­ing was get­ting in the way of sim­ply enjoy­ing my now fast expand­ing MP3 col­lec­tion (on a purely indul­gent level, and in a per­fec­tion­ist ‘every­thing has to be cor­rect’ level). It was then that I made another deci­sion: to cor­rect my error, no mat­ter how long it took. Every­thing had to be perfect.

Here are the tools I used (and some tuto­ri­als below that):

• Win­dows
  • Media Mon­key — Batch con­verts to MP3, Ogg, FLAC, etc.; nor­mal­izes vol­ume lev­els; finds and embeds album art (and sin­gles’ art), auto­matic ID3 tag­ging; auto­matic file struc­tur­ing.
    Media Mon­key is just a great, all-round music organ­iser and player. It’ll even synch with your iPod.
  • MP3Gain — For all its advan­tages, Media Mon­key is quite a ‘heavy’ appli­ca­tion. To nor­mal­ize your vol­ume faster, use the light-weight (and open-source) MP3Gain.
  • MusicBrainz’s Picard — Every­thing ID3. Artist, album, art­work, etc. I haven’t used it per­son­ally, but have heard good things. How­ever I do won­der how it will deal with my sin­gles col­lec­tion: Wikipedia states, “[Picard focuses] on album ori­ented tag­ging as opposed to track based tagging”.
  • Mp3Tag — Another good all-round tag­ging util­ity. Light-weight too. Before I moved to Media Mon­key (so I had less appli­ca­tions), this was my tool of choice.
• Linux/Unix
  • AmaroK — The best all-round music appli­ca­tion for your free OS. It does every­thing you need, and more besides. All crammed into a small, fast, light-weight appli­ca­tion. Art­work sup­port has been a bit iffy, but maybe the Embed­Cover plug-in script will fix that? Don’t for­get to enable SQL! (Oh, and it auto­mat­i­cally con­nects to your Last.fm account; sweet!)
  • Easy­TAG — I haven’t used it yet, but have a feel­ing it’s going to be my new best friend. AmaroK will always be my music player of choice, though!
• Mac
  • Don’t kid your­self, you wouldn’t move away from iTunes even if I paid you. Or if I had your mother at knife-point.

• Lifehacker’s Alpha Geek: Whip Your MP3 Library into Shape
  • Part I: Level the Vol­ume — MP3s at dif­fer­ent vol­umes? (MP3Gain)
  • Part II: Album Art — At first I was impar­tial to album art; after giv­ing it a test run, I was addicted. (Media Monkey)
  • Part III: Meta­data — The big­gie! ID3 tags a mess? (Media Monkey)
• Help
  • My cur­rent music library is 100% MP3. I’m try­ing to fully embrace the open-source cul­ture, so some sug­ges­tions on whether or not to con­vert to Ogg or FLAC is most wel­come… as are tuto­ri­als and any use­ful appli­ca­tions.