We went and saw Lipstick Homicide last night, and a punk band called Baby Guts opened the show. Afterwards I got their latest CD, The Kissing Disease, while Billy got that and their EP, Gasoline (I didn’t have enough money for both but I did get a free button ) Anyway you should definitely check them out, they also have a website at www.babyguts.com
I hope they play more shows near us, I wouldn’t mind seeing them again, they were pretty fuckin’ cool. If they’re playing a show near you go see them, they’re awesome.

Oddly enough just a little while after posting my article about using advertisements to pay for music on this site I came across this while trying to figure out how to download songs on that damn new myspace music player (it seems you can’t anymore). Looks like the majors are trying to screw the indies again, and myspace plans on helping them. Like I was saying before, if we had ads on the site it wouldn’t be nearly as bad knowing that you’re helping support the band by visiting the site and referring friends which would result in more ad clicks to help us pay for our musical expenditures. Well it looks like the Majors plan on doing this and more through myspace and completely excluding the unsigned and indie artist from joining their little circle. As the article states this is going to make myspace turn into what MTV is now, nothing worth spending any time on anymore. What’s really sad is that most people probably wont even know, or even care for that matter. It’s kind of unfortunate that myspace had to become the popular one. Sites like reverbnation, last.fm, and Earn It Yourself are much better for bands than myspace is anyway.
UPDATE: last.fm kinda just screwed over independent artists, they only allow people from the US, England, and Germany to listen songs for free now. Anyone from any other countries (Canada, Mexico, South America, etc.) have to pay a membership fee now which really sucks because our play count was actually quite high on list.fm, but since they did this our play count now is practically nil. So they fucked over their users because they can’t try to find cool indie artists to listen to anymore, and they fucked over indie artists because they don’t get exposure to anyone from those countries anymore.
Reverbnation actually shares their ad revenue with the artists (I think it’s 50%) plus provides a ton of tools to help artists with promotion and stuff. Last.fm pays artist royalties whenever anyone listens to their song on their website and internet radio. While Earn It Yourself encourages bands to take the DIY approach, helps find and trade gigs, and provides a number of articles that would be useful to any musician. It’s really sucks that myspace is turning out this way, since the whole reason I liked it when I first found out about it was the fact that I could look up local underground music in my area easily. It’s the reason I know of and listen to all the bands listed in our links section. I never gave a shit for the social networking aspect of it all, but the fact that I could look up bands in my area and listen to their songs to see if I liked them, then see if they were playing any shows in the my area that I could go to was just too cool.
Though this shouldn’t be too surprising, myspace never seemed to show any interest in indie bands at all anyway. Take a look at the reverbnation site, they have a little section on the front page showing local artist in your area to check out. When was the last time you remember myspace putting a little thing on their front page like that for local indie musicians? Yep, that’s what I thought, never. Though I remember seeing all kinds of crap about major label musicians that I could care less for. Oh well, I’ve always found myspace quite limiting anyway, which is the reason I created this site in the first place. Hopefully anyone who stumbles across our myspace page and likes our music will also click the links to this website that I put on it. I’m thinking that myspace should only be used as a promotional tool for us indie musicians if this is the way things are going to be. If myspace and the majors don’t wanna share then screw ‘em, I’ll tell our fans to come here for updates instead of myspace.

I’m doing some work on the website, so if some things seem odd or just aren’t working right don’t worry I’m in the process of fixing them.
Also I was reading this article and thought it was kind of interesting. This guy gives away free content to his viewers and lets advertisements pay for his website and pretty much everything else he does. Which made me think, what if a band tried this approach? With so many major labels bitching about people “stealing” artist’s music (which I think is bullshit, but that’s a post for another time) what’s to stop them from doing what this guy is doing. Like what if we put up all our music in high quality lossless FLAC format for free and put up a couple of ads and a donation thing on the site and let that pay for the costs of recording/mixing/mastering/website hosting/touring/living/etc. I think that would be kind of cool, I would love to be able to go to my favorite band’s website and grab whatever song I wanted for free and at the same know that I’m helping support them just by visiting their site. I would also be able to tell my friends to go check out this great band and download and listen to their music, and the band would get payed from my friends visiting their website.
Although I know the downside is that nobody likes ads (especially me) but on the other hand when you know that they’re being used in this manner (for good instead of evil) I don’t think it’s so bad. The website above talks about how if he put annoying pop up ads and the kind that fly across your screen he would make more money, but he doesn’t because it degrades the user experience to much, I thought that was pretty cool.
Anyway I think I’m going to keep this in mind, it sounds neat to me since it would give us more time to work on songs and stuff instead of having to work ‘real’ jobs to pay for all the recording/mixing/mastering/website hosting/touring/living/etc. stuff and try to squeeze in time for music.

My nephew got an incomplete mini drumset and Billy and I decided to jam out on it about three weeks ago. Billy was playing a crappy acoustic guitar and I played the drums. After a little while of jamming Billy was like “You know this is exactly what I imagined Mop and Bucket would sound like.” Mop and Bucket was a fake band Billy made up in an art class we had when we were in high school. The thing was you had to make a cd cover insert of a fake band, or create a new cd cover insert of an already existing band. Billy made a hilarious cover of a band he made up called Mop and Bucket where the guitarist was a mop playing a guitar, and a bucket banging on itself with a pair of drumsticks. Anyway I decided to recorded it on my phone, and later posted it on youtube. The quality is pretty shitty since it’s a cell phone, but it’s kinda funny. Well, at least we think its funny anyway. I also made captions for it that you can access by clicking the bottom right arrow of the video, I couldn’t remember or make out all of what Billy was saying so I just put questions marks at some parts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYwGBFrFnVE

Oh yeah, the cover band I’m in finally decided on a name, here’s the myspace link: The Noise Vandals

I made a .tk domain name for the website. It looks like myspace went and blacklisted links from any site that came from freehostia.com. So all the links on the myspace page to this website were broken and myspace gave a message that this site was a phishing or spam site and that’s why the link no longer worked…fuckin’ myspace, can’t they do anything right? Anyway .tk doesn’t seem to be blacklisted, so the links are restored now.