Last week xkcd had a strip pay­ing homage to the Dis­cov­ery Channel’s cur­rent(?) advert. Not hav­ing seen the advert, I didn’t really under­stand it. So, tonight I finally remembered to check out the advert on You­Tube, and liked it enough to stick up here; it actu­ally does do a good job of ignit­ing my sense of wonder.

Plus any song that rhymes “arach-​​a-​​nids” with “giant squids” gets my vote.

This might just be the most awe­some thing ever.

From You­Tube; check out his other tracks.

Props to my friend Brian for the link.

Edit: OK, no, him doing Sweet Child of Mine is the most awe­some thing ever.

Video on You­Tube.

This is a good one; a free, legal, online stream­ing site that lets you pick the songs you want to listen to.

Back in the mists of time, when I was a teen­ager in the early-​​nineties, who’d never so much heard of the inter­net, I had this idea for the future of music. My idea was that you’d have a mobile player that used a more advanced ver­sion of mobile phone tech­no­logy to stream music from some cent­ral server some­where — pos­sibly with the abil­ity to store some amount of it loc­ally, if you thought you were going out of range of the broad­cast. The key thing I envi­sioned was that you’d pay a reas­on­able, monthly sub­scrip­tion — say about the cost of a CD or two — for access to the music data­base. Every­one was a win­ner; con­sumers got access to all the music they could want, the elec­tron­ics pro­du­cers could sell you ever more advanced play­ers, and the music pro­dic­tion com­pan­ies still got the CD or two a month’s money out of every­one without ever hav­ing to man­u­fac­ture so much as a single phys­ical item.

Of course, look­ing back now, I was hope­lessly off on the way tech­no­logy would develop; stor­age tech­no­logy has far out­stripped broad­cast, such that it’s more feas­ible for people to carry all the music they could pos­sibly want to listen to with them than it would be for even a mod­est num­ber of people to tire­lessly stream even low-​​bit-​​rate music over the cel­lu­lar net­work. But I do still believe that the sub­scrip­tion model for music access is the way to go, for the same reas­ons I stated above. Of course the music industry doesn’t want to play that game; they want to charge us for every track we want listen to, and if they can get away with it, charge us every time we listen to it as well. There’s a whole dis­cus­sion about the mor­al­ity of that and whether it’s prac­tical, but it’s been played out all over the inter­net count­less times, and I don’t want to get into it here. The point is that Deezer seem to be offer­ing that sub­scrip­tion ser­vice, and for free as well! I can’t stress enough how cool I think this is.

The site isn’t per­fect yet, but it’s good. Their track list is extens­ive, but there are plenty of tracks I might want to listen to that they don’t have yet, and the stream­ing qual­ity is good enough for head­phones at work, but I wouldn’t pipe it through my hi-​​fi at home. Other than that it’s pretty much what I’d ask for, the tracks keep play­ing while you nav­ig­ate the site, it has work­able integ­rated playl­ist man­age­ment and there aren’t huge stut­tery “buf­fer­ing” pauses. It’s a good site that I can see myself using, and I really hope they succeed.

Which is rather the point; I’m just not sure that their busi­ness model is going to work — they’re plan­ning to pay for the whole thing with rev­enue from ads. I guess they’ve run the num­bers and think it’s going to fly, but it just seems like the record­ing industry would demand more money for this sort of thing than ads alone can gen­er­ate, Maybe I’m wrong, and if they can make it work, then more power to them. Every­one go and check it out. Also, remem­ber, if you give their ads a click they prob­ably make more money than if you just look at them, and that helps them raise the cash to keep the site going.

And if not, why not?

In com­mem­or­a­tion of DJ Dicky play­ing a Maiden song that isn’t Run to the Hills at the TUC tonight, I thought I’d share the joy. I give you Fear of the Dark:

Okay, this is shame­less link propaga­tion from Wil Wheaton, but I just had to post it. If you even vaguely remem­ber the 80s, and have fond (or not so fond) memor­ies of the music, you should love this spoof pop song from the show “How I Met Your Mother.”