The new single from the warm electoact Familjen is now available for exclusive download over at CDON! DRM-free MP3 of highest quality!
The single itself, a unique collaboration between Hybris and Adrian recordings, will be released wednesday 28 february. The album - "Det snurrar i min skalle" will be released 28 march.
It's time again for Hybris monthly club! This time we have a slightly different date then usual, it's wednesday 7 march. Still the same concept though: friendly beer prices, nice people and great music! This time the slick popsensation Elenette and the doomsday elegance of Maris bon will perform! See you there!
Internet, internet, internet. You two-faced little devil. It seems that the future is here and it's not longer a question of being famous for fifteen minutes, fifteen people or even fifteen megabytes. No, nowadays it seems that famous for fifteen page loads is more like it. We don't want to paint a bleak picture here, but we really lack gatekeepers. A big brother telling us what group we should be into. Sure that's partly our work, but the information is to vast now. There needs to be some new form of sorting through the mass of music. Media, for example, don't seem to get that and still reviews Albums every wednesday as if they were what really counted. With an occasional list of mp3s on the side. Is that all you could come up with?
For all you biz-insiders reading this - what the world needs now is not the following: 1. A new myspace (in any form) 2. A Big brother watching your every step on the Internet (such as logging mail, file-transfer etc)
What the world needs now(besides love) is: 1. Filters of information that works in new ways. Last.fm is not the final answer. 2. Big brothers the old fashion way. Or a Big sister for that matter. Some sisters and brothers are bigger than other sisters and brothers. They can help and we need their help.
If we haven't seen signs of this happening in the next month we will step into the arena and make it happen. It will be like the moonlanding. One visit, pop out the door, take a step, one small for us, one giant step for Internetkind. Our ride in the Apollo. Popping the Apollo. It will be new. It will be magnificent. Start running. You will need the head start to even have a chance to catch up.
Also, hate youtube. Cause maybe tomorrow, next month or maybe next year some old geezer will report the Robert Wyatt video to Youtube for copyright infringement. Please, old, old people with no clue. Stop with what you are doing. Just stop. You do not know what you are doing. Soon you will make people very tired of your habit of removing videos on youtube. Fact 1: there are not an endless stream of entertaining clips on youtube. Not even an endless stream of entertaining clips in the whole world. TV is not very old. Fact 2: the clips can easily be downloaded Fact 3: sooner or later some kids will download them in masses, distribute them between themselves etcetera. You should know the drill by know dear major lables/indielabels Fact 4: they will set up youtubelike sites in faraway places Fact 5: they will use easy interfaces like ilovemusicvideo to congregate/browse these youtubelike sites Fact 6: they will not need your shitty Youtube site anymore by then.
THEN WHAT WILL YOU DO? Huh? Can you spell N-A-P-S-T-E-R? Seems to us that's what you are about to construct all over again with your eager clickin on the 'report' button on Youtube, taking peoples accounts down for copyright violation. Can you, pretty please with sugar on top, stop acting like you all have amnesia? Surely you have to have some kind of memory of how it went down last time you tried to obstruct a centralized network of content in the good ol' Napster days? You see, the content on Youtube, how locked in it can look to your old, old eyes, is not very much locked in. Everything can be extreeeemly easily downloaded using Ripmyvideos or Dubayou for example. If you can cut and paste a link and choose "save as" you can download a video from Youtube or any other youtubelike site like google video or whatever. To top it off, Youtube and the other video sites has compressed the videos for you in an easy to handle format and size, just like an mp3, only it's called 'flv' and is a video file that you can download. These low in quality, but obviously good enough for millions of user to enjoy, Youtube videos is about 5-8 MB large. Now, how many Youtube clips do you think a couple of hundred thousands bored teenagers can download and save on their 500GB external harddrives during the summer holiday 2007? Yeah, A FEW.
To have all people, all content at one place, doing the same thing, that is key. That key feature at Youtube you are about to waste. Like have you never given a thought about why anyone ever gave a shit about music videos again? Remember the last like 8 years prior to Youtube? Remember how people like not gave a shit about music videos? Remember how a sizeable mass of content like a page with 1000 or so music videos attracted like zip/zilch/zero interest? People got to have huge amounts, like tens of thousands of videos. Tons of entertainment. From all over. The feeling of not knowing what this trip might take you, the feeling of complete and sincere surprise of what you might stumble upon, thats what people want. And they want it easy. And fast. They got something like that on Youtube now. But not for long, it seems. Nothing have you learned and nothing have you been taking notice to the last 7 or 8 years or so it seems oh you sweet, sweet and old, old executives. And yes, yes nothing is free in the world, people got to pay for music and blah blah, yeah but deal with reality. Like Adam ant, stand & deliver what the folks want: huge content for a small buck and you are home free.
Not that we care that much about you screwing up your future. We're just annoyed as hell that our bitchin playlists at youtube shows "this video has been removed due to copyright bla bla yada yada" each and every time.
Guess we just wanted to highlight this fact. Since Youtube getting all the biz in such a fuzz. To clarify what this main fact is: all kind of 'struggle' against Youbute videos is a waste of time in it's purest form and will eventually lead to the videos sprawling up at sites everywhere beyond all form of control. The strive for control leads to no control. Hard to grasp, but that's the truth of today: the less you try to control, the more control you will gain. Yes, from a distance it might have looked that Youtube was something controllable. But, as you must have understand by now, it is not. If you let the content stay on Youtube and swell to a collection of entertaining clips impossible to not be charmed by, you stand a chance to actually get by the current status quo and develop new business models for distributing and getting the music out there. If you do not, well, you will continue that crazy ride down the rabbit hole you seem so decisive to complete.
Yesterday the umbrella organization for the record labels, IFPI made an announcement that they have made charges towards filesharers that use or maintain DC++ hubs. Some vague statement was also made that the hubs were run with partial economic interests. We are looking forward to see how these economic interests look, since we actually have no clue how you make money out of hubs. Well, it was yet another day in the war against filesharing.
Anyway, since we are members of SOM, the umrella organization for indiependent labels, and therefore indirect members of IFPI. We feel the need to speak.
It is time, once and for all, to stand up and be counted. Charging filesharers and dragging them to court is a dead-end. It's alienating music fans from exploring exciting new alternatives to explore music in a new way. It's actually contraproductive in the process of constructing new business models for music on the Internet. The carrot a consumer needs for buying/spending money for music on the Internet is not the risk of getting caught if he/she don't pay up. The Demokles sword thing just isn't working. It is an insult towards people and hindering all reasonable debate or progress we might make in developing services that music consumers actually want.
We acknowledge filesharing as the greatest cultural impact since the invention of the grammophone. Filesharing demands a new world. That world is not a world where the music industry and music fans are entangled in a war with each other. That only leads to the overwhelming badwill and disgust most consumers feel towards record labels(the majors in particular) today.
The cultural world have been changing for some time now. It is time for record labels to take the leap of faith, not clinging on to the old safe world, towards a new risky business. It's not easy, but it has to be done.
Familjen!
