Alex Reid

The Federal government via MP Shelly Glover and the Province of Manitoba via Trade Minister Peter Bjornson have announced a shared funding boost of $1.8 million to Manitoba Music (which New Winnipeg Media is a corporate sponsor of) – a not-for-profit industry association designed to help local artists and companies market their music beyond Manitoba’s borders.

The money is part of a four-year plan under the Canada-Manitoba Western Economic Partnership Agreement (WEPA), in which both the Province of Manitoba and the Government of Canada are contributing $25 million each over four years to “to strengthen economic activity and improve the quality of life in western Canadian communities.”

Documentaries are good.

Especially those that focus on the local institutions of a community; that ‘something’ that supports and fosters a subculture of the community. The Royal Albert Arms is definitely that ‘something’ worthy of praise, and Randy Frykas captures it in his new doc Call to Arms: The Story of The Royal Albert.

“The Royal Albert is of a dying breed”, says Producer Jeff Newman.

“Most of the world’s legendary punk clubs have closed their doors, and with each one a piece of music history is extinguished. It’s time to talk about how important the place is, the careers it’s launched and the culture it preserves. At The Albert, people feel a sense of belonging and they’re utterly passionate about it. There’s a sense of ownership among the bands and the fans that comes across so clearly in ‘Call to Arms’.”

Check out this new doc at The Royal Albert this Thursday, October 8th – doors open at 8pm, screening is at 9pm, and tickets $5 at the door.

Epic.

I love how Nine Inch Nails continues to give its fans a surreal experience before they even see the show.

I was impressed by last year’s marketing of the album release of Year Zero. It started with tour t-shirts highlighting certain letters to spell a website URL, and if you were geek enough, you’d find several related web sites within the same IP block. And if you were in select concert venues during their European tour, you may have found a flash drive with a high quality MP3 of some of their yet-to-be-released songs.

Of the flash drive method, NIN head Trent Reznor said:

The USB drive was simply a mechanism of leaking the music and data we wanted out there. The medium of the CD is outdated and irrelevant. It’s really painfully obvious what people want – DRM-free music they can do what they want with. If the greedy record industry would embrace that concept I truly think people would pay for music and consume more of it.

I’ve never liked CDs. However, CDs were printed and even that was a medium. The CDs were coated with a thermo-chrome heat sensitive face which is black when first opened and with the warmth of a CD player, the colour changes to white with black binary code printed on it which further leads you to another web site.

This year’s The Slip certainly gives the industry just that. It’s free. All of it. Free and ready for download on the NIN web site. It’s being released under a Creative Commons license, which allows listeners to remix the songs as they want, provided they do so for noncommercial purposes and credit NIN as the source.

For the Luddites however, a limited special print of 200,000 CDs (accompanied with DVDs) will be available on July 22, 2008.

Last year, I used YouTube’s (beta) AudioSwap program that allows you to swap an uploaded video’s audio with that of YouTube’s selection of artists who have allowed their music to be shared as audio-tracks to (solely) YouTube videos. When the AudioSwap program began, there was limited selection of audio, but now that list has increased. That’s great, but it’s terrible that the features haven’t increased.

I uploaded this otherwise quality scenic video from a plane last year only to have it compromised; YouTube’s video encoding often ruins sweeping scenic views. I suspect I know why, but that’s for another time. In this video from last year, I selected Colin Mutchler’s ‘Destination Non-Specific’ which went very well with the pixelated theme of Thunder Bay.

This video is simply me filming a guy freaking out and yelling in the street. I had to use the video camera to even see what was going on, and I’m still not sure. I think the guy was flipping out on PCP or he was incredibly drunk/stupid. But I used this silhouette video to illustrate the many flaws of the AudioSwap program – even a year after it was rolled out. First, you can not fade in/out of the song, because back to my original frustration, it’s hard to find audio that not only matches the feel of the video, but matches the time. This video was 1:07, but no song I could find was that short. And you can’t adjust the sound volume at all. And then it doesn’t even list the artist or song name with the video after the video has been re-uploaded.

I guess Google isn’t about audio. Which might be for good reason.