Monthly Archive: February 2010

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Boom Sh-Boom

I’m very excited about a new Martin Sexton album (Sugarcoating) and a new tour. And as an added bonus, the Ryan Montbleau Band will be opening for Martin and performing as his backing band. Congratulations, RMB, you guys deserve this.

I have tickets for a Saturday night show in Madison, Wisconsin, and the next night in St. Paul, Minnesota. It’s going to be so freaking awesome. Maybe after that I’ll follow them down to New Orleans. We’ll just see how it goes…

Bob Lefsetz directed my attention to a New York Times op-ed piece by Damian Kulash, Jr., “WhoseTube?” I’m not familiar with Damian or his band, OK Go, but was interested to hear how EMI no longer allows the band’s YouTube videos to be embedded, which had previously contributed greatly to their visibility and success:

Now we’ve released a new album and a couple of new videos. But the fans and bloggers who helped spread “Here It Goes Again” across the Internet can no longer do what they did before, because our record company has blocked them from embedding our video on their sites. Believe it or not, in the four years since our treadmill dance got such attention, YouTube and EMI have actually made it harder to share our videos.

[...]

But this isn’t how the Internet works. Viral content doesn’t spread just from primary sources like YouTube or Flickr. Blogs, Web sites and video aggregators serve as cultural curators, daily collecting the items …

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