Towards the free, legal, digital distribution of music

drizzling alleyway.

"...but you've gotta check these guys out! It's metal, but these guys have a lot going on! Their music's actually about some intelligent stuff!"

"If they were that smart, they wouldn't be giving their music away from free."

This comment took me by surprise.

I'd been spending the last three hours sitting in an alleyway, behind a table with a red, gingham tablecloth, behind a large piece of cardboard with the words "RAAAWWR! Free metal cd!" spraypainted across it. A pile of albums and zines and rubik's cubes next to blaring speakers and a winamp visualisation.

"If they were that smart..."

The thing that horrified me the most from uni was when we learnt about the music industry's introduction of compact discs. At the time, cassettes cost around four bucks to manufacture, and were sold for between eight and twelve. When cds were first introducted, they only cost two dollars to press (a plastic disc being a lot cheaper to make than the fiddly, mechanical widgets inside a cassette tape).

Common sense suggests that when new technology makes manufacturing something cheaper, a proportion of that saving should be passed on to the customer. (LMAO, he's talking about economics, but referring to common sense!!)

As we all know, this didn't eventuate. The recording industry realised that people would be willing to pay a premium because the technology was better. This is the point where the industry moved from providing goods as cheaply as possible while still making a profit, to intentionally squeezing as much money out of consumers as they thought they could get away with. And not only did it work incredibly well, but it *continues* to work. In our age of constantly cheaper storage media, the only formats which are the same price as they were a decade ago are the cd and the dvd (the film industry uses this same business model). Curious, no?

At the risk of hyperbole, to me the recording industry feels like a microcosm for the failing of free-market capitalism as a whole: it's nice in theory, but in practice creates oligarchies more interested in a highly profitable status-quo than in competition.

"...they wouldn't be giving their music away for free."

I've heard this so so so many times, most notably from my old folks wailing incredulously, "Not only do you kids spend enough money to put a deposit on a house on a cd, but you're going to give it away for free?!?!?!?!"


In my brief time on this planet, the developed world has already changed dramatically thanks to the internet. The publication of art no longer behaves according to the "law" of supply and demand - any kid with a pc and a net connection can distribute infinitely many copies of their music. The cost of supply is as near to zero as makes no difference. This is a fantastic, beautiful development! Art is how humans communicate those experiences which aren't readily verbalised. How literally awesome that an artist's communications can be instantly transmitted to almost anyone in the world! How liberating that the traditional gatekeepers are rapidly becoming irrelevant!

CD sales have never been the primary source of revenue for musicians. In Australia, an album distributed by a record label needs to go gold (10,000 sales) before the musicians who perform on it make their first cent. The song writers earn their royalties whenever their songs are played: be it live, on radio, or streamed/downloaded from the net. This hasn't changed. Live performances and merch are still, and have always been, the main source of income for most musicians.

Any artist would obviously love to be able to afford to work full-time on their art, but bullying fans (via DRM, lawsuits, or even just inflated pricing in stores) is no way to acheive this. The distribution landscape has changed, and the idea of constructing artificial barriers between your music and the people who might enjoy it is a perversity that goes against the point of creating music.

Time will prove us right or wrong. Maybe Apple will invent new DRM software that gives you an electric shock whenever you listen to music you haven't paid for. Maybe the four of us will end up cynical, old paupers whining "I coulda been a contender, Charlie!" while every other indie musician becomes an overnight millionare. The fact is, the traditional music industry is currently sinking - and like all good rodents, dropbunny are getting the fuck off the ship.



you can still download our debut album 'Hypothesis' for free from dropbunny.com, or catch us in the alleyway next to Peril Underground, Elizabeth st, Melbourne every second weekend, for a free copy of the cd.

quickening of the abstract

UPDATE: In all sincerity, i'd recommend most people skip this post. It's not funny, it's not clever.

This is a bunch of shit written down as the new album continues to crystalize. I'm not sure if it will be interesting to anyone - you have been warned! If it looks like pretentious art-fag psuedo-intellectual proselytizing then that's because it is. LMFAO oh dear "psuedo-intellectual proselytizing" wha?!?! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

The background is that this follows directly from the last album.



Had been sleeping. How can you tell if it was all a dream? Pay more attention to the typeface? Writing in dreams is more honest in its treachery.

shifts and shifts and shifts again

the choice has been made, the path has been laid. The one act of creation shifted reality, the robot reacts as dead and dumb as ever. I see you there!

Following his tantrum throwing proclivities, he wails endlessly at the unfair world and the sleeping primates. While not entirely pointless, the only point is something very seperate. An extraverted nuerotic, his concience manifest in the roaring echos that return to him. The performer is the audience.

so it sings...

To be honest all this occult dribble is just trappings. Decisions had been made, eyes opened, magic worked, long before I considered following someone else's system.

There are similarities, to be sure. And referencing the known allows us to understand the unknown, but still.

I wish i could remember the first step. I think it was when Shem called me a bossy boots.

Volcano in my belly. I can't fucking believe she had a point about that.

So it starts like a calzone - take something you've seen before, let it fold over itself. The fact is reacting to your rage is rarely productive, it amounts to blind thrashing and is more in line with the terrified deaththroes of cattle than productive posthuman behaviour. Holding the rage, distilling, concentrating it, the allowing small precise droplets past your lips. Like science! The person who just sat down smells like poo.

That shit can move mountains, imolate cities, fire people into the sun. Like an orgasm - you have to have some restraint, hold it, hold it for the eart-shattering kaboom.

Magic like music like sex. Sounds like a fun weekend!

So that's the lesson learnt, grasshopper. We are now grade 7 and grade 10. Same again, HAL.

This is where it gets interesting. The trick top hat, i will create as i speak, disappearing forever into limbo, falling faster, faster,

reality takes a back-seat for a second.

busy bees

Two new live clips: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91dIBk2lINo and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL0c7VvJOno , plus one pointlessly offensive ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEO6QkIsJVk

WHAT BUSY BEES WE ARE

brainbook 00009

mouse off

"Oh, i'm between jobs at the moment...i've been out of work for a while, still not sure what I want to do. I'm enjoying not having the responsibility of a job, it's just that it gets so *boring* sometimes. I mean, you know what it's like? Nothing to do all day, you were unemployed recently.."

"Ha, yeah, but shit, i don't think i had time get bored! I was still pretty flat out even though i wasn't working." <- me being a bit of a dick

"Nah, but like, J's been out of work *six months*. You weren't out of work that long, but you know, after a while you get sooo bored! There's nothing to do! You go out of weekends, but during the day, there's nothing to do!"

"Are you serious?! I could be out of work for the rest of my life and I'd still never run out of things to do! There's so many books, languages to learn, like i'm still shithouse at violin, there's just so much to do!" <- me, well in my cups, crossing over to pretentious douche.

"No..you don't understand..."

NO I FUCKING DON'T.

This universe is so fucking big, and one lifetime so tiny. You can pick any field you like - sport, fashion, maths, science, art, theology, cooking, needlework, ANYTHING - and you could spend your entire lifetime learning more details, more intricacies. The reason fields are becoming increasingly specialised is because the wealth of human knowledge is more than anyone can grasp within a lifetime. You might be a master at genetics, but your knowledge of physics will be lacking, you won't know dick about art, maybe have a fleeting understanding of a few sports...thassit.

There are people who can unicycle, build houses, name where the grapes in the wine were grown from one sip, manufacture drugs, design rockets, speak well in public, remember pi to tens of thousand places, compose symphonies, run countries, walk across broken glass, heal the sick, swordfight, find food in the wilderness, photograph new species of fish, develop artificial intelligence, sing well, knit a jumper, blow up a building, stage a revolution, sit in quiet meditation while being doused in petrol and set alight.

"But there's nothing to do!"

There are no boring situations, just boring people. I know i sound like a self-important fuckwit, maybe humility's another skill I need to work on...but a lifetime is so very short! You only get an average of 2.5 billion *seconds*...you couldn't even meet 1/3rd of the people in the world for one second each. Are you really content to let your *ONE life* dribble away, without getting to know a bit about the space around you?

I'd be a bit disappointed if this surprisingly animate lump of flesh expired without having some idea of what the fuck just happened.

grapplesincircles the face appeared it didn't feel like it came from me this time, but it couldn't, couldn't be that, just getting a bit overexcited. Too many books, you're just too gullible, let it alone, just get on, breathe, keep focused, become one with geometry quiet quiet boom like a space cadet flying at a stone wall boom atoms implosion drifting away, who's thinking this the images flashing up and up cheeks pulled apart ready to split, violent automatons and empty rooms, so similar and yet, not sure if there's a head inside the jigsaw it didn't look like it. The film that tracks you brainwaves and becomes the absolute scariest thing your body can construct at this moment right now.

DID YOU KNOW?!

We're told in high school that the number Pi is infinite, and non-repeating (first million digits are here). This means that logically, somewhere, eventually, the decimal expansion of pi should contain *every possible string of numbers*. For instance, my home phone number appears in the first million digits. Eventually you should be able to find every phone number in the world. Also remember that every image, or song, can be represented by numbers on computer...so logically pi, somewhere, eventually, contains every image ever produced, every song ever written...not just that, but every song that ever *will* be written.

Pi is the number used to calculate the curvature of any round object. So every curve you can see contains pi, which contains every film or song which will ever be written in the universe. Somewhere, eventually.

Do you believe this?

brainbuku #00005

Our glorious laws:

Seditious Intention

The definition of "seditious intention" originally in Section 24A has become (as amended):

An intention to use force or violence to effect any of the following purposes:

(a) to bring the Sovereign into hatred or contempt;

(b) to urge disaffection against the following:

(i) the Constitution;

(ii) the Government of the Commonwealth;

(iii) either House of the Parliament;

(c) to urge another person to attempt, otherwise than by lawful means, to procure a change to any matter established by law in the Commonwealth;

(d) to promote feelings of ill-will or hostility between different groups so as to threaten the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth.


EVERYTHING IS EITHER BLACK OR WHITE
THERE IS NO GREY ANYWHERE

UP IS NOT DOWN LEFT IS NOT RIGHT YOU ARE NOT OK

Where is the line between urging disaffection against the Government and having a legitimate discussion as part of the political process? If someone (not me, obviously!) was to say "The Government is out to get you, and needs to be destroyed.", then that seems like it falls squarely into all of the above categories at once. However if someone said "The Government is out to get you, and needs to be destroyed." in quotes, then they're *referring* to the sentence, rather than *saying it themselves*. Tim said that everybody knows that anarchists believe that the Government is out to get you, and needs to be destroyed. If you refer to the sentence "the Government is out to get you, and needs to be destroyed" repeatedly, is that the same as saying it? The Government is out to get you, and needs to be destroyed. Does the previous senteance cross the line of legality? Obviously it's not the sort of thing i'd *ever* say myself, obviously! I obviously don't believe that *the Government is out to get you, and needs to be destroyed*. And I'm not being sarcastic about that, at all, obviously! Obviously!

uif Hpwfsonfou jt pvu up hfu zpv, boe offet up cf eftuspzfe.

Does the preceding sentence cross the line, or only if you move each letter back one (i.e u=t, i=h, f=e)? In which case, is that your fault or mine? What if i encode "THE GOVERNMENT IS OUT TO GET YOU AND NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED" as 1's and 0's and post it online? What if i encode it in pigments that cause a certain pattern of photons to be reflected from innocuous pieces of paper? Pemerintah mau membunuh kamu, dan harus dihancurkan. Is the previous sentence legal here, but illegal in indonesia? Would it be illegal if more Australians spoke Indonesian, and thus realised that it means "The Government is out to get you, and needs to be destroyed."? HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO SAY THE GOVERNMENT IS OUT TO GET YOU AND NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED BEFORE IT MEANS SOMETHING? Not that i ever *would* say it, obviously! I'm speaking hypothetically!

What if it turned that this whole time the sentence referred to Robert Mugabe's Government?

--------------------

Let's assume that someone (the courts? the police officers? God?) decides that the above paragraphs are not just a bunch of wanky art-students being facetious, but are actually an example of CRIMINAL BEHAVIOUR! Then let's convert each character in the offending paragraph into a number, say, its ASCII code (i.e 'W' = 87, 'h' = 104, 'e' = 101, spacebar = 32 etc). Then let's convert each number into a different shade of grey (somewhere between RGB(0,0,0) and RGB(255,255,255)). Then let's arrange all these shades of grey on a grid of squares, and put it below this paragraph.

If the above paragraph is seditious, is the image below? How do you know the image isn't just totally random grey squares, and that it wasn't *your decoding* which found the seditious paragraph, where there wasn't anything before?



IF YOU LOOK HARD ENOUGH AT ANYTHING, YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING.

(meanwhile senator conroy still thinks you can censor the internet)

you'll keep

don't even know hwat's going on

this screen in my head, everthing pressed back into fragments of 2d, so hard to tell what is and isn't me anymore. The shape of my limbs looks foreign, spiders crawling across the shifting geometry of the keyboard. It's very easy to forget that someone spent their time deciding the shapes of the letters of the alphabet, that someone had to spend long hours convincing others that *this here* is the way characters should appear.

The entire world fits snugly inside your skull. As far as you can see into the distance, know that the inside of your face is just beyond the horizon. The ultra-mega-hyper-reality-vision within a calcium wall, it's easy to confuse the film with the World Out There. Our eyesite so feeble compared to what it could be, so much radiation imperceptible.

I convinced myself that I was a triangle for an hour last night. On coming to I saw a bone coloured cat dart across my room and vanish. Straight out of fiction, and yet i *knew* the cat, like in a dream, the declarative knowledge comes so suddenly it could be innate. I know that cat.

I swear i'm not wigging out yet...there's so much of the world to see, and one life is so short. I don't want to waste it. There's 17000000000 seconds in a lifetime, and i don't want to waste even one. Wigging out is not my style, such a waste, so much you'd miss out on - having kids, retirement, making those goddamn string-theorists eat their hats when i publish my universal theory of everything. COP THAT FUCKING STRING THEORISTS I'LL FUCKING SHOW YOU! STRING?! BAH I SAY!!!

and again, if you're enjoying yourself, why stop?

Example 1

Example 2


p.s. i still can't figure out how, when they released vista, they managed to fuck up *notepad*. But it's buggy as shit, and consistently ruins my life! Whaaaaa?!

brainbook bebebebeb

ON TIMELORDS AND RELATED SYSTEMS

We are so far removed from reality that the entirity of human endeavor has still not given us more than a blurred glimpse at what we're made of.

it's a great big wild world

i got 1 so now to make 0 on a higher level. It's the metaverse flowing outwards and up, jung's archetypes making us run rampant to a backwards big bang. How much reality can YOU handle?
i started somewhere it went for a while and keeps on going. I feel like i've gotten somewhere, but i'm aware that i'm barely aware of anything. How to deal with yourself as timelord?

That'll come later in the album.

It was the ultimate shock to the system - the realisation that the system is not the system it thought it was. Obliterated in the vastness of the universe....douglas adams was a very smart cookie. Coming out of the water, up for air. Do you ever stop to think how radical are the repercussions of some electrons colliding down an axon?! With the blink of tens of nueral pathways, whole worlds are shattered. Creatures die and are given life, inanimate systems move, colours change and air molecules vibrate in a synchronicity that would never have been known otherwise. With five million red blood cells per cubic millimeter, how much of reality this small grey matter controls?!

We can't control our perceptions, evolution decided that for us long before we had a vote. What we do with our perceptions, and what we choose to perceive - that's our legacy, and large and small enough to move or not move mountains. We find ourselves running at higher and higher frequencies, with greater control of what we see...but the aeons old questions still end in insoluble recursion. The preceding sentence is false. X = X squared. It's been a hard day's night, yet i've been spinning like a log graph.

abrahadabra - i will create as i speak. The rock that's so heavy.


There's a new story starting - it begins a level lower than this, and ends a level higher. It's our new album, and we hope you enjoy it a lot. I'm very excited about it, but then i'm hardly an unbiased observer. In the meanwhile, we have some more shows up, so check them out if you feel like it.