I was driving home yesterday and flipped on my usual first choice in FM radio, Drive 105. It’s an alternative station that isn’t the best station, but here in the Twin Cities FM radio pretty much sucks.

At any rate, they were playing a song from Offspring, which I thought was pretty odd. Their staples are new music like Kings of Leon and plenty of old REM. So I flipped up through my stations, and hit 93.7 (93X)… and they were playing the same song. So I started flipping back and forth and they were playing the same song at almost the exact same point. How odd. Anyway, I don’t really care for the Offspring, so I moved on.
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greetings.

alex and i were chatting the other day, and came to the conclusion that we’re just not argumentative enough. sure, we both can have our contrarian moments, but for the most part we’re just two happy-go-lucky chums, two boys with a devil-may-care attitude, a couple of carefree, harum-scarum gentlemen.

well, no longer.

let us proudly introduce you to Point - Counterpoint, a new weekly feature we’ll just call PCP for short. in it, we’ll take a burning (or not so burning) cultural, sports-related, or political issue and give you our two cents’ worth. we may even agree on the issue at hand, or we may not. think of us as a less-abrasive, wittier version of Pardon The Interruption if that helps.

anyway, enough prelude. click here for the inaugural PCP.

So I was listening to the Powertrip morning show locally here on KFAN and as I arrived at work they started an interview with Jeff Daniels to discuss his new CD “Grandfather’s Hat”.

They were playing a little bit of one of the songs as they came in from the intro, and it sounded very familiar.  Kind of a folksy, talk to the audience and have a lot of bittersweet and/or black humor in your songs, type of music.  I know there are others who write in this vein, but they aren’t coming to mind; perhaps my more musically in tune colleagues have some insight.

At any rate, they’re about to start the interview and I think to myself, “how unfortunate this guy is that he’s got the same name as Jeff Daniels the actor”; you know, the guy in Dumb & Dumber who takes the memoriable bowel movement? Read the rest of this entry »

I’m glad she’s got a sense of humor about her big hit:

Mark Cuban has been quoted saying that anyone who buys YouTube is a “moron”.  He does have a good point in that most of the content found on the site is copyrighted.

But Cuban is far from unbiased on this topic.  He is the co-founder of HDNet, and he went out of his way to down play the usefulness of sites like YouTube and “Viral Campaigns“, while touting the great opportunities there are to advertise in mediums like, you guessed it, HDNet!!!

At least Cuban admits that user-generated content isn’t going away.  And I think owners of copyrighted material need to realize that sites like YouTube are a great vehicle for free advertising.  If someone really likes a song or a music video, do you really think they will continue to go to YouTube to watch it?  Don’t you think there is a much better chance that they would come to the source and maybe even purchase it?

Think about the clips from the Daily Show, or Countdown with Keith Olbermann.  If MSNBC or Comedy Central were to sue YouTube do you think that would drive more people to those shows?  In fact I would guess that the negative publicity of such a move would actually drive people from watching.  If anything, the publicity those shows have received from postings on YouTube have probably increased the viewership, and at no cost to the networks.

Dinosaur media needs to get with the program, and fast.  The music industry was on the leading edge of this change, mostly because it’s much easier to download and transmit a 3 minute song than it is to do the same with 45 minutes of network programming, or 90 minutes of a feature film.  But the change is coming.  It’s time to adapt and embrace, or find yourself in the no win battle the music industry is going through which could leave you on the brink of extinction.