Consumer Grade Video

Best of 2009

heads up to Sasha Frere-Jones and maura

ALBUMS
=======
(to be ranked later)

Animal Collective-Merriweather Post Pavilion
Grizzly Bear-Veckatimest
Ida Maria-Fortress Round My Heart (count it since the official US release)
The-Dream-Love vs Money
Drake-So Far Gone… (Mixtape)
XV-Please, Hold (Mixtape)
Passion Pit-Manners
Phoenix-Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Cymbals Eat Guitars-Why There Are Mountains
Sonic Youth-The Eternal
Yeah Yeah Yeahs-It’s Blitz!
Dan Deacon-Bromst


SONGS
========
Grizzly Bear-“Two Weeks”
Drake-Best I Ever Had
Animal Collective-“My Girls”
Phoenix-Lisztomania
Phoenix-1901
Faunts-Out On a Limb
The-Dream-Walkin’ on the Moon (f. Kanye West)
Drake-“Little Bit: (“f” Lykke Li)
Ida Maria-I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked
Sonic Youth-Anti-Orgasm
Wavves-So Bored
Sholi-Spy In the House of Memories
Dan Deacon-Build Voice
Junior Boys-Work
Sparks-Good Morning
Kid Cudi-Day ‘n’ Nite (is this 2008 tho…hmm)
The-Dream-Rockin That Shit (released late 2008, permeating 2009)

.

the scrabble liveblog challenge.

Born in the midst of twitter on a Saturday night in March 2009, the Scrabble Liveblog challenge will come to be.  A contest of who is the better liveblogger shall take place on Friday, March 26th, 2009. I, Heath, will serve as a judge. This is because I have nothing going on this Friday, as per usual. If there is a need to change this date, as in “someone gets a social life”, then it shall be done. The game can not take place the weekend of April 3-5, because I’m going to Boston. Let’s get down to the rules, shall we?

1. The liveblog contest will take place between @chris_anna and @jobs_schmobs

2. They will twitter during the contest, with the best of their wit.

3. Both contestants will use the hashtag #scrabbleliveblog or #scrabble liveblog

4. The judging will be done as a whole at the end of the night. The winner will be awarded based on the “body of work”, not one exciting post and several others that suck.

4a. Quality shall be rewarded over quantity, however;

4b. Contestants should tweet often.

5. As a matter of making things interesting, the losing participant must buy pizza to be consumed at my apartment.

These are the rules,

@Hasorey

President,

Scrabble Live Blog League-Virginia Tech branch

March 22, 2009

Just in time for the Holidays.

Being business manager of my radio station means doing a lot of things, mostly paying bills. One of the most important expenses we have (aside from our Transmitter move project) is that of licensing. What licensing does is allows any recorded transmission from an artist to produce a royalty for said artist. For years, ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI covered over-the-air transmissions for artists. That is, artists would be covered by these organizations, and radio stations would pay the licensing entities for transmitting music over their airwaves.  Webcasting has changed all of that.

WUVT, like any good radio station, offers a free webstream. Ours currently works on a java applet as well as an ogg.vorbis stream that can be put in several different media players. Seeing that there was a new way to make money, the gov’t decided to step in with webcasting. They designated SoundExchange as the official third party to collect internet royalties. SX is really an arm of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), but we’ll keep that under wraps. I doubt any congresspeople listen to Jay Reatard or other artists whose labels aren’t necessarily under the RIAA.

Back to the issue at hand: webcasting fees. Each year, every non-comm must produce $500 in minimum fees to webcast. I guess this makes sense, it’s as if you’re opening another station.  Then there’s another thing: “excess reporting”.  Stations are to report for two consecutive weeks for each quarter of 2008. Any month that sees listeners go over 186, 000 Aggregate Tuning Hours is charged .0018/excess hour. The ATH is determined by how many listeners are “tuned in” at a given time. If for instance two people are listening to “Electric Feel” by MGMT, that counts as two performances of the song. 185, 998 more ATHs are permitted.  This is the most confusing thing ever, because there’s a report fee and a webcast fee.  Regular licensing relies just on one blanket fee. It’s because electronic submissions are considered “perfect copies”. I’m not sure how a compressed mp3 represents a “perfect copy”.

SoundExchange needs to be reformed. Let non-comms do the one time fee, or let us go back to doing the opt out of reporting. Most of our artists aren’t on RIAA labels, and it’s just gouging from a series of stations who can’t afford it.