All you ever need for music, originally uploaded by timbearcub.

You don’t need anything else

If you’ve not tuned into Rise and Shine, so far you’ve missed ladies made of Magma saving Christmas, missing cats, Paris goes to Belgium in a currently very fashionable Italian Euro Disco vocoder stylee and a punk Santa breakin’ the law, well internet tubes - with yours truly on sleighbells!

Quite interesting seeing/hearing the songs develop by the guest songwriters and video & chat contributors, they are moulded (or maybe forged in the heat of battle over 3 hours from 7pm to 10pm until Christmas Eve.

New songs will appear here:

And don’t forget to chip in for charity here:

Just got an email from Mixwit, a service to make mixtapes of tracks that are already online via Seeqpod and other services, and share them (not the tracks, just streamed via Flash) I’ve used and hope to use in future - they’re closing at the end of the year, for unspecified reasons:

“I won’t go into the details of our situation but state simply that we boldlyre marched into in a position best described as “between a rock and a hard place.”

Which to anyone used to reading between the lines and seeing little music industry cockroaches sunning themselves there - can mean one thing: RIAA or some other body has gotten to them.

As Techcrunch points out, when will these industries ‘get it’? Mixwit was no Napster - you couldn’t download the tracks, it harked back to a more innocent time with cassette tapes made for friends, yes, but unlike those tapes (for which the laughable campaign and tape skull and crossbones logo that PirateBay is now using was created for - ‘Taping is Killing Music - and it’s a CRIME!’) you couldn’t take the tracks away, only maybe embed the little Flash device somewhere.

The tracks weren’t uploaded to their servers, no-one got any tracks they shouldn’t have, and users got to interact with music in a new(ish) way…so of course it got canned - it’s like the industry doesn’t want people to share and learn about new music - I’ve bought many albums and gone to live gigs off something originally heard on some crappy D90; ditto P2P and torrents; and sites like Hype Machine, or blip.fm who similarly has had a fatwa on their service.

So news at 11: Record Industry STILL doesn’t get it, music sharing (even just hearing the track) IS not a crime (it’s why Myspace is so big, and Youtube) and actually helps them in the long run, because people want to hear music that others recommend. Not limited by catalog or label or genre or the poor scrappy handouts from artists and labels, no the tracks they love. Love and will buy if they get reminded or exposed to them, rather than what dross some corporate marketing board is pushing this week.

And if they were wise enough to support and harness that, like Pandora (closed to the UK for many years) they’d have a massive database of what tracks people like, and what maybe they should release…but no, Father Knows Best apparently.

See you all down at the Woolworths Bargain Bin then….oh.

All this week Rise and Shine are doing live streaming writing a song (and other entertainments) interactively - in 3 hours by which it’s recorded and then put on the site, every night for a week from 7pm.

I could only drop in for the last hour and had distractions but I’m proud that the wonderfully bizarre and topical Magma Lady had a few lyric donations (polar bear and the santa bit) from me - and the lovely Ben Walker (the guy who wrote The Twitter Song - thought I recognised him from somewhere!) used them!

I think it’s a different songwriter/musician each week so it’s going to be fun…definitely tuning in tomorrow, a bit earlier (ironically I was doing a very acidic remix in Renoise, not very musical though and forgot the time!).

Anyway I think this is more what interactive/online TV should be about - live interaction with the audience helping to obtain a goal which is not just writing a song it’s also raising money for charity - btw I think at least half or more of the proceeds of these songs (if they get a hit) will go to charity, and donations on the site.

When i interviewed rx oh so many years ago, I did ask him if he’d do more UK-related cutups - nice to see he’s finally done one (well it’s the second if you count ‘Should I Stay or Should I go’

In other related news, the twitter was ablaze with questions for David Cameron this morning via Reuters, Documentally and Sizemore and co., but looks like the Tories didn’t totally understand social media. Ah well…not our loss