Amazing prank

These guys pretended to be U2, playing a surprise rooftop concert opposite Madison Square Garden. Hilarious.

Posted at 2005-06-01 23:43:23 by Richard • Link to Amazing prank

Amazon free music

I've been regularly scooping new songs off Amazon for over a month now, accumulating over a hundred (and I'm being picky!).

What's interesting is the number that fall into my three categories — “delete immediately” (awful New Age and Gospel stuff), “store and forget” (most of it, the end result of being a packrat), and “actually quite good”. Some of these last category — Laura Cantrell, the bizarrely sublime Stereo Total, the surprisingly talented Abreaction, and others — are guilty pleasures, but some are genuinely good.

I'm actually thinking about buying a few CDs as a result, probably when I'm in the United States. The conclusion is that giving tracks away works: they've converted 104 guaranteed no-sales into a few probable sales, at the cost of a bit of bandwidth. I get new music, some artists get some more exposure and sales, and Amazon gets more eyes on their product pages (and gets a cut of the sales to boot).

Snuffling the Long Tail for fun and profit.

Posted at 2005-06-01 10:06:24 by Richard • Link to Amazon free music

Out of the mouths of the old

On the radio just now, a 100 year-old woman married to her 105 year-old husband Percy for 80 years (thus becoming the longest-married couple in the world). Richard Allinson asked the lady a great question, and got a better answer:

Does it feel like 80 years?

No… only at night, when he keeps me awake.

Posted at 2005-06-01 09:41:21 by Richard • Link to Out of the mouths …