Well, no - luckily it wasn’t bloody, but Sonic Walker has been offline for 10 1/2 hours today, just after we had released the new mix by echtZEIT. Great timing! I am very sorry for this. In case you want to know the reason, you can read about it on the site of our former host (Power Outage Update). Dreamhost has been a nightmare from the start - there hasn’t been a week without downtime. I went there because of the storage and bandwidth and not because they are cheap but that’s what they are and that’s what you get.
I used the day to migrate this site and all mp3 files to a new and hopefully more reliable hosting company and if you are reading this, it means that you are looking at the new server. We will know if they can handle the high load of a netlabel release soon and I truly hope, that I don’t have to move once again (this has been the 3rd time).
freak waves are large waves which are a threat to large ships generally. In oceanography, they are more defined as waves that are more than double the significant wave height, which is itself defined as the mean of the largest third of waves in a wave record.
freak.waves includes a variety of minimalistic, experimental and housy “waves”, so some tracks come as a tiny wave to relax your ears and some are freaking around to turn you on.
So let the waves come and go and enjoy surfing the sea!
Just before the end of this month and before we release the next Sonic Walker mix, let’s have a look other netlabel mixes which have been published this month. Once again minimal techno is dominating.
Our friends from Zimmer Records have released two new mixes in their Zimmer Mix Series:
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple has posted a long article titled “Thoughts On Music“, where he is reacting to recent criticism on the DRM of the iTunes Music Store. It is an interesting article worth reading.
The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.
Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right!
As DRM free netlabel I have one thing to say: “If you don’t like DRM, why doesn’t the iTunes Music Store offer DRM free music then?” (at least next to the DRM polluted files)
Nobody is forcing Apple to follow the dictate of a few major labels which unfortunately control the distribution of over 70% of the world’s music. Look at eMusic, Bleep, Beatport etc., there are enough labels (I guess the remaining 30%) who are willing to sell their music online in good quality and DRM free.
