internet

not sure if you've seen this already, but I think it's important for 2 reasons..

1. because of the DRM issue and music protection some artists and music labels are introducing, and

2. because it came through via Boing Boing which is the Technorati "#1 ranked blog site". poular blogs are measured & given a technorati ranking based on "The biggest blogs in the blogosphere, as measured by unique links in the last six months." http://www.technorati.com/pop/blogs/

so, this entry just went out to thousands of other sites where other people are linking it and commenting on it - great way to get OZ hip hop out there.. perhaps some of the people out there will check out the bands/artists mentioned in the article. (as I like looking at stats, it'd be interesting to see if their website hits or sales adjusted partly due to this)

original blog entry @ http://intermaweb.net/2005/12/09/open-letter-hilltop-hoods/

Boing Boing blog entry:

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/12/08/fan_to_hilltop_hoods.html

[quote]
Thursday, December 8, 2005

Fan to Hilltop Hoods: treating me like a thief is bad business

Popular Aussie hiphop Hilltop Hoods band released its first DVD, The Calling Live. Partway through the disk, the band breaks off to call its fans thieves, and to promise that future musical releases will have DRM to protect the band from its listeners. Pete, a big fan of the band, has written an open letter in response:

Anecdotally, if I hadn't downloaded Left Foot, Right Foot in 2001(?), it is quite possible that I would have never purchased it, or The Calling, or The Calling DVD. It's also unlikely that I would have purchased tickets to several Hilltop Hoods shows. The same goes for my sister, and the several friends for whom I've burned copies over the years. If I had not discovered the joys of the Hoods, I may not have sought out (and purchased) music by the likes of Layla, Drapht, Downsyde, Clandestein, Hunter, Fdel, Pegz, the Herd, Bliss n Eso, After Hours, Funkoars, Art of War, Bias B, Lazy Grey, Mnemonic Ascent, Reason, Plutonic Lab etc etc etc....

So Suffa, I absolutely reject your accusations of theft, and am hurt that you reject me as a fan. I thought you were cool, and that you understood. Now, I'm not so sure...
[/quote]

Hilltop Hoods respond to the letter @ http://intermaweb.net/2005/12/10/suffas-reply-open-letter-hilltop-hoods/ and sound very reasonable.

Personally, I like the creative commons form of licensing & the ability to remix/remux existing works but I don't make my living from my art/music so come from a different perspective to an artist who does.

I think that having the songs available for download helps people try before they buy. and if someone downloads it and doesn't like it they probably weren't one of your customers anyway so you didn't lose any money from it, but perhaps one of their friends will hear it and like it and buy it then you'll gain a customer.

DRM is an issue which more & more artists will be having to deal with in the future though, a tough one for sure.

I've just finished reading "Where you're at - notes from the frontline of a hip hop planet" by Patrick Neate. I thought it was a great book - sometimes he went off on a few tangents, but they provided interesting background information on the context of the hip hop communities in the different cities covered in the book. I'm now re-reading/skimming through it to post up some notes on sections I found most thought provoking. Much of the underlying thread of the book is about the cultural misappropriation of hip hop.

from Part One: New York
page 30

I've started reading the Interactive Convergence : Critical Issues in Multimedia e-book and so far it's providing some more useful names of other books/reports to chase up. The first chapter is about the different new media university courses in the UK. pasting snippets here as I come across things to follow up or ideas to think about.

Chapter 1
Locating Interactive Media Production

(page 2)
[quote]
A few media/cultural studies writers began to look at the social
and cultural impact of new media, Sherry Turkle (1985) Second Self:
Computers and the Human Spirit; Carolyn Marvin (1988) When Old
Technologies were new; Philip Hayward (1990) Culture, Technology and
Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century; Jay Bolter, (1991) Writing
Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing; Philip
Hayward and Tana Wollen, eds. (1993) Future Visions: New technologies
of the Screen and Roger Silverstone (1994) Consuming Technologies:
Media and Information in Domestic Spaces
[/quote]

This paragraph has an interesting point.. there's not many books or published educational materials for teaching 'new media' - I suppose the plethora of academic papers are not used for this purpose??

(page 9-10)
[quote]
8. Maintaining curriculum integrity - quality teaching resources
There are other difficulties facing interactive media course designers
within any academic context. There is an impoverished supply of good
academic sources and few records of the historical development of design
for CD-ROM or the web. Compared with the sources we can draw on for
the teaching of video and film production for example, good books in the
field of interactive-media production are rare. A simple request to fellow
course leaders of interactive media in 7 different institutions for their
favourite production books, revealed that we are resourceful when it
comes to choosing teaching materials but also that most of our books were
over 4 years old and some were very old indeed. This is their list: