downloading Blog and Journals

After a year of struggling through the turmoil of doing a physical commercial release of our music we’ve decided to go down a different road. In the future our intentions will be to put together digital EP’s and singles or what we would like to call digital 45’s.

This will give us the ability to release our songs when we finish them so we can provide a good amount of content. We’ll spend most of our time writing and recording and far less time worrying about retail, deadlines, long pointless tours, and the other headaches that go along with releasing physical commercial copies of our music. Let’s face it no one is buying CD’s…retail sales for most labels have plummeted over the years and the industry is changing in ways no one person can seem to follow or understand.

This is not to say we won’t do it in the future but we will concentrate on doing it this way for as long as we can. The freedom to release things when we see fit is very liberating.

With all that being said you can look forward to our first release very soon, hopefully within the next month or two and then as frequently as possible after that.

You guys rule, we hope you’ll enjoy the new music, thanks for the mail, emails, and patience!!

NLF

NLF= New London Fire.

 

O.k Um....like I said with the title:

NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. STOP. IT. NOW.

(I HAVE JUST DECIDED THIS IS WORTHY OF AN ALL CAPS, BOLD JOURNAL)

 

THIS IS MY WORST FEAR COMING TO LIFE. I LOVE CDS. I WILL CRY IF THE DISAPPEAR FOR EVER. I DO NOT DOWNLOAD. I HATE DOWNLOADING.

I HATE IPODS.

YES I HAVE AN MP3 PLAYER BUT 1. IT'S NOT AN IPOD. 2. ALL THE MUSIC ON THERE IS FROM A CD. IT WAS RIPPED FROM THE CD AND PUT ON TO MY MP3 PLAYER. NOT STOLEN FROM LIMEWIRE, NOT BOUGHT OFF ITUNES. I BOUGHT THE CD. EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEM(unless it was a gift =]) I DROVE TO THE STORE PAYING AN OUTRAGEOUS 3 DOLLARS AND HOW EVER MANY CENTS PER GALLON, SEARCHED THROUGH THE REDICULOUSLY UNORGANIZED CD RACKS, FOUND MY CD, WALKED UP TO THE CASH REGISTER, PURCHASED IT, UNWRAPPED IT AS I WALKED OUT THE DOOR AND PUT IT INTO MY CAR. I THEN DROVE AROUND UNTIL I HEARD THE ENTIRE THING ALL THE WAY THROUGH CAUSING SERIOUS DAMAGE TO THE OZONE LAYER.

I'VE DONE THIS WITH JUST ABOUT EVERY CD I'VE EVER BOUGHT.

 

THIS DISPLEASES ME NEW LONDON FIRE. I AM NOT AMUSED.

IF OTHER BANDS, PARTICULARLY BANDS I LIKE, FOLLOW IN THEIR PATH THEY WILL SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES.

JUST SAYING.

THIS IS MY WARNING MUSICAL COMMUNITY. THIS IS MY WARNING

:)

Music downloaders in Europe, rejoice! Your privacy rights have been upheld by an EU court: record labels and film studios cannot demand that telecommunications companies hand over any personal information if you're suspected of downloading. Huzzah!

Read more...

Man, I fall in love with this man more and more each day.

According to an interview he gave in Beijing last week:

• "As for the special situation in China, it does not seem to be easy to obtain Western music via legal channels, so I have the following suggestion for our fans: If you can find and buy our legal CDs, I express my thanks for your support. If you cannot find it, I think that downloading from the Internet is a more acceptable option than buying pirated CDs. Our music is easy to find on the Internet, and you might not need to spend much effort to find most of our songs. If you like our songs after you've heard them, please feel free to share it with your friends. As I have put all my effort and heart into my music, I sincerely hope that more and more people can share the enjoyment with us."

You can read the rest of the interview here.

In order to download the videos from YouTube you need to convert them from FLV files into other formats.
Go to the video you want to download → copy the video URL → then go to http://vixy.net/ paste the URL there → choose the format you want → click start once it finishes converting, a dialog will pop up, → click save → wait the download is finished.

(Sometimes it can't download the video cause it has a blocking system for copyrighted stuff in that case you can try VideoGet. It downloads from YouTube and other 150+ video websites. And convert them into WMV, AVI, MPG, 3GP, MP4, etc. BUT that costs money)

The other options are to use Emule, Limewire or any other Filesharing software, Or to ask a someone to upload it to a site like http://www.sendspace.com/, or http://www.yousendit.com/, http://www.transferbigfiles.com/, http://www.filesend.net/ and they'll give you the URL for the download.

There are some cons though:

With enough information from your computer, someone might be able to steal your identity and virtually become you. (It opens your computer up to Hackers.)

Most of everything that you download may have a little extra payload. It may come with viruses, bots that "phone home" and do the things above, trojans, and all kinds of other spyware. It will make your computer slow to the point it is unusable. ( Be sure to keep your anti-virus and anti-spyware program up to date and active. Be sure to SCAN all downloads with your anti-virus software BEFORE you open it.)

If you do it illegally (music/programs/movies etc.), they (who hold the copyright) could sue you for all you're worth.

Last month we asked if illegally downloading / file sharing music was really a problem.  Check out if your entry was published in the new issue of Rock Sound, out now!

With online services and illegal downloading offering music, the record store, in it's purest form, is a dying breed.  To adapt with the times, New York City record store Other Music has created their own digital download service that will launch in February. 

The Modern Age reports that the service will be DRM-free, meaning that there are no restrictions on what you do with the mp3 you purchase.  Wired has an interview with co-owner Josh Madell.  Highlights include the quality of their mp3s, which will be 320Kbps and the hope to provide interviews, live streams and other features in the future.

So, the State of the Union address is tonight... am I going to watch it? Probably not. I try to stay away from that political stuff because half of it I don't agree with and the other half I don't understand. Okay no, most of it I don't understand and the rest I don't agree with, so I try and stay out of it until it comes time to elect a president, I do pay attention to that stuff, but not now. Anyway, okay. So I want to address the state of the music industry....

While CD sales dropped almost 5% in 2006, digital sales grew 65% and generated around $1 billion (this is the first time ever sales have reached 1 billion and that was reached in the middle of the year), sales of digital albums (10 songs being one album) doubled from $16 to $32 million. With digital being included with the physical sales, the drop is 1.2%, which makes that number a little better, but not much. In a time where the industry should be prospering, especially in last year's 4th quarter with releases by Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Red Hot Chili Peppers, cds just aren't selling. Of all the albums released last year, the highest selling was the soundtrack to Disney's High School Musical, it sold 3.7 million copies. That makes it the WORST selling album since 1991 when Nielsen SoundScan started tracking sales. Do you remember the days when an album would be released and it would go gold within the first week, then shortly after that it would hit platinum? Long gone are those days. To "go gold", an album must sell 500,000 copies... in August, only seven albums had debut sales of 200,000 units... that was cut in half from 2005, that was out of the 36,866 albums released from January to August. There were said to be around 60,000 new releases in 2006 and 100 of those titles make up 43% of those sold. 86% of those albums sold less than 1000 units. These numbers make me SICK because it is illegal downloading that has put this industry into the slump that it is in.

I think back to this one time... It was 2003 and I was sitting in an RV with this random band I'd met at the Warped Tour. We were in this itty bitty town in Georgia called Waycross. It was the middle of the night, the show had long been over and while the 21 and up kids ventured into the town's only bar, us underage kids sat across the street in good ole Barbara, the RV. I was having a nice little chat with the bass player about music, about touring and the business. He said that within the next few years the music stores would start closing and soon there would be no need for them, he also said that labels would start to disappear and go under... I looked at him like he was crazy. In my mind I could not imagine that there would be no music stores... no labels. And now here I am in 2006, sitting in Nashville, TN, Music City USA and I cannot tell you a single record store within city limits, there are a few mom and pop shops, but they stay open because of other revenue from non-music merchandise... I never thought there would come a day when Tower Records on West End would no longer be there. You go into the mall, and you can no longer find a record store, Sam Goody is long gone. As for the labels, its not that they have disappeared, its that they are merging and trying to keep afloat, we went from having the big 6 to the big 5 to the big 4.... what next? Lets just join all of them together and call it the Universal Sony BMG EMI Brothers Music Group. Traditionally all revenue bands gain from touring and merchandise remain untouched by their label (whereas everything else is recouped by the label), labels are beginning to strike deals with their acts so the label gets a cut of touring profits and merch sales.

I guess on the upside is the fact that sales of digital music is up (are up?). As of August 2006, digital album sales were up over 123% from last year. Over 80% of the digital releases were by indie bands, thanks to CDBaby and iTunes and other outlets that are easily accessible for indie acts. MySpace and YouTube are continuing to become a great place for bands to showcase their music and reach the masses, even major labels are hopping on that bandwagon with Universal and Sony/BMG signing deals with YouTube to get a share of the advertising revenue.

I'm just rambling on about this because I've been reading some of the things people are saying about Infinity on High being leaked and it led me to start thinking about Nielsen's report at NARM (National Association of Recording Merchandisers) this past August, then I read Rolling Stone's year end report. Things need to change because we don't want the industry to go down any further than they already have.... the illegal downloading needs to stop and the only way it is going to stop is because of the listeners, the fans. You know how you see signs in stores sometimes that say "to keep our prices down, please don't shoplift", it's like that with music... downloading illegaly off kazaa, limewire, mytunes, etc is like shoplifting and to make up for the loss, the costs of albums rise, which makes less people go out and buy physical cds. The only way to break the cycle is to start yourself, go delete limewire/kazaa/whatever p2p system you have and start supporting the music again.

*numbers thanks to Rolling Stone issue 1018 and Nielsen SoundScan's annual midyear report*

Just thought I would let everyone know that it's okay if you want to download any of the photos or videos that I post here. Even my own personal stuff is okay for downloading.

Just don't go around posting it onto other sites and saying you took the photos, okay?

I mean, you can post it if you want to, I won't try to stop you or anything, but just remember where they came from.

Thanks.