Music Business Blog by Jason Feinberg

For those of you in Los Angeles, I am speaking on a panel at the California Lawyers for the Arts conference this weekend. Details –

California Lawyers for the Arts is presenting its annual Music Business Seminar on Saturday, September 29, at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. This one-day event provides musicians, attorneys, agents, publicists and others with up-to-date information about the music industry, as well as with great networking opportunities. The seminar will present in-depth discussions of such timely topics as music rights in the digital age; advice regarding the selection of managers and agents; and recommendations regarding negotiating recording contracts (among many other useful topics).

Receive $5 off of the listed admission price if you register by September 28. Attendees may also bring a guest for $25 ($45 less than the general admission price). Attorneys electing to receive CLE credit for the event may bring a guest attorney also receiving CLE credit for the discounted price of $80. For a complete list of speakers and registration information, please visit our website at http://www.calawyersforthearts.org. Call (310) 998-5590 to register and for more information.

I’m buying into the hype and trying out Blog Rush. For any of you that have a blog and are interested in driving traffic to it, you should check this out. You can see it in action in my sidebar to the left.

There are a million widgets and schemes to drive traffic; the thing I like about this one is that it seems to be very highly relevant. It’s free, easy to install, and can be removed instantly like it never happened.

There is a lot of buzz, most of it good so far. Nobody is seeing copious amounts of traffic yet but this was just launched so most people are giving it a month or so to kick in.

Click Here To Learn More About Blog Rush.

Some of you longer-term readers may know that one of my favorite bands is the Murder City Devils. Given the obsessive nature with which I enjoy music, when I really get into a band I typically collect their stuff to the extreme. Misfits were a good example of this in the 90s, when I spent countless thousands (and eventually sold some of it for countless more thousands). Well, I have one of the most comprehensive MCD and related collections around, with thorough documentation and pictures over here: www.murdercityvinyl.com

So anyway – my point to all this – Murder City Devils are playing a show! They broke up in 2001, played two shows last year in Seattle (hell yeah I was there!), and now are scheduled to play the Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin. It’s a two day festival on November 3rd and 4th and has over 65 bands playing. A sample of who’s on board – Neurosis, Sick Of It All, Poison Idea, Ted Leo And The Pharmacists, Cat Power, The New Pornographers, Youth Brigade, The Sword, Madball, Angry Samoans, Riverboat Gamblers, and many more.

Buy yourself some tickets, and me a beer! Click Here To Begin The Fun Fun Fun!

Every now and again I get asked what hardware and software my company uses to do what we do. Oh and my other company as well. Both are small companies, work primarily in the music industry, and most projects have a reasonable budget but rarely something stellar.

We work with every form of digital media – from uncompressed HD video to stunningly compressed H.264, from a web-optimized graphic to a 70-layer Photoshop file, from 96/24 AIFF to streaming QuickTime. I recently spent a ton of cash upgrading to the latest versions of a lot of what we use around here (both hardware and software) and figured I’d make a list. It’s what I have found to be the essential tools you need to create high end output at an independent level.

Apple Final Cut Studio 2 (Mac) – This is where it’s at. A bunch of top-notch applications all in one box. My absolute favorite non-linear video editor, an amazing DVD authoring tool light years ahead of iDVD or Encore, a killer motion graphics program, a very useful scoring and audio mixing app, one of the best software-based compressors, a super-easy titling tool, and more. Can’t live without this sucker, I use it for everything from editing quick EPKs to authoring major release DVDs. It is also extremely useful in converting audio and video from one format to another.

Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Production Premium – There are a few versions, I use Production Premium. First and foremost, this includes Photoshop. You can’t do anything in this part of the biz without the ‘Shop. I thought it couldn’t get much better 3 versions ago, so every new release is just like extra toppings on the ice cream. But Adobe gives us way more – After Effects is a critical motion graphics / compositor. It offers way more control than Motion (from Final Cut Suite) and certain elements of Shake (see below) but is different from both in most ways. You also get Flash, which needs no further introduction (unless you haven’t surfed the web since 1996). Illustrator is the de facto vector art painting program and I wish I needed to use it more. You also get Soundbooth and Encore, which are ok but I think the Final Cut Studio equivalents are far superior. Other versions of the Creative Suite include InDesign, which smashes Microsoft Word into the dirt (although at a steeper learning curve) and Acrobat which makes PDFs with every possible element tweakable.

Apple Shake 4.1 (Mac) – Super high end visual effects program. This used to cost $10,000, then $5,000, then $3,000, and finally it is down to only $499. This is the software used for many of the special effects in movies like Lord of the Rings, King Kong, 300, and Harry Potter. I use this sometimes, definitely wish I needed to use it more. Come on bands, give me more green-screen footage!!

More to come in part 2…