If you're new here, you might wanna check our FAQ. The surefire way to stay up to date is to subscribe to our RSS feed, or get the latest updates from the Lab in your Email. Thanks for visiting Burst Labs!

So, here’s the deal. I, by nature, am a lazy person. Given the choice between driving 50 miles for $200 and sitting in one place for $5, I will gladly chill with Mr. Lincoln.

Combine that with all of the changes and increased workload here at Burst, and you get an “I didn’t get around to this post last month” salad. So, in deference to you, dear readers, I will be making this post 2x better than the last Music Supervisor’s Cheat Sheet (which, I’ll be honest, I wrote on the crapper).

Onward and upward!

So, mash-up wunderkind Girl Talk released his highly anticipated follow-up to “Night Ripper” today. The album, “Feed The Animals” is available from the Illegal Art website as a “pay-what-you-wish” download.

First off, the album. Girl Talk is the undisputed world champion of the schizophrenic, yet somehow cohesive, mash-up. “Feed The Animals” is, by any standard, more comprehensive, more varied, and more visceral that “Night Ripper.” The samples fly by with such effortless fluidity, that just as you think “Hey, I love that song!” he has moved on to 3 other songs you love. The result is a masterful, hugely satisfying piece of work.

Now, with that out of the way, I need to separate the music lover in me from the music creator, the one who makes a living through licensed music…

Great minds do, indeed, think alike.

Stock image juggernaut Getty Images (which also offers ‘indie’ stock music through their acquisition of Pump Audio last year) has introduced an web-based search engine that finds license-ready images and production music based on your mood, called Moodstream.

Seems like a great idea. Just sayin’… [ms]

Perhaps someone can help me out with this one.

The Hype Machine is an online music blog aggregator that surfs the web for blogs sharing (for the most part) illegal MP3s. Users then listen to the MP3s, and download them if they wish. It is a portal into a world that major labels tend to look the other way on, a world of sharing copy-written material for free in the name of “promotion.” Not that I’m against it, mind you, it’s a tremendously valuable music discovery tool.

Image via WikipediaViacom is a multinational media conglomerate who’s holdings include Paramount, Dreamworks, MTV, VH1, CMT, and Comedy Central. They have reportedly offered to buy The Hype Machine for $10M.

What is the end-game in this crazy time of media moguls snapping up music sites for insane chunks of change? Where are the profits going to come from? And don’t lay that tired “advertising revenue” smack on me. Does nobody remember the first dotcom boom and subsequent bust? Huge corporations don’t make something cool, they co-opt it, suck the cool out, and serve the reheated leftovers.

more info coming soon - hopefully next week!

Well, we’ve been absent lately. Mysteriously invisible.

If you had gotten used to the regular music updates and occasional email newsletters, well, there was a good reason we’ve been practically off the grid for the past few months :

We’ve joined forces with Extreme Music - “the undisputed masters of production music” - part of the legendary Sony/ATV music publishing empire.

We love their attitude, dig their vibe, and are absolutely jacked that they believed in our production music and ideas and brand enough to write us a fat check - and as we’ve often said “It’s easy to say you’ll never sell out when no one’s making any offers.” Well, we definitely never said we wouldn’t sell out, and someone made an offer. So there we are.

In all seriousness, this is a deal made for reasons way beyond the immediate financial impact. We have long wanted to partner with a company who Gets It in the biggest possible way, one who was also willing to put their money where their mouth was - who would put as much effort and love into the promotion and marketing aspects of this business as we do in the writing, performing, and production of the music.

There are some exciting things planned for this new venture - a full announcement should be coming next week - but it’s safe to say that with the worldwide team at Extreme Music and Sony/ATV heading up the marketing, promotion, distribution and sales, and with our team here at Burst being freed up to concentrate solely on writing and producing great music, the best is yet to come. Stay tuned!

A note to our current clients - watch your email later today for details on how we’re planning on making sure you are taken care of during this transition period. Thank you so much for being our friends and fans for this past year! We’re stoked to get back to making more killer music for you guys ASAP.

Welcome back, kiddies. Since the last Music Supervisor cheat sheet was such an unwieldy success (read: c’mon, someone read it… right? Is this thing on?), we here at Burst Labs decided to make it a regular feature.

I like to think of myself as the production music world’s Sally Struthers… if I help just one person, it will all have been worth it.

Your taste can(not) be reduced to an algorithm

Last week brought the news of the relaunch of Peter Gabriel’s TheFilter.com, a service that vows to ‘filter all online media habits… and offer advice about all of their entertainment and information options.’

This got me thinking about what I like…

While perusing my voluminous RSS feed cache, I stumbled upon this article at Coolfer. The gist of it is that Phonopolis, an indie record store in Montreal, is calling for labels and record stores to partner in the sale of “download codes”.

According to Phonopolis:

Stores would stock a larger number of codes than they would CDs (they would of course still stock CDs). They would not immediately pay for these codes, however. The lack of immediate cost, and small amount of space that these codes would take would allow small record stores to carry a wider selection of stock and larger numbers of individual titles. The stores would validate the mp3 codes at the point of sale. During the validation process (which would be on a distributor or label website), the store would pay for the product.

Sure, it sounds all kumbaya and stuff, but it overlooks one very important distinction, in my opinion :

Valleywag is reporting that Nick Denton, the publisher of the Gawker Media blog empire, is selling off Idolator, my go-to music news blog, as well as travel blog Gridskipper and politics blog Wonkette.

Idolator is being snapped up by Buzznet, the same company that recently purchased Stereogum and is being bankrolled by the Universal Music Group.

Denton reported via an internal memo (which he suggested be leaked) that the three websites accounted for only 3% of total Gawker Media web traffic, and would all have better prospects selling advertising elsewhere.

I’m not a big fan of Idolator being tied to UMG, but wish good luck to Maura and the rest. I’d like to hear Idolator’s response to this news. [ms]

Last year, we posted about Mark Burnett’s new idea, a sort of “American Idol” for jingle writers. Well, it turns out that CBS has decided to pick up the series, and casting is happening as we speak, with episodes to begin airing this summer.

May I just say, from an advertising perspective, what a stroke of genius this is?

The fact that the show will be a nationally televised commercial for anyone willing to pony up the dough, with people literally competing over how best to tell the world about how inexplicably wonderful that company is, well, that’s why Mark Burnett is a millionaire and you’re not.

And if anyone can figure out where they’re casting, give us a head’s up. [ms]

(via Reuters)