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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…

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.

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 :

BurstLabs takes on Muxtape

More than likely, you’ve heard of the dubiously legal online mixtape creation tool, Muxtape. If not, well, you need to get out less.

The site, in all of its 2.0-tastic glory, is the perfect vehicle for the budding Lester Bangs of the world to create the blogger-friendliest of blogger-friendly playlists full of songs they have not listened to all the way through, preferring to take Pitchfork’s word for it. Ryan Catbird, of music blog Catbirdseat offers his take on the scene-and-be-scene at his Muxtape.

In the interest of full disclosure, we thought it would be interesting to post our own Muxtapes (isn’t the prevailing attitude toward arbitrarily supplementing the English language amazing these days?). No artifice, embarrassment, or posturing allowed, just the cold, ugly face of our own personal music tastes :

MUXTAPE by Matt

MUXTAPE by Daniel

MUXTAPE by Kyle

As I spend an insane amount of time looking for music, and lack nothing for self-confidence in my own taste*, I thought I’d do an infrequent post here and there to aid music supervisors in locating that perfect musical backdrop for their project (assuming, of course, they have somehow failed to find what they were looking for in our incomparable catalog).

Here are some of my current favorites:

Popular mash-up alchemist DJ Earworm has constructed a 5 minute mix of Billboard’s Top 25 for 2007.

While the mash-up itself is technically impressive, it’s interesting and a little depressing to note how easily many of these songs fit together. Same keys, same progressions (or sympathetic progressions)…

I’m not going to win any awards for lamenting the monotony of modern pop music and it’s propensity toward mediocrity, but I’ve never felt as old and grizzled as I did listening to this mix.

Seth Godin offers timely and relevant advice for the music business on the incredible opportunity that sits right in front of our noses.

It is amazing how relatively little effort is needed if you really set out to make it happen. Check this snippet from Godin’s excellent post :