Besides a fan/spectator/sometime critic of eastern Iowa music, I’m a bit of a participant. My latest in a long string of obscure bands is called Radio Dramamine. We just recently made a few mp3s and stuck them up on the MySpace page. Radio Dramamine is perhaps one of the nerdiest bands in all existence, owing quite a bit of that to my involvement. Any band that would use the word “eigenvector” in a lyric has got to be down with the geeks, right?
I like to buck convention in my musical ventures, and in this case I’m even doing so in a new way: not only are the tracks downloadable from the MySpace page for exactly $0.00 (I don’t at all buy into the hysteria that Internet downloading is killing music, in fact I believe quite the opposite: it may be killing the old top-down model of the music business, but to the extent that independent musicians embrace this trend, they stand to benefit) – I plan to put together a “cover art” graphic, a text file of lyrics, and anything else that seems worth throwing in, and offer this so-called The Mind Is a Terrible Waste EP under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, as a single .zip download and as a data CD-R disseminated at our gigs, thus aligning with the “iPod generation”: we don’t make you waste your time “ripping” the tracks, they’re already ripped for you.
