Red Chuck

M.I.A. in the Mix

M.I.A.'s Online Piracy Funds Terrorism is an interesting play on the whole file sharing and piracy conundrum. Here the Sri Lankan "hip-hop, ragga, dancehall, electro and, dare we say, punk" vocalist invites budding and or established music producers the oppurtunity to re-work her songs from the ground up. M.I.A. allows for her vocal tracks to be freely downloaded. You can then remix her vocals anyway you like and then upload an mp3 of your mix to her site. Your uploaded mp3 is in turn offered in streamable m3a form for review. Visitors are then encouraged to rate your mix and others based on M.I.A.'s 3 AK37s scale.

Why do I care?

1) I love the whole open source vocals idea. With everyone trying to protect their musical assets in this day and age, I love it that an artist is saying: here ya go, have at it, show me what you got.

2) I love what I think I see working on the server side of her site (Indy stop reading now because this is extremely nerdy). I think her ISP is using Apache::MP3 to handle the different file formats offered. Maybe I am wrong, but I can't imagine how else they could have created a streamable jukebox that so cleverly invites visitor interaction — download, mix, upload, vote. I also appreciate how the Online Piracy Funds Terrorism section offers several unique mp3 trafficing options that are uniformly easys to navigate and operate (1 click downloads for all formats). Hell, I even downloaded the vocals. Rest assurred, I'll post something both here and there if I ever get around to making a mix.

3) Ummm. . . I started thinking my previous post wasn't very funny and even had a faintly misogynist tone, which was not intended at all. So just to show you I ain't a chauvanist pig, I thought I'd hip everyone to M.I.A., who sounds like she could beat my lame-white-boy-snacking-on-a-woman's-energy-bar ass on a treadmill any day of the week.

Posted by Red Chuck at June 14, 2005 02:55 PM