If Ontario Emperor rises again, it may not be on last.fm

Some of you know that before I blogged under my own name with the "Empoprises" brand, I blogged under the pseudonym Ontario Emperor. But Ontario Emperor dates long before I began blogging in October 2003. I won't take you back to the raw beginnings of Ontario Emperor, but back in 1999 (and until 2003), you could go to mp3.com and buy CDs with Ontario Emperor music. Track listings for a lot of the CDs are provided at my old Tripod site, but that site now has zillions of pop-up ads so I'll just reproduce the information here.

Besieged
October 2000
Rudy Left. Surround. Road Array. Nixon Landslide. Burning Coals. Days Summer Days. Firehose. Teasze Me. Non Sequitur 15.

Rudy Left
September 2000
Rudy Left. Windy Ridge. Bush League. Besieged by Reality. Transmission. Calculus Two. Veggie Stew.

Road Array
June 2000
Road Array. Facial. More Tea For Me. Tireless. Green Stream. Lost. Armsley Square. Flies.

Surround
March 2000
Latent Image. Surround. So Long I Sold You. Urban Plowman. Deeper in Debt (Jerry). You Want to Fly. Driving Two.

Digital Judge
November 1999
Finding My Anonymity. Or a Little Faster. Winter at Halfway House. Marooned with Mary Ann. Down the Pyro Lawn. Finding My Serenity. Gonna Walk. Deeper in Debt. November. Trashed Your Room. Finding My Tax Return. Run to the Snare. Football You Bet. I Demand a Japanese Car. Side of the Grove.

Or a Little Faster
July 1999
(deleted from CD catalog October 2000)
Or a Little Faster. Down the Pyro Lawn. Or a Little Rougher. Bucharest Sweat. Dial 911 at Boulder.

Firehose MaxiDisc
April 1999
(deleted from CD catalog October 2000)
Short Firehose. Taped Firehose. Ritalin Wail. Broken Beerlobe. Firehose. You Want to Fly. Fresh Firehose.

Firehose MiniDisc
April 1999
(deleted from CD catalog September 1999)
Short Firehose. Ritalin Wail. Broken Beerlobe. Fresh Firehose.

Cheating at Solitaire
February 1999
(deleted from CD catalog September 1999)
Burning Coals. Days Summer Days. Firehose. Teasze Me.

Of all of those, "Digital Judge" was my favorite, since I broke a rule that had existed for decades before my birth. This album had THREE sides (each of which began with a "Finding..." song).

All of the songs except "Non Sequitur 15" were instrumentals, and while I have CDs with the MP3s stashed away somewhere, I have long since lost the original lossless files (most of the songs were created on a Macintosh, and I haven't owned a Mac in over a decade).

After mp3.com went bye-bye, I preserved "Non Sequitur 15" on a geocities page...and then I uploaded a few files (including "Non Sequitur 15" and six new 2009 songs) to last.fm. The last.fm Music Manager worked out well for me, allowing me to upload both music and artwork for a collection that I called "Brevity Is."

Then geocities went bye-bye, and last.fm was the only site that hosted any of my mp3s.

I've been thinking about creating some new music again, and I began to check out various sites that could host my music. One option, of course, was to just upload the files to last.fm via the Music Manager.

But then when I went to my last.fm artist page to check my albums, I noticed something odd.

Yup, that's right - my "Brevity Is" album and its artwork are gone.

Things weren't much better when I got to the tracks page.

Yes, all the tracks are there (although they are no longer associated with albums)...but there's no way to play them from last.fm. I could play them if my songs were also on Spotify...but they're not.

So I went to the Music Manager page to sort this all out.

Of course, if I had checked Wikipedia earlier, I would have known all of this.

In January 2014, the website announced on-demand integration with Spotify and a new YouTube-powered radio player. Upon the introduction of the YouTube player, the standard radio service became a subscriber-only feature.

On 26 March 2014, Last.fm announced they would be discontinuing their streaming radio service on 28 April 2014. In a statement, the site said the decision was made in order to "focus on improving scrobbling and recommendations"....

In 2016, Music Manager was discontinued and music uploaded to the site by musicians and record labels became totally inaccessible; post-Spotify integration they could still be played and downloaded (where the option was given) but following this change not even the artists themselves are able to access their songs in the Last.fm catalogue.

From a business standpoint this makes sense, since last.fm in 2016-2017 is facing the same issues that mp3.com faced in 2003. The last.fm business model doesn't really allow support of someone with a couple of thousand plays.

Of course, there are other music hosting services...

Postscript: More on my song naming of mp3 and midi files (the midis are at that same ad-infested Tripod site).

Hard to #BoycottThe97 tech companies that united against the Presidential Executive Order

[OOPS - I POSTED THIS ON THE WRONG BLOG. BUT SINCE SPOTIFY'S ON THE LIST I'LL LEAVE IT RIGHT HERE.]

As USA Today reported early this morning, 97 companies filed a "MOTION FOR LEAVE TO FILE BRIEF OF TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES AND OTHER BUSINESSES AS AMICUS CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF APPELLEES." In essence, the companies objected to some of the immigration aspects of the executive order "PROTECTING THE NATION FROM FOREIGN TERRORIST ENTRY INTO THE UNITED STATES."

(DISCLOSURE: My employer has an interest in a separate portion of the executive order that is NOT cited in this particular court case, the "biometric exit" portion in section 7. I've briefly mentioned this section before.)

Those who support President Trump's position may choose to boycott these 97 companies, in the same way that companies such as Starbucks and 84 Lumber are being boycotted.

But 97 companies is a lot of companies.

If you're boycott-happy, here they are (Scribd link):

APPENDIX A
LIST OF AMICI CURIAE

1. AdRoll, Inc.
2. Aeris Communications, Inc.
3. Airbnb, Inc.
4. AltSchool, PBC
5. Ancestry.com, LLC
6. Appboy, Inc.
7. Apple Inc.
8. AppNexus Inc.
9. Asana, Inc.
10. Atlassian Corp Plc
11. Autodesk, Inc.
12. Automattic Inc.
13. Box, Inc.
14. Brightcove Inc.
15. Brit + Co
16. CareZone Inc.
17. Castlight Health
18. Checkr, Inc.
19. Chobani, LLC
20. Citrix Systems, Inc.
21. Cloudera, Inc.
22. Cloudflare, Inc.
23. Copia Institute
24. DocuSign, Inc.
25. DoorDash, Inc.
26. Dropbox, Inc.
27. Dynatrace LLC
28. eBay Inc.
29. Engine Advocacy
30. Etsy Inc.
31. Facebook, Inc.
32. Fastly, Inc.
33. Flipboard, Inc.
34. Foursquare Labs, Inc.
35. Fuze, Inc.
36. General Assembly
37. GitHub
38. Glassdoor, Inc.
39. Google Inc.
40. GoPro, Inc.
41. Harmonic Inc.
42. Hipmunk, Inc.
43. Indiegogo, Inc.
44. Intel Corporation
45. JAND, Inc. d/b/a Warby Parker
46. Kargo Global, Inc.
47. Kickstarter, PBC
48. KIND, LLC
49. Knotel
50. Levi Strauss & Co.
51. LinkedIn Corporation
52. Lithium Technologies, Inc.
53. Lyft, Inc.
54. Mapbox, Inc.
55. Maplebear Inc. d/b/a Instacart
56. Marin Software Incorporated
57. Medallia, Inc.
58. A Medium Corporation
59. Meetup, Inc.
60. Microsoft Corporation
61. Motivate International Inc.
62. Mozilla Corporation
63. Netflix, Inc.
64. NETGEAR, Inc.
65. NewsCred, Inc.
66. Patreon, Inc.
67. PayPal Holdings, Inc.
68. Pinterest, Inc.
69. Quora, Inc.
70. Reddit, Inc.
71. Rocket Fuel Inc.
72. SaaStr Inc.
73. Salesforce.com, Inc.
74. Scopely, Inc.
75. Shutterstock, Inc.
76. Snap Inc.
77. Spokeo, Inc.
78. Spotify USA Inc.
79. Square, Inc.
80. Squarespace, Inc.
81. Strava, Inc.
82. Stripe, Inc.
83. SurveyMonkey Inc.
84. TaskRabbit, Inc
85. Tech:NYC
86. Thumbtack, Inc.
87. Turn Inc.
88. Twilio Inc.
89. Twitter Inc.
90. Turn Inc.
91. Uber Technologies, Inc.
92. Via
93. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
94. Workday
95. Y Combinator Management, LLC
96. Yelp Inc.
97. Zynga Inc.

How many of these companies have provided products or services that YOU used in the last few days? I can count Apple, Automattic, Facebook, Foursquare, GitHub, Glassdoor, Google, Levi Strauss, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Spotify, SurveyMonkey, Twitter, Wikimedia, and probably a dozen others that I missed.

So why Levi Strauss? Its Bay Area location? Its place in Silicon Valley corporate attire?

Actually, something different.

Inventions and discoveries by immigrants have profoundly changed our Nation. Some, like alternating current (Nikola Tesla), power our world. Others, like nuclear magnetic resonance (Isidore Rabi) and flame-retardant fiber (Giuliana Tesoro), save lives. And yet others, like basketball (James Naismith), blue jeans (Levi Strauss), and the hot dog (Charles Feltman), are integral to our national identity.

And the brief doesn't even mention Albert Einstein or Wernher von Braun.

Semi-ambient hip-hop - Living Legends, "Never Fallin"

A Facebook friend shared a video, along with the comment

There's a special place in my heart for hip hop songs built on eno samples

But not just any Eno sample.

This sample comes from side 2 of "Before and After Science" - or the side that I call "After Science." Those who were around when vinyl records and cassettes were the norm know that albums of the day had two distinct sides - and on "Before and After Science," they are truly distinct. Side one closes with "King's Lead Hat," about a band that Eno liked with a lead singer who (in those days) truly WAS a burning building. But when you flipped the record or the tape over, the next song brings the tempo down a bit. But "Here He Comes" is only transitional, since the following songs bring the tempo down even more.

Until you reach "By This River."

Unlike "King's Lead Hat," "By This River" begins with the sparsest instrumentation imaginable - a single piano. And while the instrumentation builds up toward the end of the song, it remains a very simple song.



Well, how do you rap over a sample based upon THAT?

Speed it up a bit and add a drum beat.



The song "Never Fallin'" appears on the Living Legends album Classic.