T w e n t y S i d e d
They Might Be Giants are on tour. They have this thing at their site called “Venue Songs”. The site is making a big deal of the fact that they are writing a whole new song for each location they play. That would be impressive for any other band, but we already knew these guys could write songs pretty much at will. What’s amazing to me is that they have a new music video for each of those songs, and that these seem to come at the rate of about once a week.
I can believe that they can write songs this fast. Heck, I’ll bet they could churn out song ideas at the rate of one every couple of minutes if they needed to. But how do you get a new music video done in a week? These music videos are not just them on stage, playing the song in question. Most of them look like very well-done flash animations. Those things take time to produce. As much as I like TMBG, I think the real hero in this venture is whoever is churning out these videos.
And as is usual with TMBG, you can see all the videos and hear all the songs on their site for free. They don’t even make an effort to recoup the expense of playing it for you. There isn’t an ad anywhere on the site.
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TMBG is probably Three or four weeks ahead in terms of the videos
They would know all the dates on their tour long before they left on it. Thus giving them ample time to write songs and get the videos made. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if they have all the songs and movies done and just post them when the time comes. And furthermore they could put whatever into a video and it would make sense in a They Might Be Giants sort of way.
NOTE: By posting about TMBG you have finally pushed this website as far into the geek forest as any have dared to go. this site is now 2 miles past the Magic players, over the old river past the war reinactment guys, past the cross in the road that is gaurded by YU-GI-OH fanatics. then finally making camp 1 mile north of the old witchs hut where she sells a plethora of polyhedral dice and witchs brew.
The site is an advertisement.
One of the dirty little secrets of the music business is that for most performers, their largest source of income is touring. Unless they get a massive smash hit, they just don’t make all that much off album sales, because the recording companies give them the royal shaft.
That’s why so many of the performers are unsympathetic to record company concerns about P2P; it doesn’t cost the performers much, and it could conceivably induce more people to come to concerts.
And it’s the same thing with this site, I think.