Karma County's Brendan Gallagher penned this song and recorded an original version with spoken-word lyrics but felt his own voice wasn't quite right. It needed something more Australian, more gravelly. He knew someone who knew someone who worked for Bryan Brown, Australian actor of past Hollywood fame.

Brendan worked up the courage to write to Brownie and ask if he'd consider recording the track with the band and appearing in a music video. The actor said yes, because his kids thought it was a hilarious idea that their dad might appear in a pop song.

TV gardener Costa Georgiadis was a long-time friend and supporter of the band, and his mum's pristine 1950s Sydney home was used as the location, with original furnishings in place. Costa's unmissable face plays an essential role in the last few frames of the clip. Bryan Brown's own classic brown Holden Kingswood stars in the opening shot and other friends of the band and director Sean Kennedy play the support roles.

Littoral Records covered the extremely minimal production budget. We don't usually assist with music videos but this was a one-in-a-million opportunity and the result speaks for itself. 

 

Dexter & Sinistra from bigyahu on Vimeo.

Dexter & Sinistra © 2010 Karma County All rights reserved.

Is Lala.com just blahblah?Sometimes Techcrunch is too easy to impress. I think Inquisitr’s review is closer to the truth: Lala is trying to get people to pay to listen to streamed music on their desktop when they can already listen to streamed music for free from any number of providers - last.fm, grooveshark, even major portals like Yahoo! do better.

Lala’s CEO is Geoff Ralston, who used to head Yahoo!’s communications business. This being Lala’s third reincarnation, I wonder if the backers have just told Ralston to do what ever the majors want in order to licence a decent catalogue? Because this iteration feels like something major labels want more than something consumers want. Hence the geographical limit preventing users outside the US from using Lala. Not even Yahoo! Music has geographical restrictions on its streamed music.

Yes, there’s a difference in consumer benefit between per-track on demand similar music on demand, but not $0.10’s worth. We have to expect that a wide variety of music licensing models will be tested in this brave new world and only a fraction of them will make it. I’m betting this one won’t.

According to Wired magazine, Radiohead have decided not to sell their new album on iTunes Store because of Apple’s policy of selling individual tracks.

Lord only knows, pretension is hardly a new attitude in the music industry, but when I read that, I had to chuckle at the assbackwardness of it all. If I were their record label, I’d be down on my knees begging them to recant.

I assume the band are OK with radio stations not playing the entire album in one go, and I assume they haven’t produced a music video for MTV encompassing all the tracks on the album. Yet somehow, the only medium in which the album must be consumed in its entirety is the one where there’s any significant revenue to be earned.

Millions of potential buyers will instead lift a copy of the album from a friend’s CD or from a free file sharing network. Better still, because they allow artists to insist on album-only sales, Radiohead will have the entire album up in DRM-free MP3 format on 7Digital, which really gives a leg-up to the bootleggers.

Will the next Radiohead album come with a waiver that must be OK’d stating that the purchaser agrees that ‘Radiohead is bigger than Jesus” before downloading? Or one that says, “I agree not to use the ‘next track’ or ‘fast forward’ buttons while listening to this album”?

iTunes Australia store has recognised Karma County’s 10 year contribution to the Australian blues and roots genre by including not one but two tracks from Happy Birthday Dear Customer - Love Sublime and The Sea Is A Siren - on the Australian Indie & Roots edition of ‘iTunes Essentials’ out now on iTunes Store.

 Do yourself a favour - do the band and I a favour too - and go buy it now!

Check out this indie music video for James Cooper’s single, ‘Love In London’ from a crowd calling themselves the Dalkey Island Community Basketballers. Dalkey Island is somewhere Dublin, as near as I can tell… expect the unexpected!

James Cooper and his debut album Second Season are showing us at Littoral how it’s possible to build a profile for an artist prior to an album’s launch date. Our new promotions and marketing manager, Ted Jedlicki, has been doing an awesome job of getting new fans to listen to James’ music on MySpace, available from James’ MySpace profile page and add themselves as ‘friends’. We should be at 1,000 before the end of July! Also new is a competition where we’ll give away copies of Second Season to MySpace users who feature one of James’ tracks playing on their own MySpace page. We think it may really increase awareness in a short period.

Got an email from Apple today to let me know there’s a new version of iTunes Producer available to download. iTunes Producer is a simple application used to enter and upload the audio files for each track and the metadata (track name, album name, songwriter, etc…). I’d like to tell you what’s new about the software, but Apple has taken the unusual step of warning record labels not to. The email from Apple states, “We ask that you do not give this information to anyone under any circumstance, as it is covered under your agreement with Apple Computer, Inc. “ Not sure which agreement they’re referring to, as there’s nothing about it in the license agreement you agree to when you install the software. Perhaps they mean the massive iTunes label agreement you sign in order to sell music on iTunes? Anyway, you know me, I’m not a trouble-maker, so I’ll leave it to bolder folk than me to disclose what’s new. I’ll just say this: there are some new features, but it’s still not a very impressive piece of software from a company betting so much of its future on online content sales.