Amazing blog: For Those Who Tried to Rock, chronicling “every band to have been formed by teens with that perfect mixture of big dreams and questionable talent in suburban garages, high school music rooms, and college dorms across America. And to preserve them cryogenically with the very dry ice they once merited, for future generations.”
You’d better believe that the Gitch Band will soon be included in the canon of “those who tried to rock”!!! But I’ll post the story here first. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to lift some of our music off that ancient cassette somehow.
(via Canuckflack)
This blog is actually part of a much larger project called the Academy of the Recent Past (http://www.academyoftherecentpast.com/) who collect material and put out books of the stuff. The other blogs look pretty funny as well (stuff about 80s music, summer camp, bar mitzvahs, etc.).
I'm still on the fence regarding “user-generated content” though. How do other people feel about this sort of thing? A company gathering all this material together through the internet and then publishing it for a profit? I don't know what the terms are for this specific company. Maybe they do pay their contributors. But this new business model seems to be popping up everywhere, powered by the incredibly easy group-forming abilities of the internet (a phrase I have borrowed from Clay Shirky's latest book, Here Comes Everybody). Is it legal? Sure. Is it ethical? Well, probably. But there still seems something slightly skeevy about it.