New York City has been hopping lately. With the arrival of the Eric Morillo's new Pacha in a few weeks, Crobar continuing a pretty good run, Cielo still packing them in and all kinds of new venues opening up, including SOL and this new spot, Duvet (the old Centro Fly), there are plenty of parties kicking off to hear house music in New York nowadays.
Last week, in my posting about the Grokster case, I mentioned at the bottom my disdain for DRM, a necessary but controversial copyright protection method that is used in digital media files and copy-protected CD's to prevent unauthorized duplication of digital assets. As the music industry continues to transform itself from reliance on a physical product to digital distribution, it has enlisted the help of various companies developing copy protection schemes to fight piracy, which affects anyone dependent on the music industry supply chain. From labels who lose millions in sales to artists who gain exposure but lose control of where their music is sold. Eventually it affects you, the consumer, who risks purchasing low-quality product with poor fidelity from vendors on Canal Street in New York City to download sites based in Russia.
New York nightlife will be getting another shot in the arm with the arrival of Pacha, a European-style venue swinging open its doors soon after a top down renovation of the old Sound Factory space on West 46th, between 11th and 12th.
You may have heard today that file-sharing service, Grokster, who recently lost a Supreme Court ruling finding the company infringed on copyrights for allowing the sharing of movies via its p2p software, shuttered its web site today. More news on the story can be found at Yahoo: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051107/music_nm/media_grokster_dc
and an intersting comment about the effects of this decision on software developers can be found at the Ohio Free Culture blog.
Check it out now...Madsol-Desar with Herby F. and DJ Tap is Live on Netmix this morning. Even though he's in the middle of moving, Madsol found the time to get some of his friends down here from Boston to co-host the radio show today. JussListenToTheRadio is on right now til 12 noon!
I've been doing a lot of surfing of DJ and dance music culture Web sites lately. I guess I got the buzz again. It's been a long time coming.
I haven't done much talking about Web sites here, so I thought I'd better put together a preliminary Top 10 DJ sites I'm feeling pretty good about. These are robust, content driven sites that have really transcended the early days of static HTML pages. They are self-sufficient, running on open-source platforms in .asp, .jsp or .php/mySql.
