The UC Santa Cruz job is no accident; it was made possible by a donation from the Dead themselves. And it's not just drug bands spreading counterculture good fortune these days:

• Amid mass journalism layoffs, a new hippie-friendly type of gig has opened up: Pot reviewer. Denver's alt weekly went looking for just such a fellow, to serve the booming local market for "medical" marijuana.
  
• Grungy well-heeled young music fans made this year's Coachella music festival a "super happy" success. Far out for concert organizers who refused to grow up and get a "real job!"
• Vegan animal activist Jane Velez-Mitchell has a hit show over on CNN's Headline News and can now aspire to the even greater level of success attained by left-wing-radio-host-turned-MSNBC-anchor (and fellow lesbian) Rachel Maddow. (Maddow was a Rhodes scholar, putting her on the high achieving side of hippiedom.)
  
• The White House installed an organic garden under lobbying from Alice Waters, delivering a PR victory to the restaurateur derided as a hippie "dreamer" on national television just days earlier.
  
• In San Francisco, the sort of company that holds "naked" meetings and makes decisions through unanimous consensus is now showered with VC cash.
  
• A protest marcher from a hippie college changed his name to the militant "Barack" from the placid "Barry" and was soon elected president of these United States.
  
• If you advocate turning your cat vegan or making men pee while sitting down, for the environment, the New York Times will publish your op-ed, these days.

And all this time you thought "get a job" was the ultimate way to insult a hippie. Who's laughing now, straight edge??

(Pic via)

The rap band has been a pioneer in digital media, selling MP3 files and building a collection of websites, including a rap portal, well before other artists. Frontman Chuck D has also been a frequent critic, going back at least two decades, of the recording industry. So while investors in the new album will get a cut of revenue, according to TechCrunch, they shouldn't emulate industry high rollers, at least if they're fans of the talent, who famously sang in "Swindler's Lust:"

Hand in my pocket rob me for my chocolate (eheheheh)

Mo' dollars, mo' cents, for the Big Six [record companies]

Another million led to bled, claimin innocence



...No pressure, tell me why they don't care

Rap and R&B pavin the streets of Bel-Air

From the sales of singers, no longer here

The bigger killer, get the bigger share (eheheheh)

Hands off Chuck's chocolate, crowdsourced investors. It's right there in the Terms & Conditions... boyyyyy.

It's well worth the headaches to finagle a Spotify account from within the U.S. (see instructions below). Spotify is something of a miracle; the service offers a massive, seemingly endless library of music — things you'd find in Apple's iTunes music story for a buck or two — for free, via an advertising-sharing agreement with the music labels. There are plenty of holes in the collection, but we found something to keep us entertained from basically every artist we initially searched for — the original Brigitte Bardot version of Serge Gainsbourgh's "J'taime Moi Non Plus," miles and miles of Bob Dylan tracks, some Manu Chao, Carla Bruni, Mia Doi Todd, etc. Our musical tastes aren't the most eclectic, but what we were in the mood for, we found.

Better still, all that power is networked. This means not only can you log on to your music from your work computer, friend's laptop, or (soon) from an iPhone, but you can also sample collections of music assembled by strangers. This is technically possible in iTunes, but only if you're willing to pay for each track — there's no stacking up playlists and running through them as background music, as you can do on Spotify.

A Google search turns up a cornucopia of Spotify shares. The Guardian, for example, published a collection of celebrity playlists (most are humdrum, but Stuart Braithwaite and VV Brown's had some nice discoveries); on one of the indepdent sites aggregating Spotify lists, you can let Pitchfork do the driving, or visit collections that have been heavily upvoted by listeners.

Spotify has forecast a U.S. launch by the end of this year, and there are reasons to believe it will actually happen; with owners that include major music labels, the company has seen recent cash infusions valuing it at nearly $240 million.

In the meantime, you can get a taste of the music service by following the instructions here to sign up for an account via a British proxy. Unfortunately, after two or three weeks, Spotify will figure out you're a dirty Yank rather than a vacationing Brit, and cut you off. Ouch! Now we understand why our friend, recently returned from a couple of years in London, looked positively heartbroken to be dumped by Spotify.

Intriguingly, though, the service will let you keep listening — err, "traveling" from your "home" in the UK — if you pony up for a premium, ad-free account at a cost of 10 pounds a month, or approximately $46,000 worthless American dollars. Kidding! That's not the exchange rate for at least another few weeks, and we're actually thinking about forking it over. Sneaking into a Swedish music jukebox by posing as a Brit might not qualify as punk rock, but it's a lot more fun than you might expect.

(Top image: by Hector Milla)

iLike became something of an icon for a certain class of startup: Built on social networks, fast-growing, unprofitable, advertising supported. The company's impending sale to MySpace at a fire-sale price could hardly be a bigger wakeup call to these fellow makers of software "widgets."

The company was once valued at $53 million, back when Ticketmaster bought a 25 percent stake in late 2006, according to the Seattle Times. iLike amassed a total of $17 million from Ticketmaster and other investors like Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and former AOL exec Bob Pittman. Now it's negotiating to sell for just $19.5 million, All Things D reports, and $6 million of that is contingent on retaining certain employees in coming months.

It's quite comedown. But it's easy to see how iLike became a media darling and a hero to other makers of widgets. In the late spring of 2007, iLike ported its music recommendation service to Facebook, and in the process spiked its user base dramatically, to 15 million from 3 million over six months. In one week just after the Facebook launch, four venture capitalists asked CEO Ali Partovi (pictured) to lunch, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported; the company reportedly added close to 200 servers over the course of the summer.

After retaining insidery Silicon Valley flack Brooke Hammerling, iLike saw its praises sung widely in the media (emphasis added):

• Wall Street Journal, June 2007: "'Somebody's going to end up being the Facebook music service,' [co-founder Hadi Partovi] says. 'It's either going to be us, in which case we're made, or it's not.'" (By the time Patrovie gave this retrospective quote, iLike was by far the dominant music service on Facebook.)
• Billboard, July 2007: "The smart money says someone will acquire iLike, and soon. The company's social media discovery capabilities are a natural extension to any digital music service, particularly iTunes."
  
• BusinessWeek, July 2007:"'Widgets are a fundamentally important idea,' says Vinod Khosla... who has invested in two widget makers, Slide and iLike. 'I believe it has the potential to create big billion-dollar winners.'"
• Forbes, October 2007: "Says Khosla [Ventures]'s David Weiden: 'Widgets are the next kind of media network.'"
• USA Today, November 2007: "The company... has become an overnight sensation... Dave McClure, an angel investor in Silicon Valley, wouldn't be shocked if iLike... and others eventually go public."

Revenue was presumably slow in coming, though, because by fall of the following year iLike was said to be trying to sell itself and Ticketmaster wrote off half the value of its investment. Now investors are basically trying to break even with the MySpace sale. The music and advertising businesses have their own unique problems, but startups in other hot sectors, like iPhone apps, should beware: The excitement can dissipate as quickly as it inflates.

(Pic: Niall Kennedy)

We've written about nerdcore anthems before, including this rap about the SXSW internet conference, the one about the Hadron Collider and the one from the O(nline)G threatening to shank a Wired writer. With few exceptions, the genre has been dominated by geeks, which is why it's nice to see Kate Miller-Heidke get righteous on a creepy, Facebooking ex.

The Twitterati are, naturally, eating this up (though it dates to May).

[To the tune of "American Pie"]

Bye, bye those big upfront buys
Pitched my client who was pliant
But the pitch didn't fly
And old ad boys were drinking martinis dry
Singing "Tech has taken us for a ride"
"Algorithms got me cross-eyed"

[Related]

As bad as the commercial (which stars two Microsoft scientists who are, surprisingly, not trained actors) is, the product advertised is even worse. You sing, and it automatically creates a tinny, childish background track that would get bottles hurled at you in any open mic in America. It's all part of Bill Gates' plan to destroy cool things—in this case, music—with computers, resulting in global nerd domination. The Times points out that the ultimate proof of this can be found in all the YouTube videos by brave pioneers who fed classic songs into Songsmith and taped the results. What monster could promote something such as this?:

Of course, it's highly-compressed digital audio, and therefore pretty crappy. But I have to admit, the offerings go well beyond the pop selected for the Jonas Brothers' playlist — while I'm sure the cashiers at Amoeba Records might still sneer at the selection's depth, my searches for everything from Os Mutantes to Gas Huffer, Blind Willie McTell to Mongo Santamaria came up with multiple tracks to choose from. Eventually. The site is currently running incredibly slow, which may be a good sign of interest or a critical fumble of the launch. Users frustrated in the process of creating playlists might just go back to Last.fm, Imeem, iTunes or any of a number of other places to preview and purchase tracks.

(Photos by Walter Kitundu)

It has every media component you could want, and they're all married together in a platform. That means other artists could use it, other record companies could use it and gain the knowledge of our 15-year development curve.

If you doubt the man's seriousness about screwing around with technology, check out this live 1982 performance of the vocoder-driven "Sample and Hold." See? Those old analog vocoders beat the pants off T-Pain's digital auto-tuner. At the JavaOne conference, Young eagerly extolled the virtues of the entertainment industry's production standard of 96kHz, 24-bit digital audio.

Why do golden-ear types like Young hate MP3s? The format results in lower dynamic range, lossy compression artifacts and is thin in the upper frequencies. Digital audio also produces harsh even-order harmonics and not the odd-order harmonics which add textural timbre to chords, and integrated circuit amplifiers have a high noise floor because of radio-frequency interference. Even young consumers prefer the sound of analog hi-fi systems like Jackson Pollock's. (Photo by Andrea Barsanti)

An auto-refresh page which loads the video over and over.

Every 15 seconds this page will automatically refresh adding 1 view to Girlfriend's YouTube total each time it does. Keep this page open while you browse the internet, study for exams, or even sleep. For extra viewing power, open up two or more browser windows at this page!

It's the kind of view-gaming that advertisers would normally consider fraud — that is, if what fans were doing wasn't better the best advertising Lavigne and her label RCA could buy.

Of course, it was mere allegations of view-gaming that eventually caused YouTube to pull the previous pretender to the "Most viewed" throne, Clarus Bartel's Cansei der Sexy (Music is my hot, hot sex). But I have a feeling YouTube won't be pulling Lavigne's video any time soon. Once at the top, the views will simply snowball from there. And YouTube will be in the happy position of selling advertising against a pop star's music video that is, itself, advertising.

While the view gaming of the Girlfriend video might have juiced the stats, what's amazing is that it achieved its place with off-site embedding turned off. YouTube, a cross-site video pioneer that has now become a black hole where embeds go to die thanks to the DMCA and copy-protection filters, can't mind — because rather than running against ads on a third-party site, every Lavigne view is in on the company's site and in the company's salable partner program inventory.

Lavigne is still officially in second place, less than a million views off the leader's pace. In Laipply's video, the use of licensed music falls under fair use territory, but it's enough of a gray area that he isn't even in the partner program, and therefore can't generate a single advertising impression. Still, considering the controversy over retaking the top spot stirred by a lone Italian with video editing software and possibly some scripting tricks, I wouldn't be surprised if the situation wasn't being monitored manually with YouTube admins freezing view counts until the company can come to some agreement with RCA. It's the music business, after all, where a little extortion between friends is standard operating procedure.

Handily for the PM, U2's music is available on the Japanese iTunes store. In November 2006, Bono gave then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe a pair of his Armani Red campaign sunglasses for the same cause. (Photo by AP/Peter Dejong)