Day and Night Digital | Irish Independent

As wallets tighten and money is less available to artists for creative projects, Irish musicians and filmmakers are turning to online funding as a way of creating the capital required to make their art.

Sites like Sellaband, Kickstarter, Slicethepie and Pledgemusic have given people in the arts a new way of appealing to fans directly. Each crowdfunding project has different incentives depending on your level of investment: from receiving a production credit to a pre-release download to private concerts to revenue shares – if you’re a fan and you have spare cash, chances are there is something you can get out of it beyond satisfaction.

Since crowdfunding began, it has seen a fair mix of success and failure. Public Enemy were forced to concede that their original $250,000 asking price was too high. Now, nearly 11 months later, the band have raised 80% of their re-adjusted $75,000 price. Duke Special’s Pledge Music finance-raising efforts for three new albums earlier this year received 129% of its asking more modest total.
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The Rap Map
The Rap Map is a Google Maps mashup showing key places in hip-hop’s North American past, from lyrical references to streets to clubs to the motel that Virginia Beach rappers Clipse used to sell drugs from.
http://map.rapgenius.com

The Ugly Dance
Send your friend a customised interactive dance card now. They’ll appreciate it.
http://theuglydance.com

1,001 Rules For My Unborn Son
Boys need rules. Walker Lamond imparts his worldly knowledge down to his son via the medium of a blog. Now a book.
http://rulesformyunbornson.tumblr.com

Sacred Animals
Recalling the timbres of Bon Iver and Thom Yorke, Sacred Animals is a solo project from a mysterious Wexford man whose debut EP Welcome Home deals in fanciful and feral piano-led ballads.
http://sacredanimals.net

Wild Nothing – Golden Haze
A genuine three and a half minutes of ’80s dream pop made in 2010 by Virginian Jack Tatum, Golden Haze is the perfect soundtrack to dancing around your room doing that dance from The Breakfast Club.
Listen at Pitchfork

Kanye and Jay-Z’s surprise EP
Watch The Throne is an impromptu five-track EP from two of rap’s big players with appearances from Bon Iver, Nicki Minaj and Rick Ross. Check Kanye’s Twitter for MP3s.
http://twitter.com/kanyewest

Snow Patrol mashup

Galway bootleg artist Phil Retrospector mixed Jimmy Ruffin’s What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?’ with Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars. P Diddy saw it and put it on his blog. Now, you can hear it too.

• You can now get your ashes pressed into vinyl when you die.
• Music discovery in 2010 vs 1990.
• Entire band discographies distilled into a single tweet.
• Hipster Dinosaurs FTW!
• How to fix Dublin transport by a German.

Watch Spike Jonze’s short film centered on the relationship between two shoddily-made robots. In a bright idea, there are a limited number of virtual ‘cinema seats’ available per day to watch the movie.

http://www.imheremovie.com

Also known as The Cutest Playfight Ever! “In a battle of cuteness, a baby and a kitty get ready to rumble”.

Users on Chatroulette who encounter a girl about to strip, beware! It’s more than likely the viral from Lionsgate Films for their upcoming movie The Last Exorcism. Clever.

A BBC weatherman gets caught live on air giving the finger to his co-presenters. Once, he realised his mistake, the subsequent coverup is absolutely priceless.

Recommended for fans of Glee, Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon, John Hamm (Mad Men), Hurley from Lost and Betty White.

The web loves Justin Bieber. He’s the diminuitive Canadian 16 year-old pop star that keeps on giving. Already this year Bieber has been the subject of a pesky message board 4Chan plan to get him sent to North Korea and his antics have filled up internet tubes consistently. Recent highlights include a Youtube video of him escaping fans on a Segway scooter, footage of him walking into glass twice, tweeting the phone number of a hacker to his 4.5 million followers and bonding over Raekwon with Kanye on Twitter which now looks to be leading to a collaboration between the trio.

Even a former pop star, Mark Wahlberg remarked: “The world needs Justin Bieber. Justin Bieber is like a white Tupac compared to a lot of people out there.”

The latest Bieber sensation may be the best yet. A song appeared on the web last week which was Bieber’s hit U Smile slowed down by 800%.

J. BIEBZ – U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis

As a result of the slowing down, the song is now over 35 minutes long and is closer to the sound of Sigur Ros jamming with whales in a cold icy ocean. While the original is a potent and saccharine paean to a girl’s eh, smile, the slowed down version is a meandering barrage of crashing notes, ambient chord drones, stretched-out reverb-heavy vocals and lulls. It’s actually a beautiful calming piece of music that has more in common with Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson. It’s epic in feeling as well as in length. It’s the musical equivalent of the time-stretching effect in Inception.
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