Viva La Mainstream Has Moved!!!

¡VIVA LA MAINSTREAM HAS MOVED TO A NEW LOCATION!

Effective immediately, ¡Viva La Mainstream! can be found at the link above. This site will remain open for archiving and linking purposes, but all future entries will appear on the new site. Please update your RSS feeds, Google Readers, etc. to reflect this change. If you are a blogger and link to VLM on your site, please update your link so readers can still find the material you enjoy enough to recommend. The new site still has a few changes to be made before its complete (mostly stuff to make the folks at MOG happy), but in the near future everything you see on this site will be available at

HTTP://VIVALAMAINSTREAM.WORDPRESS.COM

Thank you all, and see you on the new site!

==TJ==

Happy New Year Everybody!!

Yet another computer problem has sidelined me until further notice (I'm typing this on my brother's very nice laptop). I'm seriously hoping 2009 will have fewer of these problems in store.

As for things that 2009 hold for VLM, I've got a number of ideas lined up, among them a restart of the Album-A-Day project with more commitment to that and other features, perhaps the arrival of a few guest bloggers, and the much-discussed departure from this site over to Wordpress (still exploring the idea of moving to my own server too, but that'll take more time). I have some other ideas in the pipeline, but also curious as to what you, my loyal readers, would like to see. If you have thoughts on what Viva La Mainstream should be doing, by all means drop a message somewhere on the site (or the new site when it launches in about two weeks). Till then. Happy New Year, and I'll be back again as soon as circumstance allows.

==TJ==

An Important Announcement From Viva La Mainstream

So with the help of reader Michael I was able to piece together why I've had so much trouble getting content to stay up on the blog. He found this article from prefixmag that tells the whole story. The long and short of it is that the RIAA and its European counterparts grabbed Blogger by the balls, and now Blogger has to comply with their wishes. From the looks of it, VLM has gotten it easy; yeah, posts are going down, but at least I had it coming. The comment section shows that folks who post mp3s with the band's permission are still getting crap from Blogger and the RIAA. Once again, something that could have been great is now getting set ablaze by the greedy rat bastards at the RIAA.

What this means for Viva La Mainstream: No, I'm not closing up shop. Just won't give the RIAA the pleasure. From the looks of it, it's gonna be tough continuing the way I have on Blogger. Over the next weeks and months I am going to begin archiving some of the better/more popular posts I've made over the last 18 months, so that they can be saved and posted somewhere else in the near future.

I also just registered a domain name at Wordpress, so if nothing else I might be headed there. More likely, I'm looking (with the help of fellow bloggers feeling the same troubles) at the notion of shelling out the cash to set up shop on my own. The soonest any of this would happen is early 2009, so for the time being I'm just going to tough it out as best I can here while I come up with a decent solution. Regardless of how this tale ends, I want to thank everyone who's ever found their way to this site, be it in search of a review or for an mp3 that the Hype Machine bookmarked, and Gina, who doesn't read this thing, but is indirectly the reason I got started on this blog (she told me in January of 2007 that I needed a hobby).

I'm going to try to post as much as possible in spite of the crackdown, but it probably won't be with the same frequency it was at the beginning of the year until the move to wherever is complete.

==TJ==

Now You've Done Gone and Pissed 'Im Off...

First things first:

Viva La Mainstream on the ARC October 21, 2008

Now, I've got some good news and some bad news.

Good news: People are reading the blog. Great Success! That's what a blog exists for, right?

Bad News: Some of the people reading this blog work for record labels. In one 30 minute period earlier today, six posts from the last 3 months got taken down under DMCA violations.

No, this doesn't mean I'm getting shut down. No, I'm not getting sued. No, I won't be Kevin Cogill's cellmate anytime soon. It just means that I got someone high up's attention, and I need to be more careful for a bit. The two most recent pulled posts are back up without mp3 links, and I'll do what I can to recover the older ones. In the meantime, as always you can check out my SaveFile Archive for mp3s that you may have missed. I'm gonna go off the grid for a little while just so I can make sure the heat gets taken off me, but I'll be back before you know it.

And since we know how much the RIAA loves irony...

Weird Al Yankovic - Don't Download This Song

Back soon.

==TJ==

The Closest Thing To A Podcast I'll Ever Do

So I've come to a realization that people aren't often able to listen to the Viva La Mainstream Radio Broadcast because, well, its on the interwebs at a time when people are either at work or leaving work, making listening impossible. So I finally found a purpose for the archives of shows I keep on the station computer. Effective this entry, every Tuesday night I will post that day's radio broadcast in its entirety for everyone to listen as they may choose. The sound quality is only about 64 kbps, so its not perfect, meaning I feel OK about the fact that full songs are in the broadcast.

The audio files are titled as follows: TJ O'Neill [date of show] [time show started], so this first one looks like this:

TJ O'Neill 20081014 1504
(My show on 10-14-08, starting at 3:04PM)

Feel free to rename shows as you deem fit. This is better than a traditional podcast for me because I recently learned that if you don't update your podcast in a certain period of time it gets deleted. Since come December the show will be going off the air for a month for Christmas break, the podcast would die, and that'd suck. much easier this way, no?

So here's Tuesday's show. Let me know what you think/if there are any problems.

Viva La Mainstream on the ARC - October 14, 2008

==TJ==

EDIT: So I just listened, and you can hear me talk...but the music is absent. Huh. That will be fixed for the next one.

Some More Housekeeping

So due to some arrangements that take priority right now, no radio show today. In fact, in all likelihood the radio show will be condensed to once a week, Tuesdays from 3-5PM. So I'll be back on the air fo' legit on Tuesday.

You can see some more layout changes on the site now, namely a return of the header image and one more ad (that's the last one, I promise). I'm not sure, but I feel like the site might be too cluttered now. Feedback is greatly appreciated.

In other site news, we've steadily cracked 1,000 readers for the last few days. Welcome to all new visitors, and glad to have you reading. The first two rules of Fight Club do not apply here; by all means, tell your friends!

(PS: anyone know how to get digg, reddit, and/or StumbleUpon links on each entry and wanna tell me how to do it?)

Since most of the tracks in question have now seen their official release, I'm restoring the links in this post. You can also find those links and many more by checking the VLM archives. Enjoy. In the meantime, here's something new to sweeten the deal a bit.

Oasis - The Shock of the Lightning [iTunes]

I'll be back again later tonight with the long-in-waiting Jack's Mannequin review. Check again late tonight.

==TJ==

VLM Sells Out (Kidding)

So potentially big news:

Viva La Mainstream was invited and accepted to be a part of the MOG music network. I had heard of MOG before but never looked that deep into it; from what I gathered its some cross breed between last.fm and Hype Machine, but that doesn't quite do it justice. But anyway, VLM is a member of MOG now. I'm also trying out their MOG Music Network, which will in theory bring more traffic to my site. It also means the site is ad-supported for awhile, but frankly, I'm not worried too much about it.

So basically look for some changes to come to the site in the coming weeks and months. VLM might look different, but it's still just me typing the posts, its just that now there's more going on behind the scenes.

I'm as new to this as you all are, so let's see where this goes. Thanks for sticking around this long.

==TJ==

¡VLM! Doubles Your Daily Reading Material

Hello readers. As promised, a special announcement is below.

Today will mark the official launch of Micro-Buttered Popcorn, the film/TV counterpart to this blog. I've been working on it for the last week or two since I had the idea to launch one, and as of this morning I feel its ready to be viewed by the masses. It is in some sense still under construction (sidebars and widgets still being added, template might change again), but it exists, and is certainly worth reading. I aim for it to be a pretty inclusive film blog, but right now it is very clearly a geek movie blog. Working on that. So without any more explanation or guilding the lily or whatever, I give you the newest VLM project. Read it, tell me what you think, repeat. You know the drill.

Thanks for reading.

Micro-Buttered Popcorn

==TJ==

Going Off The Grid For A Bit

In any normal situation you would be getting a blog full of interesting material right now, but there's one problem:

My computer crashed yesterday afternoon. Best case scenario I get it back Saturday-ish. Worst case scenario...well, let's not go there *takes a few deep breaths*. So suffice it to say I don't see much point in running an mp3 blog when I have no mp3s to post for the time being. So VLM is gonna take an unexpected vacation for the week. In my absence be sure to check out my blogging comrades via the sidebar on the left (under 'other fine reading material'). I'll be back when I have a computer that doesn't suck.

==TJ==

Another New Undertaking

I've begun a new project for the summer (in addition to revamping the layout on this very site). After seeing just how much music exists on my computer and amount that I've never actually listened to, I have decided that I am going to listen to my entire music library by August 31st. Just to make things a bit more interesting, rather than try to do some interesting shuffle sequence, I'm just going to go alphabetical by artist. My goal on August 31st is to have every song by every artist from +44 to The Zutons with a play count of at least 1.

The rules:
-At this moment, there are 4,149 songs in my iTunes library.
-Those 4,149 songs, assuming they all played nonstop, would take 11 days, 6 hours, 2 minutes and 14 seconds (approximately; there are some videos and other goofy stuff that doesn't count in there) to play from front to back.
-Since I don't plan on halting my acquisition of music for the summer, any music that I get will get added into the set, unless it would have already played, at which point I'll just wait till it ends. [example; as I type this I'm near the end of 'AC', so if I were to get new music by 3 Doors Down, it wouldn't be added to the list]
-Stuff played on my iPod doesn't count, since its not alphabetical. This means I have to unsync my iPod; not a big deal, just means I have to add music manually for the next few months.
-I have till August 31st to complete this. When using iTunes, I may not use party shuffle or any other playlist. If I have something specific I wanna hear, it needs to go onto the iPod.

And of course I'm going to keep you all posted on how I'm doing. I started June 2nd at 4:40PM (+44 - Lycanthrope). Since then I have finished 126 songs, the last song finished being "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds from the Across the Universe Soundtrack (filed under Across).

That's it for now. And yes, there will be MP3s throughout this venture along with the usual blogging about whatever sparks my mind.

Songs completed: 126/4149
Last Song: Across the Universe - Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds [iTunes]

Back later.

==TJ==

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes...

Hey everybody. You've probably noticed the site has a few subtle changes (and if you hadn't notice, you should really be more aware of your surroundings). I decided to mess around with a few things and see how it all looks. Feel free to leave feedback and such if you think something is particularly awesome/ugly. This reconstruction will be going on until I a) get bored with it, or b) settle on something I really like. In the meantime, check out the various widgets and such that are all around, and continue to enjoy your day!

Random MP3 of the day: Fall Out Boy feat. John Mayer - Beat It [iTunes]

Real posting will resume shortly.

==TJ==

PS If your site used to be in the Links on the Left column and is no longer there, let me know and I'll gladly re-add you. Likewise, if you want to be added, say so.