June 24th, CD Baby, the largest distributor of independent CDs on the Internet has chosen to use Weed files for digital distribution. As we speak hard drives are wizzing between Oregon and Seattle (Wide Area Sneakernet!) bringing raw .wma files to Seattle, and delivering Weed files back to CD Baby.

This is an important partnership, giving Weed a chance to offer conversion to over 200,000 song titles at the click of a radio button. CD Baby also offers iTunes, and other on-line stores. how how it differs and excels from other On-line Music Distribution formats will be come clear if people prefer Weed files. Why should they? Because you can't get anything back from a song you downloaded from iTunes. And we just heard about the lack of quality, 128kbps.

I just Weedified a song for Shank Bone Mystic called Come! it is time to give the machine man your faceIt is encoded at 320kbps .wma. Anyone who figures out what movie that line is from gets 3 free plays...Oh wait, everyone gets 3 free plays. ;-) To be honest I don't have a sound system that would do much for determining audio quality, so I invite comparisons. There are many Weed files that are encoded at 192kbps, the CD Baby files will initially be 160kbps. I like the fact that as a musician and producer, I have the choice of using whatever bit rate seems appropriate for the material, and the client.

Did I mention that Weed conversion is a free service from .wma files? You must find an ICP. ShareNewYork.com is an ICP. We are interested in a wide variety of music. More important than what it sounds like is what you as a musician can put into sharing it, and starting your marketing. Weed is not a magic bullet. It doesn't replace personal marketing, but it is an incredibly valuable tool which brings in income and as a side effect marketing data, without much more effort from the musician and her marketing department giving out Weed files on CDs, and pointing fans at sites.

ShareNewYork.comis my Weed Regional Sharing Hub, creating community both online and in the many and varied clubs of New York. Come see. Of special interest may be:

Weed as the Middle Path

How Sorry I am the it doesn't work on Macs.

Musicians, Welcome to Weed

I Imagine I'm a figment of imagination. I suspect, I'm more but I must at least be that, because I know myself as that. As my own imagination. But, that doesn't get myself very far outside of myself. I'd prefer to imagine I'm in someone else's imagination. In fact, two people's.

I think there are two people thinking about me, imagining me, writing my story...and in fact, they are doing it in the same notebook...but the circumstances which lead to the writing are, at times, vastly different. One writer is Ed, somewhere here on Earth. The other writer is Tag, in my home galaxy. Not just separated by distance, but by...well, fiction. For Tag, Earth is a world he's made up, and writes about when he feels like it. Ed, in turn, is writing about Tag and his galaxy, making it up also.

This place, the place where I live and talk, is between the worlds. I am Tem Noon, and I am semi-fictional. I am real when either Tag or Ed believe they are me, and they act in my behalf. It depends on your perspective, at any given time, whether I am fictional, or non-fictional.

This is my cabin. My home. I will try to spruce it up.

I am posting some new songs soon. First I need to turn them into Weed.

I guess I'm back on Earth again.

It's always hard to know where to begin, It tends to be in the middle you think of it, or maybe even the end before even thinking for telling it.

I try to get back to the beginning, at least in the telling. I am Tem Noon and I have come to Earth with no particular abilities...but I would like to help people.

OK, on Earth, maybe, but why Slashdot of all places? Because I have a human computer history pedigree. In 1986 on a dusty Vax-11/750 named affectionately "2LITTL::" using the DECnet nomenclature, I had my first manifestations. These have been salvaged at http://www.streetbuddhism.com/. On the home page picture?
A famous intersection is shown, with a strange looking thing in the middle. Click on that thing to get to an ftp list of Tem Noon's Cabin.

But I need to move on now. I have Weed Files available at http://www.temnoon.com/

I am also a Weed producer, authorized Independent Content Provider. I can turn computer files into money-making assets.

Weed is an amazing creation of Shared Media Licensing of Seattle.

A Weed file is one which is "initialized" to only allow 3 plays on any computer, until the file is paid for, through software called a Weed Activator. At that point that file will play unlimited on up to 3 machines, and can be downloaded to media players, or burned on CD. Weed files cost about the same as other music files online, but prices vary because they are set by the artist. However, after you buy a weed file, it becomes an asset that you can share, and make money from.

The structure of weed financials is literally a shared payment to several accounts every time the music is paid for. Those accounts are:

50% - Artist. (literally "Rightsholder")
20% - Owner who shared the file with the buyer.
10% - The previous owner.
5% - The owner before that.
15% - Shared Media Licensing.

Ah...the catch. It's not Mac compatible YET. Nor is it Linux or BSD compatible, unless there are Windows Media Players running there. Even though WMP runs on Mac, MS doesn't support the DRM on Macs. I think this stuff is going to be big. How many things can you buy for a buck, and make money from giving it away to people you think will like it? You can listen to it as much as you want, yet sell it too. So it's better than Cake!