burrokeet

sorry but i disagree - that huge marketing push is what sells the records - that is what labels do, whether they are majors or one-person indie labels.

"marketing themselves" is a pipe dream that has only worked for a tiny percentage of indie artists - a huge industry has built up around this effort, and just like the major labels made lots of money off of their artists, this industry is making lots of money off these indie artists, just exploiting economies of scale of artists instead of consumers.

no i haven't, but i should say that despite my experience, it is pretty hard to go wrong at Stanford

If the band members are also the authors/composers of their recorded material, they will receive slightly more than what is suggested here, since they will also be due mechanical and/or performance royalties from various services.

That being said, it's the best/worst time to be a musical artist - you can distribute yourself online (the biggest music marketplace) and receive a MUCH larger chunk of the revenue than ever before. At the same time, you are only going to sell 24 albums, because it takes a label or label-like organization to sell records, and because of the former point, you are now participating in a marketplace with a selection of products an order of magnitude greater than a decade ago.

there's a mix of housing in Palo Alto - a fair amount of students and young persons intermingled with home owners of (very) expensive homes. I lived in a $1500/month place on Everett (cheap) and across the street there were million dollar houses, but a block in another direction were a few places that looked like 1920s era sharecroppers houses.

If you end up in the city, make sure you are very near the Caltrain, since it sounds like you are not planning to drive. Trying to commute to Palo Alto by connecting to the Caltrain from other public transit (MUNI etc) is a PITA.

I attended CCRMA for two years as an EE PhD (post-masters) student. I really didn't like it, which sucked, since in theory it is a really interesting place. First, my interests were heavily in UI stuff and interactive interfaces, but the EE side of it is REALLY heavy in just signal processing and modeling. Having said that, Prof Julius Smith (one of the main EE faculty there) is a great guy.

Second, from the music side of things, there was a really strong bias against any form of popular music and towards heavily experimental music. The word snob comes to mind.

Third, the place just had a weird and uneasy energy - not welcoming and just strange. Another friend of mine who was there at the same time commented on this to me also, and also stopped the CCMRA programme.

YMMV - this was in the 1990s

To answer your specific question though, I had a BA and MS from a so-so state school, average (B-) grades at undergrad and very good grades in grad school (3.9/4.0 ish) and 700+ on each of the GRE sections (just the general one, I didn't sit the specialized ones). I had one publication in a peer-reviewed journal as well.

Yes I agree, with two exceptions - first when clicking somewhere opens a new itunes sub-window (who wants that?) and second they changed the reveal-in-finder command from apple-R to shift-apple-R

Other than that it rocks (literally)

I still love magasines- no iTablet to read on the toilet yet...

Wired Billboard Urb The Beat Vibe Fader

when I'm in the US or UK I also usually grab a few things at the bookstore:

Wallpaper Mix UK Future Music

+1 I LOVE this keyboard- only wish the wireless one had a numeric keypad also

This is one of the best responses I've seen to this debate here or otherwise. As someone involved in that value chain, but who is not a musician or record label, I can say with confidence that illegal downloading has devastated the lives of many people I know- engineers, session musicians, composers, persons who work at labels, publishers, distributors, etc. And the worst part of it is that the small indie type artist and labels, that people claim to support instead of the majors, are the ones who suffer the most. WEA, EMI, etc. can scale down and adapt, but look at Pinnacle in the UK, who went under yesterday, taking a huge amount of indie labels with them effectively.

I wonder if they'll axe some of the balance on my student loan...

still have to get a monitor, kb and mouse for the mini though

when you add this in, you maybe could swing a refurb imac or macbook from the apple store

I actually learned it recently by writing a small app for the Google App Engine and referencing the python docs.

After that I started learning Django using the Django docs and http://www.djangobook.com/ and this kind of rounded out the python bits as I went along

Haven't actually made reference to an actual Python book yet

I'm learning Python/Django right now (coming from a strong Java and Perl background, plus a mish-mash of other stuff)

Liking it a lot, plus have already written an app and deployed it in the GAE, which is pretty cool in itself