Poor John Digweed barely makes the top ten list, with Tiesto, Van Dyk, Corsten and Oakenfold clogging up the works.

• destroy the goodwill of music fans by entrapping the children, the poor and the technically illiterate then suing them;
• continue to release music that no one would be caught dead sharing;
• turn their back on profitable, legal sales by backing out of deals with legal music sales entities, like Apple’s iTunes music store;
• finally, gut fair-use by pursuing those true thieves–their own customers–who burn mix CDs or rip their own music for their iPods.

In the circle of life the big labels are headed back to dust.

Destroy the goodwill of music fans
The music industry has always been populated with greedy bastards. It’s a fairly common story to hear of the band signing a deal with a big record label and then being forced into using that label’s own producers, studios, and marketers, only to have their earnings from music sales eaten up by exorbitant charges: charges that were paid right back to the label itself.

Now, in the name of the artists, the RIAA, with evidence gained from its hacker team, is suing individuals under the weakest rationales. The RIAA is now celebrating its first win in the courts. This is clearly going to bring tons of goodwill to the industry and its artists. Brilliant.

Release Unsharable Music
Given that the radio industry has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the music industry, the labels can continue to release trash music with an extremely short half-life and be assured that it will get tons of airplay. This isn’t music people want to buy. It’s like a pop version of Muzak. This music will embarrass any potential file sharer. If you become the butt of jokes because you’re sharing the latest Britney Spears album, you’ll be a lot less likely to share music. Again, brilliant.

Turn its back on iTunes
While the music labels whined about Napster and pursued pathetic attempts to market digital music via repressive DRM and subscriptions, Steve Jobs and Apple single-handedly saved the retail music industry by opening the iTunes Store and giving the public a reasonable way to purchase music online. For that, many labels in the music industry are now crying foul and threatening not to renew their deals with Apple or going month-to-month on their deals.

I think they’re right. They own the music. And if they don’t want to sell any, they should back out of those deals. This will be a very effective prong of their strategy.

Start suing their own customers
In the most depraved prong of their strategy, the labels now appear poised to begin criminalizing the fair use of music. Always bitter that the software industry had a better model for selling their product than they did (licensing per device), the music industry is now hinting that they will begin pursuing their own customers for ripping music onto an iPod or burning it on a CD. By doing this, the industry reduce even further the value of its music to its customers. This is likely the final nail in the coffin for Big Music.

With this four-pronged strategy, I believe Big Music has sealed their fate.

I’m not a serial music sharer, just a long-time customer of Big Music. I purchased and own thousands of CDs. I feel like I did my part to support good music being released by the big labels. At this point, though, I will never purchase another track from the big labels. I’ll buy from Radiohead. I’ll buy from independent artists on iTunes. And I’ll continue to buy from Beatport. Those folks get it. The “Industry” doesn’t.

[photo by Erica Marshall]

The first disc is a chunky, breakey affair with a couple familiar tracks, notably Duoteque’s “Drug Queen”, Starkillers’ “Discoteka”. One highlight for me is a delightfully cheesy track, “Where The Party’s At”, a cranking mix of guitar samples and bleeping electro. Overall, disc one is nice, but the mix really starts kicking in on disc two.

The after a relatively mellow start, Disc Two shifts into high-gear around 9 minutes in with the Moroder-esque Quivver track “Not Givin’ Up” (Nox & Beckers Mix) that leads directly into one of the best tracks of the year “Colour Me Blind” by Beckers–truly a wicked track that chugs along like a 2AM clubbing freight train. Other highlights include the Backdoor Hussies “I wanna feel ya”, Prodigy’s trippy retro-feeling “Girls”, and “Heel ‘N’ Toe” from Freeland.

Not content to go out quietly this disc finishes with an electro-funk orgy of beats, analog synth stabs and syncopated basslines featuring Sarah McLeod’s “He Doesn’t Love You (Hook ‘n’ Sling Vocal Mix)” (also one of the best tracks of the year IMO) and Stretch Sylvester & Ben Macklin’s “Fireworks” featuring a sublimely integrated vocal from Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen”.

So it’s been a while since I’ve been really happy with a whole mix, but this is a great effort…particularly Disc Two. Download it at Hybridized.org and consider supporting them with a mere $12/quarter donation to support their bandwidth needs and keep the mixes coming.

Making it work is simple. Just install the software with either the cab or installer that Aspecto provides, launch WiFiTunes and it automatically finds any shared iTunes libraries on your LAN. It even supports shared playlists. Very slick and it sounds great. It uses the RAM in my device so my two-hour DJ mixes don’t really work since they’re so friggin large (125MB+ in most cases), but for regular tracks it works great.

I’ve found one more thing that I really like about my Cingular 8125.

Tracklist:

1. Snake Sedrick – Effulgence
2. Blue Room Project – Forty Nights (Panoptic Mix)
3. Dousk – Snowcone
4. Demi – Gearbox (16 bit Lolitas Mix)
5. Neverdogs, Presslaboys, & David Ruberto – Angel (Presslaboys Mix)
6. Blendbrank – Muscles (Paranoid Jack Mix)
7. Hawaii – Pure (Janicki Mix)
8. Rick Pier O’Neil – Come To Me (RPO part 2)
9. Opencloud Vs. Seyton – A Little More Mixed Up Than Usual (Colin C Consoul Mix)
10. Chris Micali – Sentient Soul
11. Deepsky and Marc Mitchell – Lost In The Moment (Peg City Allstars Mix)

It seems like Hybridized has re-awakened with lots of new mixes getting posted lately, which makes me happy!

1) Andrew Kelly – Sometimes I’m You (Intro Edit) – CDR
2) D-Nox – Seven Hours (Martinez Apocalypse Now Remix) – Electribe
3) Andrew Kelly – Not Responsible – CDR
4) M’Ocean feat Michelle Chivers – Vertigo (Andrew Kelly Mix) – Feralcode Records
5) Bjorn Fogelberg – A Brand New World (Andrew Kelly Mix) XAKK Records
6) Nick K – Who Needs Vocals Anyway – Gangsta Audio
7) Slok – Lonely Child (Satoshi Tomiie 3D Remix) – Saw Recordings
Musgrove & Mcgrath – Rollerdiscoking – EQ Records
9) Silver City – Shiver (Ewan Pearson Remix)

It’s available for a free download from Hybridized.org, but consider buying a cheap subscription to get access to Hybridized’s faster downloads. You won’t regret it. In particular, the subscription is worth it just to get Kelly’s mixes and mixes from the best, most prolific DJs you’ve never heard of, Shiloh (the Moreh brothers).

Beatport provides a Flash interface, which at first might seem annoying, but later proves to be pretty cool as you flip through tons of music while your currently playing preview track plays along in the background. Without using an ugly frame-based HTML site, this would be pretty difficult.

Every week, their store seems to get more and more labels on-board and the track selection is far superior to any brick-and-mortar, or even online, store I ever frequented. Now obviously you can’t “spin” an MP3 directly, but by burning the downloaded tracks onto a CD for your CDJ-1000 or simply downloading and spinning them with Stanton’s Final Scratch, you can freshen up your record box in no time, anytime. I’m a fan and even if you don’t buy anything, it’s fun to just flip through and listen to their generous song samples while killing time at work.