Aboriginal Peoples Choice Music Awards

My musical Mohawk friend, Jonathan Maracle, has been nominated along with Broken Walls (the band) in 6 categories in this Music Award show on November 6th & 7th. Congrats Jonathon!
Safe Journeys!

"Love Hurts" -San Antonio style

A South American musical group was playing in the Mercado Courtyard outside of Mi Tierra in San Antonio, complete with flutes and requintos (or some little bitty guitarish thing).  There was a pretty nice crowd of tourists, and they all seemed to be spending money on something.  This must have been a good weekend for the locals.  Viva San Antonio!

Bohemeos.com

Don't miss the East End Cultural Arts Fest '08 this weekend - Saturday & Sunday!

708 Telephone Road! Go to their website to get more details!

Ambience! Quiet tonight, but the East End of Houston has a jewel in Bohemeos.

Proprietor, Lupe - is a real nice guy and runs an eclectic music and art scene.

Dad's Git-Fiddle

Dad has finally been able to pick up his Git-Fiddle a little..


It was a nervous and emotional moment the first time I brought the guitar to my dad in rehab. Probably too early then, but on March 8, 2008 he picked it up and enjoyed a brief therapeutic moment doing what he loves to do - play his guitar.

Three Billion Songs Strong

By Rob Griffiths (rgriffiths@macworld.com)

So the iTunes Store just sold its three billionth song. Wow. That's a lot of anything, regardless of what you're counting. (OK, if you're counting grains of sand on the coastline of the United States, perhaps it's not a lot.) But more interesting to me is the pace at which Apple reached its latest billion-song threshold. It took the company a little less than three years to sell the first billion iTunes downloads. Then it took less than a year to sell the second billion. Now, just over six months later, the store has passed the three-billion song mark.

Looking at it as precisely as possible, if we assume that the two and three billion song targets were hit the same day as the press releases went out (January 9, 2007, and July 31, 2007, respectively), that means it took 203 days to sell one billion songs. That means the Store had to average about 4,926,108 song purchases per day, or 205,255 per hour. Breaking it down even further, that's 3,421 songs sold per minute, or an astounding 57 songs sold every second for those 203 days!

If each song is an average of 5MB, then the Store's bandwidth usage -- just for songs, not counting movies, TV shows, games, podcasts, or any other non-song-related Store item -- is a staggering 1,002GB per hour. That's nearly a terabyte of data transfer per hour, every hour, for those 203 days. Think about paying that bill from your ISP! "Yes, I'd like to know the cost of your 720TB per month data transfer plan, please."

Clearly the rate of sales can't continue to double every time the next billion song mark is reached, but Tuesday's announcement makes it clear that the iTunes Store hasn't yet reached a point where the growth rate is slowing. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the next billion; the acceleration curve on the first three would point to something like three months from now, but that seems almost too fast to me. What do you think? Where is the iTunes Store on the unit sales curve? Will things continue to accelerate, or is six months as quickly as we'll see a billion songs sold?

Get all the latest iTunes and iPod news at The iPod Blog.

Local Live Houston Musicians

My friend Vic 'Nash'' Espinoza singing at Doneraki's at Gulfgate Mall (Houston)
My friend, Lourdes sings at the wonderful Isla Coqui, a Boricua restaurant in (1801 Durham & I-10) Houston. Make it one of your weekend dinner choices. Sings the 1st Fridays of each month. They actually brought out the bag of percussion instruments and started passing them out in the crowd on the last few songs.

I love the impact of 'live music' in any environment! The blended history of Latino music that I heard last night was so rich! Vic brought accordion sounds from the German Polka heritage that helped form part of the spectrum of Mexico's contributions. Lourdes crooned the timeless ballads of Puerto Rico's European history.

Just today I discussed that it is interesting how lyrics can dig into random parts of memory & psyche and connect the points in your personal story to cause you to connect with your soul. I realize the importance that Archangel Lucifer held in directing music in the Heavenlies. Critical in our lives is the need to see music redeemed! We polarize religion, society and other areas often based on musical preferences.

Tool for creative outlets? or Weapon for destructive criticism?
hmmm