by SHANE SINNOTT

While researching this bad boy recently, I came across the Record of the Week Club, an improvisational project organized by some yahoos in Winnipeg, which you can visit at www.recordoftheweekclub.com. The premise is a weekly recording session on Wednesday evenings, in which a bunch of different musicians are thrown together, often with at least one “electronic” artist to mix things up, in order to create and record a song that same evening.

According to the site, the players don’t even know who their partners will be beforehand, though in a small town like Winnipeg, that claim seems dubious. Regardless, they record the bitch and upload it to the Web site immediately. You can stream the results for free, or download them for 99 cents if you’re so inclined. Be sure to pay a visit soon, as the project is over at the end of this month. A nice one is the result of Week 12, entitled “The Royal Canadian Lovers School,” which you can stream on the site.

Astute readers may remember my mention of the closing of Muxtape (www.muxtape.com) a couple of weeks ago. The site allowed users to upload and share “mixtape”—a bunch of MP3s—with each other. It became quickly popular, and was thus shut down at the behest of the RIAA. From its ashes, Opentape has risen—opentape.fm—which in a roundabout way allows people to do the exact same thing. It’s a piece of Web software that makes it easy for anyone with a Web site to upload MP3s that are both streamable and downloadable. Their stated raison d’être: “Sharing your musical taste on the Web should be fun and easy. We believe there is no reason it has to stop with the shutdown of a single site, so we’ve created a free tool to make this possible.” So, once again, we have the RIAA making a feebleminded attempt to keep-on-keeping-on. It’s an aggressive stick-and-bubblegum solution to a problem that has far more profitable—and less fan-pissing-offing—solutions, like, say, organizing a goddamn online licensing system amongst its members, and reaping the rewards that the Internet has to offer.