Belated – Billy Joel at Shea Stadium

I am sorry I didn’t get to this post sooner  – mostly because I wanted to write about this concert while it was fresh in my head. I’ve been a huge Billy Joel fan my entire life (like most kids from Westchester or Long Island), but the only live show of his that I’d seen was the Billy Joel/Elton John tour in Boston about 6 or 7 years ago.

So, I braved the secondary market and decided that no matter what it cost, I would procure tickets for this show – good tickets. I ended up with 6 tickets for the July 16th show – 2 for me, 2 for Dan, and 2 for my parents about 15 rows back from the field. It turned out to be worth it, because this was an incredible concert. Even if you weren’t a big Billy fan, this was a truly legendary show. Surprise guest performers included John Mayer, John Mellencamp, and Tony Bennett. Billy also played more than a few Beatles songs in a tribute the band that is one of Billy’s biggest influences, and also the first music act to ever play Shea. Billy became the last since they’ll be tearing it down at the end of the 2008 season. More exciting for me however was Billy’s own music – all 3 hours of it.

Billy played just about every one of his big hits (with the exception of Extremes, Uptown Girl, and one other that I can’t remember anymore). It was absolutely incredible to hear these songs live, and Billy delivered them with his typical high-energy, crowd-pleasing excitement – I was on my feet the entire show. Even more exciting for me though were the songs that aren’t his most well-known hits…he opened the show with Miami 2017 off of Songs in the Attic…this was the one song I desperately wanted him to play but never thought he actually would (probably my favorite Billy song, if I had to pick one). Other amazing, lesser known songs included Ballad of Billy the Kid, Angry Young Man, and The Entertainer (I guess that one doesn’t really count since it’s on Greatest Hits volume 1). Whew…just repeating that list gets me excited.

This was the kind of show that I really didn’t want to end. Although it did of course, it seemed like they were shooting for a DVD (multiple cameras, unusually formal intro at the beginning of the show, etc.), so maybe I’ll get to watch it over and over once the recording comes out. I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed.

Amazon S3 Down

For those of you who don’t know, Amazon provides elastic storage and computing power through on its cloud of servers through two services – S3 and EC2. These services have been a huge deal for many websites, as they enable applications to handle dynamic traffic loads without having huge arrays of servers – companies can pay for what they use and no more thanks to Amazon’s enormous computing capacity.

Amazon S3 has been completely down for about 3 hours this morning – no small thing at all. Thousands of websites rely on S3 to serve a variety of assets from photos to music to video. In Indaba’s case, we’ve been serving the widgets for our Mariah Carey Remix Contest through S3, which are now of course completely disabled until S3 comes back up.

Here’s the timeline according to Amazon’s Service Health Dashboard:

9:05 AM PDT We are currently experiencing elevated error rates with S3. We are investigating.
9:26 AM PDT We’re investigating an issue affecting requests. We’ll continue to post updates here.
9:48 AM PDT Just wanted to provide an update that we are currently pursuing several paths of corrective action.
10:12 AM PDT We are continuing to pursue corrective action.
10:32 AM PDT A quick update that we believe this is an issue with the communication between several Amazon S3 internal components. We do not have an ETA at this time but will continue to keep you updated.
11:01 AM PDT We’re currently in the process of testing a potential solution.
11:22 AM PDT Testing is still in progress. We’re working very hard to restore service to our customers.
11:45 AM PDT We are still in the process of testing a series of configuration changes aimed at bringing the service back online.
12:05 PM PDT We have now restored communication between a small subset of hosts. We are working on restoring internal communication across the rest of the fleet. Once communication is fully restored, then we will work to restore request processing.
12:25 PM PDT We have restored communication between additional hosts and are continuing this work across the rest of the fleet. Thank you for your continued patience.

Of course, Indaba isn’t the only site that’s been affecting – our good friends over at drop.io haven’t been able to serve certain assets, and Basecamp – the web-based project management software from 37 signals has also been unable to serve assets all morning.

I’m interested to see what happens tomorrow (Monday). S3 had similar problems in February, and outages of this size and duration really call into question the stability of the service. It’s not going to be fun over at Amazon tomorrow…(not that today was any better I’m sure).

Mariah Carey Remix Contest on Indaba Music

I am very proud to announce that this morning we launched a remix contest on Indaba Music for Mariah Carey’s new single “I’ll Be Lovin’ U Long Time.” This is obviously a big deal for the entire Indaba team – Indaba Music is a powerful way for artists to make music with each other online, and the Mariah contest showcases the platform’s ability to create that type of collaboration between major recording artists and other musicians. We couldn’t be happier about demonstrating this utility with the best-selling female artist of all-time.

In fact, when the story broke in Billboard on Saturday, it contained this priceless quotes from Mariah’s executive producer Mark Sudack:

“It’s a marketing tool as much as it is a contest,” he says. “But nowadays all you need is a laptop and a drum machine, and you have all the equipment that you need to go and make something that’s hot and sounds special. There’s so much potential talent out there that’s untapped. You could have the next Jermaine Dupri sitting in a room somewhere, and he’s got all the talent and all this genius with just no options to connect the dots.”

Exactly. It’s incredibly gratifying for us to see professionals of this caliber understanding the value that Indaba can provide to an artist like Mariah.

This contest also represents a major accomplishment for the music industry in general – these types of programs are pretty forward-thinking, and putting not just the completed song out online for free distribution, but the individual stem files is not an easy thing for most old-school players to digest. In this case, Universal Publishing, EMI Publishing, Live Nation, Island Def Jam, Mariah’s management, and of course, Mariah herself all needed to be on the same page – no small accomplishment.

These types of programs are a great way for major artists to forge a deeper connection with listeners, and they provide other artists with very exciting creative opportunities. We’re all about creating new opportunities at Indaba, especially if they add value to an industry that is struggling to derive it from as many new avenues as it can.

Plants Can Make Music Too

Yes, yes they can. This story (via Create Digital Music) chronicles an amazing sound installation in Scotland that automatically produces music in response to changing environmental factors associated with plant life in a greenhouse.

A composition for plants, yangqin, bamboo robot and robotic chimes, Three Pieces is designed as a collaboration between robots, traditional instruments, and living things, housed in Victorian Palm House of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. A traditional Chinese dulcimer is played by a robot with many bamboo fingers while the surrounding foliage hides an ensemble of robotic chimes. Despite being separate individuals, the robots communicate and perform together. The robot performers are conducted by all the living things in the Palm House. The moisture content of the soil changes slowly as the plants absorb water, while on a much faster timescale, the temperature changes in the building as animals, including humans, move about. The installation detects this living presence in the Palm House and the music changes accordingly. The robots react to humans, but their mood alters with the plants.

The robots and plants are taking over. Maybe they’re mad that we’ve been killing all of them for so long (the plants, not the robots).

THREE PIECES sound installation from Ziggy Campbell on Vimeo.