Well Diddy, Puffy, Sean Combs, whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-yourself-today, your birthday wish has come true.

So powerful were the good vibes last night at the Broadway and Pike street party that I even exchanged some pleasant IRL words with motherfucking "bobcat," who, in this forum, usually speaks to me like this:

eric you're still a piece of shit

King Hipster Grandy has his nose so far up Chop Suey (and Nuemos) ass he's blowing corn-covered shit boogers!

rad! once again Eric is writing out his ass!

Wow mr Fucking in the streets sounds like he's talking about indy rock pussies like yourself.

stick to your rave shit, douche

This one's for you, "bobcat":

Lester Bangs’ Desert Island album, Astral Weeks is regarded by tens of thousands of people with really excellent musical taste as a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, a poetic epic of pastoral jazz folk and soulful Irish vocalese. Download it into your DNA at your earliest convenience.

Press release after the jump; video of "Astral Weeks" below.

*Halloween-themed videos courtesy of Love Is All.

*A spooky sequel to How the Grinch Stole Christmas, titled Halloween is Grinch Night.

*Tim Fite's free, annual Halloween EP.

*No Kids - "For Halloween"

And now, in closing, a dog dressed as a "Candy Corn Witch" (which you will not find on BrooklynVegan, so you're welcome):

There only are a limited number of ways you could make money. It's advertising, it's subscriptions, it's e-commerce and then its using the data for smart purposes [market research].

The interview is mainly about Last.fm verses Myspace, as the latter recently launched its new Myspace Music function.

One of the big stories with MySpace Music was whether streaming the music legally would be successful in driving song purchases via downloads. How's it fared for you?

When we launched free on-demand earlier on in this year in the States, the amount of e-commerce we were generating more then [sic] doubled. It definitely does work.

Legal, free streaming is a newer phenomenon on the Internet. What's the issue?

We always said to the labels, "You have to let us do this," because what's happening at the moment is people are getting the recommendations off of Last.fm and then they're just going to all the illegal peer-to-peer sites.

They're more than familiar with that problem. What's the state of the digital music business today?

I think what you've got with the Internet is the fact that the labels and the collective side have realized that they need to make sure there is proper sharing of all the revenues which are generated with all the content creators. And I think that's correct. I think the problem, though, is that there is a lot of posturing going on, on both sides, as to what the right model is to monetize that. The [potential] market is huge, but at the moment, it's all on the peer-to-peer networks.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Make room, iTunes. MySpace is hoping to shake up the digital music scene.
In a bid to spruce up its popular online hangout, MySpace plans to flip the switch Thursday on a much-anticipated service that will give its roughly 120 million users free access to hundreds of thousands of songs from the world's largest recording labels.
The catch: the music can be played only on personal computers connected to the Internet and listeners have to tolerate advertising splashed across the screen. Anyone who wants to transfer a song to a portable device like Apple Inc.'s iPod will have to buy the music through Amazon.com Inc.'s year-old downloading service, which sells songs for as little as 79 cents apiece.
Unlike much of the material at Apple's iTunes store, the music sold through MySpace's new service won't contain the protections that limit how many times a track can be copied.
MySpace is hoping to set itself apart from iTunes even further by allowing its users to create an unlimited number of playlists containing up to 100 songs apiece — a sharing concept similar to music services already offered by Imeem and Last.fm.
If MySpace's plan pans out, people will regularly post different playlists on their profiles and expose their friends to new music.
The recording labels are betting these implicit recommendations will cultivate more interest in more songs and eventually generate revenue to help recoup some of the revenue that has evaporated as CD sales have plunged from $12 billion in 1999 to a projected $5 billion this year.

This sounds a day late and a dollar short to catch up to iTunes' dominance of the market.

Via The Associated Press

If LL Cool J’s rapping skills have fallen off in recent years, it may be due to the once-phenomenal MC spending too much time answering fans’ emails.

To all of you out there wondering if it's really me on MySpace. It's really me. A hundred and thirty thousand e-mails, and I'm trying to respond to each one. Sometimes I feel like a secretary.

Via Mediabistro

Last week, I was in NYC. I walked by Other Music, Victory Records, various little vinyl boutiques, and while, on some abstract level, I wanted to support all these businesses, I didn't come home with a single record. At my kind host's stylish but small railroad apartment, we listened to music on a nice set of speakers plugged into mp3 players and laptops. They had maybe two boxes of records. I can't remember whether or not they had a turntable set up (I don't think so).

At home, I have the same brand of shelving as every other vinyl owning young person, the one made out of 16 squares perfectly sized for 12"s (your model may have 25 squares if you're fancy). It's half full of vinyl, half full of books and other media. I have a few crates worth of records on additional shelving or in actual crates on the floor, but I'm lately convinced that I'm never going to fill the rest of this shelf up with vinyl, let alone have to someday spring for the 25 square model.

I find no joy in this conclusion. I would love to live in a house lined with shelves of records. I would prefer my living room to look like these. I just don't think it's going to happen.

Vinyl is relatively big and heavy. Airlines are charging for extra baggage, and even when they weren't, traveling with vinyl (say, enough to DJ with) is grueling compared to traveling with mp3s or even CDs. Shipping is apparently a drag as well. Apartment space for record shelving is limited.

Music is expensive. We're diving headlong into what looks to my admittedly not economically expert eyes like a serious recession/depression, and records just aren't a necessity as much as food and shelter (Segal will likely debate this point with me). Rising fuel prices only aggravate the flying/shipping issues as well. As much as I want to support these small business and be a parton of artists, I just can't give any more than I can afford. Before this job, that meant buying records as carefully as possible, downloading what I couldn't afford to buy, and supporting artists at shows and by buying other merch. Now, it frequently means building my collection through promotional copies. Both means meant more CDs and mp3s than vinyl making their way into my collection. Morgan Geist might complain that I'm not listening to his records on the proper hi-fi setup in the ideal format, but audiophile gear is a luxury that most music fans probably can't afford. Hell, even Sasha Frere-Jones is selling his record collection.

These are gloomy, doomy times—every time someone in New York asked me how work was going, I would reply that it's great, the music business is tanking, print journalism is tanking, so print music journalism is the most exciting place you could hope to be. In seriousness, it's an awesome job, I feel fortunate every day to have it, but I'm not sure it'll ever launch me comfortably into the middle class. I think I may never own a home; maybe I won't be able to hold on to all the music I love for posterity either. Maybe formats—or other, larger paradigms—will shift and force people of my class situation to leave certain things behind. I think record collections, as opposed to mp3 collections, will only become increasingly a thing of class privilege rather than of ardent music fandom (I suppose it was always this way; perhaps music fans of less means have just moved from dubbed cassettes to mp3s).

Sacrilege, maybe, but as much as I love the look and feel of vinyl, records are only of marginally more value to me than the equivalent mp3s. Or: If I have to, I can let record collecting go. At least it'll be easier to move when rising rent finally prices me out my current place.

Tip: Sarah S.

The goal with this tune seems to be to sugarcoat a bitter pill with toe-tapping, accessible music. It’s undeniably catchy and carries a strong message (in a nutshell: Palin’s a Christ-mad, oil-drunk fool), but perhaps it's not the knockout blow one was hoping for—sonically, anyway.

Tip: Kathy Fennessy

It’s right up there with the news about Gary Coleman hitting a dude with his car and Amy Winehouse actually showing up (late) for a gig.