Donation Model Much More Difficult for Indie Artists

When both Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead decided to offer their latest albums online for free, with the option for a donation, both made tons of cash. NIN in particular claimed to have made over $1.6 million in the first week, with Ghosts, while Radiohead said they made more money off their latest album than all their previous combined. That's a little hard to believe, but if true, it further reinstates just how greedy the goons at the record labels are.

Well, not surprisingly, it's pretty easy to make money by selling your music online if you are an already-established artist, and I doubt there's much dispute that both NIN and Radiohead have massive fanbases. In all reality, moving to an online model really wasn't that much of a risk for either. If you are an indie band trying to create a fanbase, it's much, much harder.

P2P-tracking site TorrentFreak took an in-depth look at the music collaboration site Jamendo, which allows artists to provide their music online and offer a donation button, while users can go on and listen and donate directly to the artist if they enjoy the tunes. Well, the results from this have been a bit lackluster, to say the least. The top artist on Jamendo cleared $1,000 worth of donations in three-years... and that about says it all. For those who don't mind not making a living off music, getting your music out there is only a good thing. It seems it's still the live shows that are going to remain the main source of income for most any artist, even the largest ones.

The top grossing artist on Jamendo is Rob Costlow, with just over $1000 in donations over three years. On Jamendo, his two albums were downloaded more than 50,000 times, and over half a million people have streamed his music on the site. Jamendo currently has close to 10,000 artists (not all of them accept donations), and 648 of those received at least one donation.

Source: TorrentFreak

The Multi-Threaded List Continues to Grow

When reading opinions on multi-core processors, one common message that some have is that there is no real use for the regular consumer to own one. That might have been true a few years ago, but that statement isn't entirely true anymore. Developers are continually upgrading their applications to better support multi-threaded operations, and other developers are finally making the code-changes required to take advantage of the huge CPUs.

Intel has sent along a fresh list of popular applications that take advantage of more than four threads, and some might not be that uncommon to you. Where gaming is concerned, some of the top titles on the market right now support Quad-Core processors, and I'm kind of impressed to see the list this large. It intrigues me enough to take a deeper look in the weeks to come. Call of Duty 4 is another one not mentioned... I can vouch for its multi-threadedness.

Other popular applications include encoders of all stripes. We are not talking just about professional applications, but consumer titles like ProShow Gold, TMPGEnc Xpress, Cyberlink Power Director, Sonic Easy Media Creator and more. For those Office buffs, you'll also be pleased to know that your spreadsheets will calculate much faster on a Quad-Core. No quick refills of coffee for you!

This is by no means a definitive list, but it's a good look at some of the most popular multi-threaded applications out there.

Gaming
• THQ Relic Company of Heroes
• Sierra World in Conflict: Soviet Assault
• EA Flagship Hellgate: London
• Crytek Crysis (Windows XP only)
• Ubisoft Assassin's Creed
• Ubisoft Far Cry 2
• Capcom Lost Planet Colonies
• Kingsoft Mission Against Terror
• Midway/Epic Unreal Tournament 3

Mainstream Content Creation
• Sonic Easy Media Creator 10
• Cyberlink Power Director 6 Plus
• ProShow Gold 3.2
• TMPEGEnc XPress 4.4
• Avid Pinnacle Studio 12
• Corel DVD Movie Factory 7
• Cyberlink Power Producer 5
• Cyberlink Power Director 7
• Corel Video Studio X2

Professional Content Creation
• Adobe Photoshop CS3
• Adobe After Effects CS4
• DivX Codec v6.8
• Autodesk 3d Studio Max
• POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 23
• Maxon Cinema v11
• Main Concept Reference Encoder and Decoder v. 1.5
• 3ivx MPEG 4
• Sobey Edit Max 7
• Newtek Lightwave v9.5
• Sony Vegas v8.0b
• Cineform Prospect HD
• Thompson Canopus EDIUS Pro 5

Office Productivity
• Microsoft Office Excel 2007
• Abbyy FineReader v9.0

Interior Design
• Yuan Fang InteriCAD6000

Tech Roundup - October 27, 2008

Motherboards & Processors
• Asus Rampage Extreme - CDR Info
• ASUS Rampage II Extreme Preview - Overclock3D

Displays & Video Cards
• Blu-Ray Performance - Intel X4500HD Versus Radeon HD 4830 - Legit Reviews
• ECS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Hydra Liquid Cooled SLI Kit - HotHardware
• ECS Hydra and Zotac Zone - Digit-Life
• Palit HD 4870 512MB - Motherboards.org
• Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 512MB - Phoronix

Memory & Storage
• Corsair Dominator Series 4GB - techPowerUp!
• OCZ PC3-16000 NVIDIA SLI-Ready Edition - Bjorn3D
• Super Talent Pico-D 8GB USB Drive - TestFreaks
• Tagan Icybox IB-NAS4220-B Dual Bay NAS - Think Computers

Cooling
• Evercool Formula 2 VGA Cooler - OCModShop

Chassis & Power Supplies
• Apevia X-Master HTPC Case - Think Computers
• Coolmax CUG-950B 950W Power Supply - Red and Blackness
• Thermaltake Armor+ MX Enclosure - Virtual-Hideout
• Thermaltake M9 Case - PC Stats

Competitions, Complete Systems & Et cetera
• Alienware Area-51 QX9770 CrossFireX System - PC Perspective
• Apple MacBook 13-inch - Digital Trends
• NVIDIA Delivers Beta OpenGL 3.0 Linux Driver - Phoronix