Man alive is The Pirate Bay finished! Business Week has an interview with Hans Pandeya, the CEO of Global Gaming Factory, the company that’s set to buy The Pirate Bay for nearly $8 million (provided it can come up with the money). What’s mainly discussed it what type of business plan does this man have in store for The Pirate Bay. It’s safe to say that The Pirate Bay will be all but dead in one year’s time.

How much would you be willing to pay for DJ Hero? The latest news or rumors or whatever you want to call it is that UK retailer ShopTo was apparently told by Activision that the MSRP of the game will be £107.99, or just shy of $180. That includes the turntable, of course.

Amazon’s got a nice deal on the Tonium Pacemaker portable DJ system until 1:00 PM Eastern today. Normally selling for $499, you can get an extra $100 off as one of Amazon’s daily Gold Box deals.

Stan Lee couldn’t have created a more hated super-villain than the Recording Industry Association of America. It’s the ultimate heel stable. Get this: a woman in Minneapolis, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, has been ordered to pay $1.92 million in damages for downloading and sharing 24 songs. That works out to about $80,000 per song. Clearly the RIAA deserves props. Mad props.

Let’s talk hypothetically for a moment. Let’s say you’re the average American (or wherever you’re from), going to school or working for The Man. Let’s say that you occasionally download an MP3 or FLAC from wherever you get such things. Now, do you have $150,000 to give to the RIAA for every song you’ve downloaded? I sure as heck don’t! (I’d need a government bailout, lol!) More importantly, why is $150,000 an appropriate amount to ask for, as Sony seems to suggest? If I can buy a song off iTunes for $1.30, how is it that “finding” that same song could cost me $150,000?

This small device is a Roland tuner - chromatic, guitar, and bass - with a needle pointed and pitch verification as well as a monitor. This means you can tune your electric instrument and then run it through this box to listen to how things sound on your headphones. It also supports effects pedals chained from the guitar the the monitor and includes a built-in metronome.

Sorry for the clipping but this sucker was loud. This is Electro-Harmonix’s local tester running the POG2 pedal through its paces. The pedal makes a standard guitar sound like a harpsichord and an organ.

The POG2 will take you even higher. Use the new attack control to fade in lush, smooth swells. Tune in the new second sub-octave to reach deeper than ever before. The 2-pole resonant low-pass filter now includes two additional Q modes. Slide in the newly enhanced detune to further refine your sound.

The POG2 delivers unrivaled tonal variations — and now you can save your favorite settings, and recall them with a click. The POG2 just plain sounds better, thanks to an enhanced algorithm that delivers a more focused and in-the-pocket harmonic performance. And all this is now packed into our rugged and pedalboard-friendly diecast chassis.

Haven’t written about Sirius XM for a little while, so here’s a treat: your bill is about to go up. Starting next month, Sirius XM will tack on a $1.98 surcharge (if that’s the word to use) to your bill in order to placate the music industry.

I know that, in the beginning, the idea of DJ Hero appealed to me. As a fan of house and related genres—Renaissance The Master Series Part 13, mixed by Hernán Cattáneo, just hit the Internet—I was looking forward to playing the role of a big haired animated DJ. But then I realized: what a minute, actually DJing isn’t that hard at all! Why bother playing a DJ video game when you can actually DJ?

After hearing Brad Paisley say that a Fender Telecaster “is nothing more than a cutting board, a baseball bat, and strings,” Zachary Custom Guitars decided to put that idea to the test — minus the part about the baseball bat.

What do you get when a Kaossilator and a Chumby mate? How about the Thingamagoop from Bleep Labs? This little bugger has an LED, a photo-resistor, and some knobs and it makes a lot of noise. What kind of noise? Noise-rock noise, which could put a damper on my plans to add this to the woodwind section in the orchestra playing my new opus, the iPhone Sonata in D Minor.
The website has a collection of sample sounds to show you what this thing is capable of which, it turns out, is a series of piercing squawks.

The following is a short play describing Kerchoonz’s K-Box. It’s a device that turns any flat surface into a speaker.

I’m of the opinion that if you write a song like “Yesterday” you can do whatever you want. That’s why (well, partially why) I’m not upset at Sir Paul McCartney, who is having a bit of a hissy fit vis-à-vis Google Street View. McCartney recently asked this his house be removed from Street View because, as a spokesman put it, he felt “unsettled” that people could look at his house 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Looks like Sony wants to marry the PSP to a music service of some sort, à la iTunes or Rhapsody. That’s what “music industry sources” say, at least. And if there’s anyone more trustworthy than someone in the music industry I don’t want to meet them

If you’re like me, your entire music collection has been downloaded/ripped willy-nilly between hits of nitrous oxide and sips of Colt .45. While this does makes for an extensive and fascinating music collection, the resulting mash of nameless tracks, albums without cover art, and songs with the title of the album in the song title (”Yanni - Ethnicity - Almost A Whisper.mp3,” for example), is hardly conducive to absolute listening pleasure.

That’s why I’m glad to report that TuneUp for iTunes is a great service/system. It fixes broken song titles and adds album art and even gives full info on each artist you listen to an offers information on shows they’re playing in your area. Cool, non?

Improvised and modified instruments are part of any self-respecting weird music creator’s repertoire. As for using plants (and banaynays) as conductive channel for a theremin-like instrument, it’s been done before (by Simian) but not on video, I think.

Here’s a random software recommendation for your Friday afternoon enjoyment. It’s Vox, it’s for Mac OS X, and it’s a lightweight music player. No, it’s not going to replace iTunes on your system—there’s no library feature, for one thing—but it’ll play some of the more obscure formats out there.

Get ready for… Guitar Hero Idol, maybe! There’s some rumblings going on that Activision Blizzard is considering turning Guitar Hero into a TV show. It’d either be an American Idol-esque contest show or more along the lines of a reality show. (Those are still around, reality shows?) Yes, perhaps the dumbest idea to ever come out of the United States of America.

This video is one of the most pleasant surprises I’ve had in quite a while. Not only is the gadgetry excellent, but the music is very much to my liking as well. Paolo Angeli, an Italian musician (and clearly roboticist as well), has modified his guitar to have extra strings, a little strummer-bot, and a set of pedal-controlled string hammers. This is the kind of one-man-band I actually like.

I may not listen to a lot of Zappa but his section in this excellent video essentially describes what’s wrong with the music industry these days: presumed familiarity with the market. When there was no feedback and no real understanding of demographics, you were able to experiment. Now, with the granularity available from modern data gathering techniques you have a set of executives who know they don’t have to move too far off of a median of “music that sells” to make money.

Then there are the rest of the guys in this video, including Chuck D, who are all riffing on this initial concept. Even Dick Dale has some great advice. Amazing stuff.