sgx

Glad to be a part of this!

Free version might still be worth grabbing. Some tracks are rearranged a bit (particularly Right Back Up) which might be interesting to you. Also, they get to the point quicker, so if you have ADD you might even prefer these versions

Thanks for listening guys, and thanks to those who purchased. Curious what you think about the difference between the free and paid versions? I tried to make sure the free version didn't feel cut down or gimped, while adding extra stuff to the paid that would be of interest to people who liked the free content. Hope you guys will share the free link with all your friends who haven't heard of me yet! Edit: also, thanks to Malcos for doing the voiceover in track 1 of the free version (it's a hidden track that only shows up when you download the entire Wonderful Bite Free). In case you were wondering who that was (I don't have an english accent. Hah!)

Hey guys, check it out! My new album, Wonderful Bite is out! It's a lot more upbeat, fun, aggressive compared to my last album, and features two vocal tracks. It's pretty kickass! You can download it for free or stream all of it here: http://albums.sgxmusic.com/album/wonderful-bite-free However, there's a version for $5.99 download or $12.99 disc preorder that has some extras: -Longer album editions of most of the tracks -Three short interlude tracks that are rad -A bonus remix by Hollidayrain -Full album liner note art (exclusive to the disc or via the download version on Protagonist Records) -Instrumental versions of the two vocal tracks (exclusive to Protagonist Records digital version) Buy from me: http://albums.sgxmusic.com/album/wonderful-bite It's also available via cdbaby, iTunes, Zune, Amazon mp3, etc. More details on the album: http://www.sgxmusic.com/?p=328 Also, for an extra dollar when you order the CD, I'll send you a second copy for you to give to a friend who doesn't know about SGX. Details on the order page. Hope you guys like it. Thanks for listening!

This track is off my new album which is coming out October 1st! Watch sgxmusic.com if you're interested. There's going to be a free version to download, plus a CD or extended download version to buy. It's good! Download track: http://sgxmusic.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/SGX-Right-Back-Up-feat.-Navi.mp3 Or stream it right here: http://www.sgxmusic.com/?p=291 Let me know what you think! Info on the upcoming album: http://www.sgxmusic.com/?p=295 Also, I'm going to be releasing a couple more free tracks via twitter and facebook this week before the album comes out. You can only get them early if you're following me, so follow me! www.twitter.com/sgxmusic and www.facebook.com/sgxmusic

This album is the bizniss. Malcos' stuff is so groovy and hooky. I've been listening at work a lot. We have a free track available at www.protagonistrecords.net as well. Check it out.

The ME1 soundtrack had more of that 80's synth vibe to it than ME2. Was that a conscious decision?

Liking the album a lot, dude. Will be posting Monsoon Season next week. Anyone else got some tracks? If you don't have tracks, come take a listen anyway! Posted 5 new awesome tracks since Sunday. We're rockin! www.protagonistrecords.net

Yo. Just cleaned it out. Man, I hate getting PMs. Emails are best! I grabbed your album man. Skimmed through it real quick - really good stuff. I like Monsoon Season. If you wanna put that up through my dropbox I can post that one up. It's got a cool synthy bass I'm diggin. I'm up in Laurel now. Where are you?

Let's do no more than 1 every two weeks. I don't want to repeat artists too often, and if I get a bunch at one time, I may be unlikely to hold onto them for a couple weeks. Thanks!

I generally try to have the artist send me some previous music to sample, or his partially completed album so I can decide to distribute it later and we can plan. Can't you send demos out before your have completed the whole thing?

I saw them live about a year ago in a small venue. Flippin' nuts!

I might be willing to spend some money in the future, when I've revised the site design and functionality a bit more. Right now I'm just trying to boost it with more content to make it more interesting more often. Do you have ideas? I'm up for talking about how to invest a bit in the site. I haven't explored that type of thing much yet. If you have some expertise, send me an email sometime sgxmusic [at] gmail . I'd appreciate it. Totally open to business suggestions/crits. I'd be down for that for sure. He's one of my featured artists anyway. It's up to them. I'll try and mention it to them. Sorry bro. I've heard your stuff and it is sweet, but I don't think "random music blog" is niche enough to intrigue people a lot. If you have anything with any electronic flavor in it though, it may be appropriate.

Cool man. If you know anybody who may like to get their stuff on here, let them know about it.

Hey there! Plenty of you may already have heard about Protagonist Records (www.protagonistrecords.net); several OCRemixers have released albums on the label, and lots of free tunes are available. Things have been cool, but long story short, I WANTS MORE TRAFFIC on the site. I've decided to change how we're operating a bit and make the site a location for not just a bunch of free tracks, but a location for a TON of free, good tracks at a regular interval. So, while I've had a few guest mp3 releases before, I'm going to make the main page MOSTLY guest releases. A lofty goal for me is to eventually ramp up to ONE A DAY if I can get good quality stuff. So, I'm putting the call out to anyone whose got some slick electronic music that wants some extra listeners. Submit a track, if I think my listeners will enjoy it, I'll likely post it at some point. Include a request to link to your site, or email, or album you have for sale, or whatever relevant you'd like included in the short writeup accompanying your track on the site, and I will include that. Details and submit link are here: http://www.protagonistrecords.net/submit I've set up an easy-peasy soundcloud dropbox. ALL submissions must go through there. Subs through my email or PMs or anything like that will be ignored in a very harsh manner. I want to make Protag a music blog pointing out great music that people will want to keep coming back to or RSS subcribe to for constant awesome music infusions. If you're an artist, hook me up with a track. If you're not, but you know some cool indie artists, send em a message and refer them to Protagonist. Get the word out. Let's make this thing cool.

A lot of my tracks start with some crescendoing, quiet pads or atmospheric sounding stuff, so if it was overlaid, its not like it would be blocking out really important bits of the song, but it would also mess things up for those who want to edit it out. I'm actually not really very concerned about people editing it out. The percentage of people who do that is probably very slim and it would also require the mp3 to be re-encoded messing with the quality a bit further. What I want is to put together a free version that people would burn and spread to their friends and whatnot. People will be way more likely to check out the free download if someone tells them it is worth their time, and if I piss people off too much with advertisements, that's less likely to happen. The more people who listen to the free version, the more are likely to give me money somehow. As an analogy, if you're telling your friend about a new artist to check out, do you link them to like an amazon mp3 page with 30 second previews, or do you just do your pal a favor and send him a bunch of tracks you've already got on your hd (oh noes...illegal!). I do the latter. So, it's not just like a demo to show people what the for-pay version sounds like so they can make up their mind, it's a way to spread the music as far as possible and hope for enough of those who want to either support me or the audiophiles to grab the high quality versions. Hmmm. I kind of just did a stream of consciousness thing, and I'm not sure if that was arguing any point or not haha. Also, there will be a disc version for sale, so this is good advertisement for that.

I'd be down for that when the album is coming out.

Ok thanks for your input guys.

Howdy folks, I'm considering releasing my next album (February-ish, hopefully) in a different way than I have before. I've always released several tracks from my albums as free single downloads, usually at a medium bitrate, but I'm considering releasing the full, or mostly complete album as a free download, and offering high-quality copies as a pay what you want (above $0) download. I'm curious on your honest thoughts on this. While I'm pretty sure I'm going to do something like this, I have some ideas for slightly "handicapping" the free version, and I'd like to know how much these things would piss off people vs how much it would make them want to grab the full versions. ideas for handicapping the free version: 1) Medium bitrate mp3's. I'm thinking 160kbps CBR. Full version can be had in either 320kbps mp3 or FLAC lossless. 2) Album art image tags have a little "free" image in the corner. 3) Some songs in the free version are a minute or two shorter than the full versions in the paid copies. 4) A couple guest remixes are only available in the paid version. Perhaps samples would be included in the free version. 5) Some or all tracks have a 10 second spoken message overlaid in the beginnings or ends of the song mentioning you are listening to the free version and you can buy it at iTunes, Amazon mp3, protagonistrecords.net etc. OR, these messages could be their own separate mp3's. I've seen this done with one of the recent Celldweller albums where the free copy was sponsored by Tomb Raider Underworld. A sexy english woman's voice would come on quickly in the beginning of the song to say it was sponsored by the game. It wasn't terribly annoying, but it always reminded me that I was being a cheapass and still listening to the free version. I'm pretty sure I'll be doing at least numbers 1 and 2. This seems like a trade-off between: Being extremely generous, creating the urge in listeners to go buy the full versions as more of a thank-you tip than something they really want, OR: Limiting the free version to make it more of an advertisement for a product they want enough to pay for the full version without annoyances. What do you think? I'm interested in the perspectives of people here who DO produce and sell their music, people who are just listeners and are already fans of mine, and people who don't know who I am. Thanks.

Just a few discs left, folks!

Malcos - Ascension album available now FLAC or 320kbps mp3 on Protagonist Records! $5.99 Malcos brings us some kick ass DnB tunes infused with his smooth vocals and slick melodies. I think a ton of people here will dig this, so come check it out. You can stream generous samples via the product page. Also, if you haven't grabbed his Daydreams album yet, you can add it for only $4 to your Ascension purchase. Just select the drop-down option through the Ascension product page. While you're visiting, check out all the other stuff on Protagonist. I think we've got a pretty sweet catalog by now, and it's all available in both Mp3 and FLAC, all artists are tippable, and it's all at good prices. Take a listen to all of our album releases! http://www.protagonistrecords.net/albums We've got music from Malcos, Zircon, Audix/Sole Signal, Siamey, Flickerfall, Pollicer, and some ass called SGX. Also, check out all the FREE MUSIC we've got! Support kickass independent music! Protagonist isn't a big company. It's me, and the artists. Alright, hope you enjoy Ascension. I know you will. Malcos should be following up with a post here shortly.

I was going for Jan 1st, but I'm not sure that's going to happen. Maybe Feb 1st. My time has been eaten up by the XNA game I'm involved with (which should come out around the same time).

That was a wonderful thread of repeating each other. On a related note, I'm going to be experimenting with releasing a full free version of my new album in a couple months and then sell higher quality digital copies and CDs. You free music people better jump on board with your money or I'll remove the free option!

It's true, it is cheaper to distribute music and it is cheaper to produce it than it has been. There is a much wider choice of music out there now, and more of it, de-valuing the product by quite a bit. However, MORE music is consumed as well since it is so easy to find, get, and pay for (or steal). However, that cost to make it and distribute it is not and never will be 0. Computers, software, musical instruments, microphones, studio time, etc necessary to produce music all cost real dollars. There is an investment of money on someone's part. Learning to play an instrument, learning to compose, learning to record, etc all cost TIME. This TIME could be used at some day job, or even second side job, to make money needed to live off of. Some guy who learned to play the guitar because it was a fun thing to do may not care to record his songs. He see's there's some money in it, so he's got to learn how to record it himself and spend money and time learning a new skill, or he's gotta pay for studio time. He's gotta spend time marketing himself in some fashion on the internet which takes A LOT of time, or money, otherwise you'd never find his stuff. I'm sure there are a few magical musicians out there who make music for the love of music, record it so they can distribute it to make people happy and make the world a better place, already know how to record at a pro level because they work at Digidesign engineering the gear and get free equipment as the company Christmas bonus, and use their library internet to upload free mp3's to effectively let you hear their wonderful music. It's ok not to give this guy any money. However, I don't think there's more than a few of them out there. The rest of us spend money to make our music better, spend time to make it, spend time learning to make it SOUND better, spend time to distribute it so you can hear it, etc. If a musician doesn't want any money back for the music, they're still getting what they want in return for distributing it; maybe satisfaction that they made someone's day more enjoyable, or some sort of ego-boost. That's nice. He got paid what he wanted. I think people should respect the price that artists ask for for their music. If you think the label is asking too much, blame it on the artist for signing a paper to let the label use their discretion on the price. Asking too much in this market is the artist's own mistake to make. So no, all music shouldn't be free. Some could be, but there are costs involved in most every aspect of creation and distribution. Spending money and or time on music creation and distribution makes the music better and gets it to more people.

SC was pretty tight. Definitely way easy though. I really felt way overpowered during the second half of the game - combat was not difficult. Maybe I just got lost more than I was supposed to an got a lot of experience. There were a few situations I got into where I did something out of order and a room got locked I needed to get back into, or something happened to break the game and make me stuck until I reloaded. Kind of sloppy (hey - just like this studio's Advent Rising which was awesome but SO breakable and glitchy). I've been playing Trials HD as well. That game is quite fun!