When you hear or read people saying, "Of course there is going to be an increase in coronavirus infections as non-essential businesses begin to reopen. No one ever said there wouldn't be. Literally no one," feel free to counter with, I agree, I didn't hear anyone say there wouldn't be new or more cases, either." When they continue with, "The alternative -- keeping everyone locked away until there's a vaccine--is absurd," feel free to counter with, "I haven't heard anyone suggest 'keeping everyone locked away until there's a vaccine.' Literally no one. That's a straw man argument." That's a good place to leave it, point delivered in no uncertain terms, but if you really want to call them out on their bullshit ask, "I'm curious, are you down with another 50K dead Americans by September? How about 100K? Wondering what that number is for you. Thanks."

This was a bad week for music submissions. There wasn't the typical flood, and much of what arrived was just lame. I can handle that, especially as we enter the summer months which are traditionally slow for quality music releases.

What is not OK with me is the continuing, worsening trend of submissions arriving as low bit rate files, or in the wrong format, or with missing metadata, or with incorrect metadata, or with no metadata, or some combination thereof. Sure, some of that is personal annoyance at my time being wasted, but it's mostly about the artists who are paying their hard-earned tips to management and/or radio promo companies who are failing at the easiest parts of their job.

Recently after importing 500 or so song submissions into our Review Library, I went to the automatically generated Review Queue playlist to find nearly 40% of the music submitted was not there. I thought it was a mistake, it had to be a mistake, my playlist/submission rules aren't that strict...but it was not a mistake. It was mistakes by many people who submitted low quality files including one established company in particular that sent 5 (yes, five) different albums as unusable low bit rate files.

I love discovering new music and sharing it with friends and hopefully inspiring sales (tickets, merch, vinyl, what have you) which support the artists who made the music. It pissed me off that there are people taking money from artists and not even doing the basics of what they are being paid to do competently week after week. 

Artists: don't get taken! Ask around before signing with a label, management company, or radio promo company. There are good ones out there, there are shitty ones that are always shitty and I don't know how they stay in business, and then there are others who right now don't seem to care enough to do the job right. Don't pay people who don't do the job right.

Today's show will be live-hosted from 9am-5pm Eastern U.S. Time and feature new music by The Black Heart Death Cult (Melbourne, Australia), a double-cover version by  The Foreign Resort (Copenhagen, Denmark, @foreignresort), and  Lithics (Portland, OR, @lithicsband).

The marathon 8-hour show is followed by 2 hours of uninterrupted music and is then rebroadcast in its entirety beginning at 7 p.m. Friday,  5 a.m. and 3 p.m. Saturday, and one final time at 1 a.m. on Sunday. That is followed by a rebroadcast of a  Fuzzy Road radio show at 11 a.m. and then a couple of old  480 Minutes episodes from this week in past years, making for hosted shows all weekend long.

Tune in and chat with fellow listeners on  Slack. Hanging out and yakking it up with real humans in a virtual conference room is (usually, and especially these isolating times) better than not hanging out and yakking it up with other humans.

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