Westsidewill – Wild Off The Air

Quinn Ojinnaka – Atlanta Falcons offensive linemen, big dude, lover, facebooker, and now accused batterer. That’s right folks, Quinn Ojinnaka (if you are like me and said “Who?” as soon as you read the name you should check out his killer stats on espn.com ) is being accused by Gwinnett County of throwing his wife down some stairs after she accused him of some Facebook pimpin’!

Domestic violence is a terrible thing, and should be treated as such, HOWEVER in this case there are some things that we can look at and say…what?

The fight between Quinn and his wife started after she was unhappy with his Facebook activity. When will the world learn that Facebook isn’t bringing the world together, it’s tearing us apart?!?!?!?!?! He alleges that his wife came after him with a pen, that’s right a pen, after she found out that he was chatting it up with a female Facebooker. That bastard! There are no confirmed reports that the female Facebook friend wanted to do the dirty with the bird (once a blog bad joke…check!)

Is this is what the world is coming to? You talk to a chick on Facebook and get stabbed?

But wait, there’s more. After the attempted stabbing was going on Quinn allegedly threw his wife down some stairs and kicked her out of the house. That’s right – you want to stop Quinn from Facebooking babes? He’s going to stop you from walking and living in his house!!!

So to review the ridiculous nature of this case:
1) The fight started over FACEBOOK …
2) The Facebook “crime” was bad enough that Quinn’s wife wanted to stab him allegedly
3) Quinn was allegedly so pissed that someone tried to stop his facebooking that he threw her down the stairs and kicked her out.
4) No word on if my dad (who is on Facebook) has any knowledge of the situation.

IF Facebook can make you so mad that you want to try to stab someone, or throw someone down the stairs, maybe it’s time to step away from the computer and go outside and garden or something…

I’m just saying…

Throughout my day I keep it real, some would argue that I keep it “really” real. I leave that up to the experts and critics – but how do I do it?

Well I get into the WestSideWill Studios and hit up the internet, and for those of you scoring at home the internet is on computers now. So what are some of my top visited sites according to the computer I use at WSW Top Secret Headquarters?
(Excluding WestSideWill.com)
1. YouTube – I think when asked the age old question “Working hard or hardly working?” that can fall under the category of “hardly working”.

2. ESPN – Ummmmmm…well I mean they could in theory run a music story…but they don’t. See above about “hardly working.”

3. K-Love From Up Above’s Blog – This is a great blog by my good friend Kenny. He blogs on all sorts of good stuff, tech, toys, music and funny, all things I need to stay up on. So…yeah it only took to get to #3 for me to prove that I do actually do some research on the web.

4. eBay all joking aside for a minute eBay is an amazing tool for musicians looking for some cheap used gear. Of course not everyone wants used stuff, but for the time being why not? I’m currently looking for some turntables and a mixer to teach myself some more DJ stuff, hence the reason it comes in at #4. That and I enjoy doing a little amateur tracking of sales of different types of equipment. Why? Well because I’m a nerd.

5. We have a Tie WestSideWill 2.0 and MySpace – I know I said no WestSideWill.com locations, well our 2.0 stuff is on a different address at the moment. It’s all going to be moved over, but it’s being tested and I have to fill out an about me page and things of that nature. It’s a real pain in the rear!

Ok…enough about what I do on the internet at work, who hits up this blog? Well, here is a chart from the last 24 hours.

Who visits this blog?

Well as you can see from the above chart we get from 350 – 970 hits an hour. But the thing that I think is by far the best thing this chart has to offer is the fact that we can see that the “slow” time for people checking this blog their 1 time a day is between 3am and 4am – WestSideWill blog checkers don’t sleep. I think that’s the only thing we can learn from this chart. And when they do sleep its between 3 and 4 am.

Awesome. A quick note, that chart is with the “spam and spiders” removed, with spam and spiders our numbers a super duper crazy (but they don’t mean anything because they are just robots visiting us.)

Anywhoooo I hope you learned a little bit about what sites I visit, and who your fellow WestSideWill Blog readers are…people who don’t sleep or at least are out partying late enough that they see the sunrise.

From time to time I like to post awesome videos in the blog, videos that I think need some recognition, and here is one that deserves just that.

Back in the day it was featured in Bill Simmons mailbag on ESPN.com, and it blew up. Why? Because it featured something that I think we can all agree was pretty awesome, dunking…on a nerf hoop. Who didn’t do that when they were like 10 – 23 (aparently)? This is a super great dunking exhibition by a group of great dunkers.

Enjoy the video (yeah…..lazy blog, I know.)

It’s fairly awesome, why? Because it sparked so many other 20 something year olds who wanted to try to do what they did…and they fail at it…

Hmmmmmmm…I guess you could say it’s like those other internet stations that try to do what we do…

In the future we hope to get some of these guys in for an interview on Dave’s New in studio Couch, have a look:

The 1970's were a crazy time....

Ohhhh, we have all sorts of great new stuff going on, how bout you?

Seriously, we have a ton going on so let’s just start from the top.

- We have 2 new members to the ownership group that now owns WestSideWill Radio, so welcome to them! They really are some rad folks and this addition really won’t mean TOO much for the artists/listeners of our site. Under their reign we have moved to our new studio and have version 2.0 of our website started (see below for more info on that.)
- Matt D. our tech guy and bowtie expert has been moved to a consulting role, so basically any email you send to him will not be redirected to Doug or one of our interns. As far as how that affects the artists and listeners it really doesn’t. Matt D. is now free to focus on other websites that he does the tech for and opens him up for special projects for us here on WestSideWill Radio (again…see below for more info on our “secret project.”
- Interviews are going to start up using Skype(or something of that ilk) – which means a shift from our text based interviews. The current interviews will have NO text component other than a mention/link in our interview section. The really nice thing about this is that the audio interviews will appear on our Top 10 shows which are saved in our Archive so they will never be lost.
- We are forming a “promotions” team which is going to lead by one of our new employees (whom I’ll let introduce himself on the blog or show or something…) This team will attend your shows (if you are around Chicago) and write reviews and things about it. They will also post a pre show flier in this blog section (which in the past month has drawn in over 100,000 visitors all by itself.)

WestSideWill Raido Version 2.0

Top Secret WestSideWill Version 2.0 Build (with willit)

We can talk more about this thing a little bit later. I don’t know a whole ton about it, our new technical team has been working on it. This isn’t a final build, in fact it’s kind of a super early build and it features our new voting widget that I talked a little bit about earlier. Code name WillIT™

What is WillIT™ ? Stay tuned in the coming weeks to find out. The point of this blog was to show you all that some changes are on their way for WestSideWill Radio. Musicians you will be getting an email in the next few days from Doug that should explain more in depth what is going on.

We are taking Memorial Day off, just like 99% of the country!

Get out there and do some grilling and enjoy the day – also pools open around the United States tomorrow so go ahead and get some swimming in. Too bad it’s going to be 70 in Northern Illinois on Monday or I’d be all about that to.

On Tuesday I’m going to have a blog that is going to talk about some of the great things we have coming up on WestSideWill Radio and I’m going to talk about some of the changes that are happening. It is for sure some very cool stuff that we are going to have a chance to preview so be ready for that!

Have a great weekend!

I got an interesting email last night from an artist who was wondering what I knew about “Jango”. Basically Jango is a Last.fm/pandora clone or love child, whatever floats your boat. You type in an artist’s name and they will play you music that you think you will like. Not exactly a brand new concept, but that’s clearly not what our artist was asking.

What he wanted to know was what do I know about Jango as far as being a “Pay for Play Scam”. The word scam was actually used which intrigued me:

scam  /skæm/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [skam] Show IPA noun, verb, scammed, scam⋅ming.
–noun 1. a confidence game or other fraudulent scheme, esp. for making a quick profit; swindle.
Source: Dictionary.com

Let’s be very clear about what a “scam” is. It’s an event to garner money by using fradulent methods, so basically someone is lying to you to get money. In my opinion Jango is NOT a scam. They tell you right off the bat that if you are an unsigned artist and you want air play they are going to charge you. There isn’t any sort of slight of hand going on here, in fact:

Jango Airplay
“Jango Airplay” is a unique music promotion service that gives emerging artists guaranteed airplay on Jango’s stations, as “similar artists” alongside the popular artists of their choice. Packages start at as little as $30 for 1,000 plays and gives emerging artist an unprecedented opportunity to be proactively exposed to millions of people who like their kind of music.
Source: Jango

So is Jango a “scam”? No way. They tell you right to your face they are going to take your money and play your music.

However, Jango is not a service that I would in any way recommend for an unsigned musician trying to get their name out there. Why is that? Oh let me count the ways:

1) I will always be against “Pay for Play”. In general you have to pay for promotion at times, and that’s something that you are going to have to deal with from time to time, HOWEVER in Jango’s case it kind of stinks of greed. I wouldn’t be as against the pay for play going on here if they didn’t run ads on their site. If you site is good enough, and you have good enough bands let the advertisers pay to keep you going.

2) There are quite a few articles and blog/message board posts that come up when you google anything about Jango being a scam. In general I think a lot of the times they are just crazy people being crazy but what I don’t like is that sometimes you’ll find in the posts that an “employee” of Jango is going around and soliciting the posters to join Jango. And sometimes, in my opinion, it appears as if they have a “plant” in on the conversation talking about how great Jango is. It could all just be from a guy who loves Jango but it just seems like the “musician” is in the converstaion to defend Jango and not talk about why it was great for them. Again, it could just be a guy who loves what Jango is, or it could be an employee of Jango talking about how awesome they are.

3) This article got me: Jango Airplay: Pay-for-play isn’t effective
by Matt Rosoff from Cnet’s Digital noise. Let me say that Matt Rosoff writes a blog that I enjoy reading and I tend to agree with his views about a lot of things – this being one of them. Again to be fair to Jango Matt is just a blogger like any of us, and that doesn’t make his opinion more qualified than anyone else. But it’s worth the read.

Again it’s up to you what you do with your money as an unsigned musician, you need promotion, and that’s a fact. WestSideWill Radio offers you free radio airplay to a targeted audience, kind of like Jango promises. However Jango’s target is fans of your genre where as our target is fans of indie/unsigned musicians.

The theory that we are working with is that a fan of Eminem or the Jonas Brothers isn’t going to give unsigned musicians that get mixed in on Jango the time of day. Is that fair? Nope. But the truth is that is how it works, mainstream is what it is for a reason. I wonder if Eminem or the Jonas Brothers are paying Jango for spins…oh, no I don’t.

What Jango is doing is using mainstream artists to draw in unsigned artist to pay for play. It’s not a scam, it’s a business model. Is there anything wrong with what they are doing? Not legally.

Is Eminem drawing in fans who want to buy your tracks or his? I can’t say.

Is it something that I would recommend? Nope.

So there you go, my mailbag question is answered, Jango is not a scam, I wouldn’t use it, but they are fairly up front about everything.

So after some time laboring away, and by laboring away I mean watching some people come in and do labor on, our new studio it has become clear that we are going to have to wait until May 26th to open it up.

Why May 26th? Because we have parts for the studio coming in from Seattle…and they aren’t getting in until early next week.

So everything is going to be ready before that, except for our missing parts. Yeah it’s going to be a pain, but we can wait, we have some cool stuff in our new studio (our 3rd studio in 2 years…which can mean one of 2 things, people really want us and we keep getting “bought” or people really hate us and we keep getting “sold”.)

I think I’ll post some photos tomorrow about what’s going on in our new studio, by the way if you have a poster or something send it in to us we’d love to put it on our wall…at this point the only thing we have on the wall is an 8×10 of Kenny Lofton (it’s funny on so many different levels.)

Well looking at the calendar and wouldn’t you know it – another year is about to pass by on WestSideWill Radio.

May 18, 2007 was our very first show – with Monday being May 18th we have decided to do the Unsigned Artist Showcase presented by VinylDisorder.com a little bit differently this week – we are doing flashback shows Monday – Wednesday.

We are starting it off Monday with a replay of our first show ever, and why are we doing this? We know a ton of you were not around to hear our first show, when we debut we got around 1,000 listeners that first week, now we get around 20k hits a day. So that show got around .71% of the weekly visitors we have now. The cool thing about this show is how different we all sound, we were trying just a little bit too hard and we were on some old school mic set up (which oddly enough we are stuck using again until we move into our new studio on Thursday.)

We have some huge announcements coming up this week, I kind of let one out of the bag but the other announcements involve ownership and some new faces and some folks we are going to be sad to see go.

More on that later – so stay tuned to the blogs and remember to enjoy this Flashback week!!!!!

We’ve all grown up quite a bit in 2 years (except Dave…he’s just growing his hair…)

Former MTV VJ and overall Craaazzzyyy person LaLa Vazquez was captured on camera being escorted from the Denver/Dallas playoff game on May 11th.

Normally this would be a non-story in my eyes because things happen when you combine sports and beer but then LaLa made it better.

Instead of letting it die (Someone should probably tell Roger Clemens to read this too) she decided to release a statement:

“Obviously the play-off games bring out the best and the worst in fans but what happened on Monday night with the racial slurs/threats, verbal attacks on my son and physical attacks to myself by irate fans was unacceptable. The fans were totally out of control.

What the cameras captured was me defending myself and didn’t show the abuse that was taking place.”

Let’s break down this statement just for fun:

1) Her first sentence was good – but then she had to kill it on the last word “unacceptable.” Maybe I’m crazy, but it would seem to me that the one who was acting in an “unacceptable” way was the person who was being kicked out.

As for the racial slurs/threats to her son. I wasn’t in the stands, and I can tell you that there really are some racist jagoffs out there. That said, would people who are really that racist really be attending an NBA playoff game. Today African-Americans comprise approximately 79% of NBA rosters (Source: Questia) so maybe racist jerks aren’t all about the NBA…I’m just saying maybe it was too early to play the race card. Not to say that there were no threats being made towards here, I’m just saying I don’t know (but if there were threats being a players fiance she should have gone to security and had those ass hats kicked out…instead of being kicked out herself.)

2) She says the fans were totally out of control. Let’s go to the video:

Yeah, I’ll agree there the fans were so out of control that 1 was asked to leave!

3) She talks about the cameras capturing her trying to defend herself, again looking at the film who was she defending herself from the security guard? And finally, when breaking down the film I don’t see her son anywhere, unless he’s the guy who looks slightly older than her with the elastic sleeves on a button up shirt (classy).

So why did we break down this statement and totally rip into LaLa. It’s not because I don’t like her, she seems like a fairly normal person who got caught up in a basketball game and got into an argument. How many times a game does this happen in an arena? Probably dozens, the only issue is that she decided to compound it by making a statement. I’m not here to judge what started the fight, there very well may have been some racist jackoffs just talking some trash to her, but what I am here to judge is the way she handled the situation (obviously poorly enough to get kicked out of the game.)

I think celebrities are going to have to start to learn pretty quick that they should stop talking about every little thing that they do. It’s funny because LaLa isn’t really even a celebrity – so goodness knows why she decided to release a statement.

If you just shut your mouth things start to disappear. Look at Mark McGwire – the dude just shut his mouth and moved on. Now let’s look at Roger Clemens – he not only will not shut his mouth, he keeps making NEW statements that are crazier than the first. Perhaps his goal is to say stuff so crazy that no one wants to hear what he says anymore and they start to ignore him. Either way, it’s a bad plan.

So again, for LaLa, she should have just filed this under: “Things I Should Not Talk About”.

By the way LaLa is there to support Carmello Anthony…and he knows a thing or two about being on a film while something silly is going on:

BUT! Our friend Carmello is smart, he didn’t feel the need to release a statement about a non issue. He was just honest and straight forward about being on the video and let it drop. So that’s a gold start for Carmello in my book!

Anywhooooooo, that’s all I got – people should just start to file more things under the ‘I should let this drop’ category.

LaLa - Brawler, and basketball fan.

I blame television and video games for the way I am, seriously. I lose interest in things so quickly it’s crazy, but I think the rest of the world is kind of with me with this affliction.

I mean there are all sorts of things that I used to think were awesome, that I’ve kind of cooled on – which got me thinking, it’s time for a list!

My List of Things I Used to Be Interested in

1) Halo 3

Halo 3...used to be cool

Dave, Boomer, some kid from Pittsburgh and I used to just dominate this game on Xbox live. We would take on all comers and really show everyone how cool we were by being good at video games.

Why interest disappeared: Dave started to really slack off on his ability, my Xbox 360 broke down and I think that kid from Pittsburgh really got into NHL 09. When my Xbox 360 was repaired I really got into Fallout 3 and the rest is history.

Chances for a Reconciliation: I’d say they would be good, but the new map packs cost money and you can’t really play online without them. And Boomer moved to Houston and started to focus on the PS3, Dave may not even have Halo anymore, and who knows what happened to that dude from Pittsburgh. So at this point I’d say 10% I get interested again.

2) Building Custom Computers

This one is no joke, I was seriously going to try to build myself a computer. The theory behind it was simple, I’m really good with hardware related things (like setting up our studio here and things like that) – but I’m terrible at software related issues. Anywhooo long story short the “Nooge Builds a Computer” project got off track quickly and never was able to regain it’s footing.

Chances for a Reconciliation: Well the good news is I still have a skeleton of a computer right next to my bed, that I look at every day. The bad news is when I look at it I think, “I should have tried to build a robot instead”.

3) Von Dutch

Von Dutch...Seriously?

Let me take you back to the past, those wild times know as the early 21st century. I was a freshman in College back in those days, and maybe it was a good thing, who didn’t have a lot of money. But during those days something magical happened, Von Dutch put an oval with cursive writing in it on trucker caps. Yes – it was perhaps the greatest move ever made in the world of Fashion. This little oval caught on like wild fire for everyone and their brother…except me. I didn’t have $50 to spend on a hat, my roommate Kenny however not only had a few hats, but he had a belt buckle too. Kenny was probably the coolest dude in DeKalb during those times, and I wanted to be like that, but alas I was broke. Before too long I lost interest in the oval, and so did the world.

Chances for a Reconciliation: Sometimes I look back at it and think, yeah I was caught up in the moment, but then a part of me still wants to buy a hat so I can be cool. So I’d put the chances of this happening at like 40% – it’s like drunk dialing a girlfriend, it may happen when I’m drunk and I’ll likely regret it – but I’ll be damned if I don’t do it!

4) Alicia Sacramone

Alicia Sacramone...we'll always have 08

The year was 2008, a time when America needed a hero, someone to step up in the Olympics to get our minds off the impending doom that would be the housing/credit markets collapsed – and one emerged…Michael Phelps. HOWEVER America’s attention was grabbed…possibly below the belt…by Alicia Sacramone – a gymnast who possibly cost the United States Women’s Gymnastics team the gold medal (she fell on both the floor and beam when we were up on the score board.) But it was so hard to give her any blame, I mean she is super hot, and to be fair she actually handled it very well. Alicia came out and said it was hard not to blame her and didn’t make any other excuses, which made her that much hotter. However, the Olympic games ended as quickly as they began and she kind of vanished. The last time that I saw her was on the Gatorade ‘G’ website doing some sort of NBA all star break stuff. I dunno…it didn’t really do it for me. I see now that she is living out in L.A. working as an intern at some T Shirt company and helping out with the UCLA Gymnastics team. Something about people moving out the L.A. to find “fame” that kind of turns me off to the whole situation.

Chances for a Reconciliation: I don’t know, I mean it was nice to have a gymnast who wasn’t 16 years old that you can watch and not feel like a creepo, and we’ll always have that, but it just seems like she got “too big” for guys like The Nooge. I may become a fan again, never say never, and she’ll always be very attractive (although outside of the Gymnastics arena she isn’t that much hotter than any non famous chicks – she’s still hot don’t get me wrong, I’m just saying…) I’d say it’s a 50/50 thing, although that whole L.A. thing just seems stupid…but yeah…she took it like a champ when she fell and she’s hot – come back to the Midwest/East from L.A. and then we’ll talk.

5) Creating my own custom Trading Card

My Trading Card - The Book Value has to be at least $100

I often wanted to actually get this card printed. I was a huge fan of 1987 Topps because of that wood grain finish. I think we all know the card was made out of cardboard but come on – if you put that wood grain on it I think it can easily make you forget. I never really went through with getting these printed, why? Because the card stock was not exactly like Topps uses – it felt a little bit flimsy. It’s a nice substitute for those of us who will never have their own rookie card, but still….

Chances for a Reconciliation: Probably better than anything else I listed above. It’s a good looking card right? I just threw that one together in a hurry, if I was going to revisit this idea I think I would use one of those professional type photos – maybe one where I’m sitting in front of the American Flag. I’d say 60%.

I hope everyone got a chance to learn a little something about me today, I lose interest in random side projects super quick. I can stay on task with the main things I’m doing, driving, reading, being a radio DJ etc. It’s the small things in my life that I rotate like every day.