Los Pikadientes De Caborca

So there are these guys in a Mexican band that recorded a song on their home laptop and handed it out to their friends via memory stick and bluetooth as a cellphone ringtone. Their friends passed it around so much that the song became popular and eventually was played on local radio stations across Sonora, Mexico and people uploaded videos of themselves dancing to the tune on YouTube. One thing led to another and they got a record deal from Colombia.

Click here for the video.

Apparently passing songs by cellphone works in these communities because they have a low rate of computer ownership, broadband access, credit card possession, and itunes accounts. But they do have pre-paid cellphones with bluetooth, so there is a very distributed network there for sharing information and music. I remember seeing people in the Philippines share information on their phones with each other and use them like laptops.

Although it looks like we're breaking away from the corporate music model, when compared to the potential growth of this distributed phone model, are we actually getting anywhere? People use ipods, but they can't talk to each other. I see local music around town and people are still selling CDs...a twenty year old technology. If I want to share it with my friends, I have to take the cd home, burn it to a computer and fileshare it from there, where I could possibly be ratted out by my internet service provider to the RIAA. Or I make copies of the CD to distribute to friends, or I buy more CDs. It'll be interesting to see where things go in the future.

Popularity Dialer

Have you ever felt like you needed to receive a phone call to your cellphone in a crowd just to feel important? Well, now you can arrange for your phone to be called anytime you like. And a recorded message will be played that sounds like an actual phone conversation in case anybody is trying to listen in on your phone call (or for those with the volume too loud). One of the interesting things about people is that the more new things we discover, the more new ways we find to maintain the old lies.

Popcorn