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Some technology and some clever art have been of interest this week. First of all, we were impressed with how creative you can be with just a piece of dead media. Cassette portraits are made with just the audio tape, spooled into a wide variety of interesting shapes. See Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Ian Curtis and a few more here. Incidently, if you’re feeling nostalgic for your old audio tapes, you could do worse than look at this Flickr set of old tape covers.

Since Muxtape went away (though back soon apparently), we’ve been lacking a simple way of sharing the music we like in a simple link. Which is where new service Mixtape.me comes in. Not only does it allow you to build playlists from the songs on the service, you can also pull in songs from elsewhere on the internet. With sites like Hype Machine offering access to countless tracks, we’re sure you could make a killer playlist, whatever your taste.

Also on a technology tip, we were impressed with Gigotron, a new iPhone app (and website) that allows you to see what gigs are happening closest to your current location. Unfortunately it’s only US right now, but we hope to see it here soon. Anything that allows fans to get closer to the music (like us , is great by us.

Play your low bitrate Britney mp3s on this high concept player

This is from this week’s Owngig.com newsletter. For the full content, register here…

One thing we love about the ‘net is the sheer pointless of what of people get involved with. That’s half the fun. This new mp3 player fits somewhere between genius and madness. It’s also very pretty. The ReBraun is based on the classic consumer gadgets by Dieter Rams who worked for Braun. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, this page shows the design goodness in depth. What makes the ReBraun straddle the genius/madness divide is the sheer cost of the thing. £12000 for an mp3 player? You could get £80 iPods for that. One for our richer email subscribers we think.

Similarly pointless, if slightly cheaper is this incredibly cute rendition of MGMT’s Kids on four iPod/iPhones. This video by The Mentalists has been all over the internet, clocking up over 650,000 views at the time of writing this. Who knows, maybe they’d like to do an Owngig. Bid for them here…

Finally, this week we’d like to give away some free music. Well, strictly speaking it’s not us, but South by South West – a yearly American music and internet jamboree. For the second year in a row, they’ve put legal mp3s of every band playing at the festival to download in a single torrent – all 1267 acts playing. You can download it here. What’s more if you feel overwhelmed by the choice contained in this massive file, someone’s gone to the trouble of writing six word reviews of each of the files contained within (as well as a rating). Get your guide here…

This is from this week’s Owngig.com newsletter. For the full content, register here…

One of the great members of the public from our favourite website this week

Our heart goes out to DJs everywhere with the website Can You Play That One Song? Dedicated to bad DJ requests, the site contains some priceless and truly clueless gems. We liked the following for example…

girl: can you play that beyonce song “put a ring on it”?
me: phaw. ok. (I play it)
same girl (15mins later): can you play that beyonce song again?
me: I just played it!
girl: but my friend just got here and she didn’t hear it!

Also this week, many of you will be aware of the latest iPod shuffle. While the size of it is very impressive, we are wondering just how tiny it can get. It reminds us of comedian Peter Serafinowicz’s Mactini sketch. The VoiceOver feature that says the name of the track you’re playing has comedic potential too – we’re wondering how it would cope with some titles on Sufjan Stevens albums or indeed some of Autechre’s output.

Finally, one piece of news that escaped us in recent weeks is the reforming of rock gods Spinal Tap. If you’ve never seen the classic 1984 classic movie This is Spinal Tap, then rent it this weekend. For those who have, feel free to bid for them on Owngig. You could see them at a puppet show near you soon.

We don’t actually issue physical tickets, but you get the idea

The music industry as anyone can see is in a state of flux. The last fifteen years have seen a series of ground breaking changes from mp3 to Spotify via Napster. We represent part of the future of live music,  bringing the world of crowdsourcing to the concert and giving fans a new way to get unique gigs from their favourite artists.

As anyone who reads our newsletters knows, we spend a lot of time behind the scenes talking to the music industry, social networks and indeed anyone else that can help us put on concerts and generally make a success of the site.

But as many of you will also know, making a success of Owngig is as much as anything a matter of getting buzz about us out there with the fans so that people come to our site to bid for events. The more bids we have, the greater the chance the gig will happen.

To promote this, we’d like to unveil a new initiative to anyone that can help get the word out about Owngig – in particular, those of you that have a blog. Basically, in return for writing a blog post about us (with an inbound link to our site), you’ll get a free ticket for any concert we put on. We’re talking to some big names (and we hate being coy, but trust us, you’ll have heard of them unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last ten years), so this is a good offer. You may even provide the tipping point that leads to a gig by one of your favourite artists taking place.

If you’re interested in taking up this offer, then get in contact via the form on our website. The offer will be redeemable once you’ve written the blog post and can either be for any gig we put on, or if you’d prefer, a specific artist. In either case, you’ll be added to the guest list for the event.

If you have any questions about this offer before you write the post, leave them via the contact form and we’ll get back in touch with you.  Clearly we won’t give away free tickets for ever, so if you like the offer, drop us a line. When the offer closes, we’ll put some of our favourite posts on the blog.

Though they’re not the most obvious axe hero band, the news that one of the biggest bands the world has ever seen, The Beatles will be available for some virtual guitar shredding on billion pound video game, Guitar Hero from this September. Given that the group’s music isn’t even available on iTunes, it’s an interesting development. We’re looking forward to doing Birthday in September.

All fans are curious about the bands they listen to – we all like to know a bit of trivia about them, so this compiled list, sourced from Amazon of what a wide variety of bands listen to is fascinating. Although top bidding Owngig act Tokio Hotel aren’t on the list there’s a lot more from Franz Ferdinand to Tom Waits. Check out the full list here.

Finally we were impressed by the Thru You video which combines loads of different videos to make music video that combines them all in a master mash up with loads of disparate sources. The actual site where the video was stored has proved so popular that at the time of writing this they’ve had to stop showing it on site. But never fear, YouTube to the rescue – you can judge it for yourself looking at the video above.