Ryan Adams hates your freedoms. And I love him for it.

Like most good ideas, LP Roulette came about over lunch.

Benjamin Palmer, Pfeffer and I were talking: What is it that record stores offer that the Internet doesn’t? What aspect of discovery have we lost?

The thing we came up with, besides local community, is browsing by album art. Those of us old enough to remember used to sometimes just browse racks and racks of LPs or Longboxes and when we stumbled upon some bad-ass looking album art, our interest was piqued. Often, that’s all you had to go on – if the clerk didn’t know or have an opinion, you were on your own. No checking Pitchfork on your iPhone.
”
And often, when you did roll the dice, man, it was BAD. Bad bad. But sometimes, juuuust sometimes, it was AWESOME. Dinosaur Jr.’s “Green Mind”., Galdalf, Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend”.
(I STILL have a 14 year old crush on that girl)

So we set out, over lunch, to fix that. To bring back that thrill. We give you, Internet, LPRoulette.com.

LP Roulette picks an album at random from Amazon’s stacks. You get the cover, the name of the record and the band name. That’s it. No ratings, no preview, no social tools. Look good? Buy it instantly. Not your cup of tea? Try the next record in the bin.

Pure, unadulterated music discovery. Happy Hunting!

1 shower. 2 audio ads. Multiple feelings & a conclusion.

Well, here we are again folks. Another month, another night of debauchery on our roof. Roofies 2 happened this week, and once again some great friends came out to hang out on our roof, enjoy some booze and snacks, and discuss such things as politics, sustainable agriculture, and Rupert Wainwright movies. You’re googling that aren’t you? No need, his best piece was Blank Check.

Before we get into things here, let’s lay some ground work. A little backstory, if you will.

1) TBG has recently moved to a brand new NY Office, nestled in lush TriBeCa. It is a very nice office.

2) It has recently been hellishly hot in NY. Blah blah record highs blah blah. I’m surprised Con Ed made it through the summer.

3) We finally had some nice weather that didn’t make you want to throw up as soon as you went outside.

Taking all of these things into account, The clear next step was to throw a party on our awesome new roof deck. Oh did I mention that? yeah I guess that is important. I suck at blogging…

This past weekend, the internet descended on Cambridge for ROFLCon II, a celebration of web culture and celebrity. This event blew all previous events out of the park. The conference featured a cavalcade of guests, including Mahir “I Kiss You” Cagri, David “David After Dentist” Devore, the owner of Keyboard Cat, and the guy who designed Clippy the Office 97 Assistant.

Barbarian Group, as is traditional, did a super classy post-ROFL VIP party with all of our guests, which packs the normal surrealness of having all the guests there into the compacted space of TBG Boston. Which, despite the uncovering of our secret company mission, was a seriously excellent time.

Here’s Ben Huh and Jason Scott:

And another from the party, Rob Cockerham and Johannes Grenzfurthner:

_audience photo CC BY courtesy Dillweed

_party photos CC BY NC ND courtesy Laughing Squid

Don’t you wish all creative briefs were like this? (found via www.d-kitchen.com)

Big news today!

For the last year, we’ve had the great pleasure of working with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum to redesign their website. It didn’t take more than a second after meeting everyone at the Rock Hall to see that they are extremely passionate about the preservation of rock and roll.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum shares an immersive, interactive experience complete with sound, video, and lights, not to mention all kinds of stuff from your favorite rock and roll artists. The music nerd in all of us wet our collective pants over Mick Jagger’s Union Jack cape (from the Stones’ 81-82 world tour), the larger than life-size photography of Jimmy Page in mid-backbend, or the phone in the Annex’s John Lennon exhibit (if it rings, answer it. Trust me). Rick’s mind was blown by the hand written lyrics to “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division, and David Byrne’s original polaroid artwork for the cover of “More Songs About Buildings and Food.”

But all this needed some help translating to the web. That’s where we came to play.

The passion behind the “most powerful art form ever created,” to quote Greg Harris, Rock Hall’s VP of Development, wasn’t translating well in the online world. Static, informational pages dominated the landscape. Media types present in the offline experience were placed sporadically throughout the site. The mission of preservation and education of a legitimate art form wasn’t being fulfilled, and the story of rock wasn’t being told as it should be.

But today – no longer.

The experience design of the new RockHall.com shifts the focus of the site to the content that makes the Museum unique, both in the educational, historically oriented content we create, as well as the information about the museum and its programs. The Rock Hall is actively creating new educational programs, events, exhibits (and so much more), and we needed to capture and translate that online.