Piracy – Karaoke – Conviviality
An Occasional Special Event at Betalevel
Swap Meet is a celebration of face-to-face cultural exchange and hand-crafted karaoke, produced by Superbunker and The Royal Academy of Nuts + Bolts, hosted by Betalevel. Admission is always free.
Swap Meet is a place for you to come with a special selection of your very most bestest most favoritest music so you can trade it with other actual human people for the special music that you’ve always wanted but didn’t know existed. It’s like social software, but replacing “software” with “beer.” And then we sing!
Piracy: How to Swap
You won’t be able to grab the entire Led Zep discography at Swap Meet — that’s what what the Department of Defense invented the Internet for. We suggest you come with a small, special selection of music.
To help facilitate the swapping we’ve specified a standard swap package called, oddly enough, the Swap Pack. The Swap Pack is just a folder full of music no larger than 128 Mb (roughly 35 MP3s). Bring this folder — or “package” — on a flash drive or CD to swap.
For more info about Swap Packs, see the Swap Pack FAQ
Karaoke: What to Sing
We have an out of date karaoke song list, which now only covers a fraction of what we have. Most of our karaoke is hand-crafted MIDI file format, so the lyrics are probably weird and the music sounds like Pac-Man… But most likely we do indeed have “that one song.”
If there’s something you must sing, you’re also welcome to bring your own karaoke files.
Conviviality: What to Bring
- bring: drinks, or a kindly donation (optional)
- bring: your singin’ voice and dancin’ shoes (optional)
- bring: some storage media and/or a Swap Pack (optional)
- bring: a defiant sense of joy in the face of our eroding cultural freedoms (required)
Additional Information
More Swap Meet
- Make friends with Swap Meet at MySpace
- Images of Swap Meet at Flickr
- Pamphlet [PDF] by The Royal Academy of Nuts + Bolts
- LA Weekly review: “Best Sunken Lair For Techno-Geeks”
Accessing Your iPod
Here’s the Superbunker Resources page for How to get music off your iPod
MIDI Karaoke Files
- Kar Universe – thousands of multi-lingual .kar files
- Ron’s Karaoke 2 U – easy download of over a thousand .kar files
The Cultural Commons
- Creative Commons – copyright alternative
- The Internet Archive – public domain culture
- Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig
- Electronic Frontier Foundation – pioneers
- Illegal Art – illegal
- Oddio Overplay – free and legal online music
- “He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me”
– Thomas Jefferson
The Global Struggle Against Extremist Business Models
- Anti-DMCA – the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hates you
- RIAA Radar – find members of the RIAA, so you can ignore them
- Downhill Battle – helping media conglomerates target their own feet
- Copyfight – at Corante
- Zeropaid – file sharing software comparison
- Chilling Effects – legal help
Please note:
According to recent legal decisions, inducing anyone to use physical space for the purpose of sharing music may render the space-time continuum illegal. Use the space-time continuum at your own risk!