Brad Sucks

"[I] was immediately hooked by a song called 'Making Me Nervous' by a one-man electro-pop band from Ottawa called Brad Sucks." —The Economist

"Really very enjoyable. Truly droll rockers have always been very thin on the ground." —William Gibson, father of cyberpunk

One of Magnatune's best selling artists and an Internet phenomenon, Brad Sucks is Brad Turcotte of Ottawa, Canada—one of the first artists to take full advantage of the free culture movement for self-promotion and distribution. Inspired by peer-to-peer file sharing of music, he began releasing his incredibly catchy indie pop songs online in 2002 and has since developed a significant online fanbase that includes remixers, visual artists, and a host of others whom he regularly invites to participate directly in his projects.

In 2005 he released his fan-funded debut album, I Don't Know What I'm Doing as well as its complete audio source. The self-produced 12 song set has been compared to Beck, Moby, Folk Implosion, and John Vanderslice and received a great deal of college and commercial airplay all over the world, including Australia, the UK, and the Caribbean.The music has been licensed by VH1, as well as several radio and television commercials. In 2007 a double album of remixes of I Don't Know What I'm Doing was released on Magnatune, featuring many of ccMixter's most popular remixers.

Since Brad was one of the first to make the decision to release his music under a Creative Commons license, he was free to promote it through sites such as Magnatune, ccMixter, and the Podsafe Music Network, and he received a significant amount of publicity through blogs and interviews in free culture magazines such as Red Hat Magazine. Brad has also been featured in Maxim, The Seattle Times, NPR's All Songs Considerd, Flak Magazine, The Economist, and the Toronto Star, among many other publications.

Brad is currently working on his second full length album, Out of It, and recently solicited "community backup vocals" for the title track. In addition to writing and recording music, Turcotte also runs the website stripcreator.com, which allows participants to create their own talking-head webcomics. He is also the creator of in4mador.