A long time ago I was watching Bob Cringely's Oregon Public Broadcasting-produced Nerds 2.0.1 documentary - perhaps it was even at the time of its production, in the year of our pathetic innocence 1998.
At the time my primary reaction was, faced with the spectacle of John MacAfee waxing philosophical about new paradigms to a backdrop of fifty billion acres of virgin California timber or whatever the fuck he owned (whatever it was, he's got less of it now) to descend into a dully raging interior whine over why I hadn't gone for the damn computers in college instead of, of all things, chemistry. I'd dicked around with a TRS-80 in high school! I was primed to become an über-nerd!
More than a decade gone, and so many billions under the bridge with scarcely a trickle making it to my doorstep (but hey, I've still got both hands wrapped firmly around the mortgage's lovely little fixed-rate neck), what stays with me from that show was a little interview with true platinum nerd Len Bosack, who summed up his work ethic in founding Cisco thusly:
Sincerity begins at a little over 100 hours a week. You can probably get to 110 on a sustained basis, but it’s hard. You have to get down to eating once a day and showering every other day, things of that sort to really get your life organized to work 110 hours a week.
Cringely asks "and the level that follows sincerity... What do we call that?"
Commitment.
Which is old Len sort of letting me off the hook somewhat. Because you could go back in the time machine, steer my unremarkable collegiate career down a different chute, but you'd have to go back a good piece farther and dick with my DNA to get me to think like that.
I thought of this again as I finally got around to watching Startup.com, a movie whose primary enigma to me thus far has been why it is in my collection at all. I have the vaguest recollection of buying it, at a very low price sometime... somewhere. I started to watch it it seems like about 7 years ago, got distracted by a thought and so time passed. We have trouble getting around to watching the Netflix these days, the only kind of movies I buy anymore are children's movies, and that's more a matter of convenience than price.
Chalk it up to an impulse buy, but then why, when I finally did a small amount of research and downloaded Handbrake, did I choose Startup.com as my first experiment in DVD ripping? I suppose it was one of the few things in my small collection I'd never actually watched. Maybe I was afraid DMCA rays might detect my possible malfeasance and blast the disk over the wire, and didn't want to risk anything I actually cared about.
At some point ripping a DVD to a file I can play on the iPod is apparently illegal. Handbrake is one of these mystery open source products (I'm not saying it's a real mystery to anyone who knows how this business works, it's just a mystery to me) that has a slick GUI and a nice icon with the cutesy fruity drinks, and a website in France and no mailing address. It works every bit a professional piece of software, it is completely free without so much as a "donate" button on the website, it is still somewhere in the .9 phase, and (once some little magic extra wodget called VLC 1.0.0 was downloaded and installed) it could do what iTunes cannot, which is rip a damn DVD to a format I can play on my iPod.
It occurs to me that there is some shrewd piece of writing wrapped up in there, from the manifold crashes of the lumbering money-beasts of Dot Com (of which Startup.com tracks a relatively human one; I'm sure many of these tales would make much grimmer watching) to this era where these strange, nimble un-companies with their esoteric names and cutesy umbrella drink icons succeed in doing what the most likely names in the industry apparently cannot, seemingly mostly because it seems like it should be doable.
Having been wracked by illness to the extent that in the last three days I've eaten approximately one and a half meals, I'll have to leave you to ponder those connections on your own. I've attained my goal of propping my eyelids up until past ten o'clock in hopes of sleeping through the night.
My observation, having finally watched Startup.com in business-card-o-vision, reclining in my bed of pain and fed up with reading, is that for me, anyway, all of the Schadenfreude of that story was gone. With the start of a new century come and gone with scarcely a sparkling puff, staggering into the ninth year of a war which has never had a clear objective, after our more recent financial falling apart that saw not just the deposition of various made-up millionaires from their fortunes but people being actually thrown out of their houses... All I see now are these kids (and it's funny because they are all the same age as me, but on film it's always 1999), wearing their power-guy suits and trying to stay human as the VC vultures pull their predictable mirror-world Cukoo trick of kicking the true parents out of nest, the better to raise more carrion birds.
I've thought for a while that it is high time for a dark, brooding cover of Prince's 1999... which is after all a song about a particularly dismal breed of nostalgia now. And did you know that Wendy And Lisa are released a solo album not a year ago? And so time continues to roll over us all.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Overload
This situation has been brewing for a while, but it has gone to a new level with the eMusic's addition of substantial holdings from Warner Brothers' catalog.
When I started out with eMusic they were still locked into independent labels only. When I came upon a band or artist that was new to me eMusic was usually my first stop on the chance they were not signed (or not yet signed) to a Major: when this was the case it was always a good moment; if I still had credits for the month I got to download new music right away. Instant gratification, hooray.
When the Majors started to show up in the form of Sony the stocks of recognizable content (for me) jumped sharply. I quickly found myself in the situation I alluded to previously: if I were to stick to just downloading the titles I've currently got listed in my "Saved for Later" file this would eat up my download quota for a full 9 months. The Replacements! Neil Young! Jimi Hendrix! Leo Kottke! Bob Dylan! It just keeps piling up. A not-insignificant percentage of these albums are things I once owned on cassette, or "sort of" owned... Well I remember the summer before my freshman year of college, when I massively recorded selections of my brothers even-then burgeoning LP vinyl collection, carefully decorating each tape with pictures cut out of magazines and my epic stack of college junk mail. No one had told me that I was "killing music" (and breaking the law!)
Not so long ago a major issue I faced with new music was simply hard drive space. I was limping along with an almost decade-old iMac, running my hard drive at a razor-thin margin of free space, aggressively culling out MP3 files and burning them to CDRs to preserve some modicum of function. With the advent of the new computer, these concerns vanished. I've got 22 days of continuous audio on iTunes, at just shy of 40 GB, which is around half my total current hard drive use, itself not even 20 percent of what I've got to spend. I'm not naive: I know what seems like an ever-loving Siberia of empty disk space will inevitably succumb to ever-burgeoning files and applications. But the era of music being the biggest wodge of disk space, the problematic app, seems over. I'm not the file-sharing type: I'm not going to celebrate all those tasty empty sectors by going on a freebie download spree. My modest consumption of eMusic and the occasional CD (sign of the times: my brother gave me a lovely Black Keys gatefold LP for Christmas: the right-hand gatefold contained the vinyl album... the left-hand gatefold contained the CD) will add a steady drip to that music folder. But the plain fact is that music, for me, is just not getting proportionally bigger. Oh, I could opt for larger, higher fidelity MP3s. But I just don't care. I am not an audiophile. I am much more that teenager who was thrilled with those cheap Radio Shack cassette rips of vinyl, made on my parents' ancient Sony Hi Fi. People bring up sampling rates as they debate the virtues of the various DRM-free music download outlets and I just don't care. I pay no attention.
Ironically, the bottleneck on my music consumption has, given my preference for the properly sanctioned download outlets, gone back to cost. My music budget is so: I download my eMusic tracks for the month, with a little cash left over for discretionary spending.
But in fact, at long last, the economics of downloading is starting to catch up with reality to the extent that if I'm being honest, I'm barely keeping up with all the new and old-to-me but new-to-digital offerings my modest budget allows. Even more ironic, what's really pushing me around decision-wise these days gets down to a matter of choices. Choices! Choices! If I recall it was a Physical Chemistry professor who first introduced me to the phrase "an embarrassment of riches." He was discussing some sort of painful and obtuse variety of calculation methodologies and the choice of phrase struck me at the time as deeply ironic. (Irony! It's so totally twenty-first century!) I think the current state of music availability is the first time in my life this phrase has occurred to me in a fully sincere way. There is so much music.
Example. Remember way back in paragraph two, when I spoke of the little spark of joy I felt when I came upon a coveted artist that turned out to be available on the indie-only eMusic? Oh how times have changed. A couple days ago I hit their interface, flummoxed again by how to discharge a dangling 4 song credits (I've mentioned before, I'm not a singles guy... and of course most of the one-hit-wonders on eMusic are now "album only" downloads). I check out the new arrivals. Holy hell, there are 243 pages of "freshly ripped" albums! I go to look at some higher level (i.e. more selective) listings of new stuff. And see that they now have the Talking Heads' catalog. My honest-to-God reaction to this is "Oh shit." More fodder for the saved for later file. I had them all in the day, to the last recorded to tape from my brother's LP collection... Remain in Light, Fear of Music, 77, More Songs About Buildings and Food, Speaking in Tongues. That's another two months of downloads! And I feel bad, I feel bad about neglecting the indies! What about new stuff, am I consigning myself to living in the past?!
Strange days. I am consuming a small stream of truly new music from various weird, independent sources - a topic I hope to get into in more detail in days to come. I really wonder about the market, these days, for truly committed-to-music newbies. There is of course still a major label system and all it has comprised for many decades. My real interest is in those stalwartly trying to forge their own way in the crazy, insanely overloaded marketplace of the new media. It isn't much of an insight to note that they are finding what market they find by making relationships, in that 2.0 sorta way, rather than the old models of radio play, of videos on MTV (that's right kids, once again, MTV used to be the Music Video channel). How are they getting by? Maybe I'll dust off Skype, give some interviews a shot. The times, they are a' changin'.
When I started out with eMusic they were still locked into independent labels only. When I came upon a band or artist that was new to me eMusic was usually my first stop on the chance they were not signed (or not yet signed) to a Major: when this was the case it was always a good moment; if I still had credits for the month I got to download new music right away. Instant gratification, hooray.
When the Majors started to show up in the form of Sony the stocks of recognizable content (for me) jumped sharply. I quickly found myself in the situation I alluded to previously: if I were to stick to just downloading the titles I've currently got listed in my "Saved for Later" file this would eat up my download quota for a full 9 months. The Replacements! Neil Young! Jimi Hendrix! Leo Kottke! Bob Dylan! It just keeps piling up. A not-insignificant percentage of these albums are things I once owned on cassette, or "sort of" owned... Well I remember the summer before my freshman year of college, when I massively recorded selections of my brothers even-then burgeoning LP vinyl collection, carefully decorating each tape with pictures cut out of magazines and my epic stack of college junk mail. No one had told me that I was "killing music" (and breaking the law!)
Not so long ago a major issue I faced with new music was simply hard drive space. I was limping along with an almost decade-old iMac, running my hard drive at a razor-thin margin of free space, aggressively culling out MP3 files and burning them to CDRs to preserve some modicum of function. With the advent of the new computer, these concerns vanished. I've got 22 days of continuous audio on iTunes, at just shy of 40 GB, which is around half my total current hard drive use, itself not even 20 percent of what I've got to spend. I'm not naive: I know what seems like an ever-loving Siberia of empty disk space will inevitably succumb to ever-burgeoning files and applications. But the era of music being the biggest wodge of disk space, the problematic app, seems over. I'm not the file-sharing type: I'm not going to celebrate all those tasty empty sectors by going on a freebie download spree. My modest consumption of eMusic and the occasional CD (sign of the times: my brother gave me a lovely Black Keys gatefold LP for Christmas: the right-hand gatefold contained the vinyl album... the left-hand gatefold contained the CD) will add a steady drip to that music folder. But the plain fact is that music, for me, is just not getting proportionally bigger. Oh, I could opt for larger, higher fidelity MP3s. But I just don't care. I am not an audiophile. I am much more that teenager who was thrilled with those cheap Radio Shack cassette rips of vinyl, made on my parents' ancient Sony Hi Fi. People bring up sampling rates as they debate the virtues of the various DRM-free music download outlets and I just don't care. I pay no attention.
Ironically, the bottleneck on my music consumption has, given my preference for the properly sanctioned download outlets, gone back to cost. My music budget is so: I download my eMusic tracks for the month, with a little cash left over for discretionary spending.
But in fact, at long last, the economics of downloading is starting to catch up with reality to the extent that if I'm being honest, I'm barely keeping up with all the new and old-to-me but new-to-digital offerings my modest budget allows. Even more ironic, what's really pushing me around decision-wise these days gets down to a matter of choices. Choices! Choices! If I recall it was a Physical Chemistry professor who first introduced me to the phrase "an embarrassment of riches." He was discussing some sort of painful and obtuse variety of calculation methodologies and the choice of phrase struck me at the time as deeply ironic. (Irony! It's so totally twenty-first century!) I think the current state of music availability is the first time in my life this phrase has occurred to me in a fully sincere way. There is so much music.
Example. Remember way back in paragraph two, when I spoke of the little spark of joy I felt when I came upon a coveted artist that turned out to be available on the indie-only eMusic? Oh how times have changed. A couple days ago I hit their interface, flummoxed again by how to discharge a dangling 4 song credits (I've mentioned before, I'm not a singles guy... and of course most of the one-hit-wonders on eMusic are now "album only" downloads). I check out the new arrivals. Holy hell, there are 243 pages of "freshly ripped" albums! I go to look at some higher level (i.e. more selective) listings of new stuff. And see that they now have the Talking Heads' catalog. My honest-to-God reaction to this is "Oh shit." More fodder for the saved for later file. I had them all in the day, to the last recorded to tape from my brother's LP collection... Remain in Light, Fear of Music, 77, More Songs About Buildings and Food, Speaking in Tongues. That's another two months of downloads! And I feel bad, I feel bad about neglecting the indies! What about new stuff, am I consigning myself to living in the past?!
Strange days. I am consuming a small stream of truly new music from various weird, independent sources - a topic I hope to get into in more detail in days to come. I really wonder about the market, these days, for truly committed-to-music newbies. There is of course still a major label system and all it has comprised for many decades. My real interest is in those stalwartly trying to forge their own way in the crazy, insanely overloaded marketplace of the new media. It isn't much of an insight to note that they are finding what market they find by making relationships, in that 2.0 sorta way, rather than the old models of radio play, of videos on MTV (that's right kids, once again, MTV used to be the Music Video channel). How are they getting by? Maybe I'll dust off Skype, give some interviews a shot. The times, they are a' changin'.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 2: Virtual is Real
Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
Remember when Virtual Reality strapped on the dual engines of Johnny Mnemonic and Disclosure and jumped the shark?
“We’re all doing [virtual reality], every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn’t need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened. VR was an even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going. Without scaring us too much, right?”
William Gibson, Spook Country
In its heyday as a topic of speculation, the problems of virtual reality (in the futuristic, helmet-and-gloves sense) seemed superficially to be technological. Binocular optic displays never worked particularly well. The consumer-level technology of tracking objects in space wasn’t really up to the task of dealing with anything like an articulated glove as a controller (let alone two). And interfaces such as treadmill-like walking surfaces were pure fantasy from a pragmatic perspective. For the most part these facts are still true.
But what occurred to me as I learned the ropes of navigating my character around Azeroth was that technology aside, the fundamental benefits of classically conceived, first-person VR were questionable. When I accidentally zoomed my view into full first person perspective, my instinct was to roll right back out again. Much more comfortable to play from a perspective a yard or two behind and above my character’s head. Fumbling around trying to manipulate physical objects seems more like a bug than a feature of physical reality. And isn’t pressing a button or twitching a mouse so much easier than actually walking around?
The fact is that the ideas behind most of the gimmicky contrivances of “Sci-Fi” VR are rooted in the assumption that the path to a more immersive virtual experience is to pursue an experience that most closely mimics actual presence. So you use your feet to walk, your hands to pick things up, and you move your head to look around. In reality, the only thing that delivers this authentic experience is being there. If anything, dodgy optic displays and clunky glove manipulators could only accentuate the unreality of the virtual experience.
On the other hand, we’re incredibly used to looking at moving pictures and increasingly comfortable manipulating things in them with devices like the mouse and the video game controller. Our real, after all, is already virtual: a model our brain constructs from sensory input. The brain is comfortable treating adequately modeled realities as real. The secret, mainly, is not getting in its way too much. Provided the the images are compelling and sufficiently realistic and the interface is smooth and not unnecessarily complicated, we can quite comfortably inhabit a small, two-dimensional visual world with mediocre stereo audio. And therein enjoy effects in the realm where true immersion occurs: not the technological, but the psychological. At least until the shooting pains in the wrist tendons start.
Remember when Virtual Reality strapped on the dual engines of Johnny Mnemonic and Disclosure and jumped the shark?
“We’re all doing [virtual reality], every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn’t need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened. VR was an even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going. Without scaring us too much, right?”
William Gibson, Spook Country
In its heyday as a topic of speculation, the problems of virtual reality (in the futuristic, helmet-and-gloves sense) seemed superficially to be technological. Binocular optic displays never worked particularly well. The consumer-level technology of tracking objects in space wasn’t really up to the task of dealing with anything like an articulated glove as a controller (let alone two). And interfaces such as treadmill-like walking surfaces were pure fantasy from a pragmatic perspective. For the most part these facts are still true.
But what occurred to me as I learned the ropes of navigating my character around Azeroth was that technology aside, the fundamental benefits of classically conceived, first-person VR were questionable. When I accidentally zoomed my view into full first person perspective, my instinct was to roll right back out again. Much more comfortable to play from a perspective a yard or two behind and above my character’s head. Fumbling around trying to manipulate physical objects seems more like a bug than a feature of physical reality. And isn’t pressing a button or twitching a mouse so much easier than actually walking around?
The fact is that the ideas behind most of the gimmicky contrivances of “Sci-Fi” VR are rooted in the assumption that the path to a more immersive virtual experience is to pursue an experience that most closely mimics actual presence. So you use your feet to walk, your hands to pick things up, and you move your head to look around. In reality, the only thing that delivers this authentic experience is being there. If anything, dodgy optic displays and clunky glove manipulators could only accentuate the unreality of the virtual experience.
On the other hand, we’re incredibly used to looking at moving pictures and increasingly comfortable manipulating things in them with devices like the mouse and the video game controller. Our real, after all, is already virtual: a model our brain constructs from sensory input. The brain is comfortable treating adequately modeled realities as real. The secret, mainly, is not getting in its way too much. Provided the the images are compelling and sufficiently realistic and the interface is smooth and not unnecessarily complicated, we can quite comfortably inhabit a small, two-dimensional visual world with mediocre stereo audio. And therein enjoy effects in the realm where true immersion occurs: not the technological, but the psychological. At least until the shooting pains in the wrist tendons start.
Friday, January 22, 2010
aside: eMusic, et. al.: brands versus labels
A quick aside of a thought that just passed through my mind. One of the curious (and presumably unintended) effects of eMusic's piecemeal acquisition of rights to the major labels' catalogs has been to make me aware, in a way I have really never been, of the legacy (and disposition) of record labels.
I'm always amused by the curious twists of corporate etymology. An album is a book of blank pages with pockets or envelopes... a label is an identifying tag you stick on something. It mostly devolves to a handful of major corporations, but maintains in its strange histories and persistent imprints (a concavity in a surface produced by pressing - I never have figured out what the hell it means in the parlance of musical commerce) a sort of DNA of the evolution of the so-called "majors".
While browsing Napster I lingered a bit on Tom Waits' classic Rain Dogs. Too much good stuff to snag just a few tracks - as is my habit now when I get interested in something I check the label and hit the enigma of Island Records. Off to Wikipedia. Founded in Jamaica, long run from the UK, now (the now is almost always SO the dull same old thing) "owned by Universal Music Group... which is distributed through Sony Music Entertainment and is operated in the United States through The Island Def Jam Music Group and in the UK through Island Records Group (or simply Island Records or Universal Island)". Do tell. Does that Sony issue relate to eMusic's acquisition of portions of the Sony catalog? Not with respect to Rain Dogs, anyway, but these days I always check: hell if I'm going to pay ten dollars if I can get away with paying four. Golly Gosh kids, it's almost like we're getting a market going here!
Something I always thought was interesting is the fact that for the most part the major publishing conglomerates have no brand identity except in that they are recognized as major conglomerates. There are a few exceptions (e.g. Pixar, Disney, whoops, is that the same thing now? I can't keep track) but nobody is going to go see a movie just because it's Warner Brothers. In a strange, temporary and limited way, the eMusic evolution is changing that dynamic for me: I'm a lot more likely to pick something up these days if it's on their ticket. Pure economics, baby. It will be interesting to see if it progresses towards the usual all-the-same bland slop.
I'm always amused by the curious twists of corporate etymology. An album is a book of blank pages with pockets or envelopes... a label is an identifying tag you stick on something. It mostly devolves to a handful of major corporations, but maintains in its strange histories and persistent imprints (a concavity in a surface produced by pressing - I never have figured out what the hell it means in the parlance of musical commerce) a sort of DNA of the evolution of the so-called "majors".
While browsing Napster I lingered a bit on Tom Waits' classic Rain Dogs. Too much good stuff to snag just a few tracks - as is my habit now when I get interested in something I check the label and hit the enigma of Island Records. Off to Wikipedia. Founded in Jamaica, long run from the UK, now (the now is almost always SO the dull same old thing) "owned by Universal Music Group... which is distributed through Sony Music Entertainment and is operated in the United States through The Island Def Jam Music Group and in the UK through Island Records Group (or simply Island Records or Universal Island)". Do tell. Does that Sony issue relate to eMusic's acquisition of portions of the Sony catalog? Not with respect to Rain Dogs, anyway, but these days I always check: hell if I'm going to pay ten dollars if I can get away with paying four. Golly Gosh kids, it's almost like we're getting a market going here!
Something I always thought was interesting is the fact that for the most part the major publishing conglomerates have no brand identity except in that they are recognized as major conglomerates. There are a few exceptions (e.g. Pixar, Disney, whoops, is that the same thing now? I can't keep track) but nobody is going to go see a movie just because it's Warner Brothers. In a strange, temporary and limited way, the eMusic evolution is changing that dynamic for me: I'm a lot more likely to pick something up these days if it's on their ticket. Pure economics, baby. It will be interesting to see if it progresses towards the usual all-the-same bland slop.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Digging the retail vibe at Napster is drenched in irony. And Coca-Cola.
I’ve been neglecting to check out Napster for a while now. Any vague conception I had of it as a pay service was formed in the era of some defunct antecedent. What’s the point? If I can’t get it on eMusic it will be on Amazon or iTunes, where I already have accounts.
It is long past relevance, originality, or humor to dwell on the irony of mainstream retail appropriating the brand of the original Robber Baron of musical file sharing. What remains is the sort of baffling fact that Napster still exists at all, let alone that its reincarnation in service of the tottering pressplay, erstwhile Sony-Universal experiment turned last ditch effort at relevance by Roxio, was worth over $120 million to Best Buy. (Fun fact that fell out of my Napster research: Kazaa coughed up $100 million to settle with the record industry and got bought and relaunched as yet another pay service. Who knew?)
I won’t begin to speculate what all went into the calculation of that price tag for BBY. The mystical force that finally drew me to dabble in the new Napster, however, is not so mysterious. It was Coca-Cola points. I have a weakness for that most consumerist of products, ultra-branded sugar water, in defiance of my better health or communist sympathies. I keep saying I’m going to give it up and I keep accumulating caps with their little codes to be entered for digital pseudo-currency which in turn may be redeemed in a radically inadequate store. Camel bucks were a better deal, aside from the cancer. Previously I’d redeemed a coupon for downloads from the Rhapsody store: that had went reasonably well. When a similar offer presented itself I figured the time was right.
What is there to say about the interface? They all look the same. They all work great if your habit is to buy whatever shit dominates the radio and television month to month. It’s always easy enough to find something you want if you already know exactly what it is. They’re all completely useless for random shopping. Napster adds some weird twists on the experience. They’re clearly trying, with a bunch of playlist-y vectors to drill into the catalog with. It’s a weird mix, though, with some weird choices. The day's Featured New Releases section included an album with a title along the lines of “Greatest Moments in Bagpipes.” Some of the playlists are almost militantly clichéd - “One Hit Wonders of the ‘80s” could have been cribbed directly from a half hour special on VH1. Others are completely bizarre: a collection of classical tracks titled “Mythological Monsters - Music inspired by beasts of Lore.” “Easy Beatles - Mellow covers of Lennon/McCartney favorites” (as opposed to Starr/Harrison favorites?) “Celtic Fusion Spirit” - I am not making this up - “Traditional sounds with a pop twist.”
I was at a complete loss, as usual. I am an album (as opposed to a singles) guy, and it seems like less and less albums come with ten or fewer tracks these days. I end up with an random mix culled from a freeform drift of musical memories- a couple of Moody Blues hits from an album a beloved, departed high school teacher gave me when I was 18, a couple of favorite tracks from mix tapes my brother made for me, a few from songs that were big hits on MTV during the brief time I watched it routinely (note for any kids who might have stumbled across this - MTV used to play music videos).
The hated 30 second preview persists, though it is at least slightly more justified by Napster’s position as a purveyor of an unlimited streaming subscription model (giving away the milk for free and so forth). Other features are less excusable. There is no track or album pricing without actually going into a purchase window (and, I discover taking a second look after my coupon is used up, they will not even give this up without entering actual payment information). Let’s just get this straight: this is a store that won't tell you what any of its merchandise costs until you give them a credit card to hold on to. What the fuck, do they want to make sure you’re serious? There’s nothing special about the price points you encounter - $.99 and $1.29 were all I saw - so what’s the big secret? It’s an inexplicable, irritating, low rent move that mystifies coming from a retail giant like Best Buy.
But the real and final criticisms actually pushes into truly intolerable territory. Napster’s download manager app isn’t available for the Mac. I can accept this - it’s idiotic, but still commonplace enough, and it isn’t like downloading the tracks one by one off the web interface is that much of a chore. But when I did - in complete defiance of all my experience - fully three tracks did not download. When I returned to my track listing, inexplicably more than half were not listed as downloaded. I retried my missing tracks. Two showed up, but the last one vanished into the ether - but was nevertheless marked as downloaded. A complete loss.
I’m not about to pursue some sort of customer service experience with Napster over a single song I bought with Coca Cola bottle tops, but seriously, what the fuck? Basically there is no excuse for that. I can’t imagine actually breaking out the credit card for this uninspired service unless they dig up some kind of major innovation (and some Mac support).
Epilog... despite my Mac-ular issues with Napster, I suppose dropping a review of their store without so much as a link is a little cold. Behold, Napster 8.6, or something... And for all your next-decade nostalgia needs, you can review the original and all its progeny at its Internet Archive's Wayback Machine page. What a long strange trip etc.
It is long past relevance, originality, or humor to dwell on the irony of mainstream retail appropriating the brand of the original Robber Baron of musical file sharing. What remains is the sort of baffling fact that Napster still exists at all, let alone that its reincarnation in service of the tottering pressplay, erstwhile Sony-Universal experiment turned last ditch effort at relevance by Roxio, was worth over $120 million to Best Buy. (Fun fact that fell out of my Napster research: Kazaa coughed up $100 million to settle with the record industry and got bought and relaunched as yet another pay service. Who knew?)
I won’t begin to speculate what all went into the calculation of that price tag for BBY. The mystical force that finally drew me to dabble in the new Napster, however, is not so mysterious. It was Coca-Cola points. I have a weakness for that most consumerist of products, ultra-branded sugar water, in defiance of my better health or communist sympathies. I keep saying I’m going to give it up and I keep accumulating caps with their little codes to be entered for digital pseudo-currency which in turn may be redeemed in a radically inadequate store. Camel bucks were a better deal, aside from the cancer. Previously I’d redeemed a coupon for downloads from the Rhapsody store: that had went reasonably well. When a similar offer presented itself I figured the time was right.
What is there to say about the interface? They all look the same. They all work great if your habit is to buy whatever shit dominates the radio and television month to month. It’s always easy enough to find something you want if you already know exactly what it is. They’re all completely useless for random shopping. Napster adds some weird twists on the experience. They’re clearly trying, with a bunch of playlist-y vectors to drill into the catalog with. It’s a weird mix, though, with some weird choices. The day's Featured New Releases section included an album with a title along the lines of “Greatest Moments in Bagpipes.” Some of the playlists are almost militantly clichéd - “One Hit Wonders of the ‘80s” could have been cribbed directly from a half hour special on VH1. Others are completely bizarre: a collection of classical tracks titled “Mythological Monsters - Music inspired by beasts of Lore.” “Easy Beatles - Mellow covers of Lennon/McCartney favorites” (as opposed to Starr/Harrison favorites?) “Celtic Fusion Spirit” - I am not making this up - “Traditional sounds with a pop twist.”
I was at a complete loss, as usual. I am an album (as opposed to a singles) guy, and it seems like less and less albums come with ten or fewer tracks these days. I end up with an random mix culled from a freeform drift of musical memories- a couple of Moody Blues hits from an album a beloved, departed high school teacher gave me when I was 18, a couple of favorite tracks from mix tapes my brother made for me, a few from songs that were big hits on MTV during the brief time I watched it routinely (note for any kids who might have stumbled across this - MTV used to play music videos).
The hated 30 second preview persists, though it is at least slightly more justified by Napster’s position as a purveyor of an unlimited streaming subscription model (giving away the milk for free and so forth). Other features are less excusable. There is no track or album pricing without actually going into a purchase window (and, I discover taking a second look after my coupon is used up, they will not even give this up without entering actual payment information). Let’s just get this straight: this is a store that won't tell you what any of its merchandise costs until you give them a credit card to hold on to. What the fuck, do they want to make sure you’re serious? There’s nothing special about the price points you encounter - $.99 and $1.29 were all I saw - so what’s the big secret? It’s an inexplicable, irritating, low rent move that mystifies coming from a retail giant like Best Buy.
But the real and final criticisms actually pushes into truly intolerable territory. Napster’s download manager app isn’t available for the Mac. I can accept this - it’s idiotic, but still commonplace enough, and it isn’t like downloading the tracks one by one off the web interface is that much of a chore. But when I did - in complete defiance of all my experience - fully three tracks did not download. When I returned to my track listing, inexplicably more than half were not listed as downloaded. I retried my missing tracks. Two showed up, but the last one vanished into the ether - but was nevertheless marked as downloaded. A complete loss.
I’m not about to pursue some sort of customer service experience with Napster over a single song I bought with Coca Cola bottle tops, but seriously, what the fuck? Basically there is no excuse for that. I can’t imagine actually breaking out the credit card for this uninspired service unless they dig up some kind of major innovation (and some Mac support).
Epilog... despite my Mac-ular issues with Napster, I suppose dropping a review of their store without so much as a link is a little cold. Behold, Napster 8.6, or something... And for all your next-decade nostalgia needs, you can review the original and all its progeny at its Internet Archive's Wayback Machine page. What a long strange trip etc.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Retro Phree: Dewey Music, filters, and the genre problem
A quick throwback to the original conception of this blog as a repository for genuinely free music (you know, like it was before this happened) while I finish up a review of Napster and compose the second chapter of Nine Nights in Azeroth.
Brian Eno characterizing recorded music as whale blubber may be an attractively unflattering comparison to further lash the beleaguered music industry, but things like Dewey Music serve to remind me that it doesn't go too far as an analogy. If I had whale blubber on tap like I've got recorded music I would heat my fucking house with it. I would be out in the garage trying to cook up whale diesel.
Dewey Music is an interface for Archive.org's public domain music library. It is a noble endeavor, and I'm sure this library is a great resource for some people (remixers, music historians and serious fans of the Grateful Dead spring to mind). But wow, how well it highlights the curious problems of super-abundance.
I. The Genre Problem
There is a genre continuum. It starts with "too generic." Rock and Pop and Hip Hop are very nearly useless categories, particularly if you're just looking for something you'd enjoy listening to and you're a sufficiently broad-minded person that you'd be up for listening to something that could easily hail from any of those categories. Yet it is apparently de rigueur that they be the starting place for browsing music catalogs online.
On the far end of the continuum is Dewey Music. The genre list there is so huge and absurd that it might actually be some sort of statement. The first five genres provided are -n, 00s, 0742 Sound, 1 and 100. There is also a genre for Rock. Not to Mention Rock And Roll, Rock Out, Rock-pop, Rockin, Rock N Roll and something listed as rock jazz punk funk virtuoso karl evans grant sharkey jay havelock southampton england uk live show bass drums primus zappa ben folds five tool live music archive funny comedy bill hicks doug stanhope which bears a single listing under the artist name "toupe" with the track listing "Feliz Cumpleanos," but doesn't actually link to any file. I believe we call this organizational methodology "crowdsourcing."
In my first attempt at browsing I opted for the genre "Van Damme" which led me to a single track under "Collected Works of Frank Harris," a very scratchy vinyl (or for all I know shellac '78 or celluloid cylinder) rip of the frequently covered '20s novelty song "(Oy That, Oy That) Yiddishe Charleston".
Okay.
II. Free isn't free. It isn't even cheap.
I'm going to review the latest incarnation of Napster branding shortly and I'll tell you up front it is not going to be a glowing review. But if I only had two options to supply all my musical consumption from I would choose handing Best Buy sixty bucks a year for unlimited streaming and 60 pathetic downloads from Napster over unlimited listening and downloading for free from Archive.org in a heartbeat.
Because here's the thing: it takes me about 12 minutes to earn five dollars. Music discovery has a definite but strictly limited and defined place in my music listening budget (and by this I mostly mean my time budget). My tolerance for lightly filtered streams of random music gets exhausted quickly. If I'm not happy with what I'm listening to and have to expend effort to listen to something else I soon come to feel that I am paying for the experience in a way I find substantially more noisome than parting with money.
Given its source and intent calling out Dewey Music on these issues is pretty unfair but it does illustrate the point so well. And it is on these rocks that ninety percent (to be generously optimistic) of the radio-slash-record store alternatives trying to make a go of it out there will founder within a few short years.
Brian Eno characterizing recorded music as whale blubber may be an attractively unflattering comparison to further lash the beleaguered music industry, but things like Dewey Music serve to remind me that it doesn't go too far as an analogy. If I had whale blubber on tap like I've got recorded music I would heat my fucking house with it. I would be out in the garage trying to cook up whale diesel.
Dewey Music is an interface for Archive.org's public domain music library. It is a noble endeavor, and I'm sure this library is a great resource for some people (remixers, music historians and serious fans of the Grateful Dead spring to mind). But wow, how well it highlights the curious problems of super-abundance.
I. The Genre Problem
There is a genre continuum. It starts with "too generic." Rock and Pop and Hip Hop are very nearly useless categories, particularly if you're just looking for something you'd enjoy listening to and you're a sufficiently broad-minded person that you'd be up for listening to something that could easily hail from any of those categories. Yet it is apparently de rigueur that they be the starting place for browsing music catalogs online.
On the far end of the continuum is Dewey Music. The genre list there is so huge and absurd that it might actually be some sort of statement. The first five genres provided are -n, 00s, 0742 Sound, 1 and 100. There is also a genre for Rock. Not to Mention Rock And Roll, Rock Out, Rock-pop, Rockin, Rock N Roll and something listed as rock jazz punk funk virtuoso karl evans grant sharkey jay havelock southampton england uk live show bass drums primus zappa ben folds five tool live music archive funny comedy bill hicks doug stanhope which bears a single listing under the artist name "toupe" with the track listing "Feliz Cumpleanos," but doesn't actually link to any file. I believe we call this organizational methodology "crowdsourcing."
In my first attempt at browsing I opted for the genre "Van Damme" which led me to a single track under "Collected Works of Frank Harris," a very scratchy vinyl (or for all I know shellac '78 or celluloid cylinder) rip of the frequently covered '20s novelty song "(Oy That, Oy That) Yiddishe Charleston".
Okay.
II. Free isn't free. It isn't even cheap.
I'm going to review the latest incarnation of Napster branding shortly and I'll tell you up front it is not going to be a glowing review. But if I only had two options to supply all my musical consumption from I would choose handing Best Buy sixty bucks a year for unlimited streaming and 60 pathetic downloads from Napster over unlimited listening and downloading for free from Archive.org in a heartbeat.
Because here's the thing: it takes me about 12 minutes to earn five dollars. Music discovery has a definite but strictly limited and defined place in my music listening budget (and by this I mostly mean my time budget). My tolerance for lightly filtered streams of random music gets exhausted quickly. If I'm not happy with what I'm listening to and have to expend effort to listen to something else I soon come to feel that I am paying for the experience in a way I find substantially more noisome than parting with money.
Given its source and intent calling out Dewey Music on these issues is pretty unfair but it does illustrate the point so well. And it is on these rocks that ninety percent (to be generously optimistic) of the radio-slash-record store alternatives trying to make a go of it out there will founder within a few short years.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 1: Invisible Walls
Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
I felt a genuine stab of disappointment when I hit my first invisible wall in Azeroth. Down in a valley with a starter-character dwarf hunter on a starter-world server, on the first night of the ten day free trial my friend had convinced me to download in observance of getting my first new computer in 8 years, I tried to climb out the far side through sparse pine forest. After a couple of virtual meters I found myself uselessly treading water on dry ground, feet still churning but going nowhere.
So the spell of immersion is broken. Math, somewhere in the digital scaffolding I knew spanned under the cartoon skin I was watching and interacting with, telling my character’s motion physics there was a wall there I couldn’t see.
It took me back to an early gaming meta-experience, punching through blind acceptance of the medium to apprehend a glimpse of rules behind the play. I was playing a racing game, probably on a friend’s Atari (my technology-resistant parents managed to keep any significant manifestation of video games out of our 80’s home until I was old enough to earn and save the money for my own NES). I realized that you could drive your car off the road: but not very far. The track’s shoulder, only there really as a speed-eating punishment for blowing turns, terminated in the soon-to-be-proverbial invisible wall.
I wished, then, that the tiny, proscribed, barely representational world of that 8-bit racer could be more like reality. That if I elected to leave the race I could just drive off in the direction I chose, keep going as long as the field before me was clear. Head for those raster pine trees in the background, maybe drive through a forest. Maybe find a city on the other side.
More like reality? To a child’s mind, maybe, and maybe there are more complicated levels of metaphorical connection between the virtual and the real than I reckoned on when I set out to describe this particular mid-life gaming experience.
Whatever: I think I felt a little of that child’s excitement (which I didn’t recognize until it got disappointed later by unscalable asymptote of the far valley wall), the first time I thought to steer my dwarf off the beaten path - and discovered there was actually something there. I suppose as well that it was somewhat of a child’s let down to make the entirely unsurprising discovery that it didn’t actually go on forever. The World of Warcraft being, of course, a “world” only in a strictly virtual sense. Still, I went back in the next night. Walls or not, there was still a whole lot of it.
I felt a genuine stab of disappointment when I hit my first invisible wall in Azeroth. Down in a valley with a starter-character dwarf hunter on a starter-world server, on the first night of the ten day free trial my friend had convinced me to download in observance of getting my first new computer in 8 years, I tried to climb out the far side through sparse pine forest. After a couple of virtual meters I found myself uselessly treading water on dry ground, feet still churning but going nowhere.
So the spell of immersion is broken. Math, somewhere in the digital scaffolding I knew spanned under the cartoon skin I was watching and interacting with, telling my character’s motion physics there was a wall there I couldn’t see.
It took me back to an early gaming meta-experience, punching through blind acceptance of the medium to apprehend a glimpse of rules behind the play. I was playing a racing game, probably on a friend’s Atari (my technology-resistant parents managed to keep any significant manifestation of video games out of our 80’s home until I was old enough to earn and save the money for my own NES). I realized that you could drive your car off the road: but not very far. The track’s shoulder, only there really as a speed-eating punishment for blowing turns, terminated in the soon-to-be-proverbial invisible wall.
I wished, then, that the tiny, proscribed, barely representational world of that 8-bit racer could be more like reality. That if I elected to leave the race I could just drive off in the direction I chose, keep going as long as the field before me was clear. Head for those raster pine trees in the background, maybe drive through a forest. Maybe find a city on the other side.
More like reality? To a child’s mind, maybe, and maybe there are more complicated levels of metaphorical connection between the virtual and the real than I reckoned on when I set out to describe this particular mid-life gaming experience.
Whatever: I think I felt a little of that child’s excitement (which I didn’t recognize until it got disappointed later by unscalable asymptote of the far valley wall), the first time I thought to steer my dwarf off the beaten path - and discovered there was actually something there. I suppose as well that it was somewhat of a child’s let down to make the entirely unsurprising discovery that it didn’t actually go on forever. The World of Warcraft being, of course, a “world” only in a strictly virtual sense. Still, I went back in the next night. Walls or not, there was still a whole lot of it.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Radio Shack, now known as The Telegraph Wigwam
Just kidding, this doesn't have anything to do with, er, the Shack. It's about rebranding, baby! If Freelala were a business, I might have spent months if not years and tens of thousands of dollars in consultant-hours trying to divine the whims of the marketplace. But it's all me, so this morning I decided I didn't want to create a new space to publish the essay I was writing about video games and set about to spend a good 15 minutes changing the Phree Musique blog into !!!Phree as in Phreakshow!!! - dedicated to the consideration of all that is available through that little wire coming out the back of your computer. Or via a wireless network if you insist on destroying the purity of the metaphor. Games, video, various text-centric contenders for the title of "book", whatever the... hell... this thing is - it's all fair game now.*
We'll see you again real soon, right here at your neighborhood Victrola Yurt.
Meantime, here's something that might keep you interested. They're talking about the art history of video games now, which means they should start showing up in your generic intro-course-level textbooks probably in no more than 40 or 50 years.
*"thing" in this sentence used to link to some whacko interactive hoo hah but the domain just goes to a parking lot now. So I redirected it to symbolics.com which is supposedly the oldest extant website (I've no reason to doubt it, just not going to bother to verify it). On the theory that it's not likely to go defunct any time soon. Plus they say they will someday leverage their historic web asset for the "betterment of humanity," and I am all about the betterment.
We'll see you again real soon, right here at your neighborhood Victrola Yurt.
Meantime, here's something that might keep you interested. They're talking about the art history of video games now, which means they should start showing up in your generic intro-course-level textbooks probably in no more than 40 or 50 years.
*"thing" in this sentence used to link to some whacko interactive hoo hah but the domain just goes to a parking lot now. So I redirected it to symbolics.com which is supposedly the oldest extant website (I've no reason to doubt it, just not going to bother to verify it). On the theory that it's not likely to go defunct any time soon. Plus they say they will someday leverage their historic web asset for the "betterment of humanity," and I am all about the betterment.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Recorded music equals whale blubber
I.
Because of recent feedback on Phree (you know who you are) I'm taking another swing at getting some writing going here. I've gone so far as to allocate myself a budget for 2010 of $100 for digital downloads from new stores for reviews. Given that my total project budget for 2010 is $500 this is a substantial commitment. Now I just need to keep myself off Rhapsody and Amazon to keep the total music budget under control.
II.
Here's a devious little budget-stretcher: reporting the decision not to make a purchase. Case in point. Okay, I feel like a little bit of a dick breaking this one down, seeing as how they're aiming to save the planet and all. Maybe I'm a little jaded at this point about organizations that are capable of uttering the phrase "save the planet" without irony. Not to get sidetracked by the specifics of the charity in question, however: my issues here are design and user interface decisions and some underlying assumptions.
1. You better get some toilet paper 'cause your artwork is butt.
If you're Corporate Whoredogs Incorporated I guess it's just part of the parcel that your artwork will be some sort of generic design atrocity. Planet saving nonprofits I expect to scrounge up some real art. I have to look at that shit every time I play the album.
2. Hubris.
The headline on the description of this album is INTRODUCING WHAT IS QUITE POSSIBLY THE MOST IMPORTANT ALBUM EVER MADE. Inane hyperbole does not endear me to your cause.
3. Gone in 30 seconds.
Maybe it's not their fault, the byzantine requirements of the recording business being what they are. I don't even care anymore: seriously, the 30 second preview has got to go. You might as well not have any preview at all, save yourself some bandwidth. Once upon a time the listening room was a standard amenity of the record store - despite the fact that providing "full preview" literally physically degraded the media. Imagine how record sales would have reacted if store proprietors had habitually elbowed their way into the listening room, jammed the needle down wherever in the middle of a track, and then ripped the headphones off customers' heads after 30 seconds. Because that is the experience of the 30 second preview.
4. I bet they think this price point is a no-brainer
The cost of the album is the always inspiring $.99 per track OR a mere $9.99 for all 41 songs. I can't stress this enough: the order-of-magnitude paradigm of Compact Disc era pricing is no longer compelling. As a reminder: I just paid less than three dollars for 35 above-average tracks by Neil Young, one of the greatest living singer-songwriters in America. It is time to start taking heed of what Mr. Eno is saying (we'll get to it soon): we are selling whale blubber here in the era of the Model T. Catch up.
Fix all that and maybe I'll consider buying Volume 2. I do see that I've got yet another music service enterprise with a doofy name to check out. Seriously, "Nimbit"? What the fuck people.
III.
You could do a lot worse with 10 or 15 minutes of your time than to read this short article and interview with Brian Eno. Not least so you can find out what all the blubber talk is about.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at the Index Page
Because of recent feedback on Phree (you know who you are) I'm taking another swing at getting some writing going here. I've gone so far as to allocate myself a budget for 2010 of $100 for digital downloads from new stores for reviews. Given that my total project budget for 2010 is $500 this is a substantial commitment. Now I just need to keep myself off Rhapsody and Amazon to keep the total music budget under control.
II.
Here's a devious little budget-stretcher: reporting the decision not to make a purchase. Case in point. Okay, I feel like a little bit of a dick breaking this one down, seeing as how they're aiming to save the planet and all. Maybe I'm a little jaded at this point about organizations that are capable of uttering the phrase "save the planet" without irony. Not to get sidetracked by the specifics of the charity in question, however: my issues here are design and user interface decisions and some underlying assumptions.
1. You better get some toilet paper 'cause your artwork is butt.
If you're Corporate Whoredogs Incorporated I guess it's just part of the parcel that your artwork will be some sort of generic design atrocity. Planet saving nonprofits I expect to scrounge up some real art. I have to look at that shit every time I play the album.
2. Hubris.
The headline on the description of this album is INTRODUCING WHAT IS QUITE POSSIBLY THE MOST IMPORTANT ALBUM EVER MADE. Inane hyperbole does not endear me to your cause.
3. Gone in 30 seconds.
Maybe it's not their fault, the byzantine requirements of the recording business being what they are. I don't even care anymore: seriously, the 30 second preview has got to go. You might as well not have any preview at all, save yourself some bandwidth. Once upon a time the listening room was a standard amenity of the record store - despite the fact that providing "full preview" literally physically degraded the media. Imagine how record sales would have reacted if store proprietors had habitually elbowed their way into the listening room, jammed the needle down wherever in the middle of a track, and then ripped the headphones off customers' heads after 30 seconds. Because that is the experience of the 30 second preview.
4. I bet they think this price point is a no-brainer
The cost of the album is the always inspiring $.99 per track OR a mere $9.99 for all 41 songs. I can't stress this enough: the order-of-magnitude paradigm of Compact Disc era pricing is no longer compelling. As a reminder: I just paid less than three dollars for 35 above-average tracks by Neil Young, one of the greatest living singer-songwriters in America. It is time to start taking heed of what Mr. Eno is saying (we'll get to it soon): we are selling whale blubber here in the era of the Model T. Catch up.
Fix all that and maybe I'll consider buying Volume 2. I do see that I've got yet another music service enterprise with a doofy name to check out. Seriously, "Nimbit"? What the fuck people.
III.
You could do a lot worse with 10 or 15 minutes of your time than to read this short article and interview with Brian Eno. Not least so you can find out what all the blubber talk is about.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at the Index Page
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
eMore eMusic
Well it's just been a big damn hullabaloo down at eMusic since I wrote about it yea, well over a year ago now. I spend way too much time on the damned internet, not to mention that I try to use all my eMusic credits each month, so you'd think I'd have been on top of the developments, but I wasn't. I only heard about it as a sort of sideline in another online discussion and had to go look it up when the change was practically on top of me.
In a nutshell eMusic added a major piece of the Sony catalog to their line-up, and restructured their pricing, and then a whole bunch of their customers totally lost their shit. To their discredit, eMusic managed to allow the whole thing to be framed as "Good news everyone - we're adding music from THE GREAT SATAN Sony which you are very excited about! By the way we're doubling your prices."
On the other hand, it has to be said that the dissenters were, on the whole, a lot of whiny little bitches.
I had it easy - I'm on the pay-a-year-in-advance pricing scheme (this is not a hard decision for me, I've got more than a year's worth of downloads in my fucking Saved for Later file as it is - on top of all the things I keep discovering I have to own right now - eMusic is basically my only music budget in these trying economic times we keep hearing about, so if you are a musician with something to sell and you aren't there you better be my good friend or it's basically tough shit, BUT ANYWAY) the point being my current contract under the old pricing schedule isn't up until mid-March, so I'm having a nice, long, and most importantly pre-paid opportunity to dig the ins and outs of eMusic's new pricing structure.
Yes, there is a price hike. It's not quite what some are making out, at least not at the sort of premium, year-in-advance level high rollers like myself are into. Under current pricing my credits (which are mostly equivalent to a single track download - so much more about that "mostly" in a moment) cost 24 cents each. Under the plan I'll convert to in March they'll cost 36 cents. The astute mathematician will note this is not in fact double, but rather half again the price, which in technical parlance is "not as bad." You will note also that it continues to be substantially less than iTunes or Amazon or pretty much anybody else. For worse value purchasing options the prices get up near 50 cents (setting aside the pay-as-you-go "booster packs" that can cost up to 60 cents a credit). With the recent addition of Warner Brothers catalog material the deal is all the sweeter for those of us who are not pure-Indie snobs.
Ah, but there are complications. Indeed: for no longer can one rely on the cost of an album being the cost of the number of tracks on that album. A substantial percentage of albums have adopted a uniform cost of 12 credits (for those following along with a calculator, this translates to around 4 to 6 dollars). Clearly this will be a bargain in some instances and a price hike in others, it all depends on how many songs are on the album. I imagine Jazz and Classical fans in particular will find the new setup uncongenial, for my own sake (and it's honestly not my intention to be some kind of big cheerleader for eMusic here) so far it has gone substantially in my favor. I've been getting better deals than ever.
But the album pricing introduces some weird new territory which is actually my whole purpose for writing this long consideration which will be read by none: for the most part you can still download album tracks a la carte from the albums, so what gives? Could you download tracks one at a time from an album with more than 12 tracks and pay more for the partial album than for the whole thing at once? I haven't actually tried it but as far as I can tell yes, you can. What about albums with less than 12 tracks? Well, there's where it gets interesting. Here you run into the other and entirely less positive (or even ambiguous) innovation in the new structure: "Album Only" tracks: tracks you can only get if you download the full album.
I imagine some albums are only available as full album downloads now, though I can't recall if I've seen that come up yet. The other (and in my experience, at least, more prevalent) example of the Album Only beast, which is, of course, the Hit Single. They are not identified as such, of course, but you don't exactly need a PhD to figure it out.
I wonder if the advent of this distinction is in fact an interesting insight into what has been rattling around in what passes for the mind of the Music Industry in their long and disastrous resistance of the digital download. It occurs to me that the industry must have something of a love-hate relationship with the Hit Single. One one hand, it is the indisputable Pitch King for their erstwhile product, the CD. The radio hit, the club favorite. But they hate to sell it alone, of course. They want you to buy the whole album. In this sense the original digital breakthroughs, the iTunes and Amazon deals, must have been bitter pills. No more would many pay 3 to 5 dollars for the venerable CD Single (a format that some, anyway, argue the industry had been trying to kill for years).
Hmm, 3 to 5 dollars, why does that sort of ballpark and spread seem familiar? A CD single can't cost substantially less than a full length CD to produce: likewise, a download of a track versus the download of an album is a matter of pennies. For that matter, in terms of production and promotion costs the difference between producing the hit and producing the rest of the album probably very quickly vanishes in the wash. The difference is all notional: the consumer is certainly not going to pay the same price for the single as for the album just because it costs the label about the same for them to have it.
It seems possible then that the real sticking point of the majors signing on with former Indie Star eMusic boiled down to that one issue: the minimum take for any particular production interpreted as transfer of the Hit Singles. 4 to 6 bucks, they're actually getting a bump.
HOWEVER, eMusic doesn't exist in a music vacuum and this creates some seriously odd situations for the canny consumer like myself.
Case Study One: Neil Young - Decade and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Decade. Classic Neil Young, from late 60s Buffalo Springfield through late 70s Stills Young Band. 35 tracks. eMusic Price: 12 credits. 12 Credits! Less than three bucks for me, if I grab it before March. Sixteen dollars from iTunes. Fifteen from Amazon. That there's a bargain. I'll be picking it up as soon as my credits refresh, tomorrow.
Decade contains many of the best songs from the solo album Everybody Knows This is Nowhere: Cinnamon Girl and Down By the River and what is apparently Young's inexplicable(to me) Hit Song, Cowgirl in the Sand (not that it's not a great song, it just seems odd hit material). Not a single Album Only track on Harvest or After the Gold Rush or Rust Never Sleeps. But Cowgirl in the Sand you have to buy the whole album to own. 12 credits for 7 tracks. It's an album worth owning, as some great stuff (not least the title track) is absent from Decade.
But the thing is, to reiterate, Cowgirl in the Sand is also on Decade. I had 6 leftover tracks, as it happened, tonight when I read about the Warner Brothers deal and went to see what kind of stuff was showing up. So I downloaded the 6 other tracks. Tomorrow, after I download Decade, I'll make a duplicate of Cowgirl in the Sand and change the metadata so that I can listen to Everybody Knows This is Nowhere in full without having to dick around. Strictly speaking, is this legal? Many will scoff that I even ask, but I think it's a legitimate question. Of course my bottom line answer is Warner Brothers can just come and get me if they think they can handle a piece of this. I'm pretty sure Neil Young would just laugh. And then again, I've already bought Cowgirl In the Sand, in one and another format, 2 times before in past incarnations. I may still have the LP somewhere: the tapes are long gone. Finally, I could have been more attentive and downloaded only the tracks that I wasn't going to get tomorrow, instead of everything but Cowgirl in the Sand. But come on. We're talking about a few quarters here, give or take. And I felt like listening to Cinnamon Girl right away.
Case Study Two: Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run.
The more conventional and irritating example. Great album, if you aren't too real to like Bruce Sprinsteen, as I am surely not. 8 tracks. 40 minutes, a short album. 12 credits. Grr, a rip job! The single Album Only track? Yeah, just guess. Okay, so now I'm quibbling over a buck or less, but you know, the principle. But here's the thing: Amazon didn't negotiate Album-Only tracks. I can buy Born to Run solo for $1.29. I think I'll go ahead and do that right now. That took less than a minute. Tomorrow when I've got credits at eMusic again I'll download the other 7 tracks on the album. Making my total cost 7 X $.24 + $1.29 or 2.97. Wait a minute! 12 X $.24 = $2.88! Damn it, I didn't do the math and now those bastards have screwed me for 9 cents!
I seriously considered erasing this case study out of embarrassment, but what the hell, you gotta stay real. Well played, Columbia Records, you imprint of Columbia/Epic Label Group, a property of Sony Music Entertainment! You win... This time...
I'm still finding the world of the legitimate digital music download on demand to be entertaining, anyway. If I had some money I'd tell you about who else is doing it. Perhaps another day.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at the Index Page
In a nutshell eMusic added a major piece of the Sony catalog to their line-up, and restructured their pricing, and then a whole bunch of their customers totally lost their shit. To their discredit, eMusic managed to allow the whole thing to be framed as "Good news everyone - we're adding music from THE GREAT SATAN Sony which you are very excited about! By the way we're doubling your prices."
On the other hand, it has to be said that the dissenters were, on the whole, a lot of whiny little bitches.
I had it easy - I'm on the pay-a-year-in-advance pricing scheme (this is not a hard decision for me, I've got more than a year's worth of downloads in my fucking Saved for Later file as it is - on top of all the things I keep discovering I have to own right now - eMusic is basically my only music budget in these trying economic times we keep hearing about, so if you are a musician with something to sell and you aren't there you better be my good friend or it's basically tough shit, BUT ANYWAY) the point being my current contract under the old pricing schedule isn't up until mid-March, so I'm having a nice, long, and most importantly pre-paid opportunity to dig the ins and outs of eMusic's new pricing structure.
Yes, there is a price hike. It's not quite what some are making out, at least not at the sort of premium, year-in-advance level high rollers like myself are into. Under current pricing my credits (which are mostly equivalent to a single track download - so much more about that "mostly" in a moment) cost 24 cents each. Under the plan I'll convert to in March they'll cost 36 cents. The astute mathematician will note this is not in fact double, but rather half again the price, which in technical parlance is "not as bad." You will note also that it continues to be substantially less than iTunes or Amazon or pretty much anybody else. For worse value purchasing options the prices get up near 50 cents (setting aside the pay-as-you-go "booster packs" that can cost up to 60 cents a credit). With the recent addition of Warner Brothers catalog material the deal is all the sweeter for those of us who are not pure-Indie snobs.
Ah, but there are complications. Indeed: for no longer can one rely on the cost of an album being the cost of the number of tracks on that album. A substantial percentage of albums have adopted a uniform cost of 12 credits (for those following along with a calculator, this translates to around 4 to 6 dollars). Clearly this will be a bargain in some instances and a price hike in others, it all depends on how many songs are on the album. I imagine Jazz and Classical fans in particular will find the new setup uncongenial, for my own sake (and it's honestly not my intention to be some kind of big cheerleader for eMusic here) so far it has gone substantially in my favor. I've been getting better deals than ever.
But the album pricing introduces some weird new territory which is actually my whole purpose for writing this long consideration which will be read by none: for the most part you can still download album tracks a la carte from the albums, so what gives? Could you download tracks one at a time from an album with more than 12 tracks and pay more for the partial album than for the whole thing at once? I haven't actually tried it but as far as I can tell yes, you can. What about albums with less than 12 tracks? Well, there's where it gets interesting. Here you run into the other and entirely less positive (or even ambiguous) innovation in the new structure: "Album Only" tracks: tracks you can only get if you download the full album.
I imagine some albums are only available as full album downloads now, though I can't recall if I've seen that come up yet. The other (and in my experience, at least, more prevalent) example of the Album Only beast, which is, of course, the Hit Single. They are not identified as such, of course, but you don't exactly need a PhD to figure it out.
I wonder if the advent of this distinction is in fact an interesting insight into what has been rattling around in what passes for the mind of the Music Industry in their long and disastrous resistance of the digital download. It occurs to me that the industry must have something of a love-hate relationship with the Hit Single. One one hand, it is the indisputable Pitch King for their erstwhile product, the CD. The radio hit, the club favorite. But they hate to sell it alone, of course. They want you to buy the whole album. In this sense the original digital breakthroughs, the iTunes and Amazon deals, must have been bitter pills. No more would many pay 3 to 5 dollars for the venerable CD Single (a format that some, anyway, argue the industry had been trying to kill for years).
Hmm, 3 to 5 dollars, why does that sort of ballpark and spread seem familiar? A CD single can't cost substantially less than a full length CD to produce: likewise, a download of a track versus the download of an album is a matter of pennies. For that matter, in terms of production and promotion costs the difference between producing the hit and producing the rest of the album probably very quickly vanishes in the wash. The difference is all notional: the consumer is certainly not going to pay the same price for the single as for the album just because it costs the label about the same for them to have it.
It seems possible then that the real sticking point of the majors signing on with former Indie Star eMusic boiled down to that one issue: the minimum take for any particular production interpreted as transfer of the Hit Singles. 4 to 6 bucks, they're actually getting a bump.
HOWEVER, eMusic doesn't exist in a music vacuum and this creates some seriously odd situations for the canny consumer like myself.
Case Study One: Neil Young - Decade and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Decade. Classic Neil Young, from late 60s Buffalo Springfield through late 70s Stills Young Band. 35 tracks. eMusic Price: 12 credits. 12 Credits! Less than three bucks for me, if I grab it before March. Sixteen dollars from iTunes. Fifteen from Amazon. That there's a bargain. I'll be picking it up as soon as my credits refresh, tomorrow.
Decade contains many of the best songs from the solo album Everybody Knows This is Nowhere: Cinnamon Girl and Down By the River and what is apparently Young's inexplicable(to me) Hit Song, Cowgirl in the Sand (not that it's not a great song, it just seems odd hit material). Not a single Album Only track on Harvest or After the Gold Rush or Rust Never Sleeps. But Cowgirl in the Sand you have to buy the whole album to own. 12 credits for 7 tracks. It's an album worth owning, as some great stuff (not least the title track) is absent from Decade.
But the thing is, to reiterate, Cowgirl in the Sand is also on Decade. I had 6 leftover tracks, as it happened, tonight when I read about the Warner Brothers deal and went to see what kind of stuff was showing up. So I downloaded the 6 other tracks. Tomorrow, after I download Decade, I'll make a duplicate of Cowgirl in the Sand and change the metadata so that I can listen to Everybody Knows This is Nowhere in full without having to dick around. Strictly speaking, is this legal? Many will scoff that I even ask, but I think it's a legitimate question. Of course my bottom line answer is Warner Brothers can just come and get me if they think they can handle a piece of this. I'm pretty sure Neil Young would just laugh. And then again, I've already bought Cowgirl In the Sand, in one and another format, 2 times before in past incarnations. I may still have the LP somewhere: the tapes are long gone. Finally, I could have been more attentive and downloaded only the tracks that I wasn't going to get tomorrow, instead of everything but Cowgirl in the Sand. But come on. We're talking about a few quarters here, give or take. And I felt like listening to Cinnamon Girl right away.
Case Study Two: Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run.
The more conventional and irritating example. Great album, if you aren't too real to like Bruce Sprinsteen, as I am surely not. 8 tracks. 40 minutes, a short album. 12 credits. Grr, a rip job! The single Album Only track? Yeah, just guess. Okay, so now I'm quibbling over a buck or less, but you know, the principle. But here's the thing: Amazon didn't negotiate Album-Only tracks. I can buy Born to Run solo for $1.29. I think I'll go ahead and do that right now. That took less than a minute. Tomorrow when I've got credits at eMusic again I'll download the other 7 tracks on the album. Making my total cost 7 X $.24 + $1.29 or 2.97. Wait a minute! 12 X $.24 = $2.88! Damn it, I didn't do the math and now those bastards have screwed me for 9 cents!
I seriously considered erasing this case study out of embarrassment, but what the hell, you gotta stay real. Well played, Columbia Records, you imprint of Columbia/Epic Label Group, a property of Sony Music Entertainment! You win... This time...
I'm still finding the world of the legitimate digital music download on demand to be entertaining, anyway. If I had some money I'd tell you about who else is doing it. Perhaps another day.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at the Index Page
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