Phree as in PhreakShow

Free as in lunch (though not as in effort): the other side of eBook econmics

2012-01-13T09:48:00.005-06:00

So I was complaining not that long ago about eBook pricing, in which you could end up paying twice as much for Amazon to shoot you what probably represents $0.000001 worth of data for them as you would pay to have someone in California mail you a like-new used copy of a book whose author died something like 25 years ago.

There is though another side to the economics of the eBook that I only slightly hinted at in that essay, the issue of (very roughly speaking) everything through 1922, which is to say, the U.S. public domain. Which is a lot, a lot of books.

Many of which are available absolutely free of charge! This is actually pretty amazingly incredible, of course. This entrances me in a way that the prospect of reading Neal Stephenson's latest three and a half pounder without suffering back strain doesn't touch, despite this latter promise being (given my actual historical reading habits) a far more practical argument for my acquiring one of these devices. To hell with Dune, who can complain about free?! Ah, watch me.

The fantasy that dances before my sparkling eyes is of hooking my freshly unwrapped Kindle (I'm sick of carrying water for Amazon but I'm pretty resigned to this being the fact of the eventual matter) and zapping an everloving bolus of data from my computer into it - et voilà - a vertiginous library of classical literature at my fingertips, intellectual fodder for a lifetime, quick and handy access to all those smarty-pants references the erudite continually sneak into their prose.

To be honest, while I do actually read this kind of thing from time to time, what really gets me is the whole library in your pocket thing. It'll doubtless be a matter of zero wonder to the kid, who is learning to read in the basically unexamined assumption that if you want to know anything, Daddy will go to the computer (he will not turn it on, it is always on) and the information will be found readily at hand. But to me - someone who quite literally came of age alongside the personal computer (and Lo, JMH didst attempt to program an adventure game in BASIC on a TRS 80, and verily didst he fail mightily) it is The Future, the stuff of fiction. My great library of human wisdom, in the palm of my hand. Glorious.

The reality of course collides with my fantasy forthwith. Even as my conviction to get on the eReader bandwagon grows, my initial forays into the world of free text rapidly demonstrate I can expect to be regularly tossed between the twin horns of Lack of Curation and Unreliability of Source.

Overabundance. Checking out the statistics page (which has 6 "likes" on Facebook, what does it all mean?!) I learn that first off, I also literally came of age alongside Project Gutenberg - being how the first text was uploaded just the month before I was, er, downloaded... But more relevantly that as of July 2011 some 36,701 books had been uploaded. Surely one to two miles of conventional bookshelf. Too much! As usual the best curating offered on the spot is popularity... handy if I want to know that A Christmas Carol, The Kama Sutra and the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes summarize the rough mindset of the Vox Populi (oh man have I got a fanfic mashup for you... Sherlock Holmes' Kama Sutra Christmas, anyone?).

I thought I was onto something of a start when I stumbled on the Harvard Classics - doubtless a shibboleth of an intellectual mindset, virtually untroubled by any shadow of what we now call multiculturalism, that belongs firmly in the 19th century. Even so! A manageable collection, officially vetted by an Extremely Erudite Gentleman.

Immediately I started running into issues. My dreams of finding this thing neatly packaged as a single one-click zip file vanished in a trice. But that wasn't the start of the end of it. Mainly I discovered (not unsurprisingly) that a free, downloadable file of an electronic book was a bit of a black box. Part of the problem of course is that I don't have a hardware eReader - yet - so I'm trying to simulate the experience with a free desktop reader... which I just discovered got eaten by Amazon at some point in the recent past which explains some stuff... Suffice to say it ain't easy. Some test files wouldn't open. A lot appeared to be just a straight whack of text - not so much as a table of contents. This is non-ideal. The first one I manage to get open at all pops up on my reader with the title Classic_Harvard Classics, and call me shallow if you like but its frontpiece image is this:

That's full size, mind you. Displeasing. But truly, readability is the big pig in this poke. No contents, no chapters, formatting (or more specifically lack thereof) that's hard on the eyes. Clearly the big pile of free text is not going to be so sweet to parse. Maybe my reading technology is to blame (it is surely at least part to blame) but seeing what I see there I find it hard to believe the state of the art will do much better with the source material. Readable in the technical sense of the word, but not nearly up to my standard for what I'd call a book.

Clearly somebody should be doing something about this.

My wild impulses has me quickly thinking about launching the Kickstarter project, you know, I think I could happily spend several years of my life turning these text dumps which represent the (noble, valuable, decent and correct, mind you) output of Project Gutenberg into something you would actually want on your virtual bookshelf. My forays into business tend to suggest I do not have a firm finger on the pulse of the consumer, though, and experience tells me that obvious things that do not end up getting done by friendly volunteers tend to prove more difficult than they seem on face value. Leave that one on the back burner. My virtual, infinite, increasingly cluttered back burner, shouldn't there be an app for that?

Indeed a certain amount of this is ongoing by the looks of things. My researches continue and I suppose my free virtual bookshelf will slowly accrete as I start to save the odd pennies towards the eventual, inevitable (it has started to feel, finally, of late) purchase. But I realize I've distinguished in my mind another gradient of freedom on the as beer/as freedom axis... The well of public domain content is increasingly both those things, but acquiring and consuming it is nothing like free from effort, yet. And my pocket library is still mainly a dream.

Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 5: The Call of the World

2011-12-27T10:48:00.003-06:00

Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

Not quite at the end of the free trial period I decided the World of Warcraft was probably not singing to my better angels: the household entertainment budget seemed like something that was due for a stoic reevaluation rather than an impulsive expansion and in just over a week I had rediscovered in myself a caution-worthy inclination towards shoveling solitary hours into the Grind - that low level, light-skill playing towards the gradual but inexorable accumulation of treasure, levels, virtual skills (as opposed to the real kind whose acquisition is far from automatic regardless of the time you sink).

Much has been made of the dangers of immersion in these new virtual realms, and I tend to think it is pretty much all invented hysteria. Escape is always going to be an attraction in an epistemologically ambiguous and frequently egregiously unpleasant physical universe and there are always going to be people who ride escape to genuine ruin - whether the medium is sherry, bridge, novels or glue. Obsession over new media is just something to sell papers with, another bit of grist for the feuilletons. Nevertheless, I let my subscription lapse. I would hope perhaps that someday I will sort out my personal issues of money, time, and personal balance to the extent of allowing me to really enjoy the possibilities of one of these new social environments.

I left my dwarf in an Inn with the beast he’d just tamed (new “skill”) at his feet - I spent a few coins to buy him a drink, even. It is all a goof, narrative wrapped in technological moonshine, but we’d spent a good few hours together nonetheless. In some sense I think of him as being there still.

That wraps it up for Nine Nights in Azeroth, and I think for the 2011 edition of Phree as in Phreakshow unless something AMAZING happens. What’s next? No idea.

Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 4: Country Mouse, City Mouse

2011-12-27T10:23:00.002-06:00

Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

Right from the get go I had this social interaction problem in World of Warcraft. It gave me a strong Playground vibe: everyone is ignoring me and that’s cool, but at any minute someone bigger and meaner than me might wander by and pants me. A lot of this came out of not taking the time to learn how to properly socially navigate the world. I didn’t know any action commands not related to combat or quest negotiation, or even how to start a conversation with another player. WoW was the first multiplayer online game I’d played. The exemplar of this weird hangup was a moment when I saw some dude tussling with a bear and noticed I had a bead on the beast with my rifle-type weapon, so assisted him with a shot. He noticed where the help had come from and executed a neat little bow and made some innocuous comment like “nice, thanks.” I had no idea what to do with this so I ran off.

So I’m running around basically grinding (which was 90% of what I did in my brief sojourn through Azeroth) and suddenly a name I do not recognize is “whispering” to me and my immediate reaction is oh what now?! Am I about to be subjected to teasing? Invited to participate in some collective action in which I’ll embarrass myself through ineptitude? Subjected to the pitch for some scam? It wasn’t until the person whispering was inviting me to connect on Skype and I recognized their handle there that I realized I was in fact talking to the same friend who had introduced me to the game in the first place - they were just inhabiting an avatar I hadn’t encountered yet - and deduced that the “whispering” thing just meant they were communicating privately.

So we got connected on Skype and my friend invited me to run around with him a while and see the sights. I’m still ridiculously susceptible to these technological “holy Brave New World, Batman!” moments and interacting with someone across town in a virtual world while simultaneously talking to them via a phoneless, internet mediated, free communication protocol was reasonably mind-blowing.

At this point I was more or less the character I’d started as, this drab dwarf in dull leather clothes: I’d acquired a few indifferent pieces of marginally better gear. So my friend shows up as some sort of wizard, resplendent in all this sparkling attire and dire-looking magical stave, attended by arcane familiars, occasionally shooting off sparks or bursts of flame... it was all very Country Mouse, City Mouse. Immediately he is showing me all this amazing stuff I was not ready to get to yet at my lowly level, transgressing at least some of those invisible walls I’d noticed at the outset.

And so I finally figured out the real hook of this kind of game: ironically (and already clichéd) it was all about the social. At its heart World of Warcraft’s actual game is not all that damn much more sophisticated than Paper Mario; certainly it doesn’t bring a lot more innovation to gameplay. The radical expansion occurs with the introduction of other people in real time. This is one of the 21st century truths of technology, I think: friends are the killer app. My nine nights in Azeroth certainly gave me a lot to think about in terms of the philosophy of gaming, as evidenced by the fact that I’m wrapping up a series of essays about it after almost 3 years, but my favorite memory of it is that night, being a rube, getting shown the bright lights by my friend from the city.

Welcoming the latest addition to our bandwagon

2011-12-12T19:55:00.011-06:00

SECOND UPDATE: $1,006,996.17
This is the Paypal balance shown on a screen cap Louis C.K. posted in his latest update. I don't mean to be a suck up but I'm fairly impressed by how he is handling this. Making people feel good about having spent their money might also just be the smartest game there is in this wild west of pure digital distribution.

UPDATE: Louis C.K. posted a lengthy and interesting follow-up discussing the economics and results of his experiment. It's a good inside look at taking the reins of a creative project with a significant budget. I won't give away the ending but I can say I saw a lot of online commentary suggesting that this probably didn't represent much of an investment or much of a risk for him, which is clearly untrue.

You know: no snark, in fact. It's true, people like Louis C.K. do tend to be a little "look at this amazing idea I invented" when they embrace the paradigm of self-publishing in the digital realm. But you know, so what. It's still significant, and very positive, for an A list performer whose star is distinctly rising to go this direction, and to do it right - offering his latest performance recording as a high quality, unencumbered file, a straight download in a versatile format, for a modest price.

There's nothing really to complain about: you can moan about Paypal but you know, seriously: Paypal won. They have just simply won at internet. Yes they occasionally unleash their hounds on cringing bundles of fuzzy kittens and bunny rabbits for no particular reason. You want to complain about Paypal, at this point your only recourse would be to start a service that actually competes. I suppose you could point a finger at the price point as well, five bucks is cheap but it isn't necessarily stellar for an hour of entertainment. But this starts to get into quibbling that puts me in mind of this Penny Arcade cartoon about Braid: or as it was succinctly put nearby: "You’re mad about five dollars? What? Shove your five dollars up your stupid ass."

I thought C.K.'s statement asking people not to torrent it was pretty reasonable, all things considered. I've always said that J.R.R. Tolkien's comments in the first authorized Ballantine paperback edition of his trilogy was a good model for this sort of thing, and bears repeating:

It seems to me a grave discourtesy, to say no more, to issue my book without even a polite note informing me of the project... However that may be, this paperback edition and no other has been published with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it, and no other. And if the many kind readers who have encouraged me with their letters will add to their courtesy by referring friends or enquirers to Ballantine Books, I shall be very grateful.

I think if content industries in general and individual creators in particular had focused on this message from the beginning, this message of courtesy, of gratitude, and of enlisting one's partisans in the service of recommending others to the "authorized edition" of whatever work, there's little question it would have done much more good at little cost compared to the Keystone Kops slapstick of their ongoing attempts to stuff the digital genie back in the bottle via legal sword rattling, and useless DRM. Louis C.K.'s appeal certainly falls more to the former end of the spectrum.

I will say it would be nice, though, to see more creators engage this question in a more nuanced way, because it's actually a damn interesting grey area that really lights up the difference in most people's mind between the law and ethics and where both - but particularly ethics - are very slippery indeed. I'd like to hear someone owning up and engaging the fact that they are copyright cheats, because EVERYBODY is a copyright cheat. Everybody makes mix CDs, rips CDs they check out from the library and decide they really like, and watches or listens to what basically amount to bootlegs on YouTube and the like. Don't tell me there's any comedian out there between the ages of 35 and 55 who never wore out a bootleg cassette of some friend's comedy album when they were a teenager. It would be nice to see someone with significant skin in the game take on the question of advocating the ethical right of the creator to realize the benefit of an exclusive right to copy their own production without merely invoking the simplistic analogy of theft. It would be nice to see someone wrestle with the unquestionable benefits of things like the proliferation of old, often out of print intellectual property finding its way online by the agency of fan curators. I don't expect to hear it from Louis C.K. but it would be nice to hear it from someone.

Will Netflix's furious backpedaling arrest its share price tailspin?

2011-10-10T09:34:00.005-05:00

And the answer is - as a non-stockholder, I don't really care. Now you probably recall my most recent Phreakshow post, in which I:

1) Reiterated my opinion that recent Netflix price increases were reasonable and expected and that people complaining about them were being "whiney", but
2) Complained about getting business communications in the form of "personal" communications from corporation executives
3) Complained about fake corporate apologies that don't actually fix anything
4) Called out the proposed division of Netflix into the Qwikster DVD service and the Netflix streaming service for adding complexity and organizational effort to the customer experience with no attendant consumer benefit
5) Offered thinly veiled insinuations that the Netflix business decisions were being driven by CEO Reed Hastings having a mid-life crisis over having made his fortune basically running a glorified direct-mail business, and finally
6) Pointed out that the real problem was Netflix's poor on-demand selection.

So, it's no secret that NFLX share prices have been diligently headed for the toilet since hitting an all-time July high near $300, and in particular have been in a scary plunge since mid-September, when they fell off the $200 cliff and proceeded to languish in the low $100s since. Given the nearly universal derision the Qwikster announcement got I was none too surprised (but certainly gratified) to get a notice in my inbox this morning letting me know that Netflix had decided to call the whole thing off.

Hey, wait a minute, let's take a glance over the notable qualities of this email...

1) It's a straightforward business announcement from "The Netflix Team"
2) It eschews explicit apology and affirms the necessity of recent price increases, but acknowledges customers didn't want the businesses to be split
3) Reverses the business split decision ("no change... no Qwikster") and finally
4) Announces a raft of additions to the streaming library and asserts a commitment to continually improving the streaming service.

Damn it Netflix, my day rate for business strategy consultation to publicly traded companies is $2500 and that is cheap, Greenspan charges six figures and look where his advice has gotten us. I've got to stop giving this gold away for free.

I suppose the other interpretation is that I have no credentials whatsoever to analyze business so I just rehash the mind-numbingly obvious but seriously, how likely is that?

And Reed... Sorry about the mid-life crisis crack.

Parsing Netflix's Bizarre Non-Apology Business Announcement

2011-09-19T09:07:00.003-05:00

I'm on record saying that I felt like people were being whiney when the started complaining about the separate and jack price maneuver Netflix pulled a while back. I'd been happy with the service, which at the end of the day provided easy access to a DVD library I'd never have been able to tap otherwise, at a reasonable price. They even dropped the price on me once. I got streaming for a long while for free, and seriously - when you're given something new to try out for free, who doesn't understand that this is an introductory offer?

Now I'm trying to figure out the next move, a mass email from CEO Reed Hastings (connected to a slightly longer blog post that invites all and sundry to Facebook back at it which, yeah, go fuck the devil in hell Reed Hastings) which is a sterling classic of that beloved genre "the corporation is sincerely sorry it inadvertently (and through no fault of its own) hurt your feelings while doing what honestly is just the best for everyone involved".

I was going to gloss over this but man I've got to take just a moment and note what's wrong with this sort of bullshit. First off, when you start a communication out with something like "I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation", the mind-space I am instantly transported to is a family meeting called by the liberal and enlightened and yet still somehow traditionally patriarchal Dad in one of the more serious episodes of an 80s-90s era sit com. An "Eight is Enough," "Family Ties," "Cosby Show" kind of touchy feely moment is imminent. I am an adult, a customer, a professional in my own right, okay? You want to communicate with me about the business we conduct by mutual consent, be a fucking professional.

Second, you did not hurt my feelings because you are not a person. I understand that Reed Hastings is a person but he is not a person I have any personal relationship with. Businesses do not hurt my feelings. I engage in commerce with them and the outcome is satisfaction, indifference, or me being pissed off. When you piss me off you can make one of two choices, you can apologize for screwing up and correct your error or you can say well, this is the way it is and if you don't like it you know where the door is. Communications like this one profess to be doing the former while actually delivering the latter. Do you think I'm stupid? Yeah that is actually a rhetorical question.

The only nut of any substance in this letter is that they are concretely dividing the businesses into the DVD mailing business, which they are renaming Qwikster, and the Streaming business, which is staying Netflix. I have to honestly consider the possibility that they chose a deliberately terrible name as a method of obfuscating discussion about what the real underlying business strategy at work is. One is left otherwise with the conclusion that nobody on the branding team bothered to notice, for example, the existing Qwikster account on Twitter, for example, or thought about the various phonetic associations with the name, such as the erstwhile identity of some transient facet of the Amway empire, or the mascot of a distinctly low-rent-tending powdered milk flavoring product...

All of which could distract a person from asking, what exactly is the benefit of this to me again? Because it seems like the only practical impact on me is going to be having to deal with twice as many websites and twice as many bills. The added video game upgrade might actually be something I want but I'd have to wait and see what the cost will be. The way my entertainment dollar is stretched right now, chances are it will be too high.

The explanation that the businesses are being separated because it is too difficult to keep them integrated seems pretty suspect, in fact. It's a straight loser for the customer, added complexity with no added functionality (that couldn't have been added to the service as it stands), and honestly, how much harder could it have been to separate the businesses internally while maintaining one name, one point for billing, and one point of entry on the internet (and for that matter, transacting the tiny bit of information relevant between the businesses, i.e. past viewing and rating information)?

A believable explanation (and I am very far from original in this suggestion) is that the DVD business is boring, and stagnant: it has gained more or less maximum market share, its price margins are mired in the physical realities of packaging and mailing - it is basically running a direct mail business, the kind of place that sends you that Valu-Pak of coupons that you throw into recycling without even opening it, which is, like, a very uncool business for a hep only barely fifty movin' and shakin' entrepreneur type to be in charge of. They are prepping it to sell, in a nutshell, to someone who will maybe maintain it in some semblance of its current form, or maybe steadily convert it into the ugly mail-order cousin of Redbox, where you can get your new releases mailed to you 2-3 weeks after the fact, and that weird little indie documentary you wanted? Yeah since the last copy of that broke in transit that is on backorder. ETA? Can't really say, no way to tell. Not the service you signed up for? No, it's not is it, it's QWIKSTER!

Of course the irony of all this is that I'm entirely ready to go all-streaming, I've got a fat ethernet pipe AND a robust wifi network in my damn basement, both connected to the teevee by various appliances. The fact that data disks are being driven around town and hand carried from the street to my home is literally offensive to my intellect. None of which (and none of the above corporate blather) addresses the tiny problem that Netflix's streaming selection is still just terrible.

Who knows, in other words, the enterprise is obviously in the grips of corporate aspiration which bears little resemblance to what customers want. I'm waiting to see how much of a pain in the ass dual account maintenance is, and what the details on that video game add-on are, and of course what goes down with the DVD-by-mail side. I'm rapidly going to lose my patience with Netflix streaming if they do not start beefing up their selection pronto. And I'm wondering if there's a very sincere email from Jeff Bezos in my future, letting me know that Amazon will be spinning off its physical item delivery business, for, you know, really everyone's good... maybe into an exciting new business we'll call, hmm, "Dumpster"?

Speaking of Media Empires

2011-09-10T11:15:00.004-05:00

If I could wave the magic wand I would be able to make a modest income (say that of a middle manager at a reasonably successful non-profit) engaging in my endless tinkering with text and sound and image (the last of these has received very short shrift in my digital presentation but it
meant a fair bit to me once).

In fact I suspect that if I really threw myself into it I could succeed in this ambition, at least with writing, even in the treacherous mutant-infested cesspool that is 21st century freelancing. I strongly suspect that I would effectively end up working 60 hours a week and 80 percent of that would be hustling. I hate hustling. I'm bad at it and it makes me feel sad. Which is why I'm leaning strongly towards just getting a job: it's more straightforward, more lucrative, and it doesn't burden the "art" with any responsibility of financial sustenance. A better person (or a better artist) might find some method of avoiding these compromises. I in fact think I feel okay about how it is all trending.

But if I had my druthers... if I had my magic wand... if I had an oil tycoon instead of a country minister for a father and a fat trust fund... Maybe I'd try to get the Media Empire rolling - it's hard to resist in the face of how utterly dumb so much of this in-between stage current media distribution paradigm is set up. My own little despotic News Corp., which would subsidize these idiosyncratic scrawlings and all the rest.

So it has been interesting (by way of revealing that these personal musings have all been virtually unrelated preamble), if intermittently envy-inspiring, to watch the development of the New Media Empire that is Penny Arcade (who don't need any linkies from the likes of me) happening in real time. It's one of these things that just absolutely shouldn't have worked. There's no need to retread the story, or to point out the qualities that are making the thing a legitimate empire which now has enough of a moat dug in its top tier events and merch that it's not likely to be easily toppled by, say, waning popularity of the core strip (not to say this is happening or going to anytime soon).

Over the last several years the maturity of the thing as a business has been evident in a perceptibly increasing drive to diversify the media product base. There's a video section now, a couple of games that did well enough (though apparently not well enough to finish the proposed trilogy). The strip hosts the occasional experimental continuities, some of which are spinning off products of their own.

Finally I have arrived at my point, which is you should check out The Trenches (starting out at the beginning there, for reasons I'll shortly elucidate). I've been on the fence about it. It's a weird strip, relatively devoid of jokes and gags, defined by continuity and off to a very slow start (the opposite of Penny Arcade in other words). It's on something like the tenth strip and I just this day figured it out and was surprised to find myself somewhat actually invested in the story. What it is, in fact, is a three-panel comic narrative serial, which is something of an odd beast, the kind of thing that thrived in the golden age of newspapers.

And now, because of the incredibly slow start and the absolutely terrible job they're doing at presenting it (the thing has been around for a solid month now and the "New Reader" link still directs to a perplexing content-free placeholder page as opposed to, say, some indication of what the hell you're reading, directions to start at the beginning if you need to, directions to a "catch up" page with links and precis of the comics or something so I can get caught up when I forget the thing exists for a couple weeks as opposed to the endless clicking around with these wretched things - << < > >> - oh and how about a feed link since the "what's new" ticker thing at the top of the redesigned PA page says there is "new Trenches" 100% of the time and consequently is right twice a week but contains no useful information by virtue of being wrong the other 5 days, and don't even get me started about the old-link-puking broken PA feed) - not to mention the terrible job they're doing at promoting it (the what's new ticker, again, by virtue of saying the same stuff pretty much all the time, has become invisible to me and I presume anyone else who visits the main PA site regularly), it is never mentioned on the PA weblog, which has got to be one of the more abused, under-utilized bully-pulpits in the internet, co-creator Scott Kurtz doesn't even have a LINK to the damn thing on his PvP site, no not even a teensy-weensy one under the "Other Stuff I Do" heading in the lower left-hand corner of his website (P.S. Mr. Kurtz the PvP page also lacks a link their to your "TV" show you did a large and frankly undeservedly successful Kickstarter for which is also posted at the biggest gaming webcomic site on the internet as you might recall, what, are you afraid of diluting your brand? ARRGH), by virtue of all this, I'm worried the damn thing is going to tank and get scrapped now that I'm just getting interested.

The preceding paragraph was a sentence approximately half of which was parenthetical asides which raises questions about my credentials in critiquing readability but then again I don't exactly have a payroll over here. Seriously, Penny Arcade, do you not have anyone doing user experience over there? Because if you do they need an assistant or something.

eBooks and the moat of legacy media

2011-09-08T23:43:00.004-05:00

I have a moderate collection of books. Too many, it seems, as I find myself adding another shelving unit to the fray and going through yet another cull of the detritus trying to get down to a collection that will actually fit on the shelves. Most of the obvious chaff was ejected in several prior purges and now it's getting down to battling with my ingrained proclivities... the mid-twentieth-century how to manuals that call to me from the shelves of friends of public library bookstores, that I almost never open, the works of great literature I generally fervently avoid but apparently feel add some sort of intellectual weight to my stacks, and most of all the indifferent mass-market paperback bindings of so-called "classic" works of speculative fiction, mostly science fiction. Which is what got me thinking about Dune.

I have no idea how this 1984 Berkley Books edition of what is frequently cited as the bestselling work of science fiction of all time ended up in my possession, aside from the fact that I'm confident I didn't buy it new, and have certainly owned it less than half of its 27 year sojourn on this earth. It's in good enough shape for reading: the binding is intact though well creased on the spine. The only marks of prior ownership it bears are the words effluvia and sussuration (sic) scrawled in small but untidy lowercase ballpoint printing inside the back cover, legacy of some reader presumably out to increase their word power. The pages are uniformly yellow but not brittle. Aside from the random vocab jotting this precis would probably account for an uncomfortable number of the books in my collection, hence the necessity of vigilant culling: when a collection like this won't fit on the shelves and starts to develop "symmetrical book stacking" behaviors you aren't a collector, you're merely a hoarder.

I've read this particular copy at least once. I read Dune at least once before that, probably my dad's copy when I was a teenager. I may have read it once before, maybe the one I own, but I doubt I've read it more than three times or I would remember it better. I barely remember it at all, other than the broad sketch of the plot. Coming across my dingy paperback inspired no desire to reread it at all. What it mainly got me thinking about were the economics.

This edition, the 31st printing, sold new for $3.95. What I actually paid for mine I don't know, as it bears no mark of its used price, but I'd be surprised if it was more than two dollars. Inflation calculators tells me $3.95 is around eight dollars in today's money. I recently picked up a new copy of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's seminal The Mote in God's Eye, cover price $7.99, so I guess reprints of classic sci-fi books are following standard inflationary models pretty well.

Conventionally printed books, that is. Out of curiosity I clicked around Amazon and found that the Kindle edition of the 40th Anniversary edition of Dune was available for immediate download for... $14.99.

This is the only legal eBook edition of Dune cursory searching produced and I can't help but think it an indication that the economics of eBooks are still a little bit, well, fucked. This is a book that is so thoroughly already done being written (let us not speak of the endless sequels) that its author has been dead for a good quarter of a century. It is being sold in a form that requires no physical production and no transportation and it costs almost twice as much as a bog standard new paperback, and that is if you are utterly unwilling to shop around at all. To say nothing of the $139 I'd have to shell out to be able to read it in the first place. I'm willing to allow that the economics of publishing are no doubt complicated and that the market has produced this as a "fair" price. But the undeniable conclusion it leads me to is that eBooks are still very much a commodity intended for individuals with substantial disposable income.

I haven't pulled the trigger on acquiring one of these electronic bookulators yet, which would probably not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me: I am a notorious late adopter of new technologies. The prices are getting into the range where it is rapidly becoming an inevitability, but things like this are still sufficient to give me pause. What would seem to be the substantial economic benefits of not actually printing words on sheets of paper, cutting them, binding them, boxing and shipping them, don't appear to be making it into the economics of conventionally published, mass-produced popular fiction with much reliability. In the end this may not really impact my eventual purchase of a digital reader much: I'm far more drawn by the allure of the deep font of the public domain available for free through agencies like Project Gutenberg. But I also do not think I will stop dipping into the massive moat of printing's long legacy - all those billions of cheap, crummy paperbacks, aging very slowly on shelves, old enough to vote, to drink, in some cases old enough to be having a solid mid-life crisis in some Minnesota basement (my almost flawless copy of Critique of Pure Reason was printed in 1966). And I don't think I will be replacing my copy of Dune with digital ephemera any time soon.

kick in the pants

2011-05-19T10:07:00.004-05:00

"It is necessary for me... To apply myself industriously to whatever business I take in hand, and not divert my mind from my business by any foolish project of growing suddenly rich"

Benjamin Franklin

I am as susceptible to the allure of the idea of "sudden" riches as the next person, and perhaps it is innate (or at least as good as innate in a world where by the designs of the already rich we are inundated almost perpetually by stark totemic spectacles scientifically designed to provoke desires that can only be answered by the application of lucre), and thus the reliability of such contrivances as the lottery. The other day the little man noticed the scratch ticket machine in the grocery store and there was nothing for it, after I explained the basic premise of gambling to him, but to have one to investigate at home. It was melancholy to witness the hope shining in his relatively guileless eyes as we scratched our ways fruitlessly through the stupid multiple games they put on the big cards to scratch some monkey-itch desire to believe that one ticket represents more than one chance of very unfavorable odds. I explained again and again that there was virtually no chance of winning but it didn't matter: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you know. How long did it take reality to genuinely beat the idea that narrative logic had any relevance to the actual working of events in your life out of me?

Thank god we got nothing, I suppose, a couple hundred dollars, say, is a depressing and meaningless pittance to me in the era of child, mortgage, ten-year-old car and real doctor bills on a regular basis. The lesson it would have taught him would have been incalculably damaging. So I guess it was worth the 20 bucks.

Now the internet presents this fresh allure, in theory everyone in the world could see your scheme and buy you your own personal off-label lottery, right? Indeed there seems to be some sort of invisible-hand type force that dictates projects of the lamest nature must appear -and succeed- on a regular basis. And a million imitators that fail unseen. Full many a gem of purest ray serene indeed.

So I was impressed by the numbers Kickstarter published to celebrate their birthday a few weeks ago. 43% is a very respectable success rate for projects overall and the fact that 85% of the money pledged is collected is even more impressive (and suggests that projects tend to fail definitively and early). My understanding is that Kickstarter juries the projects to some degree which makes it a bit less impressive, of course it is impossible to know how much true dross they reject out front.

All of which has merely been in service of giving me a chance to vent a pet peeve about the Kickstarter universe: stop offering lame-ass rewards!

1. Undying gratitude, and/or my name on a list. For any amount of money, no matter how shitty. These are not rewards. Thanks and acknowledgement are the expected minimum follow up to successful begging. If nothing else, buttons and stickers can be produced by anyone for a pittance, and quickly enough that it is not even necessary to invest a penny in advance.

2. Cooking me dinner, baking me cookies, cleaning my kitchen or anything else that has nothing to do with whatever personal competency you're trying to sell in the real project. Especially for 500 dollars or whatever. I'm not interested in your being in my home, doing things I can do myself for nothing or next to it.

3. Flying to my city to have dinner with me or whatever the hell, especially for 10,000 dollars. The overhead is actually terrible compared to the pledge size (you can get over 90% on giving away buttons for $5 pledges without even shopping around; try and do any serious travel and entertaining for less than a thousand), you're blowing days of your time that nobody who is trying to make a go of living on the virtue of creative projects can spare, and you're suggesting that your presence is worth ten grand.

You're not a celebrity, and if you were I wouldn't fund your damn Kickstarter because seriously, don't you have enough advantages already? If your project produces no product that anyone would want to pay for, maybe you don't actually have any good rationalization for asking other people to pay for its existence.

Franklin's prescription for reliable wealth, looking to the source of the quote above, was the application of "industry and patience." Speaking of which I best get back to work.

Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 3: Hell Is Something Something

2011-04-16T13:05:00.004-05:00

Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

Early in my brief hunting career in Azeroth I had one of those “World of Tomorrow” moments, which is to say a thing happened that reminded me of something I’d read in a science fiction book. I was loitering around in an inn, doing I recall not what, when some other player characters came blowing through, in apparent rapid pursuit of some gripping mission... and passed right through me.

If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn’t be able to reach the entrance. It’s way too crowded. But the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from running into each other. It doesn’t bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. On the Street, avatars just walk right through each other.

Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

It took me a while to figure it out (although not the, uh, year and a quarter since I wrote the last installment in this now truly laughably attenuated series of articles about playing a videogame for a week like two years ago) but I eventually realized that what had really struck me at that moment wasn’t a fairly mundane usability hack that a speculative writer happened to foresee a couple decades prior. What that moment had done was to finally impress on my mind that those were other real people and they were really there. We could see each other. We could interact, form a relationship of some description.

It’s a little philosophy 101 to suggest that human “reality” is at least in part the result of the consensus among all our disparate and sometimes contradictory points of view (floating in their diverse stews of personal internal metaphysics). Philosophical, perhaps, but pragmatic as well: things like money don’t make any sense at all without consensus, but there’s little argument that money is a primary factor in things that are not just shaping human society but quite actively changing massive physical realities on a planetary scale. (And perhaps it is quite understandable that Neal Stephenson went on to write 4 massive books in which the puzzle of money and currency are dominant plot elements, and is said to be currently writing a thriller involving money laundering through the baroque practice of gold farming in the online gaming world).

Perhaps the lesson is that the technological barrier that had to be overcome for virtual reality to really become something akin to what it was in the story books had very little to do with input/output peripherals - image resolution, binocular vision, sensor-studded gloves and the like - and a whole lot to do with the communications technology that allowed geographically separated people to share the same experience in as close to real time as made any difference. A premise that the aficionados of text-based MUDs of not all that yore might have nodded long before most people were aware there was such a thing as being “online.”

(9 Nights in Azeroth, a series of 5 short essays on playing World of Warcraft for a little over a week 2 years ago, WILL be completed before the world ends in 2012. If the world ends before that all bets are off, who could have seen that coming?)

eMusic the Third

2011-02-12T11:27:00.005-06:00

So I've written about eMusic twice before (1, 2) and I suspect this will be the last time. My current annual subscription comes up in March and my strong inclination at the moment is that I won't renew it, ending a four year experiment.

From a straight financial perspective I think that eMusic is probably technically still a reasonably good deal - provided you feel like you would actually want to spend whatever the statutory requirement of your contract dictates in their store anyway, doing so month in month out is likely going to give you more music for your dollar than spending the same at Amazon, iTunes and the like.

But. The shifts made in the most recent transition have appreciably cut into the savings for the customer shopping at eMusic. They have also transparently paved the way for chipping at the bargain factor of eMusic purchases in an incremental and confusing way. In a nutshell the new order at eMusic simply requires me to think too much about whether and how I buy music - and for that deal, you don't get to demand that I pay in advance.

Good things first, they expanded the catalog again, they've got most everything now, this has been the sugar they've been pushing with the medicine of costlier music all along. There are some new customer service areas, look at this bargain on headphones and buy your concert ticket here and download the free track of the day you will never listen to again. I've perused it all a couple of times and it made basically no impact on me. But I didn't actually hate it or anything.

Downsides: a substantial cost increase. It's hard to say exactly how substantial, which is part of the problem. The credit system of pricing has been eliminated: everything is priced on a cash basis now. With this shift has come variable track pricing (very generally, the standard price is .49 per track, but popular tracks often price out at .79). Album prices are frequently completely disconnected from the per-track price and they're all over the map.

Against this I'm getting a $5 monthly bonus for some reason - maybe because I'm an annual subscriber? Maybe as some sort of retention bonus? Various other small retention bonuses, rewards for reviewing tracks have cropped up. You begin to see the problem? I would get into some serious tracking and math to figure out just what sort of deal I'm getting. And I've got a feeling this is just exactly the point. The version of eMusic I started out with was straightforward: tracks cost me 24-25 cents. Every change since - album only pricing, 12 credit albums (pretty much, exceptions may apply etc.), the shift to cash basis and variable track pricing - has made it all but impossible to figure out what I'm actually paying for music.

And this doesn't work out so great for eMusic because it makes me give the various deals, bonuses, and such forth a pass and just look at most obvious comparisons, which is that I went roughly from 24 to 36 to 49 cents or more a track, all in the course of less than 2 years.

The prices have crawled into the range of the other download stores now. I feel like I have to shop around whenever I buy an album. Beastie Boys License to Ill, $7.27 on eMusic, $7.99 on Amazon. Sting's Nothing Like the Sun $5.88 at eMusic, $9.49 at Amazon. Talking Heads Remain in Light $4.52 on sale at eMusic, 7.92 at Amazon.

Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, $8.99 at eMusic, $4.99 at Amazon.

Barely a deal, a couple of decent deals (but unlikely to dip below a 40% discount it seems), a terrible deal.

Further, eMusic has finally broken the ground to basically change the deal with their customers without further notice. Bump more tracks up to 79 cents. Eliminate full album deals, change the price to the added up track price. Add more track prices between the high and low end. Add a higher high end. I don't want to have to pay this much attention.

What this stands alongside are the things that have always been a straightforward downside to the eMusic deal: the subscription requirement and the failure to roll over unused credit at the end of the month. Maybe it is purely psychological but the conversion to cash pricing has greatly reduced my tolerance for these conditions. My attitude has gone from viewing it as a subscription fee guaranteeing me access to a minimum monthly volume of music, to seeing it as a mandatory spending minimum I am required to pay in advance.

Where this leads me to is not entirely eMusic's fault but on the other hand I find it hard to believe my situation is particularly unique. It's 2011 and the American economy has been in the tank for basically ten years. Like everyone else in the heavily squeezed, rapidly vanishing middle class, I've got a weather eye constantly on the future and there is nothing non-essential that's not potentially on the chopping block. My iTunes catalog* has almost 25 straight days of audio in it, over 9,000** tracks. It's all legal: the combined CD collections of two adults plus ten years on the digital marketplace. I can't make much sense in this state of maintaining a mandatory monthly music budget. eMusic will definitely still make sense for many. I don't think it makes sense for me any longer.

*iTunes as my music management software, not the store, I'm sure less than 1% of my collection actually came from the iTunes store.
**Actually true and unintentional, still, LOL.

Hells yeah it is a store

2010-11-20T23:36:00.002-06:00

I have actually been thinking on raising my mesozoic snout up out of the swamp mud and gacking out some new content hereabouts but in the meantime there's commerce. In the event you haven't been monitoring the changes in my sidebars with breathless regard I have rebooted my Media Empire Shop for your consumptive pleasure.

On the Humble Indie Bundle, and the virtues of humility in general

2010-05-06T13:10:00.004-05:00

...Excuse me? You thought there was some sort of digital culture blog around here? Boy, it doesn't look to me like there's been anything going on around here for a while, but, okay, what the hell, I'll see what I can dig up.

The Humble Indie Bundle is a snazzy little packet of five independent video games. As a purchase, it's distinguished by a number of features that you can read about here rather than watching the pseudo-rap video on the website, because sorry, guys, but that is very terrible. Anyway, it is cross-platform (PC, Mac and Linux), the games are DRM free, you are allowed to set your own price for the bundle, and a portion of the proceeds are donated to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. How big of a portion? You can customize how much of your payment goes to either of the charities and how much goes to the developers. Sort of. You divvy up the split with an imprecise kind of slider bar widget so if you like round figures this can be sort of frustrating.

Now this is all fine and pleasant and I certainly recommend it if you have any inclination to play the games in question. But what it got me thinking about is how in this new digital commerce paradigm business the independent game developers are really standing out in terms of stomping on the notion, which is still generally being desperately clung to by the media conglomerates and publishing industries, that mature works - particular copyrighted packets of data - can successfully hang on to their legacy price points. A year, two out of the gate prices start to drop - 30, 50, 75 percent - or games show up in these sorts of rock-bottom promotions for a limited time.

Putting aside all old media conceptions it seems like it would make perfect sense- these products have paid their way, I'm assuming. They have covered their development costs and produced their hoped-for chunk of profit and whatever they generate from this point out is basically gravy. Promotion manages itself via the always hyperactive video game infosphere and, with the basic architecture of file transfer in place and bandwidth presumably on-tap and cheap (transacting bits being the business model of these developers), I'd hope the overhead on such a promotion would trend toward rock bottom. I mean I hope: as of this writing they have brought in almost $400,000, though on the other hand their suggested (to their credit quietly suggested with a very light touch) donation is around 30 bucks and by their reporting their average so far is around 8 bucks. I'm not actually sure their reporting that is such a great idea but there you go, transparency is a harsh mistress.

But as I say, it is a common sense that the media industry at large has been resisting like crazy, particularly throughout the last decade, and it bears scrutiny as to why independent game developers in particular are so far ahead on this concept - this concept that in most cases a piece of media is a thing that ages, and not like a fine wine but like a loaf of bread, and past its fresh-by date you only get to charge half price.

This is the humility I allude to in my title: to recognize that an infinitely reproducible piece of work is a commodity with a shelf life, it does not eternally retain full value, it is not some sort of sacrosanct chunk of metaphysics. I don't know the answer but several pieces occur to me. Independent game developers, quite distinct from old media producers, were I think completely ready, indeed evangelized, converted and committed, to abandon physical media in favor of digital transfer. Of course, it is pure useless overhead. Much less so than mediated music or books, I think people basically grasp that with software you are paying for rights to the data, not for some object. This makes people initially less resistant to a substantial cost for an ephemeral download, but that initial price may have less stability over time, unattached to the notion that "object X costs about $Y". Software invites the analysis, what is this functionality of this data to me now, much more than those occult entities, the Album or the Novel.

Perhaps less immediately transferable to other media, of course software is practically prone to a much harsher reality of obsolescence than most media. A book is a book, more or less, but after a certain point not only is a piece of software not up to the current standards, it won't even play on the current equipment (or at best, will play only with additional software). Beyond the nostalgia market (which seems mostly hardware/media driven, with little visible paying market for digital ephemera) old video games have basically no monetary value.

So here's a puzzle: compared to their retail value, video games are disproportionately resource-intensive to create as compared to, say, cutting an album or writing a novel. The product is subject to a much more aggressive value deterioration over time. Yet we're told that video games are eating the market share of these other media for lunch. Dear everybody trying to sell data besides the people making video games: you're doing something wrong.

Sorry, but a positive net worth is in another castle...

2010-02-21T18:55:00.001-06:00

I get down sometimes about poor financial decisions of my past. Like so many Americans, I have a solid chunk of unsecured credit debt, the cumulative legacy of every impatient purchases over two decades, an extra little financial burden that hangs over me wherever I may go.

From the basement files of the Department of How Much Worse Could it Get comes the tale of one James Burt, a hapless 24-year-old from Queensland Australia, to make me feel better about my life choices. Mr. Burt got his hands on an early release of Nintendo’s New Super Mario Brothers for Wii and decided it would be a very bright stunt to put it on a file-sharing network.

This probably seemed like a great idea until Nintendo’s anti-piracy ninjas pulled a blue turtle shell out of their bag of tricks and hunted poor James Burt down. The final disposition of this youthful indiscretion recently made the rounds of the embarrassingly rich fields of the video game news circuit: Nintendo arrived at an out-of-court settlement with Mr. Burt to pay their legal bill of $100,000... and $1.5 million AU damages for Nintendo’s lost sales. “We would like to play” indeed.

My mind is filled with questions by these kinds of stories. Like, what the hell is Nintendo threatening you with that you “settle” for a million and a half in red ink against your lifetime net worth? Did they they finagle some secret copyright arrangement with the Australian government where if you fail to settle they can have you torn apart by wild dogs? Why not $1.5 billion? Is it any more likely that a mid-twenties Australian gamer is going to be able to pay that off? Is it just meant to be cautionary news, is this individual headed directly to bankruptcy, making the specifics irrelevant? Can you bankrupt your way out of that kind of agreement? Did Nintendo present this kid with a payment plan? Does James Burt’s punishment include a lifetime banning from the Mii network?

There are all sorts of directions to go with this about copyright violation and reasonable consequences, but I have to admit I’ve become utterly bored with that whole conversation. Bogus as the system is, I’ve run out of compassion for the illicit file-sharing set as well. These people are not exactly Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Do something interesting with all this unbridled new media power, okay, or don’t come whining to me when you get stepped on for trying to abscond with the giant’s golden-egg-laying hen. Unfortunately this leaves me without a pithy moral. Except, perhaps: Don’t Fuck with Mario.

Micropayments: a bad idea that will not die

2010-02-20T14:10:00.003-06:00

I received a notification today that Tipjoy, my second foray as an early adopter of a micropayments strategy, was going under (and that if I didn’t redeem my pathetic little barely used account balance it would vanish, probably to displace a tiny portion of some beleaguered founder’s credit card balance. So I went and transferred my $4.80 right back into PayPal, because, you know, like that’s my problem). I’m far from oblivious to the irony that the whole ineffectual experiment was transacted via what is essentially a functional (if fee heavy and intermittently evil) small transaction provider.

I signed up for Tipjoy somewhat reluctantly, at the motivation of a friend, because I had been through definitive micropayment disappointment as a beta seller and buyer for the now several-years-dead Bitpass. I set up a musicians account on their Mperia store experiment. I bought anything I could remotely justify “owning” (as much as you own data). I bought micropayment cheerleader Scott McCloud’s pay per view webcomic experiment The Right Number and I’m still waiting for him to finish the story. I paid serial project-abandoner Patrick Farley for his Pokemon-Revelations mashup Apocamon - I don’t ever expect to see the end of that one. I bought music of dubious quality (though there were a couple of rough gems in the slag).

Bitpass left a particularly bad taste in my mouth because prior to closing up shop they quietly instituted account-hoovering fees - account inactivity fees, low balance fees - and I had to go raise hell to get them to give me back the money they had taken, which wasn’t much, less than twenty dollars, but which I felt obligated to demand on general principles. So at least Tipjoy got something right.

And now I see there are another couple going concerns out there, Kachingle and flattr (and I suppose there are more obscure contenders). My faith in these enterprises can be assessed by the fact that I won’t even go to the trouble of adding hyperlinks to their sites. You know how to use Google. I will note that Flattr comes from the mind of one of the founders of the Pirate Bay, which is so damn funny it deserves a post all its own, aside from the fact that it doesn’t really matter and will be defunct in just a few short years.

Let’s get into the history of micropayments as it stretches back to the mid 1990s. I’ll break down the evolution of these various strategies to collect small amounts of money from a large base of users and distribute them to content providers, and explain how these most recent start-ups have taken the lessons of the failures of their predecessors, and tapped into the robust and contentious discussions that have circled the internet, featuring heady concepts like the mental accounting barrier, and how their strategies differ from what has gone before.

Hah, yeah, right. Hey, maybe I’m wrong, and everyone will be Flattr’d and Kachingling this time next year and you can all come back and laugh and throw mocking quarters at the ubiquitous buttons I have been sheepishly compelled to add to all my projects. No. I know these people think they have figured out the core problems with micropayments, or “crowdfunding” or whatever they want to call it. They think they will change the game because they have eliminated paywalls and made everything voluntary and instituted the customer-selected price point and made it so easy to pay. Like all the foundered ships before them they have focused on the quality of the individual transaction of a consumer at a content site. These are deck chair on Titanic solutions, lipstick on pig solutions. Let’s take a look at the sow underneath. Here’s how it breaks down.

Number one problem: the content is not worth paying for. That’s the meanest way to put it but there it is. Bloggers, podcasters, webcomic artists, sub-indie label musicians set the price already at zero. There’s too much of it. Nobody is really asking to pay for it. The majority of people who think they should get paid for it can just put a donation button on their site. The tiny percentage of people who want to pay for the pleasure have already applied the button. Sites with sufficiently high value content and high volume traffic to make it worth the effort to formally “monetize” already do so with the methods that work, advertising and merchandising.

The transaction systems all break down on two points, neither of which are what ever get addressed by the fixes for a simple reason: they aren’t fixable by any small third-party intermediary. First, you have to sign up. Every day my resistance to sign-ups gets higher. Sign ups are something I have to maintain, I have to keep track of logins and passwords and update them if my email changes. They are potential weaknesses in the eternal battle to hold a line on my privacy and security. My online history is littered with pointless sign-ups I never used and which served no purpose, and every time I’m solicited to set up another one I ask, with increasing self-interest, what am I getting out of doing this? In this case I then go and take a look at their (always poorly framed, disorganized) content rosters. Which returns us to problem number one.

Second, if I do sign up, I have to maintain some sort of account. I have to transact real money into this thing so that I have something to spend (or pay off something I owe). Should I trust you to hold on to my credit card information? Is what you have to offer compelling enough to get me to sign up for a repeating transaction on some kind of subscription basis? Right now the enterprises that have earned this position are Apple (via iTunes and Apps), eMusic and Amazon. For random one-off small transactions PayPal already exists. Take a look at problem number one and guess what your chances are.

Next problem: the support transaction itself invites me to do something I have become incredibly proficient at avoiding. I have to notice a thing to click and then click it. If you’ve gotten all clever and made it some sort of optional pay-what-you-like scheme then I have to make a decision on top of that. At some point along the line I have to have signed up. On the internet I am ignoring this sort of thing all the live long day. Advertisement clicks, donation button clicks, partners and affiliate clicks, take a survey clicks. I find the content on the page and pay attention to that.

What it all adds up to is work and money for something I’m used to getting for free. Which brings us to the last but not least point: a significant percentage of your best potential customers and clients have been burned by the assholes who have gone before you. I honestly can’t think what anyone would have to show me get me to sign up for their scheme, as a buyer or seller, after Bitpass. We went through a bunch of rigamarole to no benefit to ourselves or anyone. Nobody got squat out of their relationship with Bitpass that they couldn’t have exceeded in a tenth the time with a good old begging session. And Bitpass is hardly the start of it. There are probably people out there who still remember getting burned by Flooz. And Beenz. You say you’re different but when I look at your little charts or watch your videos you look exactly the same to me. The differences in the character of the core transaction are cosmetic. I have no faith in my participation doing your clients any good or adding any substance to my experience as a consumer. You are a solution that doesn’t work for a problem that doesn’t actually need to be solved.

The eternal evolution of Search

2010-02-07T22:18:00.003-06:00

A website is down, and I wonder as usual if there is some weirdness between me and them (that sounds like I'm having juvenile relationship drama) or if the site is, in fact, down. Status issues for non-responding sites has been a bit of a search loophole, I've noticed - unless the site is big enough that its being down is literally news. Otherwise unless there is some sort of separate status site or else I happen to know of some blog or whatever that is liable to post about it, the issue of whether it is down or there is just some issue on my end I'm not getting can be tough to answer.

I noticed something new when I googled the site that was down this time though: among the search responses was a somewhat dynamic return of recent Twitter postings relevant to the subject, and sure enough the answer was there. It is an interesting bridge between honest-to-goodness "it'll be on teevee" level news and the continual, ephemeral froth which we call The Matrix. The site was indeed down. In the process of poking around this discovery I also found out about Down for everyone or just me? which takes all the drudgery out of it, but my point is, this is the sort of "duh, that's obvious" innovation that is why Google is still relevant. I couldn't help but notice that bing.com had not yet caught on to this one. Have those jokers captured any market share that they didn't pay top dollar for?

Doing it right

2010-02-05T21:43:00.002-06:00

Honestly, I hate to keep going on about eMusic - and I think after this it should really be all I have to say about the situation, barring some extreme development (the slow accretion of major labels definitely not qualifying). But what the hell, I call these businesses out when they are horrible so I should be fair and point it out when they do it right.

I wasn't happy with the default subscription model eMusic had informed me I would be converted to when my current subscription (the last under the old pricing model) expired in March. I think I understand the basis for it; it appears they just chose the closest plan to my original price. Rather than wait and likely forget I decided to convert my plan now (the balance remaining on my old subscription was pro-rated).

Glory be: as an apparent token of appreciation for sticking with the company eMusic gave me one hundred extra credits as a subscription bonus. Dear Executives of eMusic: that shit is working for me. I gotta go get some music.

Overload versus Filters

2010-02-01T12:06:00.002-06:00

I'm not an unbridled Clay Shirkey partisan, but this small talk he produced in response to my recent essay on overload is not bad. Clay's always shaking the Phree Tree for content ideas.

Just kidding, this is like two years old.

Commitment

2010-01-31T20:48:00.002-06:00

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.

Overload

2010-01-28T22:45:00.002-06:00

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'.

Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 2: Virtual is Real

2010-01-25T17:40:00.003-06:00

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.

aside: eMusic, et. al.: brands versus labels

2010-01-22T01:01:00.003-06:00

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.

Digging the retail vibe at Napster is drenched in irony. And Coca-Cola.

2010-01-21T22:02:00.006-06:00

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.

Retro Phree: Dewey Music, filters, and the genre problem

2010-01-20T10:45:00.004-06:00

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.

Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 1: Invisible Walls

2010-01-19T10:36:00.002-06:00

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 rules. 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.

Radio Shack, now known as The Telegraph Wigwam

2010-01-18T13:26:00.003-06:00

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.

Recorded music equals whale blubber

2010-01-17T16:23:00.000-06:00

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

eMore eMusic

2010-01-13T22:29:00.006-06:00

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

iTMS Coda

2009-02-03T12:30:00.002-06:00

Well, the results of my query in my most recent "why is this person still posting after he shuttered this blog" posting (A: it's kind of "my thing") is conclusive - absolutely no one really gives "a hoot" about this blog, which ironically frees me to post to it when and as I wish... Which is to say, without any concern about contextual continuity or taming my innate love of constructing tortured, difficult-to-navigate sentences, rich with parenthetical asides and sub-clauses, that then trail indecisively into ellipsis...

So anyway, he wrote, applying one of the laziest of transitional phrases, I did, as I alluded to in the aforementioned previous post, slump on over to the iTunes Music Store by and by and forked over the premium in order to convert my modest collection of purchased music into DRM-free file formats. It's only fair to say that it has been a long time since I had any substantial technical issues with Apple's DRM. It's a matter of principle, maybe nominally of future stability, mostly it just bugged me that they were in there. Sitting there in their weird file formats with their invisible rules, looking like normal songs.

Which made it all the more irritating when I discovered that the library conversion process didn't quite clear the FairPlay out of my music library. A couple dozen misbebehavers didn't register on the iTMS conversion radar. Some of them obviously came from some sort of long-forgotten freebie download (free downloads don't qualify for the conversion deal, it turns out), some of them had disappeared from the store (victims of negotiation breakdowns with one off-brand label or another from Apple's DRM-free shift?), one album (P.M. Dawn's Greatest Hits) was inexplicable.

Intolerable. I rolled up my sleeves and set forth to do what I had thus far avoided, more out of laziness than principle: I violated the DMCA by circumventing copy protection software. Or did I? The territory, as usual, is rife with gray areas. I burned the offending tracks to an audio CD, which is legal. After dragging album art from the iTunes file information window into a temporary folder, I deleted the original tracks, which is legal. Finally I ripped the files from the audio CDs back to iTunes as AAC tracks. Which is normally legal, with CDs I own. But it's maybe illegal because I used the whole process to replace copy-protected files with unprotected ones? Yet it was legal for me to have unprotected CD Audio files on an actual CD? Whatever, if I'm a criminal I can only say, I did my best, but the iTMS just wouldn't cooperate.

I wonder if I will buy any more music from the iTMS. Amazon is just as easy now, and often cheaper. I suppose as is the shape of things, pretty soon I will be seeing artists releasing things digitally "exclusively on Amazon" or "exclusively on iTunes." Of course, given I'm currently on a music budget diet and not allowing myself any new music I'm not downloading from my eMusic subscription, for the time being it's a moot point anyway. All things considered I have a feeling it will be a long while before I buy another music track from Apple.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at the Index Page

The Tipping Point

2009-01-06T16:57:00.007-06:00

It's just possible that there is that one crazy digital hermit out there who is living under a virtual rock, getting that one solitary, hopelessly attenuated thread of music news from the Phree Musique Blog. Sorry about dropping the ball, dude. For you, allow me to be the least prominent outlet to nod to the announcement that the iTunes Music Store is finally going all-DRM-free.

Listen, after the thorough flogging I gave iTMS I kind of have to announce this. And, I suppose, grudgingly upgrade their site rating from "Hate" to "Shrugs" (because your interface still SUCKS Steve Jobs! I was surfing it on the iPod touch on the free WiFi in my parents' town this Christmas and the mobile interface was RIDICULOUS).

Here's my review money quote:

The point I'm making here is that if Apple has attained Walmart-like retail status as a music seller, no mean feat, it is also delivering a Walmart retail experience. The user interface is a cluttered mess, selections based on personal data are shallow and perfunctory, searching is mediocre, and the location of the store within my music-playing software is actually kind of a pain in the ass. The failure to negotiate equal access with Amazon to DRM free major label catalogs was a big fumble, the pricing is largely uncompetitive, the surcharge on music in the Plus catalog sucks, and frankly, I'll shop there again when everything is DRM free and they offer me free upconversion of all my previously purchased, FairPlay encumbered tracks, which I'll otherwise probably expunge next time a major migration of the catalog is required.

Well I was a big old hypocrite and kept right on using iTMS, though a lot less than before, and I can't front: after I'm done wrapping this up I'm going to head right over there and pay those bastards their "30 cents per song or 30 percent of the album price" to convert my old iTunes tracks to DRM free. You Bastards!

Meanwhile: does anyone really give a hoot about this blog? I wouldn't mind keeping on, but I honestly just can't give myself a music-buying budget right now. So, if you think the reviews should continue, your job is to post an idea for how I can raise the meager "operating capital" I require to do so. If I don't get at least five UNIQUE ideas I'm shuttering it (with the occasional "just because" update like this one) with no further qualms. Caveat: advertising is not an option (been down that road) unless you are actually going to offer me money to advertise something. And don't ask me for site statistics if you are, because I don't collect them (I know, I know, it's not a business, okay?). To be continued! Or more likely not! Because I will eat my hat if this thing still has five unique readers! Incidentally, I will eat my hat online for music money!

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at the Index Page

lacuna

2008-11-03T20:28:00.005-06:00

This thing is going dormant again if it isn't already obvious. The current budget doesn't have a line item for additional music acquisition and it's tended a little too much to classic rock nostalgia pieces, which is nearly the opposite of the intent. I guess I'll let the economy have it's way with the scrappy underdogs for a while, and see who's left standing later. To be continued?

First and foremost: eMusic

2008-10-13T11:05:00.003-05:00

I'm in my second year of membership at eMusic now which says something in itself. That I've taken this long to get around to reviewing it says something else: considering how long it has been ahead of the curve, eMusic has definitely gotten short shrift in the dialog about the quest for DRM-free digital downloads. It's been at it more than a decade and has served into 9 figures of downloads from its catalog, which is in the vicinity of 5 million songs.

There are two obvious issues with eMusic. The first is that it is subscription only. There are no a la carte downloads: you have to sign up for a subscription plan that charges a fixed amount in exchange for a certain number of song downloads per month. While eMusic guarantees you can cancel your subscription at any time and attempts to lower this barrier to entry by offering a generous no-cost, no-obligation trial preview (which allows you to keep the trial songs you download whether or not you sign on for the paid service) many will find this requirement an obstacle. It certainly kept me away for a long time.

The second and arguably more significant drawback is that eMusic carries non-major-label music exclusively. Major label artists are represented here and there when their early career material was recorded on independent labels. But you will find no Madonna, no Beatles, no ABBA or Led Zeppelin here (considering this, it is an irony of eMusic's history that for a time it was owned by prime clinger to DRM and general customer abuser Universal).

The first question to answer then about whether an eMusic membership is right for your music budget is whether the indie label catalog is valuable to you. There's no question that eMusic's catalog is deep. There are tens of thousands of tiny labels represented, including heavy hitters like Merge, Matador, Drag City, Kill Rock Stars and Thrill Jockey, and eMusic has relationships as well with distribution giants The Orchard and CD Baby, among others. Noticeably missing is Sub Pop, who I believe inked a deal with Rhapsody. I wish I could speak intelligently to eMusic's Jazz and Classical catalogs, but here my knowledge falters. But for indie rock and alternative there's really no shortage of music available for years of subscriptions.

And there's no denying that the compensation for the membership requirement is good value, with the per-track prices for monthly subscriptions from 25 to 60 cents, depending on the plan chosen: additional discounts come if you prepay your account in advance: at the top level (75 songs per month) paid 2 years in advance, per track costs are as low as 20 cents. Even the lowest obligation (10 tracks paid monthly) beat iTunes and Amazon at 60 cents per track.

Downloads require installing a download tool and (unless there is some clever widget out there I haven't figured out) must be manually uploaded to your music player's catalog. I'm probably pushing a thousand song downloads and only once had a technical problem. The browsing and searching interfaces are pretty effective: I've in particular had better than average luck with their "Artists Like This" feature that suggests similar artists to what you're searching for - including artists similar to artists (like major label properties) that eMusic doesn't carry. I've found a number of new things following these suggestions. Another feature that can deliver a lot of value is information from other members. Viewing the playlists, reviews and so on from other members can lead to lots of similar tastes (it's good to remember, though, that these things are publicly viewable, so you might want to delete that "songs to seduce my best friend's girl with" playlist).

On to the downsides. eMusic definitely bears the marks of being built on older, legacy interfaces. Until recently, for instance, music previews came in the form of clunky streaming file downloads that caused me persistent problems in iTunes. They have finally come around to in-browser previews (via Flash, I assume) - but they persist in the all-too-common paranoia of offering abbreviated partial previews only. As I've mentioned before, I think the failure of digital sellers to give full-length previews represents a short-sighted approach that ignores the retail legacy of free listening. But they are certainly in good company there. And still, while it is not as slick as a fresh-minted start-up might be, the interface does continue to adapt and improve.

I think eMusic focuses on getting potential customers to sign up for their free previews to a fault: as a non-member it's fairly difficult to, for example, get to the point where you can browse their catalog or look over the subscription plans (the FAQ on subscription plans, for example, is out of date and leaves out many options such as the prepay discounts mentioned above). They don't go so far as to actually prevent non-members from viewing this information, they just don't make it easy. Again, it's a policy I think is shortsighted. Even signing up for a free preview is a certain amount of hassle, and I for one want to know a bit more about what I'm getting before I start handing out my personal data.

Once you are a member, it's important to keep in mind that unused downloads don't roll over: it's use them or lose them. Amplifying this problem is the fact that downloads are not strictly monthly: they reset every 30 days. So rather than knowing your downloads will reset on the 20th of every month or whatever, you have to keep track of when the deadline date is. While technically you get more downloads per month this way than if they reset each month on a particular date, I've lost a few month's downloads when I was too busy to keep track of my subscription. This is a situation that clearly factors in eMusic's favor - they could, after all, easily send an alert email when your downloads are about to reset. I've been told, however, that they do distribute revenue from unused downloads to their member artists rather than simply keeping it for themselves.

Although I have no experience with it, it has to be noted that there have been persistent complaints of eMusic failing to process subscription cancellations and continuing to charge customers after cancellation has been requested. Whether this is actually common or widespread, and whether it has gotten better or not over time, I don't know.

I consider these minor gripes. For the indie music fan eMusic gets solid props. I've gotten a steady supply of new music and indie classics for nearing 2 years and I suspect I'll be keeping my subscription up for years to come, indefinitely if the deal stays solid and new artists keep signing up. I hope to someday rectify some of my jazz and classical deficiencies through them as well. It's worth mentioning, though not strictly relevant here, that they also offer subscription plans for DRM-free audiobooks. eMusic deserves more recognition as a pioneer and being for most intents and purposes the best deal in digital music downloads. Keep up the good work, eMusic!.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Rhapsody MP3 Store: oasis in the desert of the real?

2008-10-03T13:45:00.004-05:00

Rhapsody.com was on the no-fly list until recently: they were every kind of wrong for Phree Musique: subscription, DRM format only, tied to the hated Real Player - but I’d read they had recently joined the growing ranks of those tapped to skunk iTunes yet again with a la carte, major label MP3 downloads on sale for more or less the going rate. Even so, I probably would have let my ongoing spite for Real keep them on the bottom of the check-out list, except for one thing: when I’d gone by to casually cruise the interface I’d noted they were giving a good deal on Led Zeppelin: Complete.

Zeppelin being one of my format problem bands: this set is mostly selections from my (recently-released-to-secondary-retail) tape collection, but Zep along with a handful of others I still own on that most persistent of formats, vinyl. I did some experiments transferring LPs to digital which were conclusive: it was a pain in the ass.

Other thirty-something’s Led Zeppelin nostalgia couldn’t be duller, right? So suffice to say that it is music that has earned a permanent spot on my emotional playlist and provided the soundtrack on a fair cross-section of teenage angst and joy. I figured I’d buy it again someday.

Still, I dithered over the purchase. I’ve yet to pay this much for a single purely digital item. The Box Set: the usual deal is you save on volume, but the physical package generally sweetens the deal with bonus material: booklets, photos, packaging, lyrics. My experience with the digital music market suggested that I’d get bupkus but the song files out of this deal. I’m not a fanatic: the bonus audio, the live versions and rare studio out takes didn’t hold much appeal.

Still, the deal was solid: the same package on Amazon was almost 40 dollars more. Maybe I’d be better off cherry picking the main albums? No help there: I wanted pretty much the canon: I through IV, Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti, and yes, Presence, In Through the Out Door and Coda, and the live stuff off of The Song Remains the Same at least. Over a hundred dollars worth of even the cheapest digital downloads, more than even the Complete Set download at Amazon. It’s a good deal. Really, when was the last time I read any of the printed material from a CD (there’s that slippery slope into digital ephemera again)?

I went for it. Browsing and building a shopping cart on Rhapsody can be done without a sign in, checkout requires setting up an account. Oops, it turns out I already signed up at some point back: looks like I’ve been resisting this purchase longer than I realized. Sign in, a standard credit card checkout, download initiated. A straight zip download: the lack of a proprietary download tool is a welcome feature.

I’ve been observing with interest the fact that digital music comes with a maintenance cost that CDs lack for being their own physical archive: I download, start loading it up into my iTunes library, but then burn the zip file to DVD: protect the data. All is ephemeral but you do what you can. And then, If I want to listen to it in the car I need to burn CDs. The blank discs, of course, are on my tab. Media and time: one is cheap but the other is ever more dear. But it takes me more than a minute to work off 60 bucks so I do my diligence and back up.

Rhapsody almost got shrugs teetering on the edge of props, because one nice deal doesn’t overcome that same old same old two point oh dietetic candy lozenge graphic design that makes browsing at their store a big ol’ yawn, the same old computer-generated link puke front page, the same boring categories, flavor of the month favorites, and blah blah blah you just paid 60 smacks for seventeen cents worth of bandwidth. And intellectual property, of course, which with luck and a little management I could own forever...

But in a little postmortem browsing later I discovered that on a fair cross-section of their material (not including Led Zeppelin, which is why I missed the feature the first time, and defined, one presumes, by the dictates of the content owners) Rhapsody is providing free, full preview without being signed in - in other words, you can just browse right in and stream full songs while you shop (albeit in an annoying pop-up window). Free listening, once an absolute staple of the record store experience just makes sense and its general absence in the current digital retail sphere is basically absurd. You nudged yourself into props, Rhapsody... just barely, so don’t get too comfortable.

P. S., why yes, they did indeed include metacontent with my “Complete” Led Zeppelin, in the form of one (1) jpeg of the collection’s utterly dull cover (the ZOSO symbols white on a black field), of the grainy persuasion, matchbook sized for mobile display. Probably could have included a 40 page pdf that someone probably already has lying around for about two tenths of a cent but grumble grumble grumble.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Site and Review Updates

2008-09-08T13:18:00.002-05:00

Once again, I'm vowing to try and get this business rolling again, with new reviews this week! Maybe!

For now, go and read the brief update I made to the Brad Sucks Review.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

aside

2008-07-05T04:18:00.003-05:00

Seeing as how I invoked this post, I thought, hell, let's check the Amazon music store (I'm shilling it for absolutely zero $s, baby!) for the theme song of Flambards. Sure enough. The Amazon MP3 download store is slightly borked, incidentally - it keeps trying to make me download the downloader over and again. Still, I got it. Now I got two copies, my hiss-n-poppy 45 transcription, and my shiny new digital download. There's a longer story attached to that, but I'll probably never bother telling it...

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

So Walk Tall... Or Baby, Don't Walk At All

2008-07-05T02:18:00.003-05:00

Maybe someday it will become the download store review site I pine for it to be...

One of the problems, incidentally, is Amazon.

Example: my recent loss of a significant number of CDs to basic distraction and merciless physics is, in fact, dwarfed by a not-quite-as-recent intentional loss... I sold all of my audio cassettes (aside from the 8-tracks) to a used record store...

Late in high school I took some of my not-insignificant savings (oh how I pine for those long-lost net black ink days) and bought myself a boombox produced under the Realistic brand by Radioshack. In my little rural Minnesota town Radioshack was run by Reed's Music, a sort of one-stop for musical instruments traditional and electronic, as well as the various technical ephemera of ye olde nineteen eightees. Ah, nostalgia. Anyway: 'twas a thing of beauty, dual cassette with hi-speed tape-to-tape dubbing, RCA line in and out, stereo divided line in... a number of my earlier recorded masterpieces were slammed directly to this beast. It was all I had. The first commercial tape I ever bought was Lou Reed's Street Hassle, from some bargain bin in Willmar, the nearest "big" town to my home in the (extraordinarily misnamed) Montevideo. Changed. My. Life.

I never listened to those dozens and dozens and dozens of tapes anymore, the classic rock and odd alternative and heavy metal and psychedelic and blues I collected from off-brand department store bins, from the ever-dwindling tape racks of city music stores. I access my music collection through my computer, and to a lesser extent through my car's CD player. I fooled around a little bit with transcribing tapes and albums to digital but it was too big of a hassle. A novelty, the novelty wore off. I sold them to clear up some space without having to add to the week's landfill quotient. I got an okay price, to my surprise. I probably lost 5 times as much as I did when I let a wallet of CDs blow off the roof of my car in that sale. I had a lot of cassettes. It was my sole format until like my senior year of college, when I bought a cheap portable CD player I could line-into that self-same realistic boombox, and my first CD, Pink Floyd's Meddle (a terrible digital transcription which sounded ten times worse than a tape my brother made me from his used LP).

Bringing us to this: a phrase rose in my mind, just moments ago. "So walk tall.. or baby, don't walk at all." Bruce Springsteen. The Wild, the Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle. Disdain, if you wish. This is my youth, my childhood, that I can't quite believe is gone although I'm (gasp) pushing 40 (I'll turn 37 this year). It's also a great album. I haven't owned it in a couple years, I suspect I haven't heard it in quite a few more. I sold it, it's gone.

I looked it up on iTunes, I guess I still have some grudging allegiance to the Apple. No dice, not Plus, fuck it. Amazon has it, DRM free, and for EXACTLY the same price (Iiinteresting...). I gots me some one-click, which is actually like five click (I have to re-download the Amazon downloader, like, WTF Amazon?) Oh well. And just like that, I'm hearing it again, after so many years, in a matter of minutes. I suppose I date myself that it still amazes me. Delights me.

"Sandy... that waitress I been seeing lost her desire for me... I spoke to her last night, she said she's not going to set herself on fire for me, anymore..."

Seriously, it's hard to be a Saint in the City. But I guess that's a different download...

It's easy to get distracted by the great back-catalog that is Amazon (and soon, I suspect, just a whole bunch of places). Any idea you might have that the digital revolution automatically trumps the old school of pop filtration is, I must assure you. misconstrued. I'll get there, nevertheless. Promise.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Updates at Glacier Speed

2008-06-13T14:55:00.003-05:00

Given how this has been going it's worth asking whether I really have the wherewithal, at this point in my life, to maintain this site at all, but I'm going to foster the illusion for at least a little longer. At this point I'm going to have to hit DJ Edna back for a bunch of updates on that interview I keep promising (once I actually finish transcribing it), and I haven't bought anything at a new venue for a couple of months. I sustain the hope that I'll get on top of a few persistent vexations soon.

Only other note, seeing as how they closed down their direct downloads and their recent behavior has been less than inspiring, from a "changing the retail paradigm" perspective, I'm decommissioning Radiohead: downgrading their assessment to "shrugs" and maintaining their review as purely a piece of historical interest. Nothing against them but they've made it evident they're not really about what this thing is about: you want to know about the Radiohead retail experience these days, you know, head over to the Amazon or iTunes review. Or go to Wal-Mart.

Onward and upward.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

iYiYi: shopping in music's Mall of America

2008-04-12T15:25:00.007-05:00

Now, I'm not going to waste more than half a sentence rehashing the discussion of whether Apple Computer's "indie cred" is counterfeit, other than to say, sometimes you've got to face facts: when you're the biggest in the U.S., you are not the scrappy underdog. The iTunes Music Store got there first (it didn't, of course, but in all practical respects it did), did it right (relatively speaking) and is reaping its reward.

I resisted the pull of the iTMS for a long time, on principle, mind you, because of the DRM. My relenting on this point was not a principled one. One day I found myself wanting to hear the full length rendition of "The Journey of the Sorcerer," the Eagles' oddball banjo-delic instrumental that has served as the theme song for the dramatization of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in various incarnations. A few years later I may have been able to hear it legally without paying for it through one of the various new social discovery experiments: as it was I succumbed to the lure of immediacy and took my DRM.

And for a while its general transparency seemed fine and once in a while I'd get music off iTunes, until a few everyday hassles reminded me that these weren't ordinary MP3s and that as a result I would have to manage them as long as I retained them. I can't say it was enough to compel me to expunge them from my collection, but it irked me enough that I elected to generally skip the iTMS as a music source.

I was excited when the news of the Music Store's "Plus" collection appeared, the first big breach in the amazingly resistant frontier of DRM-free major label digital downloads. Also I had a gift card. I ordered Dark Side of the Moon right up, firmly sorting me into some sort of approaching-middle-age-dude box, I suspect, and that went just fine. A couple of my former purchases had moved to the Plus collection, available to be unlocked for a small fee. Fair enough, or at least better than nothing, right? Steve Jobs was publicly exhorting the record industry to let his downloads go and it was all very salutary.

Nevertheless it had been a while since, the other day, I decided that I needed a refresher course in the iTMS shopping experience. No, that's a lie. Somewhere along in there I developed a distinct chip on my shoulder about the whole iTMS experience and I set out on my shopping endeavor, purely as fodder for this blog, with a bitter heart. Maybe it was the Amazon thing. Letting Amazon scoop them on a general DRM-free major label catalog continues to strike me as a major business failure. Bending that uniform pricing model to charge more for Plus tracks. Amazon debunking the whole premise of the value of uniform pricing in the first place.

So I fired up iTunes with the intent of buying the first Plus item I saw, for the unvarnished experience, sort of like wandering into Walmart. What I got was...

Well, before I get into that, can I just talk about the virtual retail space? I mean, that is a blog in itself, but these music sites. Why are there so many examples of this: front pages that seem to suggest that God gave them a single sheet of foolscap and a divine injunction to stuff everything they could on it. Here is some of what's occupying real estate in the Music Store's foyer: NEW RELEASES. JUST FOR YOU. WHAT'S HOT. STAFF FAVORITES. FREE. INDIES. Something called QUICK LINKS with links to things like Buy iTunes Gifts on it. A music store menu that ought to be called Quick Links but bears the imaginative title iTunes STORE. OH I THOUGHT I WAS ALREADY IN THE STORE. WHY ARE WE SHOUTING? TOP SO - ahem, Top Songs. Top Rentals. Top TV Episodes and Albums and Ringtones and Music Videos and Podcasts and Audiobooks... all bracketed by clusters of standalone buttons with everything from American Idol promotions to books by Oprah to Ellen Degeneres for what reason I do not know except it has SOMETHING TO DO WITH AMERICAN IDOL. I'm sorry, I'm shouting again. This was supposed to be a short review, I'm aiming for "snappier."

Here's the thing: the iTMS lives in my music player. It sleeps in the same folder as my entire music collection. Is this whole Apple aesthetic not supposed to be about the clean and simple interface? Why am I confronted with what can only be called a link vomit of (at best) postage stamp sized icons? And why is the first thing that this store which lives inside my music collection offers me Yellowcard?

Nothing against Yellowcard, okay, as I have sort of made fun of them a couple times now: I hope their multi-platinum record sales (and I'd never heard of them! So out of touch) will console them. My perusal of my $7.99 album purchase from iTMS Plus, Live from Las Vegas at the Palms, suggests they are generating well-polished punk pop, probably as we speak, much in the hardcore roots vein of Green Day, who I once saw opening for Bad Religion, if you can believe that, and if you want to know about MY indie cred. Anyway, my point is, this is not Yellowcard's bad. Signing some live exclusive deal with iTunes is not a decision I can fault any aspiring musician for.

Offering this to me, as my very first choice on the very first page I see when I enter your store, on the other hand: come one, Apple, I thought we had a relationship. Well you were wrong about that. Apple wants to see other people: LOTS of other people, and if this thing feels increasingly less personal, well, it is business. The point I'm making here is that if Apple has attained Walmart-like retail status as a music seller, no mean feat, it is also delivering a Walmart retail experience. The user interface is a cluttered mess, selections based on personal data are shallow and perfunctory, searching is mediocre, and the location of the store within my music-playing software is actually kind of a pain in the ass. The failure to negotiate equal access with Amazon to DRM free major label catalogs was a big fumble, the pricing is largely uncompetitive, the surcharge on music in the Plus catalog sucks, and frankly, I'll shop there again when everything is DRM free and they offer me free upconversion of all my previously purchased, FairPlay encumbered tracks, which I'll otherwise probably expunge next time a major migration of the catalog is required. Checkouts and downloads generally work fine, at least from inside iTunes on an iMac, the only way I've ever experienced it, but you know, checkout at Sam Goody was generally a pretty trouble free experience. I think the bar is set justifiably higher for Apple and I don't think they cleared it. Congratulations, iTunes Music Store, you are the first review to receive a rating of HATE, heralding in the age of a crueler, rougher Phree Musique digital music download store review blog! A "one thousand points of darkness" sort of digital music download store review blog! How's that? "Snappy" enough for you?

Update, January 2009: Given the recent transition to all DRM-Free tracks, I am upgrading the iTMS rating to Shrugs. Keep up the mediocre work, guys.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Epilogue for the Devil

2008-03-29T19:10:00.003-05:00

I tend to get in over my head when I get into serial essays like this... The same thing happened when I gamely attacked the history of recorded music. I mean, damn, that's a... lot of text. But I am, perhaps, out of my depth.

But beyond that, and (to me at least) much more importantly, I'm tired of reading, thinking and writing about the pop cartels and their minions. Though it's easy to get distracted from it by current events, my whole purpose in writing this thing is not to talk about the big names and their usual games. iTunes is the last major-label-centric store left for me to review for now and I'm looking forward to getting into all the real alternatives and the solo artists - the true independents. I'm sure plenty of other people will chew over the oscillating fortunes of Sony, Universal, Warner and EMI. I'm going to put the focus back on the reviews - with the occasional interview or essay about the real news in the music business: the pioneers who have long been learning to ride the wave of technological change that the major labels are still trying to control.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Sympathy for the Devil: the plight of the record industry, Part 4

2008-03-27T23:26:00.004-05:00

Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four

4: Follow the money

During the unavoidable hiatus between when I posted my third installment on U2 Manager Paul McGuinness’ speech on what needs to be done about the declining fortunes of the music industry and now, I kept having these smack-the-forehead moments, thinking of other things that are wrong with the music industry (besides the Devilish Scourge of Piracy) that I should have discussed. I forgot to talk about the theory that the transition to CD caused a one-time wave of library reformatting purchases that created unsustainable expectations of future growth! The unexpectedly robust used market! I’ve already talked some about how the CD killed the album as a desirable physical package - but I was going to get into how innovators like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails were turning this liability into an asset with “super-premium” physical offerings directed at the most dedicated fans. Surely I should have said more about “real” (that is to say commercially motivated) piracy, and why the industry virtually ignores all of the other forms of unauthorized duplication and distribution besides filesharing, and how there’s a prominent 14 dollar and a 10 dollar and a FIVE DOLLAR rack of bargain DVDs in Target, but the only front-of-the-store “bargain” CD rack is like 13 dollars, or how now even Walmart is slapping up the industry for its inflated prices (okay, I couldn’t have mentioned that one because it only came up this week).

I’m pretty sure that list could go on and on. Note only one thing about most of these ideas though: they involve the record industry fixing things that it is doing wrong and doing things on the basis of what their customers want.

Mr. McGuinness has a different notion about the whole business, as I’ve noted, in that it primarily revolves around characterizing his client’s customers as thieves. He does not, however, completely absolve the record industry of blame - though what he does saddle it with is very narrow and particular: mostly, and this is a familiar refrain all over the industry, with not reacting quickly or effectively to the amazing digital audio revolution - or, as Mr. McGuinness likes to think of it, the arising of a “collection of digital industries... that enabled the consumer to steal with impunity.” Mr. McGuinness fingers in particular the failure of the Secure Digital Music Initiative, the pan-industry effort to create universal, unbreakable DRM on digital audio files. Even here, he has a funny way of looking at the situation, laying the blame for SDMI’s failure at the feet of “competition rules,” accusing the U.S. (government, presumably) of being “overzealous in protecting the public from cartel-like behaviour.”

This is a remarkably specious version of the story of the failure of SDMI - beyond omitting its most ignoble side track, it ignores all the major failings of the SDMI: that it promoted a technology that was fundamentally unsound, that would have required a level of cooperative interaction between media and consumer electronics companies that has never been achieved, all in service of forcing the public to make a complete technological transition that no consumer, pirate or not, wanted, and which would serve only one stakeholder, the content industry.

The record industry didn’t learn the lesson of the futility of technological control with the effective collapse of the SDMI in 2001, it didn’t learn it with the Sony BMG rootkit scandal of 2005, and despite recent concessions to the sale of DRM-free MP3s, it apparently hasn’t learned it’s lesson as of 2008. While he avoids mention of the largely discredited concept of digital rights management, McGuinness inserts a plug for some proprietary tracking scheme (and it is worthwhile here to remember that while DRM has become synonymous with anti-copying technology, rights management is a much broader concept that is far from dead) called SIMRAN. There isn’t much readily available information to be had on this at the moment, but the specifics are hardly important. One can almost feel sympathy for the music industry, that after who knows how many millions have been flushed on DRM (SDMI member companies paid millions in combined membership fees alone, for exactly nothing), they are still paying up to these snake oil merchants.

Although even weirder than this aside about some obscure DRM technology is what McGuinness offers it in service of: recommending, apparently, this guy’s opinion that the major labels should create “the ultimate digital-distribution hub, a place where every band can sell its wares at the price point of its choosing” - in order to compete with the Apple iTunes Music Store’s “dominance.” We’ll take a closer look at the sort of thing this might actually be describing at the conclusion of this article: for now it’s worth pointing out the curious failure to make even a nod towards any of the industry’s many failed attempts at harnessing a digital marketplace - as well as Mr. McGuinness’ assumption that the digital marketplace would best be served by essentially having a single provider... but then we already know about his affection for “cartel-like behaviour.” If only that nasty U.S. government doesn’t thwart it! It’s also worth noting that Mr. McGuinness is apparently oblivious to the fact that there is already a very serious contender in the ring making a play for Apple’s position of dominance... Perhaps because it appears that U2 has elected not to make it’s catalog available on the nation’s #2 digital music retailer.

A whole lot more interesting than these perplexing asides about how the record industry might take the reins of selling music online ten years down the road, however, is real meat of Mr. McGuinness’ “solution” for saving the ailing industry. I had a pretty complex assessment of it started, in fact, but screw it: I’m sick of Mr. McGuinness, I’m sick of trying to navigate reality through the distorted lens of the record industry, so let’s nutshell this business and be done with it: basically, McGuinness spends the better part of his conclusion proposing the following set up: revoke the safe-harbor provisions that protect ISPs from being encumbered with the responsibility for preventing copyright transgressions, force them to punish their customers for file sharing, and somehow get some money out of them. He’s even got a snappy summary of what this is all about: “who’s got our money and what can we do?”

All technical and legal and ethical arguments aside, this, I think is the crux of this business. “Our money.” The record industry isn’t asking “what do our customers want.” It isn’t asking “what can we do to become one of the sought-after providers in a new, still-emerging marketplace?” It isn’t asking “what’s next,” it’s just asking “where’s our money.” People like Mr. McGuinness seem to honestly believe that the four billion or so in annual revenues that have vanished since the record industry peaked in the late nineties is in some sense still out there. Again, I find myself almost sympathetic, because in this misapprehension it seems quite likely that the record industry will squander what it’s got left pursuing that very phantom: their mythical missing money, which the McGuinneses of the world so blithely assume they are entitled to and naively aspire to wrest away from the supposed enablers of what is a largely fictional understanding of what happened to the actual money that used to get spent on CDs.

The reality is that digitization, compression and file sharing did not devalue recorded music. The industry devalued it in a dozen different ways, from the content to the cost to the package, and then computers and the internet provided many people with an alternative that allowed them to have their cake and eat it too. But the thing is, even putting aside the technical issue of whether file sharing could ever be effectively thwarted, people would still have the same money to spend and the same choices to make about how to spend it. If it could ever come down to it that they couldn’t have their cake and eat it too, people would just eat the damn cake - which is to say, they would buy their DVDs and video games and find some other path to a music fix. They sure as hell aren’t likely to increase their music budget for what the major labels have on offer.

In a sense, the idea of trying to shake down ISPs for “lost” revenue is a pragmatic response to this reality: CD revenues in the conventional, sell-’em-for-$15 in a big box store model aren’t going to come back ever. It’s probably why, at least as an idea to talk about, versions of this - like a de facto tax on bandwidth - are finding some traction in this discussion.

I suppose there could come to be some reality, however odious, to this sort of approach if the rest of the media - especially television and the movies - were to get involved. As it stands, the idea of the major record labels managing to extort anything like a $5 surcharge out of the ISPs, whose revenues completely dwarf those of the music business, even in its post-21st century heyday, is laughable - as is, for that matter, the idea of them out-lobbying the ISPs to significantly adjust the safe harbor provisions that Mr. McGuinness finds so unfair.

Then again, what do I know?

I’ve been writing intermittently for weeks and over many pages about Mr. McGuinness’ speech because it is a compendious representation of the wrong-headed thinking that has led the music industry into its present revenue spiral. I think that it is in this notion of enforcing some kind of statutory compensation from ISPs that the central failing of the whole industry line is revealed. There is one glaring aspect of this latest record industry boondoggle that really infuriates me - even beyond the idea of getting charged for the ostensible impact of an activity I don’t personally engage in.

It is the justification, given by Mr. McGuinness in his speech and oft repeated in this discussion, that this sort of mechanism is necessary because “whatever business model you are building, you cannot compete with billions of illegal files free on P2P networks.”

“You can’t compete with free” is the cheap, unimaginative protest of an industry that spent a decade trying to figure out how not to change and now wants everyone to pay for the consequences regardless of whether they have any stake in it or not. Independent artists are competing with free right now. High profile experiments like Radiohead’s In Rainbows and Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV are not only competing with free, they are supplying the free in the same locus as the option to buy. This isn’t about saving making music as a business, whether people like Paul McGuinness really believe it is or not - it is about preserving the former hegemony of the major labels - engineering and controlling a compulsory system to replace real innovation in a new medium that they have never understood or effectively exploited.

And that’s almost enough about that. Next time I’ll tell you how I really feel about it all, in a brief (no, seriously) coda on why I’m going to try really hard not to write any more essays like this. Then, a music store review! Because this is, after all, a digital music store review site. I’ll be critiquing a recent purchase from the still clinging to the number one spot big kahuna, none other than the iTunes Music Store. And coming up after that, an interview with someone who’s not a big jerk like Paul McGuinness. Oh man, it’s going to be great!

Meanwhile, for those pining to read more, here's a selection of some of the more interesting articles I read trying to wrap my head around what’s going on in the business of music.

The Record Industry’s Decline at Rolling Stone

A Brave New World: the music Biz at the Dawn of 2008 at Ars Technica

The music industry: From major to minor at The Economist

DRM, lock-ins and piracy: all red herrings for a music industry in trouble at Ars Technica

Recorded Music and Music Publishing by Enders Analysis (includes link to report pdf)

Fear May Not Spur CD Sales at Wired Magazine

RIAA’s Statistics Don’t Add Up to Piracy

The rest of this essay:

Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Sympathy for the Devil: the plight of the record industry, Part 3

2008-02-28T21:51:00.003-06:00

Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four

3: There is always an easy solution to every problem — neat, plausible and wrong

I'm going to depart from the meat of U2's manager's speech for a bit to get into the alternatives to the assumptions that are the basis of Mr. McGuinness' assertions: that the music business has been ruined by illegal file sharing.

One part of this is the question of just how badly the industry is doing - indeed whether they are doing badly at all. Although it references only one player in the Australian industry, this opinion piece suggested that industry’s gloomy pronouncements were hiding all-time high sales. While they may bemoan the state of the industry when discussing the impact of file sharing, when discussing their position as publicly traded companies the picture that’s painted tends to be more optimistic. All this can be confusing stuff. There are sales, and then again there are revenues, and then again there are profits. And what the hell is a “margin”?

In general though, since I’m no economist I have to go by the trends in reporting and it seems pretty clear that there is a consensus that the business of selling mainstream CDs is in trouble, revenues have tumbled sharply over the last decade, many retail stores dedicated solely or primarily to music have gone out of business, and the stocks of the publicly traded companies have taken major hits. You’d be hard pressed to find an analysis that suggest that the record business as a whole is doing anything but worse. And while projections are just that, they suggest that the decline will continue and that to the degree digital downloads counter declining CD sales, they won't completely make up for these declines.

Far more uncertain is a core argument at the center of McGuinness’ speech: that the blame, or at least the majority of the blame, for these declining fortunes can be laid at the feet of illegal file sharing. Certainly for an industry insider to hold this position is not surprising. It has been pushed hard by industry representative groups like the RIAA and the IFPI. You can find plenty of research that supports the position (of course, you have to consider the source: SafeMedia is selling technology that purports to remove illicit copyrighted materials from P2P traffic. Nevertheless, many of the cited articles are legitimately argued by relatively unbiased sources). Personally, I think that an important and largely undiscussed element in the prevalence of this argument is that it is driven by uncomplicated causal logic. Napster hit, file sharing became a phenomenon, record sales declined. Do the math, right?

I reviewed a fair amount of both primary research and media interpretations of the situation. My own unsatisfying conclusion is that I’m not equipped to make a particularly sophisticated judgment of the primary research, a situation that makes the scientist in me very leery of coming to conclusions that “happen” to support my personal biases. I think it is fair to say, however, that there is honest disagreement between the better-equipped and less biased researchers on the topic of the role and extent of of filesharing’s impact on the CD business. So I’m not going to argue my own specious conclusion on the subject. Instead, as food for thought I hope I can shine some light on just how complex and ambiguous the situation is.

That file sharing of unauthorized copies of copyrighted songs is occurring at a large scale isn’t a subject of dispute. The essential question - the one that is almost never addressed or indeed acknowledged by the record industry, is the degree to which file sharing is displacing sales. The logic contrary to the party line is simple: the fact that someone will download a song for free does not imply that they would necessarily purchase the song legally if it weren’t otherwise accessible. A trivial demonstration is that an individual could easily download free music worth, if it were purchased legally, far more than the individual has available to spend. Preventing the downloads couldn’t possibly generate the supposed revenue selling them would have generated: the money simply isn’t available.

There are a variety of different approaches to researching the attachment of music revenue losses to illegal file sharing. Data on overall file sharing volumes over time, specific files being shared, and demographics of individuals engaged in file sharing can be compared to similar data for revenue from conventional sales. Furthermore, individuals can be surveyed about their habits and beliefs about how their file sharing and music purchasing intersect.

The problems with this data are numerous. By its nature, illegal file sharing is not exhaustively or accurately tracked. Any specific data on file sharing statistics must involve a significant amount of assumption, and it is not much of a stretch to suggest that the bias of the observer will affect what sorts of assumptions are made (it is fair to point out that the issue of bias cuts both ways - plenty of biased analysis is made to argue that file sharing does not impact conventional music revenues).

Even going directly to the consumer for information provides uncertain conclusions. If individuals projected their own purchasing decisions with absolute accuracy no well-funded movie would ever bomb and no major product would ever fail. The decisions that people make with their wallets in actual consumer venues are notoriously difficult to predict. Frankly, a possible conclusion that merits greater attention is that the impact of file sharing on CD sales cannot be accurately determined.

If the case for a cause and effect relationship yields uncertain conclusions, is is only sensible to look for alternative explanations. In the case of declining music revenues there are many potential causes that have gone largely unexamined by the record industry.

The hardest to prove one way or another, while ironically the most important to correct if it is a serious factor, is the charge that the record industry basically screwed up its product. Critics point out that the major labels have progressively issued fewer new releases, in essence cutting variety and consumer choice. While essentially impossible to quantify, many have pointed to a fundamental decline in the quality of mainstream recorded music, as the age of the video favored image over substance. An interesting corollary to the quality argument is the issue of independently produced music. It is possible that the declines in major label CD sales are being displaced to a greater degree than is commonly recognized by independent music sales. Arguing an increased relevance of independent music meshes well with the Long Tail concept, which asserts that while the traditional media retail model of stock carrying costs and shelf space discourage catering to niche markets, online retail and particularly the sale of digital information via download thrives on them - virtual shelf space is infinite, and carrying “stock” of digital information is virtually costless.

Whether from truly independent self-publishers or independent labels ranging from basement startups to major-minors like Matador and Sub Pop, the true numbers on independent music can be hard to pin down, since not all are tracked by SoundScan, the major music industry data tracker run by Nielsen (of television ratings fame). Even lacking concrete numbers, it can’t be discounted that independent champions like CD Baby and eMusic have quietly risen into the top tiers of online sales of CDs as well as digital downloads. Indeed, there could be no clearer testimony to the increasing importance of this market than the fact that SoundScan is tracking more of these markets - CD Baby recently arranged for artists to have the ability to have their sales tracked, while SoundScan started tracking eMusic’s downloads in 2006, three years after they started tracking legal downloads at all. As the data on these alternative sources of music come together we might seem some very interesting and different presentations of the state of the music business. Already certain aspects of the independent markets are suggestive: eMusic, for example, places the median age of its users in the upper thirties, an underrepresented demographic in mainstream music, and gains more revenue from full album downloads than from singles.

The state of the single is a topic in itself. The CD single experienced some of the earliest and most precipitous drops in sales, and was one of the first and least contested areas where blame was placed at the feet of file sharing. But it isn’t quite so clear cut, since at the same time the industry itself attracted blame for hindering the singles market for its own purposes - namely, because it would prefer to sell more expensive full albums, regardless of whether listeners want the rest of the songs on them or not. So you could argue that the record industry actually drove file sharing trends by restricting access to legitimate singles. The fact that the largest mainstream market in legitimate digital downloads, iTunes, is driven by singles rather than albums purchases supports a common quality argument about mainstream music: that the record industry is frequently selling albums with a few hits padded by filler. And while legal digital downloads may be picking up some of the slack of declining CD sales, the fact that the digital marketplace has made virtually every song available as a single would certainly be consistent with the failure of digital download sales to make up declining CD revenues. People may be literally buying less music because they never wanted all the songs they were compelled to buy for anything that was only available as a full CD in the first place.

Another argument is that the driving force behind declining record sales is that they are being displaced by other media purchases - primarily DVDs and video games. While proving it gets into very similar kinds of complexities as equating file sharing with lost CD revenue, it is a straightforward fact that DVD and gaming revenues have been climbing. If we can assume that consumer entertainment spending has been relatively flat (an assertion I haven’t yet found a good citation for) then it is certainly consistent that declining CD sales would necessarily follow. This is an interesting argument because it again raises the question of whether it would make any difference if file sharing could be prevented. If the money isn’t available it isn’t available, and arguably the cash-strapped file sharer would simply eschew recorded music in favor of their preferred media and seek access to free music through other avenues: in this context it might be considered constructive that the top feature consumers would like in an MP3 player is an FM radio receiver - and that this desire is stronger in the 12-24 age group than it is for those 25 and over. The fact may be that, no matter how much an anathema to the record industry, people - and especially kids - may consider “free” music to be a simple necessity for their entertainment budget - and one that they will find, one way or another.

What’s interesting, and important, about these alternative causes of major label sales declines are that for the most part they suggest realistic solutions - and that these solutions uniformly have to do with acknowledging consumer expectations and desires and responding to them by offering consumers more variety, more options and better values.

But in the next installment we’ll be returning to the alternate universe inhabited by U2’s Mr. McGuinness and take another look at the solutions he’s pinning his hopes on. You’ll find they sum up quite a bit differently. And then hopefully to soon wrap this up with a little coda about whither the Record Industry, and whether I care, and then back to reviews, hurrah!

It’s important that I acknowledge the intelligent input I received from this question I asked in Ask Metafilter - a great resource (and Metafilter has a neat area for members to post their musical creations also - well worth the $5 membership fee).

Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Sympathy for the Devil: the plight of the record industry, Part 2

2008-02-14T16:28:00.004-06:00

Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four

2: Thieves, Burglars and Pirates

Before I get into analyzing U2’s manager’s version of the “what went wrong with the record industry” party line, let me clarify some personal stances. I’m not a proponent of file sharing as a method of mass transgression of copyrights. I never used Napster. I’ve never used KaZaA, eMule, Limewire, BitTorrent or any of the many other file sharing networks or applications to access copyrighted content, and I’ve never held an account for any of the networks that require one. I am a proponent of strong and durable copyrights (though not of the duration Disney recently purchased from Congress), I believe in paying copyright owners for their intellectual property (though I am happiest when most of the money goes to the actual creator). To this extent I’d guess I’m substantially in agreement with U2’s Mr. McGuinness.

On the other hand, like the majority of people I have a history of copyright transgression. A clear memory of my history with recorded music is buying a box of Radio Shack 90 minute tapes and recording a couple dozen records from my family’s LP collection the summer before my freshman year of college. I’ve made and received my share of mix tapes (and these days, CDs). I’ve gotten a few copies of CDs burned by friends, although it’s something I don’t ask for and don’t encourage. I’ve downloaded a few oddments that are technically infringing though not copies of commercially available materials, like Danger Mouse’s Grey Album remix, and I’ve downloaded a few (literally, a few) things, via various unorthodox tools, that by my own standards I really should have purchased.

I’m not a saint or a purist about copyright. I’m a realist and occasional opportunist. I bring it up not to proselytize my position or justify my transgressions but to stress that while I’m about to disagree strenuously with most of what Mr. McGuinness has to say about problems in the record industry, my objections are not based on a moral disagreement of what and artist or even that less empathy-inviting organism, the copyright owner, deserves. What I object to is stupid ideas that won’t fix anything and which would cause harm disproportionate to the problem they purport to solve anyway.

Revisit with me a moment the purported motive of Mr. McGuinness’ speech:

What I’m trying do here today is identify a course of action that will benefit all: artists, labels, writers and publishers.

In the first part of this essay I invited examination of this sentiment for what might be missing from it. Of course, the omitted party is the listener, the consumer, the fan.

Is this an inadvertent slip or a rare piece of unvarnished honesty? Have things come to the point that the industry insider sees the listener, the sole and absolute foundation of every iota of their fortunes, as nothing except a problem to be controlled?

I’d argue that whether it is conscious or not, leaving the listener out of the benefits equation is no mistake. One thing that’s clear in this speech is that the party line position is obsessed with the idea of stealing. Mr. McGuinness invokes the idea of stealing (and related concepts like thievery, burglary, crime and of course piracy) sixteen times in this speech. This is critical for two reasons. The first is that it is indicative of how thoroughly the listener experience, listener desires and listener rights have been left out of the equation. Mr. McGuinness does not pay even the smallest lip service to the value consumer of recorded music, or to the solution of the industry’s woes as having anything to do with satisfying the consumer’s desires or expectations. The closest he comes to addressing the fan as anything other than a presumed thief is his argument that people are enjoying live concerts more than ever, as based on the “generally unresisted” trend towards increasing ticket costs.

The second thing this identification of listener as thief illustrates is that it has become fundamentally unquestioned dogma within the record industry that the decline of major-label CD sales has been caused exclusively by illegal file sharing. There is not a hint of alternative or complimentary causes for the declining fortunes of the CD in this speech. And indeed this sentiment has been largely picked up and echoed by most mainstream media coverage. For the most part, the only thing that varies in this assessment are opinions on how the industry let the situation get so out of hand, and what can be done to rectify it now.

Leading the charge on the “what now” front is another commonplace component of the party line: the belief that there is, at least theoretically, a technical fix for the problem of file sharing. The speech invokes the SDMI as an example of what went wrong with the industry’s response to the problem of file sharing in the 90s. It is telling that the only culprit identified for the failure of this initiative is the US government’s “overzealous” protection of the public from “cartel-like behaviour.”

The latest take on DRM isn’t the only technical fix McGuinness proposes. A somewhat new facet of his thesis is the preposterous claim that ISPs could easily detect and disrupt file sharing traffic of unauthorized copies of copyrighted materials if they wished to do so. The examples McGuinness provides in the full speech reveal a depth of ignorance about what the internet is - indeed, what it means to “share files” - that is all too common in the record industry - and that might amuse if it was not the foundation of so much ill-founded and harmful ideas about changing government policy.

Which leads us to the third predictable leg on this tripod of industry-standard arguments. First, the dominant role of the consumer is intrinsically as a thief. Second, that the offending activity - file sharing - could be disrupted by a technical fix. And finally, that if the gatekeepers of this nefarious filesharing paradise, the ISPs, cannot be convinced to voluntarily deny the thieving consumer access to their stolen files via technological intervention, they should be compelled to do so by law.

These are all pretty much versions of arguments that the industry have been pushing for a decade - the relatively new component is the focus on ISPs and digital hardware manufacturers as the primary targets of ire and the perceived source of remedy.

It’s not really a surprising change in position. The industry’s only extant “solution” to the issue of file sharing - civil suits against individuals - have been an extravagant failure, and indeed statements made during the recently publicized first such suit to go to trial suggest that it has been a costly failure.
The shift of focus to players with deep pockets is inevitable. McGuinness takes what is coming to be a common tactic, to lay the blame of the situation at the anarchistic leanings of the silicon valley crowd - their “hippy values.” Of course, the same sort of pejorative assessment of communistic values has been slapped on anyone who has suggested that the increasing accessibility of information is an inevitable outcome of the information age, and that demanding that the technology makers and gatekeepers of the information infrastructure fundamentally alter their business to cater to the content crowd is rather the tail wagging the dog.

And really that part of it is just smoke, anyway, a bit of rhetorical flourish. The real meat of the argument is summed up in one question: “who’s got our money?” It is a sentiment that is mirrored in the idea that music industry “assets are exploited by the buyers” of MP3 players (the legal use of format-shifted tracks from legally owned CDs is ignored as usual), or the response to the existence of premium cost internet access for “heavy downloaders” with the rhetorical question “isn’t that our money?”

While it’s impossible to say for sure, I suspect that this line of reasoning will characterize the next act in this sad farce of the record industry’s decline. In the next chapter, I’ll examine these arguments about the causes and remedies of the record industry’s sad estate, and whether they’re likely to find much relief out of the pockets of Apple and Comcast.

Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Sympathy for the Devil: the plight of the record industry, Part 1

2008-02-13T15:59:00.005-06:00

Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four

Prologue

Recently I went looking for commentary about the decline of the record industry. Before anything else, I’ll say that what I’m defining as the “record industry” for these purposes is the Big Four: EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner. My motivation is that there is a tale being told about what’s supposedly gone wrong in the business of music. Indeed it has been repeated so frequently that it is virtually uncontested in the mainstream media. And that’s a shame, because if the story isn’t critically examined the opportunities to learn from it is lost. Lots of other people, many better equipped than me, are examining this story. But the party line is so overwhelmingly over-represented in the media that there is always room for another perspective.

1: U2, Brutus?

What got me thinking about all this again was the transcript of this speech, proudly displayed on U2’s official website [Note - it's since dropped off their front page, and U2 does not seem particularly interested in people accessing older website content, so I've switched this link to a hopefully more stable location], by their longtime manager Paul McGuinness, regarding the woes of the music industry. Mr. McGuinness states his goal in the speech:

What I’m trying do here today is identify a course of action that will benefit all: artists, labels, writers and publishers.

Take a moment to reread that statement and see if you can spot the stake holder that is arguably missing from this assessment, because this omission contains the thesis of my later arguments.

It is very worthwhile to read this entire speech as a representative sample of how an industry insider with every reason to consider himself an expert on the topic understands the declining fortunes of, in particular, the CD business for the 4 major labels. But I’ll highlight what I see as the major points and trends in this analysis. Here’s a excerpted rendition of his speech.

Record companies... allowed an entire collection of digital industries to arise that enabled the consumer to steal with impunity the very recorded music that had previously been paid for...

The SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative)... and similar attempts... have partly been thwarted by competition rules. The US government has sometimes been overzealous in protecting the public from cartel-like behaviour...

...Though I may be critical of the ways in which the digital space has been faced by the industry I am also genuinely sympathetic and moved by the human fallout... it is terrible that a direct effect of piracy and thievery has been the destruction of so many careers...

...There is one effective thing the majors could do... I quote from Josh Tyrangiel in Time Magazine: -“The smartest thing would be for the majors to collaborate on the creation of the ultimate digital-distribution hub...’

There is technology now, that the worldwide industry could adopt, which enables content owners to track every legitimate digital download transaction... This system... is called SIMRAN... I should disclose that I’m one of their investors...

Sadly, the recent innovative Radiohead release... seems to have backfired to some extent. It seems that the majority of downloads were through illegal P2P download services like BitTorrent and LimeWire... Even Radiohead’s honesty box principle showed that if not constrained, the customer will steal music...

It’s interesting to look at the character of the individuals who built the industries that resulted from the arrival of the microprocessor. Most of them came out of the so-called counterculture on the west coast of America. Their values were hippy values...

I’ve met a lot of today’s heroes of Silicon Valley. Most of them don’t really think of themselves as makers of burglary kits... I call on them today to start... taking responsibility for protecting the music they are distributing and... by commercial agreements, sharing their enormous revenues with the content makers and owners...

For ISPs in general, the days of prevaricating over their responsibilities for helping protect music must end... [W]hen the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the EU Electronic Commerce Directive were drawn up, legislators were concerned to offer safe harbours restricting the responsibilities of ISPs who acted as a “mere conduit”... [A]s it turned, the “Safe Harbour” concept was really a Thieves’ Charter... It is time for ISPs to be real partners. The safe harbours of the 1990s are no longer appropriate, and if ISPs do not cooperate voluntarily there will need to be legislation to require them to cooperate.

...The truth is that whatever business model you are building, you cannot compete with billions of illegal files free on P2P networks.

ISPs could implement a policy of disconnection in very quick time. Filtering is also feasible... There are many other examples that prove the ability of ISPs to switch off selectively activity they have a problem with... We must shame [ISPs] into wanting to help us. Their snouts have been at our trough feeding free for too long.

There’s a huge commercial partnership opportunity there as well. For me, the business model of the future is one where music is bundled into an ISP or other subscription service and the revenues are shared between the distributor and the content owners.

I believe this is realistic; the last few years have shown clear proof of the power of ISPs and cable companies to bundle packages of content and get more money out of their subscribers. In the UK, most ISPs offer different tiers of services, with a higher monthly fee for heavy downloaders. Why are there ‘heavy’ downloaders? Isn’t that our money?

Universal – U2’s label - recently struck a deal with Microsoft that sees it receive a cut of the revenues generated by sales of the Zune MP3 player... [it] follows from the U2/Apple deal, the principle that the hardware makers should share with the content owners whose assets are exploited by the buyers of their machines. The record companies should never again allow industries to arise that make billions off their content without looking for a piece of that business.

So, to conclude – Who’s got our money and what can we do?

I suggest we shift the focus of moral pressure away from the individual P2P file thief and on to the multi billion dollar industries that benefit from these countless tiny crimes... the message to government is this: ISP responsibility is not a luxury for possible contemplation in the future. It is a necessity for implementation TODAY – by legislation if voluntary means fail.

All emphasis added.

Oh my, I seem to have consumed the bulk of my first chapter restating Mr. McGuinness’ copyright-protected content. But I’m sure he wouldn’t mind... After all, I’m helping to spread his good word about the salvation of the record industry, right?

The next chapter will be an examination of whether the party line gives a complete picture of the plight of the record industry.

Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

If it was about my album it would be a self-link

2008-01-24T23:31:00.000-06:00

Only the Very Greatest Hits, a collection of my favorite recordings of my original music from the last 10 years, is available for sale as a digital download. You can preview the whole album here, and here's a sample:

I've been working on this collection for several months, and arranged for it to be published online soon after I finished writing the 2,000th Song of the Day.

In April of 1998 (I'll be announcing a 10 year anniversary event shortly) I began writing the first sequence of the song of the day project (A.K.A. Songs of Days volumes 1-7) which persisted for 1,001 consecutive lyrics. I took a break of about 5 years. On Friday, January 25 2008 I wrote "Beautiful," the 999th song of the current sequence (titled A Song A Day second iteration: The Book of Hours - volumes 1-6 and counting...).

Comics artist Dave Sim wrote: The cliché (which isn't a cliché, it's the truth) is that you have two thousand bad pages in you and until you draw them, you won't start producing good pages.

I realize it's just a number but even so I've been looking forward to it. In celebration of having written my 2,000th bad song, I'm publishing a album of what I feel is my best recorded solo work. The album has 29 tracks of 160 kbps MP3s and comes with artwork and lyrics, and costs $1.35 for an 85-odd MB digital download. That is $1.35 total cost transacted through PayPal. PayPal will accept payments via credit cards from non-PayPal members. If you're determined to have the album but don't want to use PayPal or a credit card, email me and we'll come to an arrangement.

Although it shows many hallmarks of amateur production, I am pleased with and proud of this album, and I feel that it's an excellent value. If you're feeling starved for text you can read a long essay about issues of pricing here.

Buy it here.

The first 5,000 purchasers will receive, absolutely free of charge, a copy via email of the lyrics for the 2,000th song of the day projects song and free access to unlimited copies of it, once it gets recorded, someday. Everyone else will have to wait 1,764 songs (1,764 days plus however many I skip) for it to be published normally in the Fairly Secret Song of the Day blog.

Write a review of your Digital Commerce Experience at Spirit of Salt Dot Com. It could appear on the internet!

Donations Suck! Thank you for supporting the Phree Musique blog, the Fairly Secret Song of the Day blog, and of course the Jonathan Mark Hamlow 2nd Lifetime Memorial Text Museum by purchasing this album.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

On Pricing

2008-01-24T22:37:00.000-06:00

The cost of my new digital album is $1.35. The simple explanation of how I arrive at this figure is that it nets me about a dollar. If a nobody like me somehow got a record deal it would be a reasonably thrilling to realize a $1 per album royalty. Thus do I explain what would otherwise be an excessively low price by almost any going standard.

For this price you get 29 160 kbps MP3s, a digital cover image and a rich text format file of album notes and lyrics. The album is 47.3 minutes long and the whole package is 86.4 MB of data.

My feelings about pricing for digital downloads of music are complicated but easily summarized: I think they are uniformly far too expensive.

Consider a minute music pricing in the conventional model. Let’s say I head over to the Billboard charts, find the number one album de jour (As I Am by Alicia Keys), and then head over to Sam Goody for the purchase price. It doesn’t get more conventional than that, Right? The price when I engaged in this exercise (well, I didn’t actually purchase it, but you know) is $16.99 for a 14 track album with a duration of about 50 minutes. That works out to $1.21 per track.

As far as I’m concerned $0.99 a track at iTunes is pretty much the same price. The accepted standard for a digital downloads, which can be placed unreservedly at the feet of Apple, falls squarely inside the conventional model. I’ve got a problem with this because I think a number of factors should mitigate the download costs as compared to CDs:

1. Lossy compression (encoding tracks in a lower-fidelity format like MP3) should reduce the price of the digital information
2. Lack of physical media, which serves as a data backup, and is still necessary when a computer or MP3 player isn’t available (e.g. I have to burn copies of my digital downloads on media I pay for to use them in my car), and lack of physical packaging (lyrics and artwork) should reduce the price of the digital information.

These issues are basically built into the digital download package - artwork and lyrics are seldom included and MP3s are the standard format. For these issues alone I think Apple’s $0.99 standard is too high. I also think a number of contextual issues should affect the price of a digital download. This is getting into territory where my opinions are more idiosyncratic.

3. Cultural prevalence and lack of currency. I think newer and rarer materials command a natural premium. They’re fresh, they haven’t been played out in the various public arenas. They tend more to represent an individual’s immediate work and there tend to be production costs that must still be covered. Conversely, the older and more common something is, the less willing I am to pay a premium cost. On a very basic level of practical value, I am comparing the price of the download to the price of a used CD, a comparison more suited to its availability and ubiquity.

This gets into my general rejection of the idea of uniform pricing. It’s another one I blame on Apple and while it might have made sense in the very restricted context of launching the iTunes Music Store it makes no sense in the evolving real marketplace of digital music downloads. If I went into Cheapo Records and found them charging the same price for a used copy of Dark Side of the Moon as for a brand new copy of the latest from, say, Tinariwen (I just picked the first thing of Pitchfork’s top fifty albums of the year list), I'd turn around and walk right out again. Of course I allowed the Apple iTunes Music Store to do just that thing to me not six months ago, but that was a gift card and prices just didn't seem that important.

In any case, I know the analogy doesn’t hold up. For one thing, I’ll download Tinariwen off of eMusic for less than 3 dollars, but that’s a whole other conversation. We’re talking conceptual spaces here, okay? Whatever, anyway:

4. The rare factor is mitigated by music quality, sound quality, and degree of independence of production and distribution. Music and sound quality are easy: less quality should mean less cost. Relatively, of course, all of these value judgments are relative. I’ve paid for plenty of low-fi, home recorded, even somewhat less than professionally played music. Let’s not be coy: if you purchase my greatest “hits” album, you will be purchasing an album of songs that are low-fi, home recorded, and yes, somewhat less than professionally played. I would be loathe to pay full retail CD cost for them, no matter how much I love some of the misbehavers.

Independence, though, can work both ways. On one hand I understand that independents have to support themselves, they do not have an organization to carry them or exploit economies of scale on their behalves. On the other hand, there are less mouths to feed between you and the artist, less overhead. On the other hand, it is almost certainly more work for the artist. I respect and want to support the artist who is starving one of the big four of their corporate graft, of money spent to people who are both stupid and, excuse me, assholes. But I expect them to cut me in on at least a small consideration of that action.

All of these things added up together translate to, you pay $1.35 for my album as opposed to, say, $7.99 for higher quality MP3s of Yellowcard’s Live from Las Vegas at the Palms, which is the first thing I see when I open a window onto the iTunes Music Store. Which is, like, what the fuck, Apple. Yellowcard? I’ve never even heard of it.

But it’s on iTunes Plus meaning I’m going to end up purchasing the goddamn thing, sight unseen (dear iTMS and eMusic, your live previews suck, love Jon). To review it, it’s like, you know, symmetry.

Anyway.

That’s like a saving of $6.64, two cents less than the Discount of the Beast! And may I thank you most kindly for your consideration.

By Sunday, I review my experience purchasing the Yellowjackets ahem, sorry, I mean Yellowcard from the iTunes Music Store iTunes Plus. Let me just drop a slight spoiler here: it’s not going to be a positive review. I’m gonna keep an eye on those Yellowjackets guys, though. I probably need a little jazz-fusion in my collection.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Stupid linear progression of time.

2008-01-18T09:59:00.000-06:00

My best intentions founder under the weight of commitment and necessity, overwhelming my schedule so thoroughly that I can't even find the time to buy cheap music. Soon, soon I say! In the meantime, some extracurricular reading - another link roundup in what is surely shaping up to be an unprecedented year for the transformation of commercial music distribution.

Radiohead Revisited: Critics didn't give In Rainbows, the object Radiohead's alternative distribution experiment, a whole lotta love - but while the band was initially cagey with download and sales figures (inspiring a crop of disputed rumors), figures cited in a Wired interview between frontman Thom Yorke and longtime genre-buster David Byrne confirmed that the online album was an unqualified commercial success.

An interesting though less discussed fact is the apparent success of the ultra-atomic alternative to the digital download, the costly discbox with its vinyl 12" 45s (about as old school as it gets) and enhanced CD. While sales figures are again ambiguous, there's little doubt it's in the vicinity of 100,000 - at around $80 a pop, certainly a money-maker. The ironic footnote to the story is that while demonstrating the potential of pure digital distribution Radiohead simultaneously confirmed that the opulent physical package the CD era left behind still has a solid place in the business of music (another Wired article presents an interesting take on the ongoing impact of vinyl). Is the conventional industry really taking note of either lesson?

(Well, EMI is certainly trying, although with disappointingly dickhead timing to coincide with the independent release of the conventional CD of In Rainbows, and attended by total exclusion of the band from the release, and whiny statements to the press about the break with Radiohead being the sole fault of the band's unfair demands in their final negotiations. The thing is, there might be plenty of truth in EMI's side of things. But the devil is in the details, which combine to give the impression that the message EMI wants to put out is, we're certainly willing to try new things if it looks like there's some money in it, but screwing over artists is still Job Number 1! Even the ones that get it don't get it).

Byrne's article on the variety of distribution options available to artists today makes a nice companion to the Yorke interview. While there is nothing particularly earth-shattering in the facts presented (particularly to anyone who has been following these developments in the business of music), it is a nicely organized and presented package of these facts - and Byrne brings both a breadth of experience and a viewpoint that is relatively free of rhetoric and politics that make the article a must-read for this topic.

Moving on: I have mixed feelings about Ian Rogers. He doesn't miss an opportunity to insert the Yahoo! brand into the discussion (to be fair, it sort of is his job), and I think he's overselling the "context as product" message. But he's got interesting things to say, and he's not afraid to repeatedly tell the Industry that they've still got their heads up their asses. He's refined his pitch in this presentation to the Aspen Live Conference, and it's worth a read.

Finally: and then there were none. Second to last DRM-free holdout Warner Brothers announced near the end of the year that they would be allowing the sale of MP3s through Amazon's digital store. And finally, Sony BMG succumbed. The spectacle of the once and future king of failed proprietary formats, stinging from the interminable rootkit CD scandal and the humiliating failure of the once-mighty Walkman brand in the MP3 player market, dragging its ass in dead last in the move to abandon the technical and marketing fiasco of DRM, honestly invites speculation on whether being the biggest douchebag in the room is actually a branding strategy.

You have to keep this in perspective: Napster the First demonstrated an overwhelming demand for a simple, straightforward product, the MP3, almost a decade ago. It is easy to fall for the industry fallacy, which is that all Napster was about was pricing, or the lack thereof. And of course getting things free was attractive, and important to the meteoric rise of Napster. But it wasn't the whole story. People who understood also wanted MP3s because they made a digital music collection manageable by a ordinary home computer possible. Apple understood this and made a pile of money out of the fact with iTunes and iPods. People like me were dreaming a decade ago of a world where there was no need for anything to ever be allowed to fall out of print, and where reasonably priced singles were no longer the sole domain of flavor-of-the-month pop hits. And it was hard to believe it could take more than a couple of years. As I say, it's been almost ten and we're STILL not there. There is nothing impressive or laudable about the record industry's grudging stumble into this marketplace. Anyone will grasp at straws when they're sliding into a ditch.

Enough of that. An elephant in the bedroom that doesn't seem to be getting much discussion is the fact that the majority of tracks available on at Apples iTunes Music Store are still saddled with DRM. I mean, I sure as hell won't buy another FairTunes-encumbered track. If it's not on Amazon yet I'll wait it out. Many are saying the rectification of the entire iTMS catalog is inevitable - and it probably is - but the fact that Amazon has been allowed to scoop Apple so badly on DRM-free major-label downloads has to mean something, and I'm honestly confused there isn't more speculation about it. It is frankly an embarrassment to Apple, particularly in the context of Steve Job's famous essay. Could it really be a general industry move to punish Apple for past hubris? That seems like a Pyrrhic bit of revenge at best. Is it about Apple's notorious resistance to variable pricing? In that case the shame is on Apple, particularly when Amazon is generally undercutting their prices. Or did Amazon quietly cut some sweetheart profit-sharing deals in exchange for at least temporary exclusion of Apple from the lion's share of the DRM free market? If you hear anything, let me know.

Okay, jeeze I'm a windbag. More reviews soon, I promise. I'm thinking about trying out the MySpace/Snocap thing. Anybody got any artist recommendations? Just kidding, I know nobody's reading this. Oh, I laugh through the tears. Back soon!

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

The loss of physical media: literal and figurative

2007-12-13T11:41:00.000-06:00

True story: I was running late the other day, trying to get out of the house with my three-year-old son in tow. Somewhere out on the road I realized I didn't have the CD wallet we keep in the car. I was pretty sure I'd brought it out with me from the house and I had a bad feeling I knew exactly where I'd last seen it: sitting on the roof of the car where I'd set it before rushing back to the house to pick up some forgotten item.

By the time I was somewhere where I could safely pull over and take a look it was predictably gone. Its recovery now is beyond a long shot, I have to assume all those CDs, almost 30, are gone. In many cases I don't even have a back-up - I've been lazy about ripping new stuff to iTunes and of the newest CDs tend to get into the car rotation.

As financial losses go it's on par with a medium car repair or perhaps some dental work - the sort of thing that happens pretty regularly, in other words, though I'm finding myself considerably more irked by this somehow. Maybe because replacing what was lost is going to involve considerable work. Going through all the empty cases, figuring what I've got a copy ripped to iTunes for, deciding what to let go, what to burn a fresh copy and leave it at that, what to replace with a new CD.

Quite a different wrinkle in the range of choices there, and it's been making me think about this transition to a standalone-media-optional world. Digital downloads have dominated my music purchases recently, and I haven't been losing any sleep over issues of lower audio quality, lack of packaging or the arguable ephemerality of a digital purchase. But this recent loss has made me realize there is still a pretty sharp line between a digital download and a physical CD in my mind. Where I have (or had) a CD I think of that as the master copy; even if I have MP3s ripped to my hard drive I don't feel like I still have that album: I still have to decide whether I think it essential enough that I'll need to replace it with a new CD.

There are excellent reasons for valuing a CD in the digital download age - not least because when technological development eliminates the need for compression of audio files, anything on CD will allow a free fidelity upgrade. But I have a feeling the distinction I'm making is primarily psychological. I don't feel like digital purchases I've made recently are less of an album than CDs I've bought. But I bought those CDs I lost and mentally, I'm feeling the loss of an object.

I think about loss differently with digital files. To me, psychologically, there is no "original" or "master" copy. The data on my hard drive is regularly reiterated in backups, and total loss of anything that's been backed up, while not impossible, would certainly involve something fairly catastrophic.

The distinctions I'm chewing over are not really practical or technical ones. The interesting inner reality it boils down to is that my purchasing habits have evolved to a new environment but there is still a lot of an old mentality present as far as how I view my music as possessions. It is a distinction I expect to continue eroding until the possession of a physical object becomes genuinely obsolete.

A final thought this whole consideration puts me in mind of is that, while I currently scorn the "subscription" model of digital music (I mean, where you pay for access that you lose when your subscription lapses), I can see a real place for the underlying service model where maintenance of the "master copy" is handled remotely. Already, managing the footprint music occupies on my hardware memory is an issue. I might well find it worth paying for some centralization that could render loss obsolete and provide me with software and statistical tools for managing it all - downgrading the seldom-used to remote maintenance, optimizing the currently popular for distributed access, and so forth. In the current environment it would probably be a legal tangle, and memory, bandwidth and wireless developments will radically change how it all pans out. But I suspect the model of data management as a service will play a big role in the future of music as commerce. The end of physical ownership that could, ironically, render the music one "owns" far less ephemeral than mere disks of plastic - which can disappear with a momentary lapse of attention.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Brad Does Not Suck: real indie at last.

2007-11-30T20:54:00.001-06:00

Update: September 2008: Brad Sucks recently released a new CD, Out of It. Given the minor technical glitch I experienced with the sale in the review below, a note on my most recent retail experience: my pre-order sale went through without a hitch, I got a head's up email on release day that my downloads were enabled, and got the album with no problems. Everything I like about Brad Sucks has stayed just as good, though. This recent blog update gives details about how he's sticking with the "open source" mentality that characterized the first album release. And those dumb humps over at Pitchfork still never heard of him.

Original Review

Ottowa-based Brad Sucks has everything a person ought to need to be a mainstream success. Musically solid, catchy, lots of smartly-woven musical threads drawing on sources from dance to Detroit rock guitarsmanship to country. All delivering sharply written, economical lyrics sung in an appealing baritone (Brad informs me he thinks he's actually a low tenor) that's a perfect fit to the words. But of course I'm not reviewing music here, I'll have to leave that up to Pitchfork. Apparently nobody over at Pitchfork reads William Gibson's blog, though, as Brad Sucks is of this writing unknown there. In summary, new media or not, there's still a lot of holes in the net, and my opinion is not yet a significant factor in what "blows up."

Now I've known of Brad Sucks for a while, and in fact shared space on a compilation album I may have mentioned previously with him (he and I appearing as alter egos frenetic and nanojath respectively, lower case represent!), and I've been looking forward to listening to his full album, I Don't Know What I'm Doing, for a long time, but I had this idea rolling around in my brain that I was going to start the Phree Musique Blog again as a digital music store review site, so I squirreled away that link in a folder with lots of company and, you know, years passed.

Of course my unreliable writing strategy need not have interfered with my listening to all the music and then some, since Brad offers lower quality free downloads, full production files for the remix-minded (and plenty of the remixed for free as well). But this is one of the persistent downsides of the internet: out of sight, out of mind.

So after taking something like three years after deciding I wanted to own it to purchase the album I don't know how much I should complain that it took four or five days for my digital album to be available to download. It was my own fault for mindlessly agreeing to whatever PayPal defaulted to and electing to pay with an e-check, the banking industry's for its "shit don't happen weekends or holidays" policy (I ordered just before Thanksgiving), and it must be said a glitch in Brad's self-coded store that the download stayed hung up even after the e-check cleared (the open source store software is still another totally cool Brad service, though). I did eventually have to clear it up with an email, which was quickly and politely dealt with. Doubtless the kink is already worked out. I also don't doubt that an email at any point in the transaction would have gotten the files unlocked.

Other than that the store itself is simple with lots of options (OGG and FLAC files are available for you purists, along with the 192k MP3s for us philistines) and the commerce half is the standard PayPal experience. If I'd used a credit card (or trusted PayPal to hang on to more of my money) it would have been transparent commerce. My only other complaint is that I still think a buck a track is too steep, particularly for direct sale, and though the full album gets a price break it's the same cost as the physical CD (though you save shipping): I imagine this is a conscious choice and I suppose there's an argument for uniform pricing. I still crave a bargain when shopping digital files, and more than the "save on shipping" variety.

Still, the package when it arrived pretty much blew away the competition thus far: I've been complaining about the stinginess with the metadata in a context where delivering additional data is all but free: I was very pleased to see files for the full CD booklet (with lyrics) and even a circular formatted label if you're the sort of person who prints labels for your CD-Rs.

In short, I expect great things from Brad Sucks: definitely one to watch. I think in most respects he sets the bar higher for the pure digital commerce experience. Pitchfork take note.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

The Screw Up: a Thanksgiving essay on unintended consequences

2007-11-21T22:00:00.005-06:00

So I made an online purchase from a single artist store a couple days ago, which is still pending as of this writing. I know, right? Intolerable. But it's complicated, I'm not sure if I myself, the artist, or PayPal is primarily to blame. Obviously a review of the experience is out of the question for now, anyway. I'll tell you all about it when my download clears. Anyway, it seemed like a good excuse to slip in an essay.

I get lost sometimes in contemplation of how badly the record business screwed up their business model with the CD. I tend to be well behind the curve, technologically, but I knew they'd blown it when one of my more with it friends explained to me that their computer's CD-ROM drive played music CDs and did so by virtue of some 3rd party, unaffiliated software. Actual mix "tapes" were still the norm at this point: we're talking about ten, twelve years ago.

Pushing a media transition to a completely unprotected data format on what is shaping up to be the first popular post-diskette media for computers probably isn't the sort of mistake the record boys would make today but then I doubt they'll get another opportunity to screw around with formats. Music went post-media without them.

What I was thinking about recently though was that they also screwed the product aesthetically in the shift to the CD and that this in no small part is facilitating the disappearance of a discrete object from the recorded music equation. As a general rule I'm perfectly happy to have a bit of digital image the size of four postage stamps replace the packaging of my CDs. The artwork's just barely superior, the metadata tends to the mundane (and marginally usable). And the jewel case? The jewel case is the cruel joke of an arrogant orthodoxy.

Maybe this is one of the opportunities of the nascent marketplace in the pure digital sound: can anyone deliver an aesthetic experience along with the megabytes? Because the evidence of my explorations so far suggests that no, you can't. Maybe that's done now, for music, and your four postage stamps is what you get, or maybe your video is your new jacket art, filmed in Canada to replace printed in. Still, if you're looking for some stand out angle to distinguish your little pop stand along the fabled superhighway, it might bear considering.

Give thanks for unintended consequences. Back after the holiday.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Intellectual Property: a study in contrasts

2007-11-15T11:12:00.000-06:00

It seems to me a grave discourtesy, to say no more, to issue my book without even a polite note informing me of the project... However that may be, this paperback edition and no other has been published with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it, and no other. And if the many kind readers who have encouraged me with their letters will add to their courtesy by referring friends or enquirers to Ballantine Books, I shall be very grateful.

- J.R.R. Tolkien, internationally famous author and cultural icon, foreword to the 1965 paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings

Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid's face should have been sued off the face of the earth. They should have taken their houses and cars and nipped it right there in the beginning. Those kids are putting 100,000 to a million people out of work. How can you pick on them? They've got freckles. That's a crook. He may as well be wearing a bandit's mask.

Gene Simmons, minor reality television celebrity and cultural dinosaur, 2007 Billboard Interview

I was finally getting around to patching up my battered paperback boxed set of The Lord of the Rings - nostalgically purchased for a few dollars for being twins to the set that introduced me to the trilogy - my father's original set that he purchased when he was just a few years out of the Seminary. I first read that statement about the authorized edition over twenty years ago: reading it again I was struck by the contrast to Simmons' tough guy melodrama I'd read the day before.

My dad has related to me many times how he picked up the first book of Ace's unauthorized (and hastily assembled, and error-ridden) edition off a rack without knowing anything about the book, only to discover it was part of a trilogy. His attempts to mail order the rest of the series ran afoul of the publicity backlash Ace experienced when Tolkien spread the word that the edition had been produced without his consent (and without payment to him), which spurred Ace to pull the volume and pay Tolkien a compensatory pittance. Ace's edition was probably legal, as it exploited a loophole in U.S. copyright law, but popular outcry led them drop the book without legal compulsion.

Some interesting comparisons could be contemplated between the current business situation of the "record industry" and Tolkien and his British publisher's plight in the mid 1960's, though the situations are very far from perfectly analogous. Indeed, there is a whole other article to be had picking apart Simmons' assertions about the business of music - his comparison of the perceived value of music to the price of gold is in itself a lesson in twentieth century information psychology (extending the analysis to a slightly more apt comparison, such as to the market in diamonds as the age of inexpensive engineered gemstones evolves might make for particularly interesting investigation).

But what really struck me is the contrast in the tone and content of these two statements. Simmons' tirade, while nominally directed against the record industry, bears every hallmark of the party line. From the dire assumption of the death of commercial music (with a quick violin riff for all the little people whose livelihoods will be destroyed), to the conflation of file sharing with robbery, and particularly the assumption that the only possible solution would have been massive, heavy-handed legal retribution against individuals to cow the public into respecting copyright out of fear.

Tolkien doesn't warn of some cataclysm in the business of publishing books or even suggest that his own fortunes will be destroyed by the unauthorized publication of his works. He does not treat the legalities of the issue at all, and he certainly does not suggest that individuals who might have taken advantage of Ace's cheaper edition (by selling or buying it) deserved to suffer some consequence for their action. His formal, almost courtly plea suggests that the reader might find the critical question to be of all things one of courtesy.

The appeal to courtesy is something that the the major labels and their chattels have utterly lost access to in the midst of their ongoing assault of legal attacks, specious and ham-handed social engineering, and the technological insults of DRM. More independent players who elected not to stumble along with this failed campaign might yet make very good use of it, I think.

Tolkien aside, it perpetually blows my mind that the press is willing to give a pass to the assertions of self-appointed experts like Gene Simmons that the financial woes of the record industry can be devolved to one thing: college kids with computers and their devilish P2P voodoo. It leads me to seriously consider whether the primary function of the RIAA is not so much the Sisyphean task of staunching the industry's ongoing hemorrhage as to ensconce firmly in the public mind this particular scapegoat. Which wouldn't necessarily be a surprising goal since common sense and an increasing body of empirical evidence suggest a raft of alternative contributions to the decline in music industry revenues, which mostly boil down to stupid business practices by a lazy, profligate industry that lost any serious engagement with innovation somewhere around the mid-nineties. There could be no more blatant example than the fact that the industry's current, tentative forays into selling DRM-free digital downloads comes a good seven years late (and five years after finally suing fresh-faced college student Shawn Fanning's Napster off the face of the earth, Mr. Simmons take note) - a decision based solely on the almost unimaginably technologically incompetent assertion that unencumbered digital files would somehow contribute to illicit file sharing in a manner that conventional CDs would not.

There are lessons of opportunity in every one of these examples. Every year the conventional industry fails to adapt is a year of opportunity for everyone else to take advantage of customers like me: I'm spending more money on music than ever, to a large degree because of the superior value I'm getting from alternative markets and my conviction that for the most part I'm buying through avenues that give the artists themselves a better deal. And when my (at least) third-hand copy of The Lord of the Rings wears out completely I'll be sure to buy a new copy that contributes to the estate. As a courtesy.

Amazon.com: test driving the big Kahuna

2007-11-11T15:24:00.000-06:00

I'm not a big fan of Amazon.com, to put it right out front, mainly because of their patent hijinx and "relaxed" attitudes towards privacy. In fact, I'm pretty sure I pompously "canceled my account" in an energetically written email inspired by some outrage de jour, several years back. Of course, they never flushed my data, as I discovered to little surprise when I came slinking back at some later date, snared in the unethical pincers of the lowest available price...

Indeed, I was moderately horrified upon signing in for the first time in quite a while to discover that my account (with credit card info preloaded and ready) was still hanging out there guarded only by my old, pre-paranoia, weakish password that I used to secure EVERYTHING with before some weird though inconclusive anomalies turned up on a credit card account and spooked me into converting anything identity-theftalicious over to strong, pain-in-the-ass long strings of gibberish passwords. Take that, NSA!

Anyway.

So despite my ambiguous relationship with the great flagship of ye olde internette bubble the first (another list in that long line of things I never thought I'd find myself doing: pining for the nineties), I found it very significant and exciting when Amazon announced the launch of its DRM-free MP3 download store. Let's not mince words: this is the first and at this point only competition to iTunes. I'm talking, of course, about the mainstream here, and I don't expect this bicameral hegemony to last long. Still, although my credentials as a capitalist are shaky, I believe in the value of competition to optimize transactional systems, and seeing this unfold in a nascent marketplace in real time definitely turns my crank. And honestly, I've been fairly impressed with what I've been seeing out of Amazon recently, as regards commoditization of data transaction, so I've been eager to check the new kid on the block out.

It would be real interesting to find out what sort of wrangling it took to get a serious chunk of the major labels' catalogs available without DRM. I have a sneaky suspicion that the prospect of sticking it to Apple, which seems to have a less than idyllic relationship with many of its content providers, had a place in this equation. But alas such questions are beyond the scope of my little review project. Perhaps someone will write a book someday. Let's get to the core commerce experience.

I'm proceeding on the assumption that Gentle Reader comes with previous experience with the Amazon shopping paradigm. Up to checkout shopping the online store is pretty identical. You're encouraged to grab a little download manager app, and indeed I believe it is mandatory to download full albums, but the process is conventional and painless (as long as you don't mind clicking "I agree" boxes without first doing a lot of tedious reading to find out which rights you're clicking away this time). I'd recommend installing it up front.

The MP3 Downloads Department front page is the same witlessly organized, overstuffed (six page-downs of scroll!) mess we've all come to know and love (amusingly led, in this case, by shameless exploitation of iPod iconography, universal symbol of the digital music). I'll freely admit I don't have ready alternatives for the apparently inescapable melange of useless genre category sidebars, "hot new picks," and row after row of brainless categories... featured artists (why look honey, Jay-Z is featured. Let's check that young man out), the spotlighted, the new, the hot, and in the basement, the inevitable blogged. I won't let my lack of solutions stop me from pointing out what a travesty this sort of virtual mall experience is on the downhill side of the 21st century, decade one. At least the search toolbar, the only thing on the page that's worth a damn, is at the top.

Search is, of course, rendering ever-widening swaths of data presentation obsolete, and to be honest I had to kind of force myself to notice what a junkyard the front page was. My inclination is to automatically ignore it and just start looking for what I want. Amazon's search is perfectly functional, I found what I was looking for first time out 3 tries in a row.

For purchasing, it appears Amazon has adopted the iTunes "pay as you go" system: there isn't a shopping cart feature for downloads: everything goes through 1-click (and you can stick your registered trademark up your @-hole, Amazon). While this isn't such a burden if you're buying albums, it's as stupid system for a la carte downloads on Amazon as it is on iTunes, maybe more so as Amazon already has the architecture of a shopping cart in place.

Beyond this, the downloads went mostly smoothly. They went into my iTunes library automatically, a welcome feature for a third party vendor. The album art showed up as well, though at this point I've got so many widgets and doodads managing musical metacontent that it's hard to tell if Amazon had anything to do with that.

I had one scare with my purchases. Some downloaded content stopped showing up in iTunes in the middle of the process, apparently as the result of my dicking around with unrelated iTunes files while the transfer was ongoing. When I saw the missing songs listed as complete in Amazon's download manager window I feared an interaction with customer support was in my future. I should say it's hard to say whether this error was Amazon's fault, something to do with iTunes, or the result of my overstuffed hard drive, which is causing my aging G4 iMac to gag over pretty much any kind of multitasking these days.

Whatever the case, a handy "Reveal in Finder" button on the download manager showed that only the transfer to the iTunes library had been arrested - the files were safely ensconced in a welcome new Amazon downloads folder in my iTunes music files. My buddies over at eMusic (I'll get to you, I'll get to you!) could take some lessons from Amazon's download management protocols. I called the missing tracks up from within iTunes and all was well.

The prices are pretty conventional, too high in my book, in other words - mostly $.99, occasionally $.89 a track. M.I.A. gave me a break for buying the whole album on Kala (yay), no such love from Steely Dan, however (boo). I bought three LPs and spent a little under $23, not terrible, but hopefully that competition factor will actually kick in at some point. Still, I ended up with well-organized albums of 256 kbps MP3s intelligently fed into my computers music filing system.

Bottom line: Amazon delivers an impressive catalog of DRM-free albums and tracks at market-fair but uninspiring prices. The browsing interface is typically clunky but the download manager is simple and helpful, and the mesh with iTunes virtually seamless. I have no reservations saying that Amazon has earned its place as an essential vendor for any serious consumer of digital downloads. Amazon, my grudging props to you.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Stay tuned, new soon...

2007-11-05T11:50:00.000-06:00

Ambition. Well, it surely was not my intent to get the recreation of this underway and then immediately get stalled by day to day circumstances. But I did. But I'm looking to get back rolling next week, look for a new music buying experience November 12, you can read a bit more about the details over at the song of the day weblog.

The times, they are a'changin'... Link roundup

2007-10-11T15:54:00.000-05:00

In between reviews I plan to do some topical roundups of relevant links and the occasional essay.

It's been a hell of a couple of weeks for the major labels. EMI's new moneyman owner notices his newly acquired industry has been getting run into the ground by fat cat executives with no vision. The music guy for the last relevant internet portal business tells said fat cat executives "your business model sucks, so I'm not going to use it anymore." But the big news is without question the artists. Radiohead. Trent Reznor. Jamiriquoi and Oasis. The currently unsigned and soon-to-be-released are making news with announcements and rumors of taking to the heady waters of self-distribution.

Even download-hating, "what the fuck do you think you're doing" label queen Madonna is said to be in negotiations to ditch Warner Bros. for a decidedly unconventional relationship with a concert promoter, though that particular deal sounds more like "I reject you, Satan, in favor of you, Satan Prime!" It's still an industry, after all. Nevertheless, as far as the business of music is concerned, we do seem to be blessed with the curse of living in interesting times. Let's observe a moment of silence together and imagine a record company executive shitting a brick.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page

Okay... Computer? Radiohead imitates some dude in a basement

2007-10-10T23:21:00.001-05:00

As Radiohead's "historic" offer is now defunct and they show little interest in continuing as a download provider I'm decommissioning this review, so to speak. Read more here. I'm also downgrading my assessment to "shrugs" out of pure spite.

Of course I'm pushing two weeks behind the curve of the hype on the Radiohead "pay what you like" digital download of their latest album, In Rainbows.

And I'll admit: a part of me is a little annoyed by the degree of swooning, "this changes everything" coverage Radiohead's payment-optional experiment has received. I covered Jane Siberry doing this very thing in March of '06, and it was old news then (what Siberry calls "self-determined pricing" is still the standard at her site and it is still well worth checking out, incidentally). From "try it for free, buy if you feel it" presentations like Harvey Danger to every unsigned solo with free MP3s and a virtual tip jar, "payment optional" is hardly a new deal.

Even so, the distinction here is obvious. Radiohead is a major international act that has demonstrated its ability to debut an album at the top of the charts and sell a million copies in the U.S. alone. After wrapping up their contract with EMI in 2003 they could have rung up any of the major or major-minor labels and entered serious negotiations for a big money record deal. Not selling out is a different kind of decision when there are plenty of interested buyers with deep pockets.

And like a lot of people, I'm happy to see anything that motivates more public dialog about getting past the absurdly counterproductive artificial restrictions of the conventional market for music (and indeed for information in general).

So much for philosophy: on to the commerce experience.

I'll lead with the negatives. If Radiohead deserves bigger kudos for risking an unconventional distribution strategy as a big ticket act, then I give them worse marks for delivering a somewhat clunky, confusing sales experience. When I used it the website was very slow, and the actual transaction was not straightforward.

There are only two products for sale on the site - a costly (around $80 U.S.) discbox that includes vinyl LPs and CDs in premium packaging, and the price-unspecified digital download. Since a download is included in the price of the discbox, there is no reason to purchase more than one of these items. So the fact that the purchaser is forced to go through an "add item to cart/proceed to checkout" sales process is pointless and particularly irritating when each redundant click initiates another glacially slow page load (to add insult to injury, you have to click through two pointless front pages to get to the point where you can actually elect to purchase. I could have saved you the trouble by linking directly to the order page, but I'd hate for you to miss out on the complete Radiohead experience).

Now I could be accused of nitpicking, so I want to reiterate: to the extent that Radiohead made a statement about the roll affordable digital downloads can and should play in commercial music, they diluted this statement by delivering a poorly executed and tedious commerce experience.

Other cons included the fact that the site failed to deliver specifics about the download - format, number of tracks, or overall length - details I considered important to setting a price for the download (I eventually found these facts reported by third parties), some glitches in the checkout process resulting in getting kicked back to blank forms, and the fact that the download delivered only the MP3 tracks, no artwork or lyrics (I know I'm bucking established trends but damn it, delivering data is cheap. If you've got more, give it! Particularly when the purchaser's only options are a very expensive premium physical product versus a bare-bones digital download). Finally, I'm never thrilled when a purchase form requires I enter a mobile phone number. What if Radiohead won't stop texting me?

Moving on to the positives: I'd say that purchasing the album was not a terrible experience, merely substandard. Once I made it to the actual payment screen things went smoothly enough, and I quickly ended up with a link to a reasonably speedy download. The price was right - I elected to pay what I consider a very reasonable $3 (I'll tell you right now that my opinion that the general cost of music online is inflated is going to be an ongoing theme here) - which came out to £1.47. They tacked on a £0.45 service fee for a total £1.92 or about $3.92 U.S. For this I received a 48.4 MB zip archive of 10 160kbps MP3s. The tracks had correctly encoded metadata (mangled or absent track metadata is a HUGE pet peeve) so firing it up in iTunes was a cinch. I had successfully purchased my first Radiohead album. I liked it.

The bottom line: while I wouldn't tolerate this sort of technical incompetence from a website dedicated to selling digital music, I'm going to give Radiohead the benefit of the doubt in assuming that inexperience in the digital market and underestimating the volume of response the offer would receive were more at work in what was wrong with this transaction than actual indifference to the purchaser experience. So on the three point scale I just this moment invented of Props, Shrugs or Hate, I give Radiohead Props. Congratulations, Radiohead, you can now proudly display "the Phree Musique Blog gave the In Rainbows purchase site props!" on your website. Note: not anymore, as noted above. You mopey Limey bastards.

See previous reviews and submit sites for review at the Index Page

Digital Music Sellers Review Index

2007-10-10T23:05:00.008-05:00

Note, January 17 2010: I won't be updating the index any longer. The way I've got it set up is just too tedious to modify for the nominal utility it offers.

Index of Digital Music Sellers reviewed on the Phree Musique blog. Updated as reviews are added. To submit a site for review or note a change, mistake or disappearance of any previously reviewed link please leave a comment on this entry.

Multiple Artist Sites

Site Link : Review Link : Site Notes and Genre Info : Bottom Line*

1. Amazon.com : Review : Eclectic catalog of mostly mainstream downloads, all genres : Props
2. eMusic : Review : One of the originals with a huge indie catalog : Props
3. iTunes Music Store : Review : Apple's original Big Box digital infotainment megastore : Shrugs
4. Rhapsody MP3 Downloads : Review : Routine retail with the bonus of full streaming previews : Props

Single Artist Sites

Site Link : Review Link : Site Notes and Genre Info : Bottom Line*

1. Radiohead DOWNLOAD SITE CLOSED : Review : Download site for single album, Alt Rock : Shrugs
2. Brad Sucks : Review : Two solid alt-rock albums with lots of diverse freebies on the site : Props

*Sites judged on 3 point scale from Hate to Shrugs to Props where Hate is bad and Props are good.

We'll Get a New Deal for Christmas This Year

2007-10-10T22:36:00.000-05:00

Previously on the Phree Musique blog...

I'd been posting links to free, available-for-the-download MP3s that were, to the best of my ability to determine, pretty much legal. Which equivocating phrase indicates that, even eschewing the gang of plainly illegal MP3 blogs which infest the Tubes, there was an awful lot of ambiguity in the free music biz.

Well, no more. We turn our attention now to music which is free as in, well, as in not free. While Apple, Amazon, EMI and Yahoo! have been making news lately by offering or at least talking about selling digital music without digital rights management (DRM) technology in place, many independent labels have been doing it for years. I'm going to try them all out and report back on the new digital music shopping experience.

My rules for inclusion:

1. You must be able to purchase digital files outright.
2. The files must be totally free of DRM. I'm not going to get into issues some have raised like dodgy, personally identifying metadata in the files (iTunes Plus) or overzealous terms of use (Amazon).

And that's about it. If you want to submit a site for review please leave a comment on the Index Page

2006-07-19T00:37:00.000-05:00

Totally not phree musique!

To order the CD click here!

I recently participated in the creation of a collectively arranged and managed music CD featuring pieces by members of the community weblog metafilter.com.

This CD is now complete and will be shipping by the end of November, and features a recording I made of one of the songs of the day, Obsession, among 24 other tracks.

Profits will be donated to a nonprofit music education charity for children. I hope you'll consider buying a copy, because otherwise I will deny any knowledge of you when I am rich and famous. But seriously, I think it's going to be a great and quirky CD and well worth owning for 12 bucks, shipping included (17 for international delivery).

You can read about the album by clicking here
And read my artist profile by clicking here

Order the CD click here!

Thanks for listening -

Jon/aka nanojath/aka Scrivener

-=-

In the meantime... there remains one last thing that I am will persist in trying to keep up with daily... behold the fairly secret song of the day blog.

2006-07-12T03:25:00.000-05:00

Sorry

Permanent Vacation?

Sorry, indefinite hiatus. Life, stuff, you know how it is. Feel free to forget that it ever existed.

2006-05-17T20:09:00.000-05:00

Corn Dogs for the Pickin'

MF Doom is one of these rappers who seems to generate loose, loping flows of laid back rhyme much like an apple tree generates apples. DJ Dangermouse may currently be best known for the "Grey Album", a conflation of the Beatles' White Album and Jay Z's Black Album which is enough of a cultural artifact now that it is reliably available despite being totally illegal. This aside, Dangermouse is a prolific remixer.

When these two radical vectors collide with the Cartoon Network's experimental media laboratory Adult Swim, the resultant "Danger Doom" is a free roaming, monstrously self-referential acid treat I can't make heads or tails of. But they're giving away free MP3s, so hey. I think the lyrics may be, you know, unsuitable for minors. But I can't really tell.

Scrivener downloaded...
A full EP is now available at Adult Swim - download Occult Hymn here.

Don't know what this is? Read the FAQ