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.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Micropayments: a bad idea that will not die
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.
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.
Sunday, February 07, 2010
The eternal evolution of Search
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?
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?
Friday, February 05, 2010
Doing it right
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.
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.
Monday, February 01, 2010
Overload versus Filters
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.
Just kidding, this is like two years old.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Commitment
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.
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.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Overload
This situation has been brewing for a while, but it has gone to a new level with the eMusic's addition of substantial holdings from Warner Brothers' catalog.
When I started out with eMusic they were still locked into independent labels only. When I came upon a band or artist that was new to me eMusic was usually my first stop on the chance they were not signed (or not yet signed) to a Major: when this was the case it was always a good moment; if I still had credits for the month I got to download new music right away. Instant gratification, hooray.
When the Majors started to show up in the form of Sony the stocks of recognizable content (for me) jumped sharply. I quickly found myself in the situation I alluded to previously: if I were to stick to just downloading the titles I've currently got listed in my "Saved for Later" file this would eat up my download quota for a full 9 months. The Replacements! Neil Young! Jimi Hendrix! Leo Kottke! Bob Dylan! It just keeps piling up. A not-insignificant percentage of these albums are things I once owned on cassette, or "sort of" owned... Well I remember the summer before my freshman year of college, when I massively recorded selections of my brothers even-then burgeoning LP vinyl collection, carefully decorating each tape with pictures cut out of magazines and my epic stack of college junk mail. No one had told me that I was "killing music" (and breaking the law!)
Not so long ago a major issue I faced with new music was simply hard drive space. I was limping along with an almost decade-old iMac, running my hard drive at a razor-thin margin of free space, aggressively culling out MP3 files and burning them to CDRs to preserve some modicum of function. With the advent of the new computer, these concerns vanished. I've got 22 days of continuous audio on iTunes, at just shy of 40 GB, which is around half my total current hard drive use, itself not even 20 percent of what I've got to spend. I'm not naive: I know what seems like an ever-loving Siberia of empty disk space will inevitably succumb to ever-burgeoning files and applications. But the era of music being the biggest wodge of disk space, the problematic app, seems over. I'm not the file-sharing type: I'm not going to celebrate all those tasty empty sectors by going on a freebie download spree. My modest consumption of eMusic and the occasional CD (sign of the times: my brother gave me a lovely Black Keys gatefold LP for Christmas: the right-hand gatefold contained the vinyl album... the left-hand gatefold contained the CD) will add a steady drip to that music folder. But the plain fact is that music, for me, is just not getting proportionally bigger. Oh, I could opt for larger, higher fidelity MP3s. But I just don't care. I am not an audiophile. I am much more that teenager who was thrilled with those cheap Radio Shack cassette rips of vinyl, made on my parents' ancient Sony Hi Fi. People bring up sampling rates as they debate the virtues of the various DRM-free music download outlets and I just don't care. I pay no attention.
Ironically, the bottleneck on my music consumption has, given my preference for the properly sanctioned download outlets, gone back to cost. My music budget is so: I download my eMusic tracks for the month, with a little cash left over for discretionary spending.
But in fact, at long last, the economics of downloading is starting to catch up with reality to the extent that if I'm being honest, I'm barely keeping up with all the new and old-to-me but new-to-digital offerings my modest budget allows. Even more ironic, what's really pushing me around decision-wise these days gets down to a matter of choices. Choices! Choices! If I recall it was a Physical Chemistry professor who first introduced me to the phrase "an embarrassment of riches." He was discussing some sort of painful and obtuse variety of calculation methodologies and the choice of phrase struck me at the time as deeply ironic. (Irony! It's so totally twenty-first century!) I think the current state of music availability is the first time in my life this phrase has occurred to me in a fully sincere way. There is so much music.
Example. Remember way back in paragraph two, when I spoke of the little spark of joy I felt when I came upon a coveted artist that turned out to be available on the indie-only eMusic? Oh how times have changed. A couple days ago I hit their interface, flummoxed again by how to discharge a dangling 4 song credits (I've mentioned before, I'm not a singles guy... and of course most of the one-hit-wonders on eMusic are now "album only" downloads). I check out the new arrivals. Holy hell, there are 243 pages of "freshly ripped" albums! I go to look at some higher level (i.e. more selective) listings of new stuff. And see that they now have the Talking Heads' catalog. My honest-to-God reaction to this is "Oh shit." More fodder for the saved for later file. I had them all in the day, to the last recorded to tape from my brother's LP collection... Remain in Light, Fear of Music, 77, More Songs About Buildings and Food, Speaking in Tongues. That's another two months of downloads! And I feel bad, I feel bad about neglecting the indies! What about new stuff, am I consigning myself to living in the past?!
Strange days. I am consuming a small stream of truly new music from various weird, independent sources - a topic I hope to get into in more detail in days to come. I really wonder about the market, these days, for truly committed-to-music newbies. There is of course still a major label system and all it has comprised for many decades. My real interest is in those stalwartly trying to forge their own way in the crazy, insanely overloaded marketplace of the new media. It isn't much of an insight to note that they are finding what market they find by making relationships, in that 2.0 sorta way, rather than the old models of radio play, of videos on MTV (that's right kids, once again, MTV used to be the Music Video channel). How are they getting by? Maybe I'll dust off Skype, give some interviews a shot. The times, they are a' changin'.
When I started out with eMusic they were still locked into independent labels only. When I came upon a band or artist that was new to me eMusic was usually my first stop on the chance they were not signed (or not yet signed) to a Major: when this was the case it was always a good moment; if I still had credits for the month I got to download new music right away. Instant gratification, hooray.
When the Majors started to show up in the form of Sony the stocks of recognizable content (for me) jumped sharply. I quickly found myself in the situation I alluded to previously: if I were to stick to just downloading the titles I've currently got listed in my "Saved for Later" file this would eat up my download quota for a full 9 months. The Replacements! Neil Young! Jimi Hendrix! Leo Kottke! Bob Dylan! It just keeps piling up. A not-insignificant percentage of these albums are things I once owned on cassette, or "sort of" owned... Well I remember the summer before my freshman year of college, when I massively recorded selections of my brothers even-then burgeoning LP vinyl collection, carefully decorating each tape with pictures cut out of magazines and my epic stack of college junk mail. No one had told me that I was "killing music" (and breaking the law!)
Not so long ago a major issue I faced with new music was simply hard drive space. I was limping along with an almost decade-old iMac, running my hard drive at a razor-thin margin of free space, aggressively culling out MP3 files and burning them to CDRs to preserve some modicum of function. With the advent of the new computer, these concerns vanished. I've got 22 days of continuous audio on iTunes, at just shy of 40 GB, which is around half my total current hard drive use, itself not even 20 percent of what I've got to spend. I'm not naive: I know what seems like an ever-loving Siberia of empty disk space will inevitably succumb to ever-burgeoning files and applications. But the era of music being the biggest wodge of disk space, the problematic app, seems over. I'm not the file-sharing type: I'm not going to celebrate all those tasty empty sectors by going on a freebie download spree. My modest consumption of eMusic and the occasional CD (sign of the times: my brother gave me a lovely Black Keys gatefold LP for Christmas: the right-hand gatefold contained the vinyl album... the left-hand gatefold contained the CD) will add a steady drip to that music folder. But the plain fact is that music, for me, is just not getting proportionally bigger. Oh, I could opt for larger, higher fidelity MP3s. But I just don't care. I am not an audiophile. I am much more that teenager who was thrilled with those cheap Radio Shack cassette rips of vinyl, made on my parents' ancient Sony Hi Fi. People bring up sampling rates as they debate the virtues of the various DRM-free music download outlets and I just don't care. I pay no attention.
Ironically, the bottleneck on my music consumption has, given my preference for the properly sanctioned download outlets, gone back to cost. My music budget is so: I download my eMusic tracks for the month, with a little cash left over for discretionary spending.
But in fact, at long last, the economics of downloading is starting to catch up with reality to the extent that if I'm being honest, I'm barely keeping up with all the new and old-to-me but new-to-digital offerings my modest budget allows. Even more ironic, what's really pushing me around decision-wise these days gets down to a matter of choices. Choices! Choices! If I recall it was a Physical Chemistry professor who first introduced me to the phrase "an embarrassment of riches." He was discussing some sort of painful and obtuse variety of calculation methodologies and the choice of phrase struck me at the time as deeply ironic. (Irony! It's so totally twenty-first century!) I think the current state of music availability is the first time in my life this phrase has occurred to me in a fully sincere way. There is so much music.
Example. Remember way back in paragraph two, when I spoke of the little spark of joy I felt when I came upon a coveted artist that turned out to be available on the indie-only eMusic? Oh how times have changed. A couple days ago I hit their interface, flummoxed again by how to discharge a dangling 4 song credits (I've mentioned before, I'm not a singles guy... and of course most of the one-hit-wonders on eMusic are now "album only" downloads). I check out the new arrivals. Holy hell, there are 243 pages of "freshly ripped" albums! I go to look at some higher level (i.e. more selective) listings of new stuff. And see that they now have the Talking Heads' catalog. My honest-to-God reaction to this is "Oh shit." More fodder for the saved for later file. I had them all in the day, to the last recorded to tape from my brother's LP collection... Remain in Light, Fear of Music, 77, More Songs About Buildings and Food, Speaking in Tongues. That's another two months of downloads! And I feel bad, I feel bad about neglecting the indies! What about new stuff, am I consigning myself to living in the past?!
Strange days. I am consuming a small stream of truly new music from various weird, independent sources - a topic I hope to get into in more detail in days to come. I really wonder about the market, these days, for truly committed-to-music newbies. There is of course still a major label system and all it has comprised for many decades. My real interest is in those stalwartly trying to forge their own way in the crazy, insanely overloaded marketplace of the new media. It isn't much of an insight to note that they are finding what market they find by making relationships, in that 2.0 sorta way, rather than the old models of radio play, of videos on MTV (that's right kids, once again, MTV used to be the Music Video channel). How are they getting by? Maybe I'll dust off Skype, give some interviews a shot. The times, they are a' changin'.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 2: Virtual is Real
Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
Remember when Virtual Reality strapped on the dual engines of Johnny Mnemonic and Disclosure and jumped the shark?
“We’re all doing [virtual reality], every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn’t need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened. VR was an even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going. Without scaring us too much, right?”
William Gibson, Spook Country
In its heyday as a topic of speculation, the problems of virtual reality (in the futuristic, helmet-and-gloves sense) seemed superficially to be technological. Binocular optic displays never worked particularly well. The consumer-level technology of tracking objects in space wasn’t really up to the task of dealing with anything like an articulated glove as a controller (let alone two). And interfaces such as treadmill-like walking surfaces were pure fantasy from a pragmatic perspective. For the most part these facts are still true.
But what occurred to me as I learned the ropes of navigating my character around Azeroth was that technology aside, the fundamental benefits of classically conceived, first-person VR were questionable. When I accidentally zoomed my view into full first person perspective, my instinct was to roll right back out again. Much more comfortable to play from a perspective a yard or two behind and above my character’s head. Fumbling around trying to manipulate physical objects seems more like a bug than a feature of physical reality. And isn’t pressing a button or twitching a mouse so much easier than actually walking around?
The fact is that the ideas behind most of the gimmicky contrivances of “Sci-Fi” VR are rooted in the assumption that the path to a more immersive virtual experience is to pursue an experience that most closely mimics actual presence. So you use your feet to walk, your hands to pick things up, and you move your head to look around. In reality, the only thing that delivers this authentic experience is being there. If anything, dodgy optic displays and clunky glove manipulators could only accentuate the unreality of the virtual experience.
On the other hand, we’re incredibly used to looking at moving pictures and increasingly comfortable manipulating things in them with devices like the mouse and the video game controller. Our real, after all, is already virtual: a model our brain constructs from sensory input. The brain is comfortable treating adequately modeled realities as real. The secret, mainly, is not getting in its way too much. Provided the the images are compelling and sufficiently realistic and the interface is smooth and not unnecessarily complicated, we can quite comfortably inhabit a small, two-dimensional visual world with mediocre stereo audio. And therein enjoy effects in the realm where true immersion occurs: not the technological, but the psychological. At least until the shooting pains in the wrist tendons start.
Remember when Virtual Reality strapped on the dual engines of Johnny Mnemonic and Disclosure and jumped the shark?
“We’re all doing [virtual reality], every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn’t need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened. VR was an even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going. Without scaring us too much, right?”
William Gibson, Spook Country
In its heyday as a topic of speculation, the problems of virtual reality (in the futuristic, helmet-and-gloves sense) seemed superficially to be technological. Binocular optic displays never worked particularly well. The consumer-level technology of tracking objects in space wasn’t really up to the task of dealing with anything like an articulated glove as a controller (let alone two). And interfaces such as treadmill-like walking surfaces were pure fantasy from a pragmatic perspective. For the most part these facts are still true.
But what occurred to me as I learned the ropes of navigating my character around Azeroth was that technology aside, the fundamental benefits of classically conceived, first-person VR were questionable. When I accidentally zoomed my view into full first person perspective, my instinct was to roll right back out again. Much more comfortable to play from a perspective a yard or two behind and above my character’s head. Fumbling around trying to manipulate physical objects seems more like a bug than a feature of physical reality. And isn’t pressing a button or twitching a mouse so much easier than actually walking around?
The fact is that the ideas behind most of the gimmicky contrivances of “Sci-Fi” VR are rooted in the assumption that the path to a more immersive virtual experience is to pursue an experience that most closely mimics actual presence. So you use your feet to walk, your hands to pick things up, and you move your head to look around. In reality, the only thing that delivers this authentic experience is being there. If anything, dodgy optic displays and clunky glove manipulators could only accentuate the unreality of the virtual experience.
On the other hand, we’re incredibly used to looking at moving pictures and increasingly comfortable manipulating things in them with devices like the mouse and the video game controller. Our real, after all, is already virtual: a model our brain constructs from sensory input. The brain is comfortable treating adequately modeled realities as real. The secret, mainly, is not getting in its way too much. Provided the the images are compelling and sufficiently realistic and the interface is smooth and not unnecessarily complicated, we can quite comfortably inhabit a small, two-dimensional visual world with mediocre stereo audio. And therein enjoy effects in the realm where true immersion occurs: not the technological, but the psychological. At least until the shooting pains in the wrist tendons start.
Friday, January 22, 2010
aside: eMusic, et. al.: brands versus labels
A quick aside of a thought that just passed through my mind. One of the curious (and presumably unintended) effects of eMusic's piecemeal acquisition of rights to the major labels' catalogs has been to make me aware, in a way I have really never been, of the legacy (and disposition) of record labels.
I'm always amused by the curious twists of corporate etymology. An album is a book of blank pages with pockets or envelopes... a label is an identifying tag you stick on something. It mostly devolves to a handful of major corporations, but maintains in its strange histories and persistent imprints (a concavity in a surface produced by pressing - I never have figured out what the hell it means in the parlance of musical commerce) a sort of DNA of the evolution of the so-called "majors".
While browsing Napster I lingered a bit on Tom Waits' classic Rain Dogs. Too much good stuff to snag just a few tracks - as is my habit now when I get interested in something I check the label and hit the enigma of Island Records. Off to Wikipedia. Founded in Jamaica, long run from the UK, now (the now is almost always SO the dull same old thing) "owned by Universal Music Group... which is distributed through Sony Music Entertainment and is operated in the United States through The Island Def Jam Music Group and in the UK through Island Records Group (or simply Island Records or Universal Island)". Do tell. Does that Sony issue relate to eMusic's acquisition of portions of the Sony catalog? Not with respect to Rain Dogs, anyway, but these days I always check: hell if I'm going to pay ten dollars if I can get away with paying four. Golly Gosh kids, it's almost like we're getting a market going here!
Something I always thought was interesting is the fact that for the most part the major publishing conglomerates have no brand identity except in that they are recognized as major conglomerates. There are a few exceptions (e.g. Pixar, Disney, whoops, is that the same thing now? I can't keep track) but nobody is going to go see a movie just because it's Warner Brothers. In a strange, temporary and limited way, the eMusic evolution is changing that dynamic for me: I'm a lot more likely to pick something up these days if it's on their ticket. Pure economics, baby. It will be interesting to see if it progresses towards the usual all-the-same bland slop.
I'm always amused by the curious twists of corporate etymology. An album is a book of blank pages with pockets or envelopes... a label is an identifying tag you stick on something. It mostly devolves to a handful of major corporations, but maintains in its strange histories and persistent imprints (a concavity in a surface produced by pressing - I never have figured out what the hell it means in the parlance of musical commerce) a sort of DNA of the evolution of the so-called "majors".
While browsing Napster I lingered a bit on Tom Waits' classic Rain Dogs. Too much good stuff to snag just a few tracks - as is my habit now when I get interested in something I check the label and hit the enigma of Island Records. Off to Wikipedia. Founded in Jamaica, long run from the UK, now (the now is almost always SO the dull same old thing) "owned by Universal Music Group... which is distributed through Sony Music Entertainment and is operated in the United States through The Island Def Jam Music Group and in the UK through Island Records Group (or simply Island Records or Universal Island)". Do tell. Does that Sony issue relate to eMusic's acquisition of portions of the Sony catalog? Not with respect to Rain Dogs, anyway, but these days I always check: hell if I'm going to pay ten dollars if I can get away with paying four. Golly Gosh kids, it's almost like we're getting a market going here!
Something I always thought was interesting is the fact that for the most part the major publishing conglomerates have no brand identity except in that they are recognized as major conglomerates. There are a few exceptions (e.g. Pixar, Disney, whoops, is that the same thing now? I can't keep track) but nobody is going to go see a movie just because it's Warner Brothers. In a strange, temporary and limited way, the eMusic evolution is changing that dynamic for me: I'm a lot more likely to pick something up these days if it's on their ticket. Pure economics, baby. It will be interesting to see if it progresses towards the usual all-the-same bland slop.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Digging the retail vibe at Napster is drenched in irony. And Coca-Cola.
I’ve been neglecting to check out Napster for a while now. Any vague conception I had of it as a pay service was formed in the era of some defunct antecedent. What’s the point? If I can’t get it on eMusic it will be on Amazon or iTunes, where I already have accounts.
It is long past relevance, originality, or humor to dwell on the irony of mainstream retail appropriating the brand of the original Robber Baron of musical file sharing. What remains is the sort of baffling fact that Napster still exists at all, let alone that its reincarnation in service of the tottering pressplay, erstwhile Sony-Universal experiment turned last ditch effort at relevance by Roxio, was worth over $120 million to Best Buy. (Fun fact that fell out of my Napster research: Kazaa coughed up $100 million to settle with the record industry and got bought and relaunched as yet another pay service. Who knew?)
I won’t begin to speculate what all went into the calculation of that price tag for BBY. The mystical force that finally drew me to dabble in the new Napster, however, is not so mysterious. It was Coca-Cola points. I have a weakness for that most consumerist of products, ultra-branded sugar water, in defiance of my better health or communist sympathies. I keep saying I’m going to give it up and I keep accumulating caps with their little codes to be entered for digital pseudo-currency which in turn may be redeemed in a radically inadequate store. Camel bucks were a better deal, aside from the cancer. Previously I’d redeemed a coupon for downloads from the Rhapsody store: that had went reasonably well. When a similar offer presented itself I figured the time was right.
What is there to say about the interface? They all look the same. They all work great if your habit is to buy whatever shit dominates the radio and television month to month. It’s always easy enough to find something you want if you already know exactly what it is. They’re all completely useless for random shopping. Napster adds some weird twists on the experience. They’re clearly trying, with a bunch of playlist-y vectors to drill into the catalog with. It’s a weird mix, though, with some weird choices. The day's Featured New Releases section included an album with a title along the lines of “Greatest Moments in Bagpipes.” Some of the playlists are almost militantly clichéd - “One Hit Wonders of the ‘80s” could have been cribbed directly from a half hour special on VH1. Others are completely bizarre: a collection of classical tracks titled “Mythological Monsters - Music inspired by beasts of Lore.” “Easy Beatles - Mellow covers of Lennon/McCartney favorites” (as opposed to Starr/Harrison favorites?) “Celtic Fusion Spirit” - I am not making this up - “Traditional sounds with a pop twist.”
I was at a complete loss, as usual. I am an album (as opposed to a singles) guy, and it seems like less and less albums come with ten or fewer tracks these days. I end up with an random mix culled from a freeform drift of musical memories- a couple of Moody Blues hits from an album a beloved, departed high school teacher gave me when I was 18, a couple of favorite tracks from mix tapes my brother made for me, a few from songs that were big hits on MTV during the brief time I watched it routinely (note for any kids who might have stumbled across this - MTV used to play music videos).
The hated 30 second preview persists, though it is at least slightly more justified by Napster’s position as a purveyor of an unlimited streaming subscription model (giving away the milk for free and so forth). Other features are less excusable. There is no track or album pricing without actually going into a purchase window (and, I discover taking a second look after my coupon is used up, they will not even give this up without entering actual payment information). Let’s just get this straight: this is a store that won't tell you what any of its merchandise costs until you give them a credit card to hold on to. What the fuck, do they want to make sure you’re serious? There’s nothing special about the price points you encounter - $.99 and $1.29 were all I saw - so what’s the big secret? It’s an inexplicable, irritating, low rent move that mystifies coming from a retail giant like Best Buy.
But the real and final criticisms actually pushes into truly intolerable territory. Napster’s download manager app isn’t available for the Mac. I can accept this - it’s idiotic, but still commonplace enough, and it isn’t like downloading the tracks one by one off the web interface is that much of a chore. But when I did - in complete defiance of all my experience - fully three tracks did not download. When I returned to my track listing, inexplicably more than half were not listed as downloaded. I retried my missing tracks. Two showed up, but the last one vanished into the ether - but was nevertheless marked as downloaded. A complete loss.
I’m not about to pursue some sort of customer service experience with Napster over a single song I bought with Coca Cola bottle tops, but seriously, what the fuck? Basically there is no excuse for that. I can’t imagine actually breaking out the credit card for this uninspired service unless they dig up some kind of major innovation (and some Mac support).
Epilog... despite my Mac-ular issues with Napster, I suppose dropping a review of their store without so much as a link is a little cold. Behold, Napster 8.6, or something... And for all your next-decade nostalgia needs, you can review the original and all its progeny at its Internet Archive's Wayback Machine page. What a long strange trip etc.
It is long past relevance, originality, or humor to dwell on the irony of mainstream retail appropriating the brand of the original Robber Baron of musical file sharing. What remains is the sort of baffling fact that Napster still exists at all, let alone that its reincarnation in service of the tottering pressplay, erstwhile Sony-Universal experiment turned last ditch effort at relevance by Roxio, was worth over $120 million to Best Buy. (Fun fact that fell out of my Napster research: Kazaa coughed up $100 million to settle with the record industry and got bought and relaunched as yet another pay service. Who knew?)
I won’t begin to speculate what all went into the calculation of that price tag for BBY. The mystical force that finally drew me to dabble in the new Napster, however, is not so mysterious. It was Coca-Cola points. I have a weakness for that most consumerist of products, ultra-branded sugar water, in defiance of my better health or communist sympathies. I keep saying I’m going to give it up and I keep accumulating caps with their little codes to be entered for digital pseudo-currency which in turn may be redeemed in a radically inadequate store. Camel bucks were a better deal, aside from the cancer. Previously I’d redeemed a coupon for downloads from the Rhapsody store: that had went reasonably well. When a similar offer presented itself I figured the time was right.
What is there to say about the interface? They all look the same. They all work great if your habit is to buy whatever shit dominates the radio and television month to month. It’s always easy enough to find something you want if you already know exactly what it is. They’re all completely useless for random shopping. Napster adds some weird twists on the experience. They’re clearly trying, with a bunch of playlist-y vectors to drill into the catalog with. It’s a weird mix, though, with some weird choices. The day's Featured New Releases section included an album with a title along the lines of “Greatest Moments in Bagpipes.” Some of the playlists are almost militantly clichéd - “One Hit Wonders of the ‘80s” could have been cribbed directly from a half hour special on VH1. Others are completely bizarre: a collection of classical tracks titled “Mythological Monsters - Music inspired by beasts of Lore.” “Easy Beatles - Mellow covers of Lennon/McCartney favorites” (as opposed to Starr/Harrison favorites?) “Celtic Fusion Spirit” - I am not making this up - “Traditional sounds with a pop twist.”
I was at a complete loss, as usual. I am an album (as opposed to a singles) guy, and it seems like less and less albums come with ten or fewer tracks these days. I end up with an random mix culled from a freeform drift of musical memories- a couple of Moody Blues hits from an album a beloved, departed high school teacher gave me when I was 18, a couple of favorite tracks from mix tapes my brother made for me, a few from songs that were big hits on MTV during the brief time I watched it routinely (note for any kids who might have stumbled across this - MTV used to play music videos).
The hated 30 second preview persists, though it is at least slightly more justified by Napster’s position as a purveyor of an unlimited streaming subscription model (giving away the milk for free and so forth). Other features are less excusable. There is no track or album pricing without actually going into a purchase window (and, I discover taking a second look after my coupon is used up, they will not even give this up without entering actual payment information). Let’s just get this straight: this is a store that won't tell you what any of its merchandise costs until you give them a credit card to hold on to. What the fuck, do they want to make sure you’re serious? There’s nothing special about the price points you encounter - $.99 and $1.29 were all I saw - so what’s the big secret? It’s an inexplicable, irritating, low rent move that mystifies coming from a retail giant like Best Buy.
But the real and final criticisms actually pushes into truly intolerable territory. Napster’s download manager app isn’t available for the Mac. I can accept this - it’s idiotic, but still commonplace enough, and it isn’t like downloading the tracks one by one off the web interface is that much of a chore. But when I did - in complete defiance of all my experience - fully three tracks did not download. When I returned to my track listing, inexplicably more than half were not listed as downloaded. I retried my missing tracks. Two showed up, but the last one vanished into the ether - but was nevertheless marked as downloaded. A complete loss.
I’m not about to pursue some sort of customer service experience with Napster over a single song I bought with Coca Cola bottle tops, but seriously, what the fuck? Basically there is no excuse for that. I can’t imagine actually breaking out the credit card for this uninspired service unless they dig up some kind of major innovation (and some Mac support).
Epilog... despite my Mac-ular issues with Napster, I suppose dropping a review of their store without so much as a link is a little cold. Behold, Napster 8.6, or something... And for all your next-decade nostalgia needs, you can review the original and all its progeny at its Internet Archive's Wayback Machine page. What a long strange trip etc.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Retro Phree: Dewey Music, filters, and the genre problem
A quick throwback to the original conception of this blog as a repository for genuinely free music (you know, like it was before this happened) while I finish up a review of Napster and compose the second chapter of Nine Nights in Azeroth.
Brian Eno characterizing recorded music as whale blubber may be an attractively unflattering comparison to further lash the beleaguered music industry, but things like Dewey Music serve to remind me that it doesn't go too far as an analogy. If I had whale blubber on tap like I've got recorded music I would heat my fucking house with it. I would be out in the garage trying to cook up whale diesel.
Dewey Music is an interface for Archive.org's public domain music library. It is a noble endeavor, and I'm sure this library is a great resource for some people (remixers, music historians and serious fans of the Grateful Dead spring to mind). But wow, how well it highlights the curious problems of super-abundance.
I. The Genre Problem
There is a genre continuum. It starts with "too generic." Rock and Pop and Hip Hop are very nearly useless categories, particularly if you're just looking for something you'd enjoy listening to and you're a sufficiently broad-minded person that you'd be up for listening to something that could easily hail from any of those categories. Yet it is apparently de rigueur that they be the starting place for browsing music catalogs online.
On the far end of the continuum is Dewey Music. The genre list there is so huge and absurd that it might actually be some sort of statement. The first five genres provided are -n, 00s, 0742 Sound, 1 and 100. There is also a genre for Rock. Not to Mention Rock And Roll, Rock Out, Rock-pop, Rockin, Rock N Roll and something listed as rock jazz punk funk virtuoso karl evans grant sharkey jay havelock southampton england uk live show bass drums primus zappa ben folds five tool live music archive funny comedy bill hicks doug stanhope which bears a single listing under the artist name "toupe" with the track listing "Feliz Cumpleanos," but doesn't actually link to any file. I believe we call this organizational methodology "crowdsourcing."
In my first attempt at browsing I opted for the genre "Van Damme" which led me to a single track under "Collected Works of Frank Harris," a very scratchy vinyl (or for all I know shellac '78 or celluloid cylinder) rip of the frequently covered '20s novelty song "(Oy That, Oy That) Yiddishe Charleston".
Okay.
II. Free isn't free. It isn't even cheap.
I'm going to review the latest incarnation of Napster branding shortly and I'll tell you up front it is not going to be a glowing review. But if I only had two options to supply all my musical consumption from I would choose handing Best Buy sixty bucks a year for unlimited streaming and 60 pathetic downloads from Napster over unlimited listening and downloading for free from Archive.org in a heartbeat.
Because here's the thing: it takes me about 12 minutes to earn five dollars. Music discovery has a definite but strictly limited and defined place in my music listening budget (and by this I mostly mean my time budget). My tolerance for lightly filtered streams of random music gets exhausted quickly. If I'm not happy with what I'm listening to and have to expend effort to listen to something else I soon come to feel that I am paying for the experience in a way I find substantially more noisome than parting with money.
Given its source and intent calling out Dewey Music on these issues is pretty unfair but it does illustrate the point so well. And it is on these rocks that ninety percent (to be generously optimistic) of the radio-slash-record store alternatives trying to make a go of it out there will founder within a few short years.
Brian Eno characterizing recorded music as whale blubber may be an attractively unflattering comparison to further lash the beleaguered music industry, but things like Dewey Music serve to remind me that it doesn't go too far as an analogy. If I had whale blubber on tap like I've got recorded music I would heat my fucking house with it. I would be out in the garage trying to cook up whale diesel.
Dewey Music is an interface for Archive.org's public domain music library. It is a noble endeavor, and I'm sure this library is a great resource for some people (remixers, music historians and serious fans of the Grateful Dead spring to mind). But wow, how well it highlights the curious problems of super-abundance.
I. The Genre Problem
There is a genre continuum. It starts with "too generic." Rock and Pop and Hip Hop are very nearly useless categories, particularly if you're just looking for something you'd enjoy listening to and you're a sufficiently broad-minded person that you'd be up for listening to something that could easily hail from any of those categories. Yet it is apparently de rigueur that they be the starting place for browsing music catalogs online.
On the far end of the continuum is Dewey Music. The genre list there is so huge and absurd that it might actually be some sort of statement. The first five genres provided are -n, 00s, 0742 Sound, 1 and 100. There is also a genre for Rock. Not to Mention Rock And Roll, Rock Out, Rock-pop, Rockin, Rock N Roll and something listed as rock jazz punk funk virtuoso karl evans grant sharkey jay havelock southampton england uk live show bass drums primus zappa ben folds five tool live music archive funny comedy bill hicks doug stanhope which bears a single listing under the artist name "toupe" with the track listing "Feliz Cumpleanos," but doesn't actually link to any file. I believe we call this organizational methodology "crowdsourcing."
In my first attempt at browsing I opted for the genre "Van Damme" which led me to a single track under "Collected Works of Frank Harris," a very scratchy vinyl (or for all I know shellac '78 or celluloid cylinder) rip of the frequently covered '20s novelty song "(Oy That, Oy That) Yiddishe Charleston".
Okay.
II. Free isn't free. It isn't even cheap.
I'm going to review the latest incarnation of Napster branding shortly and I'll tell you up front it is not going to be a glowing review. But if I only had two options to supply all my musical consumption from I would choose handing Best Buy sixty bucks a year for unlimited streaming and 60 pathetic downloads from Napster over unlimited listening and downloading for free from Archive.org in a heartbeat.
Because here's the thing: it takes me about 12 minutes to earn five dollars. Music discovery has a definite but strictly limited and defined place in my music listening budget (and by this I mostly mean my time budget). My tolerance for lightly filtered streams of random music gets exhausted quickly. If I'm not happy with what I'm listening to and have to expend effort to listen to something else I soon come to feel that I am paying for the experience in a way I find substantially more noisome than parting with money.
Given its source and intent calling out Dewey Music on these issues is pretty unfair but it does illustrate the point so well. And it is on these rocks that ninety percent (to be generously optimistic) of the radio-slash-record store alternatives trying to make a go of it out there will founder within a few short years.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 1: Invisible Walls
Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
I felt a genuine stab of disappointment when I hit my first invisible wall in Azeroth. Down in a valley with a starter-character dwarf hunter on a starter-world server, on the first night of the ten day free trial my friend had convinced me to download in observance of getting my first new computer in 8 years, I tried to climb out the far side through sparse pine forest. After a couple of virtual meters I found myself uselessly treading water on dry ground, feet still churning but going nowhere.
So the spell of immersion is broken. Math, somewhere in the digital scaffolding I knew spanned under the cartoon skin I was watching and interacting with, telling my character’s motion physics there was a wall there I couldn’t see.
It took me back to an early gaming meta-experience, punching through blind acceptance of the medium to apprehend a glimpse of rules behind the play. I was playing a racing game, probably on a friend’s Atari (my technology-resistant parents managed to keep any significant manifestation of video games out of our 80’s home until I was old enough to earn and save the money for my own NES). I realized that you could drive your car off the road: but not very far. The track’s shoulder, only there really as a speed-eating punishment for blowing turns, terminated in the soon-to-be-proverbial invisible wall.
I wished, then, that the tiny, proscribed, barely representational world of that 8-bit racer could be more like reality. That if I elected to leave the race I could just drive off in the direction I chose, keep going as long as the field before me was clear. Head for those raster pine trees in the background, maybe drive through a forest. Maybe find a city on the other side.
More like reality? To a child’s mind, maybe, and maybe there are more complicated levels of metaphorical connection between the virtual and the real than I reckoned on when I set out to describe this particular mid-life gaming experience.
Whatever: I think I felt a little of that child’s excitement (which I didn’t recognize until it got disappointed later by unscalable asymptote of the far valley wall), the first time I thought to steer my dwarf off the beaten path - and discovered there was actually something there. I suppose as well that it was somewhat of a child’s let down to make the entirely unsurprising discovery that it didn’t actually go on forever. The World of Warcraft being, of course, a “world” only in a strictly virtual sense. Still, I went back in the next night. Walls or not, there was still a whole lot of it.
I felt a genuine stab of disappointment when I hit my first invisible wall in Azeroth. Down in a valley with a starter-character dwarf hunter on a starter-world server, on the first night of the ten day free trial my friend had convinced me to download in observance of getting my first new computer in 8 years, I tried to climb out the far side through sparse pine forest. After a couple of virtual meters I found myself uselessly treading water on dry ground, feet still churning but going nowhere.
So the spell of immersion is broken. Math, somewhere in the digital scaffolding I knew spanned under the cartoon skin I was watching and interacting with, telling my character’s motion physics there was a wall there I couldn’t see.
It took me back to an early gaming meta-experience, punching through blind acceptance of the medium to apprehend a glimpse of rules behind the play. I was playing a racing game, probably on a friend’s Atari (my technology-resistant parents managed to keep any significant manifestation of video games out of our 80’s home until I was old enough to earn and save the money for my own NES). I realized that you could drive your car off the road: but not very far. The track’s shoulder, only there really as a speed-eating punishment for blowing turns, terminated in the soon-to-be-proverbial invisible wall.
I wished, then, that the tiny, proscribed, barely representational world of that 8-bit racer could be more like reality. That if I elected to leave the race I could just drive off in the direction I chose, keep going as long as the field before me was clear. Head for those raster pine trees in the background, maybe drive through a forest. Maybe find a city on the other side.
More like reality? To a child’s mind, maybe, and maybe there are more complicated levels of metaphorical connection between the virtual and the real than I reckoned on when I set out to describe this particular mid-life gaming experience.
Whatever: I think I felt a little of that child’s excitement (which I didn’t recognize until it got disappointed later by unscalable asymptote of the far valley wall), the first time I thought to steer my dwarf off the beaten path - and discovered there was actually something there. I suppose as well that it was somewhat of a child’s let down to make the entirely unsurprising discovery that it didn’t actually go on forever. The World of Warcraft being, of course, a “world” only in a strictly virtual sense. Still, I went back in the next night. Walls or not, there was still a whole lot of it.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Radio Shack, now known as The Telegraph Wigwam
Just kidding, this doesn't have anything to do with, er, the Shack. It's about rebranding, baby! If Freelala were a business, I might have spent months if not years and tens of thousands of dollars in consultant-hours trying to divine the whims of the marketplace. But it's all me, so this morning I decided I didn't want to create a new space to publish the essay I was writing about video games and set about to spend a good 15 minutes changing the Phree Musique blog into !!!Phree as in Phreakshow!!! - dedicated to the consideration of all that is available through that little wire coming out the back of your computer. Or via a wireless network if you insist on destroying the purity of the metaphor. Games, video, various text-centric contenders for the title of "book", whatever the... hell... this thing is - it's all fair game now.*
We'll see you again real soon, right here at your neighborhood Victrola Yurt.
Meantime, here's something that might keep you interested. They're talking about the art history of video games now, which means they should start showing up in your generic intro-course-level textbooks probably in no more than 40 or 50 years.
*"thing" in this sentence used to link to some whacko interactive hoo hah but the domain just goes to a parking lot now. So I redirected it to symbolics.com which is supposedly the oldest extant website (I've no reason to doubt it, just not going to bother to verify it). On the theory that it's not likely to go defunct any time soon. Plus they say they will someday leverage their historic web asset for the "betterment of humanity," and I am all about the betterment.
We'll see you again real soon, right here at your neighborhood Victrola Yurt.
Meantime, here's something that might keep you interested. They're talking about the art history of video games now, which means they should start showing up in your generic intro-course-level textbooks probably in no more than 40 or 50 years.
*"thing" in this sentence used to link to some whacko interactive hoo hah but the domain just goes to a parking lot now. So I redirected it to symbolics.com which is supposedly the oldest extant website (I've no reason to doubt it, just not going to bother to verify it). On the theory that it's not likely to go defunct any time soon. Plus they say they will someday leverage their historic web asset for the "betterment of humanity," and I am all about the betterment.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Recorded music equals whale blubber
I.
Because of recent feedback on Phree (you know who you are) I'm taking another swing at getting some writing going here. I've gone so far as to allocate myself a budget for 2010 of $100 for digital downloads from new stores for reviews. Given that my total project budget for 2010 is $500 this is a substantial commitment. Now I just need to keep myself off Rhapsody and Amazon to keep the total music budget under control.
II.
Here's a devious little budget-stretcher: reporting the decision not to make a purchase. Case in point. Okay, I feel like a little bit of a dick breaking this one down, seeing as how they're aiming to save the planet and all. Maybe I'm a little jaded at this point about organizations that are capable of uttering the phrase "save the planet" without irony. Not to get sidetracked by the specifics of the charity in question, however: my issues here are design and user interface decisions and some underlying assumptions.
1. You better get some toilet paper 'cause your artwork is butt.
If you're Corporate Whoredogs Incorporated I guess it's just part of the parcel that your artwork will be some sort of generic design atrocity. Planet saving nonprofits I expect to scrounge up some real art. I have to look at that shit every time I play the album.
2. Hubris.
The headline on the description of this album is INTRODUCING WHAT IS QUITE POSSIBLY THE MOST IMPORTANT ALBUM EVER MADE. Inane hyperbole does not endear me to your cause.
3. Gone in 30 seconds.
Maybe it's not their fault, the byzantine requirements of the recording business being what they are. I don't even care anymore: seriously, the 30 second preview has got to go. You might as well not have any preview at all, save yourself some bandwidth. Once upon a time the listening room was a standard amenity of the record store - despite the fact that providing "full preview" literally physically degraded the media. Imagine how record sales would have reacted if store proprietors had habitually elbowed their way into the listening room, jammed the needle down wherever in the middle of a track, and then ripped the headphones off customers' heads after 30 seconds. Because that is the experience of the 30 second preview.
4. I bet they think this price point is a no-brainer
The cost of the album is the always inspiring $.99 per track OR a mere $9.99 for all 41 songs. I can't stress this enough: the order-of-magnitude paradigm of Compact Disc era pricing is no longer compelling. As a reminder: I just paid less than three dollars for 35 above-average tracks by Neil Young, one of the greatest living singer-songwriters in America. It is time to start taking heed of what Mr. Eno is saying (we'll get to it soon): we are selling whale blubber here in the era of the Model T. Catch up.
Fix all that and maybe I'll consider buying Volume 2. I do see that I've got yet another music service enterprise with a doofy name to check out. Seriously, "Nimbit"? What the fuck people.
III.
You could do a lot worse with 10 or 15 minutes of your time than to read this short article and interview with Brian Eno. Not least so you can find out what all the blubber talk is about.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at the Index Page
Because of recent feedback on Phree (you know who you are) I'm taking another swing at getting some writing going here. I've gone so far as to allocate myself a budget for 2010 of $100 for digital downloads from new stores for reviews. Given that my total project budget for 2010 is $500 this is a substantial commitment. Now I just need to keep myself off Rhapsody and Amazon to keep the total music budget under control.
II.
Here's a devious little budget-stretcher: reporting the decision not to make a purchase. Case in point. Okay, I feel like a little bit of a dick breaking this one down, seeing as how they're aiming to save the planet and all. Maybe I'm a little jaded at this point about organizations that are capable of uttering the phrase "save the planet" without irony. Not to get sidetracked by the specifics of the charity in question, however: my issues here are design and user interface decisions and some underlying assumptions.
1. You better get some toilet paper 'cause your artwork is butt.
If you're Corporate Whoredogs Incorporated I guess it's just part of the parcel that your artwork will be some sort of generic design atrocity. Planet saving nonprofits I expect to scrounge up some real art. I have to look at that shit every time I play the album.
2. Hubris.
The headline on the description of this album is INTRODUCING WHAT IS QUITE POSSIBLY THE MOST IMPORTANT ALBUM EVER MADE. Inane hyperbole does not endear me to your cause.
3. Gone in 30 seconds.
Maybe it's not their fault, the byzantine requirements of the recording business being what they are. I don't even care anymore: seriously, the 30 second preview has got to go. You might as well not have any preview at all, save yourself some bandwidth. Once upon a time the listening room was a standard amenity of the record store - despite the fact that providing "full preview" literally physically degraded the media. Imagine how record sales would have reacted if store proprietors had habitually elbowed their way into the listening room, jammed the needle down wherever in the middle of a track, and then ripped the headphones off customers' heads after 30 seconds. Because that is the experience of the 30 second preview.
4. I bet they think this price point is a no-brainer
The cost of the album is the always inspiring $.99 per track OR a mere $9.99 for all 41 songs. I can't stress this enough: the order-of-magnitude paradigm of Compact Disc era pricing is no longer compelling. As a reminder: I just paid less than three dollars for 35 above-average tracks by Neil Young, one of the greatest living singer-songwriters in America. It is time to start taking heed of what Mr. Eno is saying (we'll get to it soon): we are selling whale blubber here in the era of the Model T. Catch up.
Fix all that and maybe I'll consider buying Volume 2. I do see that I've got yet another music service enterprise with a doofy name to check out. Seriously, "Nimbit"? What the fuck people.
III.
You could do a lot worse with 10 or 15 minutes of your time than to read this short article and interview with Brian Eno. Not least so you can find out what all the blubber talk is about.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at the Index Page
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
eMore eMusic
Well it's just been a big damn hullabaloo down at eMusic since I wrote about it yea, well over a year ago now. I spend way too much time on the damned internet, not to mention that I try to use all my eMusic credits each month, so you'd think I'd have been on top of the developments, but I wasn't. I only heard about it as a sort of sideline in another online discussion and had to go look it up when the change was practically on top of me.
In a nutshell eMusic added a major piece of the Sony catalog to their line-up, and restructured their pricing, and then a whole bunch of their customers totally lost their shit. To their discredit, eMusic managed to allow the whole thing to be framed as "Good news everyone - we're adding music from THE GREAT SATAN Sony which you are very excited about! By the way we're doubling your prices."
On the other hand, it has to be said that the dissenters were, on the whole, a lot of whiny little bitches.
I had it easy - I'm on the pay-a-year-in-advance pricing scheme (this is not a hard decision for me, I've got more than a year's worth of downloads in my fucking Saved for Later file as it is - on top of all the things I keep discovering I have to own right now - eMusic is basically my only music budget in these trying economic times we keep hearing about, so if you are a musician with something to sell and you aren't there you better be my good friend or it's basically tough shit, BUT ANYWAY) the point being my current contract under the old pricing schedule isn't up until mid-March, so I'm having a nice, long, and most importantly pre-paid opportunity to dig the ins and outs of eMusic's new pricing structure.
Yes, there is a price hike. It's not quite what some are making out, at least not at the sort of premium, year-in-advance level high rollers like myself are into. Under current pricing my credits (which are mostly equivalent to a single track download - so much more about that "mostly" in a moment) cost 24 cents each. Under the plan I'll convert to in March they'll cost 36 cents. The astute mathematician will note this is not in fact double, but rather half again the price, which in technical parlance is "not as bad." You will note also that it continues to be substantially less than iTunes or Amazon or pretty much anybody else. For worse value purchasing options the prices get up near 50 cents (setting aside the pay-as-you-go "booster packs" that can cost up to 60 cents a credit). With the recent addition of Warner Brothers catalog material the deal is all the sweeter for those of us who are not pure-Indie snobs.
Ah, but there are complications. Indeed: for no longer can one rely on the cost of an album being the cost of the number of tracks on that album. A substantial percentage of albums have adopted a uniform cost of 12 credits (for those following along with a calculator, this translates to around 4 to 6 dollars). Clearly this will be a bargain in some instances and a price hike in others, it all depends on how many songs are on the album. I imagine Jazz and Classical fans in particular will find the new setup uncongenial, for my own sake (and it's honestly not my intention to be some kind of big cheerleader for eMusic here) so far it has gone substantially in my favor. I've been getting better deals than ever.
But the album pricing introduces some weird new territory which is actually my whole purpose for writing this long consideration which will be read by none: for the most part you can still download album tracks a la carte from the albums, so what gives? Could you download tracks one at a time from an album with more than 12 tracks and pay more for the partial album than for the whole thing at once? I haven't actually tried it but as far as I can tell yes, you can. What about albums with less than 12 tracks? Well, there's where it gets interesting. Here you run into the other and entirely less positive (or even ambiguous) innovation in the new structure: "Album Only" tracks: tracks you can only get if you download the full album.
I imagine some albums are only available as full album downloads now, though I can't recall if I've seen that come up yet. The other (and in my experience, at least, more prevalent) example of the Album Only beast, which is, of course, the Hit Single. They are not identified as such, of course, but you don't exactly need a PhD to figure it out.
I wonder if the advent of this distinction is in fact an interesting insight into what has been rattling around in what passes for the mind of the Music Industry in their long and disastrous resistance of the digital download. It occurs to me that the industry must have something of a love-hate relationship with the Hit Single. One one hand, it is the indisputable Pitch King for their erstwhile product, the CD. The radio hit, the club favorite. But they hate to sell it alone, of course. They want you to buy the whole album. In this sense the original digital breakthroughs, the iTunes and Amazon deals, must have been bitter pills. No more would many pay 3 to 5 dollars for the venerable CD Single (a format that some, anyway, argue the industry had been trying to kill for years).
Hmm, 3 to 5 dollars, why does that sort of ballpark and spread seem familiar? A CD single can't cost substantially less than a full length CD to produce: likewise, a download of a track versus the download of an album is a matter of pennies. For that matter, in terms of production and promotion costs the difference between producing the hit and producing the rest of the album probably very quickly vanishes in the wash. The difference is all notional: the consumer is certainly not going to pay the same price for the single as for the album just because it costs the label about the same for them to have it.
It seems possible then that the real sticking point of the majors signing on with former Indie Star eMusic boiled down to that one issue: the minimum take for any particular production interpreted as transfer of the Hit Singles. 4 to 6 bucks, they're actually getting a bump.
HOWEVER, eMusic doesn't exist in a music vacuum and this creates some seriously odd situations for the canny consumer like myself.
Case Study One: Neil Young - Decade and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Decade. Classic Neil Young, from late 60s Buffalo Springfield through late 70s Stills Young Band. 35 tracks. eMusic Price: 12 credits. 12 Credits! Less than three bucks for me, if I grab it before March. Sixteen dollars from iTunes. Fifteen from Amazon. That there's a bargain. I'll be picking it up as soon as my credits refresh, tomorrow.
Decade contains many of the best songs from the solo album Everybody Knows This is Nowhere: Cinnamon Girl and Down By the River and what is apparently Young's inexplicable(to me) Hit Song, Cowgirl in the Sand (not that it's not a great song, it just seems odd hit material). Not a single Album Only track on Harvest or After the Gold Rush or Rust Never Sleeps. But Cowgirl in the Sand you have to buy the whole album to own. 12 credits for 7 tracks. It's an album worth owning, as some great stuff (not least the title track) is absent from Decade.
But the thing is, to reiterate, Cowgirl in the Sand is also on Decade. I had 6 leftover tracks, as it happened, tonight when I read about the Warner Brothers deal and went to see what kind of stuff was showing up. So I downloaded the 6 other tracks. Tomorrow, after I download Decade, I'll make a duplicate of Cowgirl in the Sand and change the metadata so that I can listen to Everybody Knows This is Nowhere in full without having to dick around. Strictly speaking, is this legal? Many will scoff that I even ask, but I think it's a legitimate question. Of course my bottom line answer is Warner Brothers can just come and get me if they think they can handle a piece of this. I'm pretty sure Neil Young would just laugh. And then again, I've already bought Cowgirl In the Sand, in one and another format, 2 times before in past incarnations. I may still have the LP somewhere: the tapes are long gone. Finally, I could have been more attentive and downloaded only the tracks that I wasn't going to get tomorrow, instead of everything but Cowgirl in the Sand. But come on. We're talking about a few quarters here, give or take. And I felt like listening to Cinnamon Girl right away.
Case Study Two: Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run.
The more conventional and irritating example. Great album, if you aren't too real to like Bruce Sprinsteen, as I am surely not. 8 tracks. 40 minutes, a short album. 12 credits. Grr, a rip job! The single Album Only track? Yeah, just guess. Okay, so now I'm quibbling over a buck or less, but you know, the principle. But here's the thing: Amazon didn't negotiate Album-Only tracks. I can buy Born to Run solo for $1.29. I think I'll go ahead and do that right now. That took less than a minute. Tomorrow when I've got credits at eMusic again I'll download the other 7 tracks on the album. Making my total cost 7 X $.24 + $1.29 or 2.97. Wait a minute! 12 X $.24 = $2.88! Damn it, I didn't do the math and now those bastards have screwed me for 9 cents!
I seriously considered erasing this case study out of embarrassment, but what the hell, you gotta stay real. Well played, Columbia Records, you imprint of Columbia/Epic Label Group, a property of Sony Music Entertainment! You win... This time...
I'm still finding the world of the legitimate digital music download on demand to be entertaining, anyway. If I had some money I'd tell you about who else is doing it. Perhaps another day.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at the Index Page
In a nutshell eMusic added a major piece of the Sony catalog to their line-up, and restructured their pricing, and then a whole bunch of their customers totally lost their shit. To their discredit, eMusic managed to allow the whole thing to be framed as "Good news everyone - we're adding music from THE GREAT SATAN Sony which you are very excited about! By the way we're doubling your prices."
On the other hand, it has to be said that the dissenters were, on the whole, a lot of whiny little bitches.
I had it easy - I'm on the pay-a-year-in-advance pricing scheme (this is not a hard decision for me, I've got more than a year's worth of downloads in my fucking Saved for Later file as it is - on top of all the things I keep discovering I have to own right now - eMusic is basically my only music budget in these trying economic times we keep hearing about, so if you are a musician with something to sell and you aren't there you better be my good friend or it's basically tough shit, BUT ANYWAY) the point being my current contract under the old pricing schedule isn't up until mid-March, so I'm having a nice, long, and most importantly pre-paid opportunity to dig the ins and outs of eMusic's new pricing structure.
Yes, there is a price hike. It's not quite what some are making out, at least not at the sort of premium, year-in-advance level high rollers like myself are into. Under current pricing my credits (which are mostly equivalent to a single track download - so much more about that "mostly" in a moment) cost 24 cents each. Under the plan I'll convert to in March they'll cost 36 cents. The astute mathematician will note this is not in fact double, but rather half again the price, which in technical parlance is "not as bad." You will note also that it continues to be substantially less than iTunes or Amazon or pretty much anybody else. For worse value purchasing options the prices get up near 50 cents (setting aside the pay-as-you-go "booster packs" that can cost up to 60 cents a credit). With the recent addition of Warner Brothers catalog material the deal is all the sweeter for those of us who are not pure-Indie snobs.
Ah, but there are complications. Indeed: for no longer can one rely on the cost of an album being the cost of the number of tracks on that album. A substantial percentage of albums have adopted a uniform cost of 12 credits (for those following along with a calculator, this translates to around 4 to 6 dollars). Clearly this will be a bargain in some instances and a price hike in others, it all depends on how many songs are on the album. I imagine Jazz and Classical fans in particular will find the new setup uncongenial, for my own sake (and it's honestly not my intention to be some kind of big cheerleader for eMusic here) so far it has gone substantially in my favor. I've been getting better deals than ever.
But the album pricing introduces some weird new territory which is actually my whole purpose for writing this long consideration which will be read by none: for the most part you can still download album tracks a la carte from the albums, so what gives? Could you download tracks one at a time from an album with more than 12 tracks and pay more for the partial album than for the whole thing at once? I haven't actually tried it but as far as I can tell yes, you can. What about albums with less than 12 tracks? Well, there's where it gets interesting. Here you run into the other and entirely less positive (or even ambiguous) innovation in the new structure: "Album Only" tracks: tracks you can only get if you download the full album.
I imagine some albums are only available as full album downloads now, though I can't recall if I've seen that come up yet. The other (and in my experience, at least, more prevalent) example of the Album Only beast, which is, of course, the Hit Single. They are not identified as such, of course, but you don't exactly need a PhD to figure it out.
I wonder if the advent of this distinction is in fact an interesting insight into what has been rattling around in what passes for the mind of the Music Industry in their long and disastrous resistance of the digital download. It occurs to me that the industry must have something of a love-hate relationship with the Hit Single. One one hand, it is the indisputable Pitch King for their erstwhile product, the CD. The radio hit, the club favorite. But they hate to sell it alone, of course. They want you to buy the whole album. In this sense the original digital breakthroughs, the iTunes and Amazon deals, must have been bitter pills. No more would many pay 3 to 5 dollars for the venerable CD Single (a format that some, anyway, argue the industry had been trying to kill for years).
Hmm, 3 to 5 dollars, why does that sort of ballpark and spread seem familiar? A CD single can't cost substantially less than a full length CD to produce: likewise, a download of a track versus the download of an album is a matter of pennies. For that matter, in terms of production and promotion costs the difference between producing the hit and producing the rest of the album probably very quickly vanishes in the wash. The difference is all notional: the consumer is certainly not going to pay the same price for the single as for the album just because it costs the label about the same for them to have it.
It seems possible then that the real sticking point of the majors signing on with former Indie Star eMusic boiled down to that one issue: the minimum take for any particular production interpreted as transfer of the Hit Singles. 4 to 6 bucks, they're actually getting a bump.
HOWEVER, eMusic doesn't exist in a music vacuum and this creates some seriously odd situations for the canny consumer like myself.
Case Study One: Neil Young - Decade and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Decade. Classic Neil Young, from late 60s Buffalo Springfield through late 70s Stills Young Band. 35 tracks. eMusic Price: 12 credits. 12 Credits! Less than three bucks for me, if I grab it before March. Sixteen dollars from iTunes. Fifteen from Amazon. That there's a bargain. I'll be picking it up as soon as my credits refresh, tomorrow.
Decade contains many of the best songs from the solo album Everybody Knows This is Nowhere: Cinnamon Girl and Down By the River and what is apparently Young's inexplicable(to me) Hit Song, Cowgirl in the Sand (not that it's not a great song, it just seems odd hit material). Not a single Album Only track on Harvest or After the Gold Rush or Rust Never Sleeps. But Cowgirl in the Sand you have to buy the whole album to own. 12 credits for 7 tracks. It's an album worth owning, as some great stuff (not least the title track) is absent from Decade.
But the thing is, to reiterate, Cowgirl in the Sand is also on Decade. I had 6 leftover tracks, as it happened, tonight when I read about the Warner Brothers deal and went to see what kind of stuff was showing up. So I downloaded the 6 other tracks. Tomorrow, after I download Decade, I'll make a duplicate of Cowgirl in the Sand and change the metadata so that I can listen to Everybody Knows This is Nowhere in full without having to dick around. Strictly speaking, is this legal? Many will scoff that I even ask, but I think it's a legitimate question. Of course my bottom line answer is Warner Brothers can just come and get me if they think they can handle a piece of this. I'm pretty sure Neil Young would just laugh. And then again, I've already bought Cowgirl In the Sand, in one and another format, 2 times before in past incarnations. I may still have the LP somewhere: the tapes are long gone. Finally, I could have been more attentive and downloaded only the tracks that I wasn't going to get tomorrow, instead of everything but Cowgirl in the Sand. But come on. We're talking about a few quarters here, give or take. And I felt like listening to Cinnamon Girl right away.
Case Study Two: Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run.
The more conventional and irritating example. Great album, if you aren't too real to like Bruce Sprinsteen, as I am surely not. 8 tracks. 40 minutes, a short album. 12 credits. Grr, a rip job! The single Album Only track? Yeah, just guess. Okay, so now I'm quibbling over a buck or less, but you know, the principle. But here's the thing: Amazon didn't negotiate Album-Only tracks. I can buy Born to Run solo for $1.29. I think I'll go ahead and do that right now. That took less than a minute. Tomorrow when I've got credits at eMusic again I'll download the other 7 tracks on the album. Making my total cost 7 X $.24 + $1.29 or 2.97. Wait a minute! 12 X $.24 = $2.88! Damn it, I didn't do the math and now those bastards have screwed me for 9 cents!
I seriously considered erasing this case study out of embarrassment, but what the hell, you gotta stay real. Well played, Columbia Records, you imprint of Columbia/Epic Label Group, a property of Sony Music Entertainment! You win... This time...
I'm still finding the world of the legitimate digital music download on demand to be entertaining, anyway. If I had some money I'd tell you about who else is doing it. Perhaps another day.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at the Index Page
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
iTMS Coda
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
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
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
The Tipping Point
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
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
Monday, November 03, 2008
lacuna
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?
Monday, October 13, 2008
First and foremost: eMusic
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
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
Friday, October 03, 2008
Rhapsody MP3 Store: oasis in the desert of the real?
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
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.
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