I'm on record saying that I felt like people were being whiney when the started complaining about the separate and jack price maneuver Netflix pulled a while back. I'd been happy with the service, which at the end of the day provided easy access to a DVD library I'd never have been able to tap otherwise, at a reasonable price. They even dropped the price on me once. I got streaming for a long while for free, and seriously - when you're given something new to try out for free, who doesn't understand that this is an introductory offer?
Now I'm trying to figure out the next move, a mass email from CEO Reed Hastings (connected to a slightly longer blog post that invites all and sundry to Facebook back at it which, yeah, go fuck the devil in hell Reed Hastings) which is a sterling classic of that beloved genre "the corporation is sincerely sorry it inadvertently (and through no fault of its own) hurt your feelings while doing what honestly is just the best for everyone involved".
I was going to gloss over this but man I've got to take just a moment and note what's wrong with this sort of bullshit. First off, when you start a communication out with something like "I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation", the mind-space I am instantly transported to is a family meeting called by the liberal and enlightened and yet still somehow traditionally patriarchal Dad in one of the more serious episodes of an 80s-90s era sit com. An "Eight is Enough," "Family Ties," "Cosby Show" kind of touchy feely moment is imminent. I am an adult, a customer, a professional in my own right, okay? You want to communicate with me about the business we conduct by mutual consent, be a fucking professional.
Second, you did not hurt my feelings because you are not a person. I understand that Reed Hastings is a person but he is not a person I have any personal relationship with. Businesses do not hurt my feelings. I engage in commerce with them and the outcome is satisfaction, indifference, or me being pissed off. When you piss me off you can make one of two choices, you can apologize for screwing up and correct your error or you can say well, this is the way it is and if you don't like it you know where the door is. Communications like this one profess to be doing the former while actually delivering the latter. Do you think I'm stupid? Yeah that is actually a rhetorical question.
The only nut of any substance in this letter is that they are concretely dividing the businesses into the DVD mailing business, which they are renaming Qwikster, and the Streaming business, which is staying Netflix. I have to honestly consider the possibility that they chose a deliberately terrible name as a method of obfuscating discussion about what the real underlying business strategy at work is. One is left otherwise with the conclusion that nobody on the branding team bothered to notice, for example, the existing Qwikster account on Twitter, for example, or thought about the various phonetic associations with the name, such as the erstwhile identity of some transient facet of the Amway empire, or the mascot of a distinctly low-rent-tending powdered milk flavoring product...
All of which could distract a person from asking, what exactly is the benefit of this to me again? Because it seems like the only practical impact on me is going to be having to deal with twice as many websites and twice as many bills. The added video game upgrade might actually be something I want but I'd have to wait and see what the cost will be. The way my entertainment dollar is stretched right now, chances are it will be too high.
The explanation that the businesses are being separated because it is too difficult to keep them integrated seems pretty suspect, in fact. It's a straight loser for the customer, added complexity with no added functionality (that couldn't have been added to the service as it stands), and honestly, how much harder could it have been to separate the businesses internally while maintaining one name, one point for billing, and one point of entry on the internet (and for that matter, transacting the tiny bit of information relevant between the businesses, i.e. past viewing and rating information)?
A believable explanation (and I am very far from original in this suggestion) is that the DVD business is boring, and stagnant: it has gained more or less maximum market share, its price margins are mired in the physical realities of packaging and mailing - it is basically running a direct mail business, the kind of place that sends you that Valu-Pak of coupons that you throw into recycling without even opening it, which is, like, a very uncool business for a hep only barely fifty movin' and shakin' entrepreneur type to be in charge of. They are prepping it to sell, in a nutshell, to someone who will maybe maintain it in some semblance of its current form, or maybe steadily convert it into the ugly mail-order cousin of Redbox, where you can get your new releases mailed to you 2-3 weeks after the fact, and that weird little indie documentary you wanted? Yeah since the last copy of that broke in transit that is on backorder. ETA? Can't really say, no way to tell. Not the service you signed up for? No, it's not is it, it's QWIKSTER!
Of course the irony of all this is that I'm entirely ready to go all-streaming, I've got a fat ethernet pipe AND a robust wifi network in my damn basement, both connected to the teevee by various appliances. The fact that data disks are being driven around town and hand carried from the street to my home is literally offensive to my intellect. None of which (and none of the above corporate blather) addresses the tiny problem that Netflix's streaming selection is still just terrible.
Who knows, in other words, the enterprise is obviously in the grips of corporate aspiration which bears little resemblance to what customers want. I'm waiting to see how much of a pain in the ass dual account maintenance is, and what the details on that video game add-on are, and of course what goes down with the DVD-by-mail side. I'm rapidly going to lose my patience with Netflix streaming if they do not start beefing up their selection pronto. And I'm wondering if there's a very sincere email from Jeff Bezos in my future, letting me know that Amazon will be spinning off its physical item delivery business, for, you know, really everyone's good... maybe into an exciting new business we'll call, hmm, "Dumpster"?
Monday, September 19, 2011
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Speaking of Media Empires
If I could wave the magic wand I would be able to make a modest income (say that of a middle manager at a reasonably successful non-profit) engaging in my endless tinkering with text and sound and image (the last of these has received very short shrift in my digital presentation but it
meant a fair bit to me once).
In fact I suspect that if I really threw myself into it I could succeed in this ambition, at least with writing, even in the treacherous mutant-infested cesspool that is 21st century freelancing. I strongly suspect that I would effectively end up working 60 hours a week and 80 percent of that would be hustling. I hate hustling. I'm bad at it and it makes me feel sad. Which is why I'm leaning strongly towards just getting a job: it's more straightforward, more lucrative, and it doesn't burden the "art" with any responsibility of financial sustenance. A better person (or a better artist) might find some method of avoiding these compromises. I in fact think I feel okay about how it is all trending.
But if I had my druthers... if I had my magic wand... if I had an oil tycoon instead of a country minister for a father and a fat trust fund... Maybe I'd try to get the Media Empire rolling - it's hard to resist in the face of how utterly dumb so much of this in-between stage current media distribution paradigm is set up. My own little despotic News Corp., which would subsidize these idiosyncratic scrawlings and all the rest.
So it has been interesting (by way of revealing that these personal musings have all been virtually unrelated preamble), if intermittently envy-inspiring, to watch the development of the New Media Empire that is Penny Arcade (who don't need any linkies from the likes of me) happening in real time. It's one of these things that just absolutely shouldn't have worked. There's no need to retread the story, or to point out the qualities that are making the thing a legitimate empire which now has enough of a moat dug in its top tier events and merch that it's not likely to be easily toppled by, say, waning popularity of the core strip (not to say this is happening or going to anytime soon).
Over the last several years the maturity of the thing as a business has been evident in a perceptibly increasing drive to diversify the media product base. There's a video section now, a couple of games that did well enough (though apparently not well enough to finish the proposed trilogy). The strip hosts the occasional experimental continuities, some of which are spinning off products of their own.
Finally I have arrived at my point, which is you should check out The Trenches (starting out at the beginning there, for reasons I'll shortly elucidate). I've been on the fence about it. It's a weird strip, relatively devoid of jokes and gags, defined by continuity and off to a very slow start (the opposite of Penny Arcade in other words). It's on something like the tenth strip and I just this day figured it out and was surprised to find myself somewhat actually invested in the story. What it is, in fact, is a three-panel comic narrative serial, which is something of an odd beast, the kind of thing that thrived in the golden age of newspapers.
And now, because of the incredibly slow start and the absolutely terrible job they're doing at presenting it (the thing has been around for a solid month now and the "New Reader" link still directs to a perplexing content-free placeholder page as opposed to, say, some indication of what the hell you're reading, directions to start at the beginning if you need to, directions to a "catch up" page with links and precis of the comics or something so I can get caught up when I forget the thing exists for a couple weeks as opposed to the endless clicking around with these wretched things - << < > >> - oh and how about a feed link since the "what's new" ticker thing at the top of the redesigned PA page says there is "new Trenches" 100% of the time and consequently is right twice a week but contains no useful information by virtue of being wrong the other 5 days, and don't even get me started about the old-link-puking broken PA feed) - not to mention the terrible job they're doing at promoting it (the what's new ticker, again, by virtue of saying the same stuff pretty much all the time, has become invisible to me and I presume anyone else who visits the main PA site regularly), it is never mentioned on the PA weblog, which has got to be one of the more abused, under-utilized bully-pulpits in the internet, co-creator Scott Kurtz doesn't even have a LINK to the damn thing on his PvP site, no not even a teensy-weensy one under the "Other Stuff I Do" heading in the lower left-hand corner of his website (P.S. Mr. Kurtz the PvP page also lacks a link their to your "TV" show you did a large and frankly undeservedly successful Kickstarter for which is also posted at the biggest gaming webcomic site on the internet as you might recall, what, are you afraid of diluting your brand? ARRGH), by virtue of all this, I'm worried the damn thing is going to tank and get scrapped now that I'm just getting interested.
The preceding paragraph was a sentence approximately half of which was parenthetical asides which raises questions about my credentials in critiquing readability but then again I don't exactly have a payroll over here. Seriously, Penny Arcade, do you not have anyone doing user experience over there? Because if you do they need an assistant or something.
meant a fair bit to me once).
In fact I suspect that if I really threw myself into it I could succeed in this ambition, at least with writing, even in the treacherous mutant-infested cesspool that is 21st century freelancing. I strongly suspect that I would effectively end up working 60 hours a week and 80 percent of that would be hustling. I hate hustling. I'm bad at it and it makes me feel sad. Which is why I'm leaning strongly towards just getting a job: it's more straightforward, more lucrative, and it doesn't burden the "art" with any responsibility of financial sustenance. A better person (or a better artist) might find some method of avoiding these compromises. I in fact think I feel okay about how it is all trending.
But if I had my druthers... if I had my magic wand... if I had an oil tycoon instead of a country minister for a father and a fat trust fund... Maybe I'd try to get the Media Empire rolling - it's hard to resist in the face of how utterly dumb so much of this in-between stage current media distribution paradigm is set up. My own little despotic News Corp., which would subsidize these idiosyncratic scrawlings and all the rest.
So it has been interesting (by way of revealing that these personal musings have all been virtually unrelated preamble), if intermittently envy-inspiring, to watch the development of the New Media Empire that is Penny Arcade (who don't need any linkies from the likes of me) happening in real time. It's one of these things that just absolutely shouldn't have worked. There's no need to retread the story, or to point out the qualities that are making the thing a legitimate empire which now has enough of a moat dug in its top tier events and merch that it's not likely to be easily toppled by, say, waning popularity of the core strip (not to say this is happening or going to anytime soon).
Over the last several years the maturity of the thing as a business has been evident in a perceptibly increasing drive to diversify the media product base. There's a video section now, a couple of games that did well enough (though apparently not well enough to finish the proposed trilogy). The strip hosts the occasional experimental continuities, some of which are spinning off products of their own.
Finally I have arrived at my point, which is you should check out The Trenches (starting out at the beginning there, for reasons I'll shortly elucidate). I've been on the fence about it. It's a weird strip, relatively devoid of jokes and gags, defined by continuity and off to a very slow start (the opposite of Penny Arcade in other words). It's on something like the tenth strip and I just this day figured it out and was surprised to find myself somewhat actually invested in the story. What it is, in fact, is a three-panel comic narrative serial, which is something of an odd beast, the kind of thing that thrived in the golden age of newspapers.
And now, because of the incredibly slow start and the absolutely terrible job they're doing at presenting it (the thing has been around for a solid month now and the "New Reader" link still directs to a perplexing content-free placeholder page as opposed to, say, some indication of what the hell you're reading, directions to start at the beginning if you need to, directions to a "catch up" page with links and precis of the comics or something so I can get caught up when I forget the thing exists for a couple weeks as opposed to the endless clicking around with these wretched things - << < > >> - oh and how about a feed link since the "what's new" ticker thing at the top of the redesigned PA page says there is "new Trenches" 100% of the time and consequently is right twice a week but contains no useful information by virtue of being wrong the other 5 days, and don't even get me started about the old-link-puking broken PA feed) - not to mention the terrible job they're doing at promoting it (the what's new ticker, again, by virtue of saying the same stuff pretty much all the time, has become invisible to me and I presume anyone else who visits the main PA site regularly), it is never mentioned on the PA weblog, which has got to be one of the more abused, under-utilized bully-pulpits in the internet, co-creator Scott Kurtz doesn't even have a LINK to the damn thing on his PvP site, no not even a teensy-weensy one under the "Other Stuff I Do" heading in the lower left-hand corner of his website (P.S. Mr. Kurtz the PvP page also lacks a link their to your "TV" show you did a large and frankly undeservedly successful Kickstarter for which is also posted at the biggest gaming webcomic site on the internet as you might recall, what, are you afraid of diluting your brand? ARRGH), by virtue of all this, I'm worried the damn thing is going to tank and get scrapped now that I'm just getting interested.
The preceding paragraph was a sentence approximately half of which was parenthetical asides which raises questions about my credentials in critiquing readability but then again I don't exactly have a payroll over here. Seriously, Penny Arcade, do you not have anyone doing user experience over there? Because if you do they need an assistant or something.
Thursday, September 08, 2011
eBooks and the moat of legacy media
I have a moderate collection of books. Too many, it seems, as I find myself adding another shelving unit to the fray and going through yet another cull of the detritus trying to get down to a collection that will actually fit on the shelves. Most of the obvious chaff was ejected in several prior purges and now it's getting down to battling with my ingrained proclivities... the mid-twentieth-century how to manuals that call to me from the shelves of friends of public library bookstores, that I almost never open, the works of great literature I generally fervently avoid but apparently feel add some sort of intellectual weight to my stacks, and most of all the indifferent mass-market paperback bindings of so-called "classic" works of speculative fiction, mostly science fiction. Which is what got me thinking about Dune.
I have no idea how this 1984 Berkley Books edition of what is frequently cited as the bestselling work of science fiction of all time ended up in my possession, aside from the fact that I'm confident I didn't buy it new, and have certainly owned it less than half of its 27 year sojourn on this earth. It's in good enough shape for reading: the binding is intact though well creased on the spine. The only marks of prior ownership it bears are the words effluvia and sussuration (sic) scrawled in small but untidy lowercase ballpoint printing inside the back cover, legacy of some reader presumably out to increase their word power. The pages are uniformly yellow but not brittle. Aside from the random vocab jotting this precis would probably account for an uncomfortable number of the books in my collection, hence the necessity of vigilant culling: when a collection like this won't fit on the shelves and starts to develop "symmetrical book stacking" behaviors you aren't a collector, you're merely a hoarder.
I've read this particular copy at least once. I read Dune at least once before that, probably my dad's copy when I was a teenager. I may have read it once before, maybe the one I own, but I doubt I've read it more than three times or I would remember it better. I barely remember it at all, other than the broad sketch of the plot. Coming across my dingy paperback inspired no desire to reread it at all. What it mainly got me thinking about were the economics.
This edition, the 31st printing, sold new for $3.95. What I actually paid for mine I don't know, as it bears no mark of its used price, but I'd be surprised if it was more than two dollars. Inflation calculators tells me $3.95 is around eight dollars in today's money. I recently picked up a new copy of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's seminal The Mote in God's Eye, cover price $7.99, so I guess reprints of classic sci-fi books are following standard inflationary models pretty well.
Conventionally printed books, that is. Out of curiosity I clicked around Amazon and found that the Kindle edition of the 40th Anniversary edition of Dune was available for immediate download for... $14.99.
This is the only legal eBook edition of Dune cursory searching produced and I can't help but think it an indication that the economics of eBooks are still a little bit, well, fucked. This is a book that is so thoroughly already done being written (let us not speak of the endless sequels) that its author has been dead for a good quarter of a century. It is being sold in a form that requires no physical production and no transportation and it costs almost twice as much as a bog standard new paperback, and that is if you are utterly unwilling to shop around at all. To say nothing of the $139 I'd have to shell out to be able to read it in the first place. I'm willing to allow that the economics of publishing are no doubt complicated and that the market has produced this as a "fair" price. But the undeniable conclusion it leads me to is that eBooks are still very much a commodity intended for individuals with substantial disposable income.
I haven't pulled the trigger on acquiring one of these electronic bookulators yet, which would probably not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me: I am a notorious late adopter of new technologies. The prices are getting into the range where it is rapidly becoming an inevitability, but things like this are still sufficient to give me pause. What would seem to be the substantial economic benefits of not actually printing words on sheets of paper, cutting them, binding them, boxing and shipping them, don't appear to be making it into the economics of conventionally published, mass-produced popular fiction with much reliability. In the end this may not really impact my eventual purchase of a digital reader much: I'm far more drawn by the allure of the deep font of the public domain available for free through agencies like Project Gutenberg. But I also do not think I will stop dipping into the massive moat of printing's long legacy - all those billions of cheap, crummy paperbacks, aging very slowly on shelves, old enough to vote, to drink, in some cases old enough to be having a solid mid-life crisis in some Minnesota basement (my almost flawless copy of Critique of Pure Reason was printed in 1966). And I don't think I will be replacing my copy of Dune with digital ephemera any time soon.
I have no idea how this 1984 Berkley Books edition of what is frequently cited as the bestselling work of science fiction of all time ended up in my possession, aside from the fact that I'm confident I didn't buy it new, and have certainly owned it less than half of its 27 year sojourn on this earth. It's in good enough shape for reading: the binding is intact though well creased on the spine. The only marks of prior ownership it bears are the words effluvia and sussuration (sic) scrawled in small but untidy lowercase ballpoint printing inside the back cover, legacy of some reader presumably out to increase their word power. The pages are uniformly yellow but not brittle. Aside from the random vocab jotting this precis would probably account for an uncomfortable number of the books in my collection, hence the necessity of vigilant culling: when a collection like this won't fit on the shelves and starts to develop "symmetrical book stacking" behaviors you aren't a collector, you're merely a hoarder.
I've read this particular copy at least once. I read Dune at least once before that, probably my dad's copy when I was a teenager. I may have read it once before, maybe the one I own, but I doubt I've read it more than three times or I would remember it better. I barely remember it at all, other than the broad sketch of the plot. Coming across my dingy paperback inspired no desire to reread it at all. What it mainly got me thinking about were the economics.
This edition, the 31st printing, sold new for $3.95. What I actually paid for mine I don't know, as it bears no mark of its used price, but I'd be surprised if it was more than two dollars. Inflation calculators tells me $3.95 is around eight dollars in today's money. I recently picked up a new copy of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's seminal The Mote in God's Eye, cover price $7.99, so I guess reprints of classic sci-fi books are following standard inflationary models pretty well.
Conventionally printed books, that is. Out of curiosity I clicked around Amazon and found that the Kindle edition of the 40th Anniversary edition of Dune was available for immediate download for... $14.99.
This is the only legal eBook edition of Dune cursory searching produced and I can't help but think it an indication that the economics of eBooks are still a little bit, well, fucked. This is a book that is so thoroughly already done being written (let us not speak of the endless sequels) that its author has been dead for a good quarter of a century. It is being sold in a form that requires no physical production and no transportation and it costs almost twice as much as a bog standard new paperback, and that is if you are utterly unwilling to shop around at all. To say nothing of the $139 I'd have to shell out to be able to read it in the first place. I'm willing to allow that the economics of publishing are no doubt complicated and that the market has produced this as a "fair" price. But the undeniable conclusion it leads me to is that eBooks are still very much a commodity intended for individuals with substantial disposable income.
I haven't pulled the trigger on acquiring one of these electronic bookulators yet, which would probably not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me: I am a notorious late adopter of new technologies. The prices are getting into the range where it is rapidly becoming an inevitability, but things like this are still sufficient to give me pause. What would seem to be the substantial economic benefits of not actually printing words on sheets of paper, cutting them, binding them, boxing and shipping them, don't appear to be making it into the economics of conventionally published, mass-produced popular fiction with much reliability. In the end this may not really impact my eventual purchase of a digital reader much: I'm far more drawn by the allure of the deep font of the public domain available for free through agencies like Project Gutenberg. But I also do not think I will stop dipping into the massive moat of printing's long legacy - all those billions of cheap, crummy paperbacks, aging very slowly on shelves, old enough to vote, to drink, in some cases old enough to be having a solid mid-life crisis in some Minnesota basement (my almost flawless copy of Critique of Pure Reason was printed in 1966). And I don't think I will be replacing my copy of Dune with digital ephemera any time soon.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
kick in the pants
"It is necessary for me... To apply myself industriously to whatever business I take in hand, and not divert my mind from my business by any foolish project of growing suddenly rich"
Benjamin Franklin
I am as susceptible to the allure of the idea of "sudden" riches as the next person, and perhaps it is innate (or at least as good as innate in a world where by the designs of the already rich we are inundated almost perpetually by stark totemic spectacles scientifically designed to provoke desires that can only be answered by the application of lucre), and thus the reliability of such contrivances as the lottery. The other day the little man noticed the scratch ticket machine in the grocery store and there was nothing for it, after I explained the basic premise of gambling to him, but to have one to investigate at home. It was melancholy to witness the hope shining in his relatively guileless eyes as we scratched our ways fruitlessly through the stupid multiple games they put on the big cards to scratch some monkey-itch desire to believe that one ticket represents more than one chance of very unfavorable odds. I explained again and again that there was virtually no chance of winning but it didn't matter: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you know. How long did it take reality to genuinely beat the idea that narrative logic had any relevance to the actual working of events in your life out of me?
Thank god we got nothing, I suppose, a couple hundred dollars, say, is a depressing and meaningless pittance to me in the era of child, mortgage, ten-year-old car and real doctor bills on a regular basis. The lesson it would have taught him would have been incalculably damaging. So I guess it was worth the 20 bucks.
Now the internet presents this fresh allure, in theory everyone in the world could see your scheme and buy you your own personal off-label lottery, right? Indeed there seems to be some sort of invisible-hand type force that dictates projects of the lamest nature must appear -and succeed- on a regular basis. And a million imitators that fail unseen. Full many a gem of purest ray serene indeed.
So I was impressed by the numbers Kickstarter published to celebrate their birthday a few weeks ago. 43% is a very respectable success rate for projects overall and the fact that 85% of the money pledged is collected is even more impressive (and suggests that projects tend to fail definitively and early). My understanding is that Kickstarter juries the projects to some degree which makes it a bit less impressive, of course it is impossible to know how much true dross they reject out front.
All of which has merely been in service of giving me a chance to vent a pet peeve about the Kickstarter universe: stop offering lame-ass rewards!
1. Undying gratitude, and/or my name on a list. For any amount of money, no matter how shitty. These are not rewards. Thanks and acknowledgement are the expected minimum follow up to successful begging. If nothing else, buttons and stickers can be produced by anyone for a pittance, and quickly enough that it is not even necessary to invest a penny in advance.
2. Cooking me dinner, baking me cookies, cleaning my kitchen or anything else that has nothing to do with whatever personal competency you're trying to sell in the real project. Especially for 500 dollars or whatever. I'm not interested in your being in my home, doing things I can do myself for nothing or next to it.
3. Flying to my city to have dinner with me or whatever the hell, especially for 10,000 dollars. The overhead is actually terrible compared to the pledge size (you can get over 90% on giving away buttons for $5 pledges without even shopping around; try and do any serious travel and entertaining for less than a thousand), you're blowing days of your time that nobody who is trying to make a go of living on the virtue of creative projects can spare, and you're suggesting that your presence is worth ten grand.
You're not a celebrity, and if you were I wouldn't fund your damn Kickstarter because seriously, don't you have enough advantages already? If your project produces no product that anyone would want to pay for, maybe you don't actually have any good rationalization for asking other people to pay for its existence.
Franklin's prescription for reliable wealth, looking to the source of the quote above, was the application of "industry and patience." Speaking of which I best get back to work.
Benjamin Franklin
I am as susceptible to the allure of the idea of "sudden" riches as the next person, and perhaps it is innate (or at least as good as innate in a world where by the designs of the already rich we are inundated almost perpetually by stark totemic spectacles scientifically designed to provoke desires that can only be answered by the application of lucre), and thus the reliability of such contrivances as the lottery. The other day the little man noticed the scratch ticket machine in the grocery store and there was nothing for it, after I explained the basic premise of gambling to him, but to have one to investigate at home. It was melancholy to witness the hope shining in his relatively guileless eyes as we scratched our ways fruitlessly through the stupid multiple games they put on the big cards to scratch some monkey-itch desire to believe that one ticket represents more than one chance of very unfavorable odds. I explained again and again that there was virtually no chance of winning but it didn't matter: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you know. How long did it take reality to genuinely beat the idea that narrative logic had any relevance to the actual working of events in your life out of me?
Thank god we got nothing, I suppose, a couple hundred dollars, say, is a depressing and meaningless pittance to me in the era of child, mortgage, ten-year-old car and real doctor bills on a regular basis. The lesson it would have taught him would have been incalculably damaging. So I guess it was worth the 20 bucks.
Now the internet presents this fresh allure, in theory everyone in the world could see your scheme and buy you your own personal off-label lottery, right? Indeed there seems to be some sort of invisible-hand type force that dictates projects of the lamest nature must appear -and succeed- on a regular basis. And a million imitators that fail unseen. Full many a gem of purest ray serene indeed.
So I was impressed by the numbers Kickstarter published to celebrate their birthday a few weeks ago. 43% is a very respectable success rate for projects overall and the fact that 85% of the money pledged is collected is even more impressive (and suggests that projects tend to fail definitively and early). My understanding is that Kickstarter juries the projects to some degree which makes it a bit less impressive, of course it is impossible to know how much true dross they reject out front.
All of which has merely been in service of giving me a chance to vent a pet peeve about the Kickstarter universe: stop offering lame-ass rewards!
1. Undying gratitude, and/or my name on a list. For any amount of money, no matter how shitty. These are not rewards. Thanks and acknowledgement are the expected minimum follow up to successful begging. If nothing else, buttons and stickers can be produced by anyone for a pittance, and quickly enough that it is not even necessary to invest a penny in advance.
2. Cooking me dinner, baking me cookies, cleaning my kitchen or anything else that has nothing to do with whatever personal competency you're trying to sell in the real project. Especially for 500 dollars or whatever. I'm not interested in your being in my home, doing things I can do myself for nothing or next to it.
3. Flying to my city to have dinner with me or whatever the hell, especially for 10,000 dollars. The overhead is actually terrible compared to the pledge size (you can get over 90% on giving away buttons for $5 pledges without even shopping around; try and do any serious travel and entertaining for less than a thousand), you're blowing days of your time that nobody who is trying to make a go of living on the virtue of creative projects can spare, and you're suggesting that your presence is worth ten grand.
You're not a celebrity, and if you were I wouldn't fund your damn Kickstarter because seriously, don't you have enough advantages already? If your project produces no product that anyone would want to pay for, maybe you don't actually have any good rationalization for asking other people to pay for its existence.
Franklin's prescription for reliable wealth, looking to the source of the quote above, was the application of "industry and patience." Speaking of which I best get back to work.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 3: Hell Is Something Something
Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
Early in my brief hunting career in Azeroth I had one of those “World of Tomorrow” moments, which is to say a thing happened that reminded me of something I’d read in a science fiction book. I was loitering around in an inn, doing I recall not what, when some other player characters came blowing through, in apparent rapid pursuit of some gripping mission... and passed right through me.
If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn’t be able to reach the entrance. It’s way too crowded. But the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from running into each other. It doesn’t bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. On the Street, avatars just walk right through each other.
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
It took me a while to figure it out (although not the, uh, year and a quarter since I wrote the last installment in this now truly laughably attenuated series of articles about playing a videogame for a week like two years ago) but I eventually realized that what had really struck me at that moment wasn’t a fairly mundane usability hack that a speculative writer happened to foresee a couple decades prior. What that moment had done was to finally impress on my mind that those were other real people and they were really there. We could see each other. We could interact, form a relationship of some description.
It’s a little philosophy 101 to suggest that human “reality” is at least in part the result of the consensus among all our disparate and sometimes contradictory points of view (floating in their diverse stews of personal internal metaphysics). Philosophical, perhaps, but pragmatic as well: things like money don’t make any sense at all without consensus, but there’s little argument that money is a primary factor in things that are not just shaping human society but quite actively changing massive physical realities on a planetary scale. (And perhaps it is quite understandable that Neal Stephenson went on to write 4 massive books in which the puzzle of money and currency are dominant plot elements, and is said to be currently writing a thriller involving money laundering through the baroque practice of gold farming in the online gaming world).
Perhaps the lesson is that the technological barrier that had to be overcome for virtual reality to really become something akin to what it was in the story books had very little to do with input/output peripherals - image resolution, binocular vision, sensor-studded gloves and the like - and a whole lot to do with the communications technology that allowed geographically separated people to share the same experience in as close to real time as made any difference. A premise that the aficionados of text-based MUDs of not all that yore might have nodded long before most people were aware there was such a thing as being “online.”
(9 Nights in Azeroth, a series of 5 short essays on playing World of Warcraft for a little over a week 2 years ago, WILL be completed before the world ends in 2012. If the world ends before that all bets are off, who could have seen that coming?)
Early in my brief hunting career in Azeroth I had one of those “World of Tomorrow” moments, which is to say a thing happened that reminded me of something I’d read in a science fiction book. I was loitering around in an inn, doing I recall not what, when some other player characters came blowing through, in apparent rapid pursuit of some gripping mission... and passed right through me.
If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn’t be able to reach the entrance. It’s way too crowded. But the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from running into each other. It doesn’t bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. On the Street, avatars just walk right through each other.
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
It took me a while to figure it out (although not the, uh, year and a quarter since I wrote the last installment in this now truly laughably attenuated series of articles about playing a videogame for a week like two years ago) but I eventually realized that what had really struck me at that moment wasn’t a fairly mundane usability hack that a speculative writer happened to foresee a couple decades prior. What that moment had done was to finally impress on my mind that those were other real people and they were really there. We could see each other. We could interact, form a relationship of some description.
It’s a little philosophy 101 to suggest that human “reality” is at least in part the result of the consensus among all our disparate and sometimes contradictory points of view (floating in their diverse stews of personal internal metaphysics). Philosophical, perhaps, but pragmatic as well: things like money don’t make any sense at all without consensus, but there’s little argument that money is a primary factor in things that are not just shaping human society but quite actively changing massive physical realities on a planetary scale. (And perhaps it is quite understandable that Neal Stephenson went on to write 4 massive books in which the puzzle of money and currency are dominant plot elements, and is said to be currently writing a thriller involving money laundering through the baroque practice of gold farming in the online gaming world).
Perhaps the lesson is that the technological barrier that had to be overcome for virtual reality to really become something akin to what it was in the story books had very little to do with input/output peripherals - image resolution, binocular vision, sensor-studded gloves and the like - and a whole lot to do with the communications technology that allowed geographically separated people to share the same experience in as close to real time as made any difference. A premise that the aficionados of text-based MUDs of not all that yore might have nodded long before most people were aware there was such a thing as being “online.”
(9 Nights in Azeroth, a series of 5 short essays on playing World of Warcraft for a little over a week 2 years ago, WILL be completed before the world ends in 2012. If the world ends before that all bets are off, who could have seen that coming?)
Saturday, February 12, 2011
eMusic the Third
So I've written about eMusic twice before (1, 2) and I suspect this will be the last time. My current annual subscription comes up in March and my strong inclination at the moment is that I won't renew it, ending a four year experiment.
From a straight financial perspective I think that eMusic is probably technically still a reasonably good deal - provided you feel like you would actually want to spend whatever the statutory requirement of your contract dictates in their store anyway, doing so month in month out is likely going to give you more music for your dollar than spending the same at Amazon, iTunes and the like.
But. The shifts made in the most recent transition have appreciably cut into the savings for the customer shopping at eMusic. They have also transparently paved the way for chipping at the bargain factor of eMusic purchases in an incremental and confusing way. In a nutshell the new order at eMusic simply requires me to think too much about whether and how I buy music - and for that deal, you don't get to demand that I pay in advance.
Good things first, they expanded the catalog again, they've got most everything now, this has been the sugar they've been pushing with the medicine of costlier music all along. There are some new customer service areas, look at this bargain on headphones and buy your concert ticket here and download the free track of the day you will never listen to again. I've perused it all a couple of times and it made basically no impact on me. But I didn't actually hate it or anything.
Downsides: a substantial cost increase. It's hard to say exactly how substantial, which is part of the problem. The credit system of pricing has been eliminated: everything is priced on a cash basis now. With this shift has come variable track pricing (very generally, the standard price is .49 per track, but popular tracks often price out at .79). Album prices are frequently completely disconnected from the per-track price and they're all over the map.
Against this I'm getting a $5 monthly bonus for some reason - maybe because I'm an annual subscriber? Maybe as some sort of retention bonus? Various other small retention bonuses, rewards for reviewing tracks have cropped up. You begin to see the problem? I would get into some serious tracking and math to figure out just what sort of deal I'm getting. And I've got a feeling this is just exactly the point. The version of eMusic I started out with was straightforward: tracks cost me 24-25 cents. Every change since - album only pricing, 12 credit albums (pretty much, exceptions may apply etc.), the shift to cash basis and variable track pricing - has made it all but impossible to figure out what I'm actually paying for music.
And this doesn't work out so great for eMusic because it makes me give the various deals, bonuses, and such forth a pass and just look at most obvious comparisons, which is that I went roughly from 24 to 36 to 49 cents or more a track, all in the course of less than 2 years.
The prices have crawled into the range of the other download stores now. I feel like I have to shop around whenever I buy an album. Beastie Boys License to Ill, $7.27 on eMusic, $7.99 on Amazon. Sting's Nothing Like the Sun $5.88 at eMusic, $9.49 at Amazon. Talking Heads Remain in Light $4.52 on sale at eMusic, 7.92 at Amazon.
Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, $8.99 at eMusic, $4.99 at Amazon.
Barely a deal, a couple of decent deals (but unlikely to dip below a 40% discount it seems), a terrible deal.
Further, eMusic has finally broken the ground to basically change the deal with their customers without further notice. Bump more tracks up to 79 cents. Eliminate full album deals, change the price to the added up track price. Add more track prices between the high and low end. Add a higher high end. I don't want to have to pay this much attention.
What this stands alongside are the things that have always been a straightforward downside to the eMusic deal: the subscription requirement and the failure to roll over unused credit at the end of the month. Maybe it is purely psychological but the conversion to cash pricing has greatly reduced my tolerance for these conditions. My attitude has gone from viewing it as a subscription fee guaranteeing me access to a minimum monthly volume of music, to seeing it as a mandatory spending minimum I am required to pay in advance.
Where this leads me to is not entirely eMusic's fault but on the other hand I find it hard to believe my situation is particularly unique. It's 2011 and the American economy has been in the tank for basically ten years. Like everyone else in the heavily squeezed, rapidly vanishing middle class, I've got a weather eye constantly on the future and there is nothing non-essential that's not potentially on the chopping block. My iTunes catalog* has almost 25 straight days of audio in it, over 9,000** tracks. It's all legal: the combined CD collections of two adults plus ten years on the digital marketplace. I can't make much sense in this state of maintaining a mandatory monthly music budget. eMusic will definitely still make sense for many. I don't think it makes sense for me any longer.
*iTunes as my music management software, not the store, I'm sure less than 1% of my collection actually came from the iTunes store.
**Actually true and unintentional, still, LOL.
From a straight financial perspective I think that eMusic is probably technically still a reasonably good deal - provided you feel like you would actually want to spend whatever the statutory requirement of your contract dictates in their store anyway, doing so month in month out is likely going to give you more music for your dollar than spending the same at Amazon, iTunes and the like.
But. The shifts made in the most recent transition have appreciably cut into the savings for the customer shopping at eMusic. They have also transparently paved the way for chipping at the bargain factor of eMusic purchases in an incremental and confusing way. In a nutshell the new order at eMusic simply requires me to think too much about whether and how I buy music - and for that deal, you don't get to demand that I pay in advance.
Good things first, they expanded the catalog again, they've got most everything now, this has been the sugar they've been pushing with the medicine of costlier music all along. There are some new customer service areas, look at this bargain on headphones and buy your concert ticket here and download the free track of the day you will never listen to again. I've perused it all a couple of times and it made basically no impact on me. But I didn't actually hate it or anything.
Downsides: a substantial cost increase. It's hard to say exactly how substantial, which is part of the problem. The credit system of pricing has been eliminated: everything is priced on a cash basis now. With this shift has come variable track pricing (very generally, the standard price is .49 per track, but popular tracks often price out at .79). Album prices are frequently completely disconnected from the per-track price and they're all over the map.
Against this I'm getting a $5 monthly bonus for some reason - maybe because I'm an annual subscriber? Maybe as some sort of retention bonus? Various other small retention bonuses, rewards for reviewing tracks have cropped up. You begin to see the problem? I would get into some serious tracking and math to figure out just what sort of deal I'm getting. And I've got a feeling this is just exactly the point. The version of eMusic I started out with was straightforward: tracks cost me 24-25 cents. Every change since - album only pricing, 12 credit albums (pretty much, exceptions may apply etc.), the shift to cash basis and variable track pricing - has made it all but impossible to figure out what I'm actually paying for music.
And this doesn't work out so great for eMusic because it makes me give the various deals, bonuses, and such forth a pass and just look at most obvious comparisons, which is that I went roughly from 24 to 36 to 49 cents or more a track, all in the course of less than 2 years.
The prices have crawled into the range of the other download stores now. I feel like I have to shop around whenever I buy an album. Beastie Boys License to Ill, $7.27 on eMusic, $7.99 on Amazon. Sting's Nothing Like the Sun $5.88 at eMusic, $9.49 at Amazon. Talking Heads Remain in Light $4.52 on sale at eMusic, 7.92 at Amazon.
Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, $8.99 at eMusic, $4.99 at Amazon.
Barely a deal, a couple of decent deals (but unlikely to dip below a 40% discount it seems), a terrible deal.
Further, eMusic has finally broken the ground to basically change the deal with their customers without further notice. Bump more tracks up to 79 cents. Eliminate full album deals, change the price to the added up track price. Add more track prices between the high and low end. Add a higher high end. I don't want to have to pay this much attention.
What this stands alongside are the things that have always been a straightforward downside to the eMusic deal: the subscription requirement and the failure to roll over unused credit at the end of the month. Maybe it is purely psychological but the conversion to cash pricing has greatly reduced my tolerance for these conditions. My attitude has gone from viewing it as a subscription fee guaranteeing me access to a minimum monthly volume of music, to seeing it as a mandatory spending minimum I am required to pay in advance.
Where this leads me to is not entirely eMusic's fault but on the other hand I find it hard to believe my situation is particularly unique. It's 2011 and the American economy has been in the tank for basically ten years. Like everyone else in the heavily squeezed, rapidly vanishing middle class, I've got a weather eye constantly on the future and there is nothing non-essential that's not potentially on the chopping block. My iTunes catalog* has almost 25 straight days of audio in it, over 9,000** tracks. It's all legal: the combined CD collections of two adults plus ten years on the digital marketplace. I can't make much sense in this state of maintaining a mandatory monthly music budget. eMusic will definitely still make sense for many. I don't think it makes sense for me any longer.
*iTunes as my music management software, not the store, I'm sure less than 1% of my collection actually came from the iTunes store.
**Actually true and unintentional, still, LOL.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Hells yeah it is a store
I have actually been thinking on raising my mesozoic snout up out of the swamp mud and gacking out some new content hereabouts but in the meantime there's commerce. In the event you haven't been monitoring the changes in my sidebars with breathless regard I have rebooted my Media Empire Shop for your consumptive pleasure.
Thursday, May 06, 2010
On the Humble Indie Bundle, and the virtues of humility in general
...Excuse me? You thought there was some sort of digital culture blog around here? Boy, it doesn't look to me like there's been anything going on around here for a while, but, okay, what the hell, I'll see what I can dig up.
The Humble Indie Bundle is a snazzy little packet of five independent video games. As a purchase, it's distinguished by a number of features that you can read about here rather than watching the pseudo-rap video on the website, because sorry, guys, but that is very terrible. Anyway, it is cross-platform (PC, Mac and Linux), the games are DRM free, you are allowed to set your own price for the bundle, and a portion of the proceeds are donated to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. How big of a portion? You can customize how much of your payment goes to either of the charities and how much goes to the developers. Sort of. You divvy up the split with an imprecise kind of slider bar widget so if you like round figures this can be sort of frustrating.
Now this is all fine and pleasant and I certainly recommend it if you have any inclination to play the games in question. But what it got me thinking about is how in this new digital commerce paradigm business the independent game developers are really standing out in terms of stomping on the notion, which is still generally being desperately clung to by the media conglomerates and publishing industries, that mature works - particular copyrighted packets of data - can successfully hang on to their legacy price points. A year, two out of the gate prices start to drop - 30, 50, 75 percent - or games show up in these sorts of rock-bottom promotions for a limited time.
Putting aside all old media conceptions it seems like it would make perfect sense- these products have paid their way, I'm assuming. They have covered their development costs and produced their hoped-for chunk of profit and whatever they generate from this point out is basically gravy. Promotion manages itself via the always hyperactive video game infosphere and, with the basic architecture of file transfer in place and bandwidth presumably on-tap and cheap (transacting bits being the business model of these developers), I'd hope the overhead on such a promotion would trend toward rock bottom. I mean I hope: as of this writing they have brought in almost $400,000, though on the other hand their suggested (to their credit quietly suggested with a very light touch) donation is around 30 bucks and by their reporting their average so far is around 8 bucks. I'm not actually sure their reporting that is such a great idea but there you go, transparency is a harsh mistress.
But as I say, it is a common sense that the media industry at large has been resisting like crazy, particularly throughout the last decade, and it bears scrutiny as to why independent game developers in particular are so far ahead on this concept - this concept that in most cases a piece of media is a thing that ages, and not like a fine wine but like a loaf of bread, and past its fresh-by date you only get to charge half price.
This is the humility I allude to in my title: to recognize that an infinitely reproducible piece of work is a commodity with a shelf life, it does not eternally retain full value, it is not some sort of sacrosanct chunk of metaphysics. I don't know the answer but several pieces occur to me. Independent game developers, quite distinct from old media producers, were I think completely ready, indeed evangelized, converted and committed, to abandon physical media in favor of digital transfer. Of course, it is pure useless overhead. Much less so than mediated music or books, I think people basically grasp that with software you are paying for rights to the data, not for some object. This makes people initially less resistant to a substantial cost for an ephemeral download, but that initial price may have less stability over time, unattached to the notion that "object X costs about $Y". Software invites the analysis, what is this functionality of this data to me now, much more than those occult entities, the Album or the Novel.
Perhaps less immediately transferable to other media, of course software is practically prone to a much harsher reality of obsolescence than most media. A book is a book, more or less, but after a certain point not only is a piece of software not up to the current standards, it won't even play on the current equipment (or at best, will play only with additional software). Beyond the nostalgia market (which seems mostly hardware/media driven, with little visible paying market for digital ephemera) old video games have basically no monetary value.
So here's a puzzle: compared to their retail value, video games are disproportionately resource-intensive to create as compared to, say, cutting an album or writing a novel. The product is subject to a much more aggressive value deterioration over time. Yet we're told that video games are eating the market share of these other media for lunch. Dear everybody trying to sell data besides the people making video games: you're doing something wrong.
The Humble Indie Bundle is a snazzy little packet of five independent video games. As a purchase, it's distinguished by a number of features that you can read about here rather than watching the pseudo-rap video on the website, because sorry, guys, but that is very terrible. Anyway, it is cross-platform (PC, Mac and Linux), the games are DRM free, you are allowed to set your own price for the bundle, and a portion of the proceeds are donated to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. How big of a portion? You can customize how much of your payment goes to either of the charities and how much goes to the developers. Sort of. You divvy up the split with an imprecise kind of slider bar widget so if you like round figures this can be sort of frustrating.
Now this is all fine and pleasant and I certainly recommend it if you have any inclination to play the games in question. But what it got me thinking about is how in this new digital commerce paradigm business the independent game developers are really standing out in terms of stomping on the notion, which is still generally being desperately clung to by the media conglomerates and publishing industries, that mature works - particular copyrighted packets of data - can successfully hang on to their legacy price points. A year, two out of the gate prices start to drop - 30, 50, 75 percent - or games show up in these sorts of rock-bottom promotions for a limited time.
Putting aside all old media conceptions it seems like it would make perfect sense- these products have paid their way, I'm assuming. They have covered their development costs and produced their hoped-for chunk of profit and whatever they generate from this point out is basically gravy. Promotion manages itself via the always hyperactive video game infosphere and, with the basic architecture of file transfer in place and bandwidth presumably on-tap and cheap (transacting bits being the business model of these developers), I'd hope the overhead on such a promotion would trend toward rock bottom. I mean I hope: as of this writing they have brought in almost $400,000, though on the other hand their suggested (to their credit quietly suggested with a very light touch) donation is around 30 bucks and by their reporting their average so far is around 8 bucks. I'm not actually sure their reporting that is such a great idea but there you go, transparency is a harsh mistress.
But as I say, it is a common sense that the media industry at large has been resisting like crazy, particularly throughout the last decade, and it bears scrutiny as to why independent game developers in particular are so far ahead on this concept - this concept that in most cases a piece of media is a thing that ages, and not like a fine wine but like a loaf of bread, and past its fresh-by date you only get to charge half price.
This is the humility I allude to in my title: to recognize that an infinitely reproducible piece of work is a commodity with a shelf life, it does not eternally retain full value, it is not some sort of sacrosanct chunk of metaphysics. I don't know the answer but several pieces occur to me. Independent game developers, quite distinct from old media producers, were I think completely ready, indeed evangelized, converted and committed, to abandon physical media in favor of digital transfer. Of course, it is pure useless overhead. Much less so than mediated music or books, I think people basically grasp that with software you are paying for rights to the data, not for some object. This makes people initially less resistant to a substantial cost for an ephemeral download, but that initial price may have less stability over time, unattached to the notion that "object X costs about $Y". Software invites the analysis, what is this functionality of this data to me now, much more than those occult entities, the Album or the Novel.
Perhaps less immediately transferable to other media, of course software is practically prone to a much harsher reality of obsolescence than most media. A book is a book, more or less, but after a certain point not only is a piece of software not up to the current standards, it won't even play on the current equipment (or at best, will play only with additional software). Beyond the nostalgia market (which seems mostly hardware/media driven, with little visible paying market for digital ephemera) old video games have basically no monetary value.
So here's a puzzle: compared to their retail value, video games are disproportionately resource-intensive to create as compared to, say, cutting an album or writing a novel. The product is subject to a much more aggressive value deterioration over time. Yet we're told that video games are eating the market share of these other media for lunch. Dear everybody trying to sell data besides the people making video games: you're doing something wrong.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Sorry, but a positive net worth is in another castle...
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.
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.
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.
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