After careful consideration, I've decided that I feel very similarly about two new products that have been recently introduced to the American market: the iPhone and Barack Obama. I don't have time for a thorough, prosaic explanation, so for now, I'll reduce it to the language of the board room meetings that no doubt produced them both -- bullet points.
PROS
- black (in a field where white has been the norm)
- sexy
- sounds great
- light years ahead of the competitors
CONS
- functionality hindered by necessary but regrettable attachment to a bloated, corrupt legacy organization that controls access to consumers
- first generation product; unproven in a real-world environment
FINAL ANALYSIS
- i want to believe, but i'm still skeptical
- will wait until next generation deployment, when the bugs are ironed out, before i decide to adopt
UPDATE: Apparently I'm not the first one to make this comparison (thanks, Eliot!)
Load up that iPod, dust off your charger. Take that candy yellow sport walkman out of the dead tech box in your closet, and steal some AA batteries from your VCR remote -- you're not using it anyway.
Tomorrow, net radio purveyors from Pandora to KCRW to Yahoo! will be darkening the netwaves to protest the ruinously high webcasting rates recently mandated by the US Copyright Office. The single-day protest was organized by Kurt Hanson, founder of the Radio and Internet Newsletter (RAIN).
We hate the idea of doing without Pandora for a whole day. But even scarier is the prospect of losing it -- and the myriad other voices in the ether, offering an unprecedented range of musical styles and viewpoints to tens of millions of listeners -- forever. If you'd like to do your part to convince the powers that be to scale back royalty rates to reasonable levels, check out SaveNetRadio.org.
It's official: EMI's finally getting bought, right after announcing another dismal quarter. No big surprise that they finally found a buyer -- after all, they've been on and off the block for years.
What is a bit surprising, however, is who the buyer isn't -- namely, another record label. EMI and Warner have been doing the mating dance for years at this point. This seems like one more tiny bit of evidence that the long rising tide of media consolidation may finally be receding. A decade ago, there were six major labels, then there were five, then there were four. I, for one, am happy that the number won't be falling to three any time soon. Innovation and creativity are hard enough to encourage in an oligopoly, but virtually impossible in a triopoly (witness U.S. network television, or wireless telecom).
Almost as interesting is who the buyer is -- namely, private equity firm Terra Nova. This is the second purchase of a major label by private equity in recent years (the first was Warner). I don't want to read too much into it, but I think this all hints at a larger shift of market risk away from established media firms, toward smaller, savvier capital -- which could be very good for both creators and consumers. Of course, everything that comes apart eventually falls back together -- it's a cycle, after all -- but in the meantime, maybe I can actually start listening to commercial radio again (even broadcasting behemoth Clear Channel's selling out to private equity and selling off stations).
Jeremy Silver, a former EMI exec and current smartypants, has got more to say about the deal here.
Billboard is reporting that the Beatles are close to clearing their catalog for digital sale through iTunes. There's been plenty of recent chatter to suggest this was in the works (e.g. iPod-Apple and Beatles-Apple kiboshing their trademark dispute), but this time it comes straight from the cute horse's mouth -- Sir Paul, himself.
We wonder whether the Beatles catalog will fall into the EMI/iTunes agreement to sell un-crippled, DRM-free tracks. I'd like to think it will, but history tells us that, despite their early embrace of studio technowizardry, the keepers of the fab four flame have always erred -- and boy how they've erred -- on the side of luddism and technoparanoia.
Maybe the strangest thing about this is that anyone cares. I mean, the Beatles broke up before I was born, and I'm OLD. But whenever I teach my music course at USC Annenberg, and ask my kids what they've got on their iPods, more than 90% always raise their hands when I mention the band. Go figure.
UPDATE: Now it's (almost) official. EMI has confirmed that McCartney's entire post-Beatle solo catalog will be released digitally. Soon come Beatles. Can't wait to download Ram -- my vinyl version's getting a little clicky-poppy.
This week, I interviewed Pandora founder and pianist Tim Westergren, to get his take on the recent webcasting rate hikes. The result is published in Truthdig.com, to which I recently started contributing media/tech news analysis.
Sinnreich: What do you think the impact of these new rates will be on the Internet radio industry as a whole?
Westergren: If these new rates really stick, it’ll stop. No legitimate webcaster can afford to stream. There may be a few large terrestrial stations that keep their streams going online as a loss leader, but the whole business and ecosystem around Net radio is really going to be wiped out. On the other hand, there are 70 million Americans currently listening to radio over the Internet. If you suddenly turn it off, the demand doesn’t go away. More Web radio will start sprouting up from countries where royalties aren’t strictly enforced, and people will start tuning in to them.
If you're at all concerned about the future of internet radio, I highly recommend you check out SaveNetRadio.org, which contains further information, as well as a petition.
A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Annenberg Center for Communication, based on the research I've been doing into sample-based music for my doctoral dissertation. Musicologist, musician and all-around cool human Joanna Demers (author of Steal this Music) also spoke, about the aesthetics of electronic music.
There's a WMV video of the event here, and an MP3 here. Howard Rheingold also blogged it here.
Many thanks to the Annenberg Center for giving us the opportunity to present our research, and to all the people who came to hear us.
Incidentally, Marissa and I will be presenting related research, based on our recent consumer survey about configurable cultural practices (e.g. mash-ups, remixes, machinima, etc.) at MIT5 in Cambridge later this month, and at ICA in San Francisco next month.
Napster CTO Bill Pence has written a pretty cogent answer to critics' concerns that Zune signals the end of Microsoft's support for its PlaysforSure DRM format (and therefore for the digital music subscription industry as we know it). He argues that Microsoft has every reason to develop Zune and PlaysforSure in parallel, the way they do XBOX and PC games.
Interestingly, the piece also has a thinly-veiled threat to Microsoft: abandon PlaysforSure, and the music industry may abandon DRM in return (fat chance, but I like his moxy):
the disappearance of an open platform could spell the end of DRM technology altogether, at least for digital music. Since I believe strongly that the market in the end must and will be based on interoperable digital formats, if DRM is used to erect barriers to that goal, then there is no question it will be swept aside, and the industry may end up with what many have believed was the obvious choice from the beginning: open MP3 files.
