Wired Prescribes the End of Music Piracy
November 30, 2010
Is it time to stop pirating music? According to Paul Boutin in Wired (via reddit), yes.
It’s time for everybody to go legit. The reason: We won. And all you audiophiles and copyfighters, you know who fixed our problems? The record labels and online stores we loved to hate.
Paul lines up arguments in favor of pirating, and then attacks each argument in turn. DRM? Gone. Resolution? Improved to the point at which most ears couldn’t hear an improvement in quality. Catalog? Expanded, in fact wider than Paul claims, since you can now find the Beatles in iTunes. And so on.
I’d take issue with Paul on one point (besides the quibble about the Beatles). “The age of stealing music via the Internet is officially over.” But his arguments are that it should be over. In other words, they are prescriptive arguments.
I haven’t seen a strong descriptive case that music piracy is ceasing. That would require data showing that people aren’t taking music for which they payed, and which was not given to them. As the discussion on Reddit shows, there are people who intend to obtain music without paying for it. That raises questions such as: How many of them are there? How responsible is the music industry for their existence? But I won’t go into that here.
I will read with interest Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. I didn’t steal it, I borrowed it from the library. I hope author Steve Knopper doesn’t mind. Perhaps the music industry has become less self-destructive since the book was published.
Thanks, Food, etc.
November 25, 2010
I started my first Thanksgiving as a citizen of the USA by reaching inside a turkey. Mercifully for all involved, the turkey wasn’t alive at the time.
I am thankful for many things. Food: I’ll eat a lot today. Family: it’s good to be with my family here, and I’ll call my family back in England. Opportunity to tell yet again the joke that Brits do celebrate Thanksgiving – on the 4th of July.
Back to food. One of the things I cook most often is pasta with what we call b-sauce. We call it that because it’s like bolognese sauce, but isn’t authentic. Today’s Guardian carries the reassuring news that “there is no definitive recipe for a bolognese meat sauce.” It provides several recipes, varying with respect to meat, vegetables, wine, whether there’s a dairy ingredient, etc.
My own recipe comprises, in order of appearance in the saucepan: onions, carrots, ground pork, mushrooms, tomatoes (crushed, canned), wine, salt, pepper, oregano. Talking of wine, I’m surprised that most of the recipes in the Guardian article call for white wine. I prefer to use red, have sometimes used white, but often have to resort to water.
All this reminds me of a recent (well, earlier this month) WordPress.com announcement: FoodPress. The site looks interesting, but could use a more prominent search box.
Wherever you are, I hope you also have much to be thankful for.
Isn’t it a little early for best of the year lists?
November 18, 2010
Best music of 2010? Isn’t it too early too tell, given that there are another 6 weeks of the year, and we could use a little time with music before picking winners? There are already so many lists that the Largehearted Boy list of best of lists is under way, with 9 lists being added today. LHB does a similar list of lists for books.
NPR’s All Songs Considered is in on the best of the year bandwagon. But so far, it’s only gone as far as a nomination-soliciting post on the show’s blog.
My own lists have been qualified with “so far” following “year.” I really can’t pick a front runner from the 9 albums currently on my list. Yes I, like NPR, and old-fashioned enough to think in terms of albums.
It’s a Beatle, Not a Cloud
November 16, 2010
So today’s big Apple announcement was not streaming iTunes, as widely predicted. It was Beatles music being available for purchase at iTunes.
Mashable Adam provides good brisk coverage. Comments on his post tend to be variations on the theme of “I’m younger than Steve Jobs, so I don’t care.”
CrunchGear’s Devin valiantly tries to explain why we care. “Being that the Beatles MP3 holdout is emblematic of the recording industry’s resistance against modern distribution methods, the way in which the Beatles discography will be made available should be telling.”
I’m inclined to think that those who really want Beatles music already have the CDs, while many of those who want the music in digital form without the hassle of a disc also want to avoid the hassle of payment. But the holiday/gift/rampant commerce season is upon us, so a lot of money may change hands.
I’ll be watching to see when and how the other music services announce: Beatles for Sale. As for Beatles music, I care enough to have allowed myself to be talked into a festival of Beatles cover bands (Abbey Road on the River, in DC earlier this year, and that’s Britbeat in the photo), and to be putting together a Beatles playlist/CD.
When it comes to the playlist, I’m surprised at how much Paul there is. When I think of the Beatles songwriters in the abstract, I think of Paul as sentimental, George as having penned a classic or two, and John as the man. When I listen to the music itself, I’m reminded of just how good McCartney’s best is, how annoyingly self-absorbed Lennon often was, and how Harrison doesn’t quite make the cut in that elite company.
My favorite few minutes of the Beatles come on Revolver, on which John’s “And Your Bird Can Sing” is followed by Paul’s “For No One.” The best of John (and a fine band performance) followed by the best of Paul.
Enough about the Beatles, lest I start sounding as old as Steve Jobs.
37signals, One Suite
November 10, 2010
I’ve long been an admirer of 37signals. Today, Jason Fried announced the 37signals suite. The suite comprises 4 web apps: Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire. The last of these is for online chatting, the first three for managing, respectively, projects, contacts, and stuff.
There are three pricing options, starting at $99/month. It’ll be interesting to see how and if that changes. 37signals like to keep things simple, while some of their clients will have “but I want more of this and less of that with price more like that” comments.
It’s interesting to see that this is not a freemium offering. There is no $0 small-scale or trial version of the suite.
37signals is the best example I know of a firm with a strategy. By strategy, I mean propensity to respond to requests with: No, that’s not what we do. In particular:
- 37s takes a hard line against feature creep. To make it into a product, a new feature has to add a lot more in terms of useful function than it does in terms of clutter.
- 37s does not believe in losing money to gain clients. It has always priced for profit. There are $0 versions of the apps, but they are intended for trial, not for extended free-of-charge use.
In terms of my own use, I like the first of these things a lot more than I like the second. One of the reasons I stopped using Backpack was because my use outgrew the $0, but my inclination to pay didn’t. I do currently use Highrise.
What should 37s do next? Well, what I’d like them to do is a Learning Management System (LMS). A ruthlessly uncluttered LMS would allow focus on learning from the course, without wasting cycles navigating the LMS. But I don’t think that an LMS is on the 37s radar, and so I’ll keep on writing about other LMSs.
Netflix: Streaming Beats Discs, But Loses to Downtime
November 9, 2010
Netflix is now a digital video streaming company first that happens to also offer DVDs by mail, observes Forrester’s James McQuivey at Paid Content (via RWW). Netflix is starting to deliver more content by streaming than my mail.
That’s mostly good news, although it does rely on Netflix being able to stream. It was down a few minutes ago (but is back up right now). Netflix does downtime less gracefully than a certain whale-watching site I could mention: it blamed my computers, got stuck on at the license stage. It didn’t own up to having problems, and it didn’t show me a cute animal. Then again, Twitter has had more practice with downtime than has Netflix.
That suggests a couple of games. The first is to come up with a mascot for Netflix downtime. I suggest the Netflix narwhal, but will leave the artwork/implementation to others. Then there’s the Netflix version of rock-paper-scissors. Downtime beats streaming, which beats discs, which beat downtime. I hope that streaming wins…
Music and Months of 2010
November 7, 2010
Elvis Costello’s National Ransom came out this week. If I made a list of the year’s music with as many entries as months so far, NR would make that list.
Yes, NR does sprawl, across styles, and for over an hour, but I don’t object. Neither do I object to the sprawl of The Suburbs (at least not to that of the album with that title) so Arcade Fire join Elvis at the recent end of the list. So does Richard Thompson, with another hour-plus album. I posted about his Dream Attic when it came out, and it’s holding up well after many subsequent plays.
That’s 3 albums to add to the 5 I listed at 2010′s 6-month mark. Add John Grant’s Queen of Denmark, which I missed when it came out in the first half of the year, and my favorites of the year list is up to 9 after 10+ months.
Twitter as Usual, Baked in a Pie
November 5, 2010
Twitter Blackbird Pie is a method of displaying tweets as rich full content rather than as just simple URLs or images. I would include an example in this post, were Twitter not down at the moment.
Twitter Blackbird Pie is a plugin for WordPress. It’s also a feature of WordPress.com, a service with rather more uptime than Twitter.
Totara: Another LMS Launches
November 3, 2010
Totora is a new open source learning management system. It’s from Kineo, and the quote is from Kineo’s Cammy Bean.
Totara is a distribution of the free/open source LMS Moodle, aimed at Kineo’s corporate clients: I’m sure that it’s aimed to attract new clients, as well as to serve current clients.
Since Moodle is under the GPL, so is Totara. That means that when you get Totara, you get its source code, and are free to modify and redistribute your modifications. (It means more than that, but that’s enough about the GPL for this post.)
I plan to try out Totara when it becomes available. It looks as though that means January 2011. The LMS I’m trying out right now is Schoology, about which I posted last week.
