Music Spotlight Turns From Spotify to Facebook
June 21, 2011
Facebook’s music plans involve Spotify, others, revealed Om Malik, thus setting the tone for this week’s conversation about online music.
Last week’s conversation was more about Spotify itself, with $100M in new funding giving a bump to the long-running rumor that the US launch really is near. A deal with Facebook was often mentioned (although sometimes with a note that Facebook was probably not interested in teaming up).
I have more curiosity than enthusiasm about Spotify’s arrival, music on Facebook, and the intersection of the two. I miss Lala, which was acquired by Apple back in 2009, and haven’t enjoyed any other service nearly as much since. Amazon, Apple, and Google have of course each launched a music locker, each with different features above and beyond the basic locker. None of them gives me the control that Lala did.
I’ll try Spotify when it launches, but I fear that its US launch will come too late, and in the shadow of Facebook.
Tale of Two Springs
April 26, 2011
We took a trip up to Boston for a few days, returning on Easter Sunday. The picture is appropriate, not only seasonally, but because we had a party at the indoor playground with this mural outside (Kids’ Fun Stop in West Roxbury, highly recommended, and not just because the owner is a good friend).
We drove past our old house in Roslindale, which made Maddie (now 7) nostalgic, but which Max (4) doesn’t really remember. We also drove past Fallon Field playground, where we spent many an hour, and the arboretum, in which we would have taken a walk had the weather been kinder.
We took the kids’ winter coats to Boston, and the weather justified our decision. Then we got back to the DC area, and were soon digging out their summer sandals. We also had to get out the allergy medication: Max started sneezing while we were still on the plan descending toward BWI airport.
This is a great part of the world, especially if you can stand the pollen, the heat to come, the traffic, and a few other things. I still miss Boston, though.
Amazon Cloud Drive and Player
March 29, 2011
Amazon Cloud Drive is your hard drive in the cloud. You can use it, along with Amazon Cloud Player, as a music locker.
There’s coverage all over the place. NPR is mainly positive, but points out that there are legal challenges to music lockers. TechCrunch describes Amazon’s offering as fierce competition for existing music locker services, given the space it offers and its integration with Amazon’s MP3 store.
At Mashable, Ben Parr actually used the service before posting about it. Good for him! His first impressions are more positive than mine. To Ben, “it became apparent that Amazon wasn’t launching some half-baked product.” To me, it seemed strange that deleting just one MP3 file caused Amazon Cloud Drive to think that I had no files left, even though I was using some of my space allowance.
I’m confident that Amazon will fix the early bugs quickly, and otherwise improve its cloud drive and player. As an example of an improvement, how about looking at my prior Amazon MP3 purchases, and offering to shift them into my locker without having to locate them on my computer and then upload them?
This music locker service combines several of Amazon’s strengths: cloud management, MP3 store, brand name, etc. You get 5 GB of storage for free. To add another 20 GB, you only need to buy one MP3 album. MP3 purchases are automatically added to your locker, and do not count against your storage quota.
Now, let’s see what Apple, Google, and others come back with…
Must… buy… iPad 2
March 11, 2011
After years of being annoyed by Apple, I find myself at the online store, with an iPad 2 and a smart cover in my shopping cart. Since you ask: 16GB with Wi-Fi, black, engraved; orange.
You might also be asking what I’ve found annoying about Apple. There are three main things: smug, overpriced, closed. The first of those is still there, and is unlikely to go away any time soon.
As for overpriced, $500 doesn’t seem like a lot to pay for such a cool tablet. And there’s free shipping! And free engraving! (At least, right now there is.) And think of the hundreds of dollars I’d be saving by getting the Wi-Fi version, which doesn’t involve a contract with a phone company!
So why haven’t I ordered the thing already? Partly because $500 is still a lot of money, and I can’t claim that I really need an iPad.
Then there’s the closed thing. That’s troubling enough to deserve its own post – or at least, to cause some more soul-searching before I finally rationalize my decision to actually place the order.
Changing Year: The Music Edition
February 14, 2011
Arcade Fire won the Grammy for album of the year (via HuffPo and lots of other places). Are they indie? Sort of. Did they deserve it? Well, it’s a very good album, and to criticize an album called The Suburbs for sprawling is perhaps to miss the point.
That said, I think that my album of the year was Laura Veirs’ July Flame. It was among my top 5 of the first 6 months of 2010, and overtook the midpoint front-runner by lasting particularly well. My favorite album released in the second half of the year was Lisbon, from The Walkmen.
Although there was no one release that told me in no uncertain terms that it was my album of the year, 2010 was a pretty good year in music. But it was, according to NPR and other sources, a very bad year for trying to sell music.
Which brings us to 2011, to Radiohead, and to their latest attempt to sell recorded music. I, and many others, will be downloading The King of Limbs in less than a week. The download, which costs $9, is one of two formats in which KoL will initially be available. The other is very analog, with two 10″ vinyl records, and lots of pieces of artwork. It also includes a digital download – and even a CD, to appease those stuck between the analog and download eras, and those who think that for $48 they should get a CD as well.
My album of 2011 so far is Bright Eyes’ The People’s Key, which will be released tomorrow. So today is the last day on which it can be streamed on NPR.
Super Bowl Wins Super Bowl in Super Bowl Shock
February 8, 2011
This was one of those rare years when the Super Bowl game outshone the Super Bowl ads, declared CMO.com. The declaring was actually done by my friend Constantine von Hoffman.
Kid care took me away from the TV, and hence the Super Bowl, at the end of the first half. That means I missed what seems to have been an excellent second half. On the bright side, it means that I was spared the BEP’s halftime show.
As for the ads, consensus seems to be that they came in second place, behind the game and ahead of the BEP. I’d seen the Darth Vader VW ad before the game, thought it was great, and even enjoyed seeing it again.
Then there was that other ad that got a strong reaction: the Tibetan Groupon ad. It struck me as clumsy more than anything else. I think that reasonable people (e.g., Marshall at RWW) may differ on this.
For the most part, the ads simply weren’t interesting. I’m glad that the game was.
Parenting: Battles and Other Stories
January 12, 2011
You may have heard of Amy Chau, and her new book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. If so, that’s probably due to the excerpt published in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago. The headline was “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” Here’s a quote.
Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best.
My wife, who is Chinese, drew my attention to the WSJ piece. It upset her. Her views on parenting differ from the views presented in the excerpt. So do my views.
In the car today, I had the radio tuned to NPR (WAMU, to be specific), as I usually do. Amy Chau was on the Diane Rehm show. That spot shows that the book is to a large extent about how Amy Chau rethought her parenting style.
This is a story about media, as well as about parenting. Here are some headlines I could have used for this story/post.
- WSJ shows only one side of a story.
- WSJ and NPR show different sides of the same story.
- Guardian writer lazily mistakes WSJ excerpt for book.
The trouble with the above headlines is that none of them is surprising. I wish that the last one was surprising. But there is an article in today’s Guardian that seems to mistake the WSJ excerpt for the book, and even for the author herself. The Guardian article is open for reader comments, and many of them based on the assumption that it’s fine to insult an author based on a Guardian account of a WSJ article.
Confession time. I haven’t read the book either. I did think unkindly of Amy Chau on the basis of an excerpt in the WSJ, which appeared under a headline almost certainly provided by a WSJ staffer, rather than by the author of the words selected to appear under the headline.
Perhaps, as we move from January 1 to Chinese new year (of the rabbit, not of the tiger, by the way), a resolution to cut back on jumping to conclusions about people might be in order.
2011 and Other Cubs
January 1, 2011
Happy new year!
I took the kids to the National Zoo today. We hoped to see the lion cubs, and all seven of them did indeed venture outside (although only three of them, plus the two mothers, are in this photo). They are 3+ months old now, and immensely cute and playful.
I hope that 2011, young as it is, has already started to be a good year for you.
We don’t need no stinking cable
December 2, 2010
I can’t cut the cable. I just can’t drop my subscription to cable TV! Why not? Because I’ve never had one. Neither have I ever had satellite TV.
So when I read something about cutting the cable (e.g., a recent post at RWW), I like it, but as a defensive measure against my family deciding that we need cable. And actually, adding TV to our Verizon phone/FiOS service wouldn’t be ruinous.
Right now, I expect to be able to get through my life without ever having subscribed to cable TV. We don’t even have a TV. I expect we’ll get one soon, but I don’t think we’ll need cable to get good content for it.
