Wow, yet another huge concession by the music industry. Music piracy is like a mass protest right now, and half the people participating don’t even recognize the significance of their actions.

So a company like Ruckus builds an app and gets to be a kind of middleman, “selling” college students’ attention to both labels and advertisers. What a great deal for Ruckus. They’re like YouTube, but rather than rely on user-generated content, they’ll rely on label-generated content.

But why do we need a separate company to do this? Does the music industry’s business model not give them room to seek attention directly, advertise to it, and cash in that way? MTV has lived off of advertising forever. So, given the fall of CDs, why aren’t we seeing labels transition into “media” companies?

Maybe because they’re already pwned by bigger “media” companies?

I am tired of sending people to Amazon from my blog to find media. I want a web site that has a static page for everything that Amazon has, with links to many different sources for acquisition: your local libraries, sites that let you trade with people, your local independent bookstores, and then, yes, if you really have to, an online bookseller.

What I’m talking about is a site that promotes the library and the local economy at the same time. Have you thought lately about how great the library is? The library is a network that can get you pretty much anything. It saves trees and oil by sharing a local resource. And now that we’ve lost most of our town squares, it is one of the few local non-commercial community spots left. What’s more, you’ve already paid for it in your tax bill, so it is a wise financial move. Of course, libraries don’t have many copies of the hottest new books and movies, so that’s where the independent bookstore comes in.

I know about WorldCat, and I’m excited to see the upcoming WorldCat.org. But even with a new face, they don’t have circulation data. I wish libraries had open APIs like Amazon does, where you could query availability, request books, and so on. I’ve heard about “Library 2.0,” but where is it? I’ve read about LibraryLookup. I’ve seen Google Print. None of give the complete answer when the readers’ question is “what is the fastest, cheapest way for me to borrow/acquire/read/view X?”

And isn’t that always the question?

Well, no. Other questions might be “what did people think of this book?”, “what other library books did people check out when they checked this one out?”, and “how can I save this book for later checkout/purchase?”

I don’t know of a site that answers even one of these questions and includes my local library.

There’s too much excellent music in this world that gets overlooked.

An album series idea. Every four months, go through all the waning major label CDs from the preceding quarter that never got off the ground and pull together the gem songs from these albums. The distinction here is that these artists are not indie at all. They all wanted to be hip hop/pop stars, but it just didn’t work out. The music might still be damn good.

possible titles

- Expensive Music by Broke Artists
- It’s a Ms. (for the female artist off-shoot)
- The Best of Unpopular Music (or just Unpop— why isn’t this a popular genre already?)
- Tepid Greats
- Great Artists Without Sunglasses (the cloudy day series)
- Debt Relief
- Solid Pyrite
- Overlooked and Underpaid

a few good items from the NY Times today:

a compelling op-ed about the gay marriage debate

an article about Finnish snow and ice sculptures.. the included slide show is stunning. In a way, nothing beats beautiful temporary art.

a ditty about the web site idea-a-day.com, and the idea of ideas as entertainment. I like.

Cello disco, anyone? You’re not going to find it on iTunes Music Store (I looked…)

Musicians typically release one album at a time. Twelve or so songs, once per year at most.. usually more like every two years. While outside the studio, they tour to promote the current offering.

With MP3s, the notion of an album is only a holdover from the media of the past. Songs are the level of granularity we’re looking at today. So I predict that some artists will move to a model where they record a dozen songs at once in the studio and they release one song at a time, on a rolling schedule, until they get back into the studio. Tours would feature a rolling set list, which might add a song or two as they are released. The single would come out first, so the artist can perform it at all shows. While on the road, the artist could work out different arrangements for the songs (as naturally happens anyway), prehaps resulting in a remix or two. Song-level releases would keep the act continuously fresh for audiences and the artist alike.

Someone must be doing this already. Who is it?

(On the other hand, it breaks the continuity of an album. How would people react if “Dark Side of the Moon” were released one song at a time? No, thanks.)

From The NY Times Mag from last weekend, an interesting piece about copyright law in the 21st century. I’m glad to see this topic getting some real attention in the press, especially since the spin is heavily on the side of the Copy Left people, the Creative Commons, Larry Lessig, etc. Of course, producers and consumers are both vital to keeping the media industries alive, so a solution must balance the needs of both. That’s economics. What remains to be seen is how much further the noose will be tightened wrt. distribution, reuse, and redistribution. Can the Internet still save us?

This article doesn’t take packaging—one of the precious few physical manifestations of all this data—as seriously as consumers do. You’re not going to get packaging on the iTunes Music Store. We’ve gone from live performances (the most visceral option) to LP records (with big 10”x10” or so images) to CDs (much smaller) to little web pages about the music. I guess people put up with the transition to CDs, out of convenience, so maybe they’ll put up with no physical manifestation, out of convenience. But this just isn’t a complete musical experience, in my mind.

So I think packaging’s value is on the rise, at least during the transition period from CDs to downloaded MP3s. Maybe I’m just paying more attention to it, but aren’t companies are putting a lot more effort into their packaging these days?

A nice article about Rufus Wainwright, whose partying has gotten him into trouble lately… I await the new album he’s recently finished.

Daniel is going on tour with Josh Rouse soon, promoting Josh’s new record 1972. A pretty good disc, well put together. He has a nice voice. I’m particularly fond of the song “Flight Attendant,” a lonely song with a nice nostalgic/cinematic sound. I think a lot of Josh’s past success has been in movie soundtracks. On a side note, the flute seems to be whispering its way back into rock-n-roll. Or maybe it’s been there all along, and I just keep hearing it lately.

I listened to the audio version of E. Annie Proulx’s The Accordion Crimes on a car trip this weekend. It’s sort of an American version of The Red Violin that nicely covers immigration and American cultural history from the perspective of one green Italian accordion as it changes hands and brings a curse (and a little blessing) to its owners over a couple centuries.