meta-roj

in a 2-to-1 decision, the us court of appeals for the 2nd circuit in new york ordered that jose padilla be released from military custody. perhaps less reported, but more interesting to me, even the dissenting judge in this case agreed that padilla must have access to counsel.

washington post

“Let’s remember,” [White House press secretary Scott] McClellan said, “we’re talking about an individual who was involved in seeking to do harm to the American people. And the president has repeatedly said that his most solemn obligation . . . is to protect the American people.”

let us also remember, that we are talking about an individual who is guaranteed the protection of law, and is, in matters of law, innocent until proven guilty. then consider the potential bias introduced into legal proceedings when the white house press secretary affirms the guilt of a suspect in public statements. nothing new in this administration, ashcroft set the precedent.

also yesterday, and also a 2-to-1 decision, the us court of appeals for the 9th circuit in san francisco ruled that detainees held as enemy combatants at guantanamo bay also get lawyers and fall under the jurisdiction of us courts.

both, of course, will be appealed by the bush administration, and both are being spun by the white house as bad decisions. i hope the next round results in a more dramatic rebuke, but my observation of the supreme court of late suggests that is unlikely. for now, anyway, there’s a little life left in the old constitution…

14th amendment to the united states constitution, 1868 (emphasis mine)

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

i wandered into this [demographics may be requested] story at the oregonian, describing an interesting effort to give politicians some perspective.

Officials get taste of how lower income live

“I did try, ” said [Multnomah County Commissioner Serena] Cruz, who was allotted $50 a week to feed herself and her husband. “You have to make all of your food. You have to bring your lunch. You can’t get your latte. It’s really hard.”

i’m going to go ahead and take the cheap shot: yes. without your latte, it’s really hard.

$2.50 (tiny boring latte at starbucks) * 7 (days a week) * 2 (people) = $35.

and with that out of the way, what i really want to do with this post is draw attention to the walk a mile program. most of us don’t have a staff (or legal exceptions) to smooth life over around all the legal messes and policy decisions that our politicians create.

perspective is a good thing.

little diz

walmart’s online music thing is now live, and (no surprise here), breaks the 99 cent trend.

walmart is 88 cents.

no word yet on who felt the pinch the hardest…

once upon a time (in 2000), attorney general john ashcroft thought he’d make a good president. the federal election commission has fined [washington post, some demographics may be requested] his campaign for illegally accepting $110, 000. that the fine is only $37,000 (it helps to have friends decide your penalties) and there’s definitely some follow-up coming, but what we have here is a disregard for election law that even the republican half of the federal election commission couldn’t make go away.

strike two is in the form of a statement [also the post, same deal] from u.s. district judge gerald rosen, criticizing ashcroft for violating his order to avoid comment on a pending terrorism trial. ashcroft seems to have decided that talking about convicting terrorists is more important than functional legal proceedings, and in so doing jeopardized the trial (which may have “let the terrorists go”!).

there’s more to both stories, but they’re getting good coverage – i encourage you to develop your own perspective. myself, i’m left with the same request i’ve for so many years now:

please, someone. get this man away from my laws.

i wasn’t using my civil rights anyway

i really should have noticed this a while ago, but as an interesting challenge to those who disagree with me on the future of the cd, you have an opportunity to step up and put some money on it. long bets makes it legit and jake walker has thrown the gauntlet.

my post on the death of the album generated a bit of interest out there (thanks and a nod to robert kaye, grant henninger and the people who left comments).

i thought i’d take a little time today to see if there was another way to figure out this death of the album thing. rolling stone provided some data to check out – the 500 greatest albums of all time. certainly, there is rich material here. there are a lot of interesting things in this list, but since i’m coming from a “death of the album” perspective, i thought i’d go dig up release dates and make a pretty chart. it looks like this:

the earliest album to make the rolling stone list was released in 1952 (#276, Anthology of American Folk Music), and that introduces a problem with this list – anthologies. if i pull the “greatest hits” and other obvious re-releases, it leaves 465 albums. this second chart reveals an interesting bias – a disproportionate number of the more-recent “greatest albums” are collections of older material.

when you combine this picture with the quick analysis of itunes data, it does look like a pretty grim situation for the album. maybe not all the way dead, but mostly dead.

we could speculate about the pattern here and make observations about how it takes time to recognize greatness in art, and how it takes time for artists to mature to the point where they make great art, and that explains why the peak of “great albums” happened 30 years ago. i think it’s simpler than that. the industry has made a major shift from “organic” to “directed” music production. the development cycle at major labels is so short now that there is no room for a “growth” album. you’re signed, you make a hit, pump it as hard as possible, lather, rinse, repeat. if you miss anywhere along the cycle, you’re gone. the industry of music can’t afford to wait around for two or three albums while you find your greatness. outside the industry of music, i think there’s still a lot of room for musicians to develop with their audiences, but that’s getting a bit off topic. back to this album thing.

a lesson here is that there are two ways to get onto the rolling stones greatest albums of all time list – you can make a great album (93% of the list), or you can make a long, great career and turn that into an album (the other 7%).

i made light of it (and so did mick, apparently), but there’s a reason i had to say something about the knighting of the lead stone. sir mick happened because the rolling stones have a decades-long relationship with their fans. mick jagger has gone from from rebel bad boy to getting knighted by the same queen (well, indirectly – i understand prince chuck did the actual honors) the stones were screaming about in the 60’s.

putting together a few hit songs and filling out an “album” with garbage serves the record label well, but it doesn’t serve the musicians well. the hit is there (with some follow-up potential, of course), so there’s money to be made, and they will pull every string available to make it. but, if you alienate your fans by making them feel ripped off (gee, 2/3rds of this album sucks – why did i pay so much for it?) or inconvenienced (skip track 2. skip track 5…), then they won’t come back and buy your next release. they won’t come to your concert. they won’t keep you fed. you (the musician) broke the relationship with your audience, and that is the hard limit on your career.

your label, on the other hand, has a thousand people just like you waiting for their chance. the label has to deal with investors and quarterly financial statements and other short-term business things, but you need to keep some focus on the long term – you really don’t get to start over too many times in this business of music. this is your career (and diet) on the line. do it right.

for the musician, perhaps the broader question is: “should i worry about albums at all?” i’ll go ahead and answer that one for you – maybe. there is no perfect model. if you can produce a great album – an album that is coherent, that works for you, that builds a relationship with your audience, then yes. worry about it a great deal, and do it. do it well, do it right, and do it with 10 or 15 or even 50 songs if that’s what it takes.

on the other hand, if you don’t have that many solid tracks, or if you can’t make it coherent, or can’t afford to produce all of them right now, then don’t sweat the album thing. work with what you have. play your strengths. build that life-long relationship with your audience some other way. do it one concert at a time, or 5 great tracks at a time, or one person at a time. we (your fans) are smart enough to work with you on this, and we will respect you in the morning if you respect us today.

then again, we’re also smart enough to realize when we’re getting the raw end of the deal, and there are plenty of other bands out there for us to fall in love with…

…but have fun storming the castle…

knighted for services to music.

about a month ago, i ran into this story over that the christian science monitor – the death of the album.

at the time, i thought i’d make some brilliant and insightful comments about how it’s a singles-driven market and the album is usually an artificial creation that doesn’t really have any integrity with the listeners, but it wasn’t something i could really get my teeth into.

when i got the “good news” from peter lowe over at apple, speaking at music 2.0, i dug into the “drafts” (that is, reminders) and realized i’d left it hanging. i won’t make you dig for this one, because it’s worth repeating.

the death of the album

The music store from Apple, iTunes, says that of the more than 17 million songs purchased since April, about 46 percent were downloaded as part of full albums.

news.com

Apple director of marketing Peter Lowe said that 45 percent of songs downloaded through iTunes had been sold as part of a full album, rather than in single song form. That indicates many people are still interested in purchasing large numbers of songs, or full albums, despite having a la carte options, Lowe said.

when i did this before, the assumption was 12 tracks per album (which is just a guess, really) – and i’ll use it again. since i’ve got two data points from itunes, i can do a little more.

based on the csm statement:
46% of 17m = 651,667 albums + 9.18 million singles. (6.63% of sales are albums)

based on the music 2.0 statement:
45% of 20m = 750,000 albums + 11 million singles. (6.38% of sales are albums)

that’s a 15.1% increase for album sales, and a 19.8% increase for singles sales. personally, i expect that gap to continue to widen.

my spin is already on the record (as it were). while that statement was directed at the high end of the music market, i think the concept holds from top to bottom.

as a musician, what you’re creating is a song that captures a tiny piece of that brutal attention market. it’s about getting some attention and building a relationship on top of it. that’s something that an album can do, but it’s not the only way, and it doesn’t work for that many artists. when it works, the single gets your foot in the door, and the album makes it a relationship. once it’s a relationship, it’s yours to lose (for example, by getting busted for lipsynching your whole career).

the problem for many artists is that the pressure to get something “out there” means that a few good tracks are bundled with a bunch of not-so-good tracks and called an album – it’s got 12 tracks, so it’s an album – but it doesn’t work like one. if your audience starts telling their cd player to skip track 2, then track 2 and 3, then 2 and 3 and 6 – you’re not building a relationship, you’re annoying your people.

yes. that kind of album is dead.

the death of the album

But what constitutes an album’s worth of music might also change as artists, freed from the restrictions of a 70-minute CD, could make their collections longer or shorter. If a band only has 20 minutes of good songs, then it doesn’t have to pad out the material.

that i don’t get. i just don’t see how “the restrictions of a 70-minute cd” preclude producing a 20-minute cd… i think the economics have shifted enough that producing a cd with 20 minutes of solid material is the way to go. it’s a very rare artist that can put together 70 minutes of quality material, let alone something that would only be possible once “freed” from the cd.

the csm article couples the death of the album format to the physical format. it’s probably obvious by now that i think that the cd will be with us for a while, so i don’t make that connection. the album was created as soon as a physical format made it possible, and for the subset of artists that can do 10 or more songs and make it coherent and use it to build relationships, the album will remain too.

technology companies and record labels have a great interest in coming up with new formats for delivering music – new formats mean new equipment and repeat sales (buy it on 8-track, buy it again on vinyl, buy it again on cd…).

the package matters to the industry, but not so much to the audience. we’ve seen cylinders and platters and tape and optical – 78s, 45s, lps (1948ish), reels, cassttes (1965ish), elcasette (1977ish), playtape (1967ish), dcc (1992ish), 4-track (1956ish), 8-track (1966ish), minidisc (1993ish), and dat (1984ish). we’re still doing it with superaudio cd and dvd-audio peeking over the horizon – plus the hundreds of other formats that have been cooked up in labs and never made it out. we just want something that will put the sounds we like into our ears.

update (8:22pm): i found this post over at arstechnica suggests that at least at the top of the market, it’s closer to 14 tracks per album. thankfully, that means my 12-per-album figure was generous.

based on the csm statement:
46% of 17m = 558,571 albums + 9.18 million singles. (5.74% of sales are albums)

based on the music 2.0 statement:
45% of 20m = 642,857 albums + 11 million singles. (5.52% of sales are albums)

update (2003.12.12): a different perspective on the phenomenon (my own follow-up based on different data).

update (2003.12.13): i should point out that “album” apparently originated with a collection of 78s, bound in a book format – hence the name and the legacy.

for more on the subject… from the people…
stefan doroschuk
clay shirky
richard hyett (it’s the comment that counts)
paul mcaleer
kevin white
dana blankenhorn
augie deblieck jr
brian w. doss
james guthrie

and from the media….
forbes
usa today
fox
salon [wants your money]

rolling stone

When we first went to talk to these record companies — about eighteen months ago — we said, “None of this technology that you’re talking about’s gonna work. We have Ph.D.s here who know the stuff cold, and we don’t believe it’s possible to protect digital content.”

of course, this isn’t new lots of us have been talking about it in one form or another, but now that the steve has spoken, will anyone listen? (kevin gets props on this one, because it might be his memo… 🙂 )