meta-roj

ot to be confused with the unreal online music store.

news all over the web, here are a few. same old story – 99 cents and a few hundred thousand tracks.

news.com and slashdot are as good as any.

Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books

Books belong to those kinds of instruments that, once invented, have not been further improved because they are already alright, such as the hammer, the knife, spoon or scissors.

it’s a wonderful essay (and no surprise, really), that got a bit of traction several weeks ago, but i want to add the guitar to professor eco’s list. i’m just strange like that.

now that i’ve gotten my strangeness out of the way, i do encourage you to read the whole thing….

discovery communications makes up footage. no big deal, really, in the business of television, sometimes there just isn’t a picture to show. i don’t have a problem with recreations, dramatizations or other tools of the trade.

what i do have a problem with is when the network makes up this footage and doesn’t label it as made up footage. discovery promotes their channels (discovery, tlc, discovery health, animal planet, discovery kids, science channel, discovery wings, travel channel, discovery times) as sources of information, not disinformation or misinformation.

sometimes, it’s obvious. sure, anyone reasonably intelligent should realize that discovery communications did not actually have a camera crew on-site during the mongol invasions of central asia, sometimes it’s not so obvious. sometimes, they stage things like snakebite victims driving down off mountains, recreating the adventure with the actual victims and cutting in interview segments with them and their actual friends and family.

this is even more offensive since the times is working with discovery now, you’d think some concept of journalistic integrity would make it across the gap. no, apparently not.

even e! is willing to admit when they’re faking it – they put little graphics on the screen to indicate when they’re staging the nicole brown simpson and ronald goldman murders, and didn’t actually have a camera crew on-site. just like discovery used to do.

is that really too much to ask, now that we have constant station-identification graphics and annoying self-promotion graphics that actually overlap content on the screen? how many times have you seen the name of an interviewee obscured and unreadable by an animated promotion graphic for some new program?

discovery communications has violated my trust. the deal is off.

i’m annoyed, and i’m not the only one… an alternative is in the works. i draw your attention to CSN: Cable Science Network

while wandering around the web, i found an old press release from the riaa, with the bold title “Aiken ‘Measures’ Up In November.”

since i recently looked at the pop chart picture and singled out aiken specifically as the weakest #1 of the year (ranking 71 of 160 for artistjuice, despite a #1 debut), i guess this means the riaa and i use different sticks to measure these things.

come to think of it, that may explain a lot of my thoughts on the music business.

i’m going to forego significant analysis, but did want to draw your attention to some things that have been cluttering up my backfile.

for the musicians

garageband from apple. turn every mac into a recording studio… which opens a flood of new content, with the associated “goods” (like more choice) and “bads” (like the discrimination problem).

so apple lets you become a recording artist, now you need to get that record deal. artistopia promises to streamline your introduction to the music industry. i’d love to hear some feedback from people who’ve been through this adventure.

artistopia – about us

Although talent cannot be uniformed, however, what can be standardized is the approach process artists take to professionalizing and formalizing their respective music careers.

yikes. the people at artistopia need to get some english help. it’ll be very interesting to learn if the real experience for the “talent” is positive with them.

for the audience

worth noting again, professor lessig applies some thought to the walmart terms. now you can decide if saving those 11 cents is worth it.

bbspot reviews the online music stores.

destra music brings the online track sales to australia. slashdot covered it. pretty much the same deal (except, of course, for the exchange rate).

sitting in the to-post queue entirely too long (and with a nod to crys), transpose launched goombah. i’m not going to get to play with this one much, so i’ll be watching for the comments from real people.

in a similar vein, i should drop a link to echocloud. echocloud also wants to help you find new music, and they got started way back in spring 2003. then it seems to have fizzled.

for the toolmakers

‘meta-files’ proposed for legal music sharing brought to you by universal (big label) and microsoft (big software) among others, under the operating name of the content reference forum (crf). musicbrainz could be an alternative, particularly with the recent developments

with cd sales slipping, the dvd steps in [new york times, registration, archive will cost you].

with cd sales slipping, the dvd steps in

Sales for music video DVD’s in 2003 jumped 102 percent over 2002 sales, to 17.2 million units, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

year ends on high note for album sales [reuters]. echoing news that we got from barry ritholtz we find that the music industry turned in 2003.

year ends on high note for album sales

With the holiday shifting back a day, from Wednesday in 2002 to Thursday, album sales are up a whopping 20.6% over the same week of the prior year. The final week’s splurge more than compensates for the 5.8% deficit seen the week before the Christmas frame or the 0.5% gap of the year’s 50th week.

Further, the 31.3 million album units sold during this Christmas shopping period also exceeds those of the holiday week in 2001, when Dec. 25 fell on a Tuesday. There were 24.8 million sold that week and 25.9 million tallied during Christmas week 2002. The strong holiday rally closes the gap in this year’s album sales to just 3.6%, the smallest lag behind prior-year sales that the industry has seen in 24 months.

Add up the last two shopping weeks of 2003, and the 63.4 million album units sold in that period beats the same window of 2002 by 5.6%, when Nielsen SoundScan had the year’s final two weeks clocked at 60 million copies.

the riaa and the pew internet and american life project would have you believe this demonstrates the success of the lawsuit strategy and their “education campaign.” barry has another theory.

barry ritholtz

If the marketplace is allowed to freely function, competition would drive prices down and unit sales up. Artificial price supports are what was killing sales, and not the advertising that is file sharing . . .

in what has become the first major meta-roj blog phenomenon of the year, the story of hope stout has brought well over 1000 visitors, and many comments and good wishes.

thanks to everyone.

well, we have the page at apple, and it’s just not quite right yet.

important points are $249 and 1000 songs. technically, that’s 4gb, temporally it’s 60+ hours.

compared to my hints not too long ago, this mini ipod isn’t quite where i would go with the concept.

who’s ready to fund the roj-pod?

update (2004.01.07): businessweek is underwhelmed too.

hope stout was the subject of a recent post here, reflecting the inspiration of a 12-year old who was generous beyond her years. (go read that post, that’s where all the action is).

late in the evening of january 4th, a couple visitors here left word that she had died. by this morning, i managed to find reliable media sources that confirm this unfortunate turn of events.

hope made a wish. and her wish was to give 155 other children on the make-a-wish waiting list their wishes.

the foundation scheduled a celebration of hope for january 16th to raise the money to make hope’s wish, and the wishes of 155 other children, come true.

it saddens me that she won’t see it.

do what you can to make hope’s wish come true.

(photo credit: News 14)

in light of recent events, i’ve pulled the front-page stuff related to blogspam. it’s just wrong to clutter the stage with petty small issues today. they’ll come back later.

there are simply more important things that belong at the top of this page for now.

update (2004.01.08): they’re baaaaaack