Four short links: 27 August 2009

Copycrime, Die Music Industry Die, Open Government Data, Augmented Reality

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Second Degree Murder and Six Other Crimes Cheaper Than Pirating Music -- I'm outraged that the Obama administration is supporting the RIAA on the case against Jammie Thomas, a single mother of four who has to pay them $1.92 million for downloading songs. That's more expensive than murder and six other crimes... (via Br3nda)
2. Bill Drummond Talk (MP3) -- cofounder of the KLF gives 130 years of music industry history and explains why music's future might depend on not recording it. (via Br3nda)
3. NZ Government Recommends CC-BY -- NZ all-of-Government licensing framework recommends CC. So far as copyright works are concerned, NZGOAL proposes that agencies apply the most liberal of the New Zealand Creative Commons law licences to those of their copyright works that are appropriate for release, unless there is a restriction which would prevent this. The most liberal Creative Commons licence is the Attribution (BY) licence. So far as non-copyright information is concerned, NZGOAL recommends the use of clear “no-known rights” statements, to provide certainty for people wishing to re-use that information..
4. Augmented Reality: 5 Barriers to a Web That's Everywhere (ReadWriteWeb) -- great post with five areas that need to be addressed before we can move from "wow" to commonplace. Interoperability: Right now you cannot see information from the Wikitude AR environment if you're looking through the Layar AR browser. This could be the coming of a new browser war just like that of the 1990s. It may not be obvious and it may not even be true that users have a right to view any layer of Augmented Reality through any Augmented Reality browser. Interoperability, standards and openness have been what has let the Web scale and flourish beyond the suffocating walled gardens of its early days. The same is true of telephones, railroads and countless other networked technologies. Logically then, a lack of interoperability between AR environments would be a tragedy of the same type as if the web had remained defined by the islands of AOL and Compuserve or Internet Explorer, forever. (A lack of data portability when it comes to Augmented Reality could cause substantial psychological distress!)

Old Media, New Media and Where the Rubber Meets the Road

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 11

Analog (old) media is all about managing scarcity by controlling distribution, the net effect of which is to enable publishers to price access to their “toll roads” as they see fit.

Digital (new) media, by contrast, is premised on the assumption that the tools for content creation, selling, distributing and marketing enable meta-professionals and prosumers to create a surplus of “good enough” content.

This content, in tandem with un-tethered distribution and pretty good search/retrieval functions, operates in complete disregard for the old media-based pricing models that preceded it.

As such, when the forces of analog media collide with digital media, as they have in music, newspapers, yellow pages, books and magazines (and are beginning to collide in television and movies), a brutally efficient “creative destruction” process occurs.

Simply put, if the digital forces can assemble a “good enough” version of the un-tethered content, then in most cases, the analog media provider is in deep trouble (read: devastating business model disruption).

Understanding Media Disruption

My once-beloved San Francisco Chronicle has been “hollowed out,” reduced to a thin pamphlet, thereby accelerating their subscriber attrition.

Why PAY for content that is less deep, less differentiated than I can get online elsewhere for FREE? It's a vicious cycle.

My once-favorite local news station, KRON, no longer has sports on the weekends; it runs more syndicated content and requires that its reporters operate their own cameras to minimize cost. It's definitely struggling. KNBR, which is the sports radio station that I listen to, tells a similar story.

Do you even know anyone who actually uses the Yellow Pages anymore? That would have been unfathomable when I was growing up.

Now, Google is the Yellow Pages.

On some level, it really is as simple as saying that Craigslist killed the classified ads business, which in turn, killed the newspaper business.

The music business was once supremely cool. Records were cool. The whole chain between record producers, tour promoters and record stores was pretty cool.

Remember record stores? Whither Tower Records. Heck, even Blockbuster is standing on some wobbly legs.

Strangely, it's not that the music suddenly is less good. In fact, I probably listen to as much music as I ever have.

It's just that the "disruption" cow has left the barn (and is living in my iPod), and there is no turning back.

In this case, there are just too many incentives for the performers to maximize their online availability and shift their monetization to other sources, like touring and merchandising.

As a result, the music producer/promoter has been pushed to the backseat (for now).

(Un)Differentiated Media

It seems that the only safe havens are highly differentiated media creators that can’t readily be replicated elsewhere, such as the type of original programming one sees on HBO (e.g., check out: True Blood); the vertical/demographically targeted cable channels (where old media distribution rules still promulgate); and big budget movies, where production values (and production costs) are out of the reach of meta-professionals.

That is what makes the furor playing out with AP, all the more interesting.

AP is a syndicated content and news distribution service that makes its money offering infill content to (traditionally) analog media sources.

In the online world, however, the digital form of AP’s fee-based media is fodder for enabling digital publishers to link to, reference and excerpt from these same stories, typically without paying a nickel to AP.

Now, AP wants to turn back the hands of time by limiting/restricting access to and usage of that content.

Meanwhile, digital media advocates are citing fair use, and you just know that this can’t end well for AP, as their product is fundamentally undifferentiated.

That is not to suggest that they have no case, at least karmically speaking, but it's akin to arguing about oxygen. This is the atmosphere that they operate within.

The media industry would have to exercise a collective re-set to turn the tide on this one. Maybe they will, but I am skeptical.

Re-thinking The Audience and Your Product

Extending the conversation further, Fred Wilson’s post, ‘Monetize The Audience, Not The Content’ (read the comments section) presents a conundrum.

On the one hand, I totally agree with the objective of building your business around your audience.

But, I also think that a true solution needs to reconcile how the product or service evolves to achieve differentiation in such a universe; and that is a bigger challenge.

Here, my specific assertion is that while not all content is created equal, a whole heck of a lot of it is fundamentally undifferentiated.

In the case of The New York Times (a high profile pub that Fred regularly writes about), there are a few star writers, but none of which are such must-reads as to drive users to pay for access to them (hence, the failure of NYT's Times Select).

I love reading Frank Rich; Maureen Dowd is pretty entertaining; and Thomas Friedman is thought-provoking. Plus, there are 6-7 other times throughout the month that I find myself reading a Times article.

But, I've seriously never considered paying for access to them, and when the Select thing was in effect, and folks like Friedman were behind lock and key, I mostly forgot about them.

Case in point, whatever happened to Howard Stern after he left broadcast radio? Is the King of All Media even relevant anymore?

Don't tell me how much he is worth now. Tell me this. What happened to his audience?

It's a hard truth, but while there are 10+ good “enough” quality news/opinions sources for every news story of the day (and they are easy to find and well-indexed vis-a-via Techmeme and Google News), there is no "good enough" cheap/free alternative to the Ridley Scott directed, Christian Bale starring action movie.

As such, the NYT’s of the world face a real paradox. Their brand is their content, and without continuing to cultivate their content and innovate the way it's presented, which costs money, they have no durable audience.

Thus, I think a better path is to:

1. Come up with well-defined linkages between online and offline workflows. For example, print subscribers get access to deeper analysis, better tools for saving, excerpting, sharing and finding related content;
2. Create new types of media/engagement units that reward loyalty, communit-ize it, perhaps game-ify it;
3. Re-think segmentation (and pricing) across high-end, low-end, hyper-local, and vertical-specific distinctions, and re-work the product accordingly.

Apple, Record Labels serve up 'Cocktail'

So it seems fortuitous, that as I am updating this post, word filters into the blogosphere that Apple's long-rumored Tablet computing device is due in September (the Friday rumors said Q1, 2010), and that Apple is working with the record labels to re-invent the packaged music experience for the digital realm. Smart!

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Apple wants to make bigger purchases more compelling by creating a new type of interactive album material, including photos, lyric sheets and liner notes that allow users to click through to items that they find most interesting.

Consumers would be able to play songs directly from the interactive book without clicking back into Apple’s iTunes software, executives said. “It’s not just a bunch of PDFs,” said one executive. “There’s real engagement with the ancillary stuff.”

New York Story

Ending where we began, creative destruction has had a field day with the media business (and by virtue of its association, advertising as well).

To get to the other side intact, the NYT’s of the world have to figure out what they are that a focused, less expensive blogger, prosumer or meta-creator can’t emulate.

With brutal efficiency, this truth will separate those that can meaningfully, unquestionably differentiate from those that can’t.

Prognosis: more hurting ahead; then the industry finds its footing, begins a renaissance, and gets back on offense.

Related Posts:

1. Digital Media Rules: The Open Sourcing of Information
2. Apple, the ‘Boomer’ Tablet and the Matrix
3. How Social Media Works: It's About Breadcrumbs and Conversations
4. The Programmable Fan Site: A New Media/Ad Unit Model
5. Flip Video News Network: Crowd-Sourcing meets CNN

Four short links: 25 June 2009

Twitter Bucks, Nike Numbers, Map Apps, and Digi Shiz

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. How an Indie Musician Can Make $19,000 in 10 Hours Using Twitter -- as Zoe Keating pointed out: "cash made by @amandapalmer in one month on Twitter = $19,000; cash made by @amandapalmer from 30,000 record sales = $0".
2. The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics (Wired) -- And not only can we collect that data, we can analyze it as well, looking for patterns, information that might help us change both the quality and the length of our lives. We can live longer and better by applying, on a personal scale, the same quantitative mindset that powers Google and medical research. Call it Living by Numbers—the ability to gather and analyze data about yourself, setting up a feedback loop that we can use to upgrade our lives, from better health to better habits to better performance. Collective intelligence + sensor networks can = happiness. (Mathematics gets by with just an "equals" operator. The rest of us need a "can equal" operator ...)
3. Old Map App -- iPhone app with old maps. Reminds me of David Rumsey's keynote at OSCON 2004.
4. Make It Digital -- Digital NZ site that helps organisations wanting to produce digital content, by offering them guidance on formats, metadata, and other issues they'll have to tackle. Includes a voting system to promote the (NZ) content you want to have digitised.

NiN's Rob Sheridan on iPhone Application Rejection

by Timothy M. O'Brien | comments: 11

In this interview with Rob Sheridan (@rob_sheridan), Nine Inch Nails' Artistic Director, Rob discusses the experience of getting the rejection letter from Apple, and what effect it has on the band's plans to build community applications on the iPhone platform. You'll hear Sheridan express an uneasiness that Apple can act as judge and jury without providing any transparency into the approval process. Rob spoke with me from Florida where Nine Inch Nails is getting ready for a tour with Jane's Addiction that kicks off on May 9th in Tampa, FL.

What is a headlining, often controversial industrial rock band to do when nameless censors at Apple decide that content downloaded by an iPhone application contains "objectionable content"? Yesterday, the world found out, as Trent Reznor (@trent_reznor) tweeted:

When a band like NiN encounters arbitrary censorship, they raise the issue in the public forum. In this case Trent Reznor tweeted and blogged about the issue expressing his dissatisfaction with the decision and drawing attention to the fact that the "objectionable content" in question is a song named "The Downward Spiral" currently available via the iTunes store. While comparing Apple's obscenity standards to Walmart's war against profanity, Reznor pointed to similar inconsistencies in a previous round of censorship:

I can understand if you want the moral posturing of not having any 'indecent' material for sale--but you could literally turn around 180 degrees from where the NIN record would be and purchase the film 'Scarface' completely uncensored, or buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto where you can be rewarded for beating up prostitutes. How does that make sense?

While Apple's rejection of an application based on arbitrary and inconsistent standards, is nothing new, the attention being paid to this particular rejection is significant and could prompt Apple to add more structure and transparency to the iPhone application approval process. On Monday, Aidan Malley of AppleInsider reported that Apple may be prepared to allow explicit content with the introduction of more capable parental controls in the iPhone 3.0 OS update.

If you are wondering what all the fuss is about, here is a walkthrough of the NIN:access application from Trent Reznor and Rob Sheridan which was posted by the ninofficial YouTube user:

Four short links: 8 Apr 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

Bias, RFCs, virus batteries, and a glimpse at life beyond record labels (the last item features profanity, beware):

1. Bias We Can Believe In (Mind Hacks) -- Vaughn asks the tricky question about the current enthusiasm for Behavioural Economics in government: where are the sceptical voices? As he points out, It's perhaps no accident that almost all the articles cite a 2001 study that found that simply making the US's 401(k) retirement savings scheme opt-out instead of opt-in vastly increased participation simply because it's a hassle to change and employees perceive the 'default' as investment advice. But it's probably true to say that this example has been so widely repeated but it's one of the minority of behavioural economics studies that have looked at the relation between the existence of a cognitive bias and real-world economic data from the population. And it's notable that behavioural economists who specialise in making this link, a field they call behavioural macroeconomics, seem absent from the Obama inner circle.
2. How The Internet Got Its Rules (NYTimes) -- about the first RFCs, which became IETF. The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the content of those first documents was that they were available free of charge and anyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard. (via Glynn Moody)
3. Viruses Could Power Devices (Science News) -- Ions and electrons can move through smaller particles more quickly. But fabricating nano-sized particles of iron phosphate is a difficult and expensive process, the researchers say. So Belcher’s team let the virus do the work. By manipulating a gene of the M13 virus to make the viruses coat themselves in iron phosphate, the researchers created very small iron phosphate particles. (via BoingBoing)
4. Amanda Palmer's Label-Dropping Game -- interesting email from Amanda Palmer to her fans about trying to get dropped from her label. i had to EXPLAIN to the so-called "head of digital media" of roadrunner australia WHAT TWITTER WAS. and his brush-off that "it hasn’t caught on here yet" was ABSURD because the next day i twittered that i was doing an impromptu gathering in a public park and 12 hours later, 150 underage fans - who couldn’t attend the show - showed up to get their records signed. no manager knew! i didn’t even warn or tell her! no agents! no security! no venue! we were in a fucking public park! life is becoming awesome. and then the times they are a-changing fucking dramatically, when pong-twittering with trent reznor means way more to your fan-base/business than whether or not the record is in fucking stores (and in my case, it ain’t in fucking stores).

The Sizzling Sound of Music

by Dale Dougherty | @dalepd | comments: 74

Are iPods changing our perception of music? Are the sounds of MP3s the music we like to hear most?

Jonathan Berger, professor of music at Stanford, was on a panel with me at a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Mountain View, CA on Saturday. Berger's presentation had a slide titled: "Live, Memorex or MP3." He mentioned that Thomas Edison promoted his phonograph by demonstrating that a person could not tell whether behind a curtain was an opera singer or one of Edison's cylinders playing a recording of the singer. More recently, the famous Memorex ad challenged us to determine whether it was a live performance of Ella Fitzgerald or a recorded one.

Berger then said that he tests his incoming students each year in a similar way. He has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer "sizzle sounds" that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.

I remember wondering what audiophiles were up to, buying extremely expensive home audio systems to play old vinyl records. They put turntables in sand-filled enclosures with elaborate cabling schemes. I wondered what they heard in that music that I didn't. Someone explained to me that audiophiles liked the sound artifacts of vinyl records -- the crackles of that format. It was familiar and comfortable to them, and maybe those affects became a fetish. Is it now becoming the same with iPod lovers?

Our perception changes and we become attuned to what we like -- some like the sizzle and others like the crackle. I wonder if this isn't also something akin to thinking that hot dogs taste better at the ball park. The hot dog is identical to what you'd buy at a grocery store and there aren't many restaurants that serve hot dogs. A hot dog is not that special, except in the right setting. The context changes our perception, particularly when it's so obviously and immediately shared by others. Listening to music on your iPod is not about the sound quality of the music, and it's more than the convenience of listening to music on the move. It's that so many people are doing it, and you are in the middle of all this, and all of that colors your perception. All that sizzle is a cultural artifact and a tie that binds us. It's mostly invisible to us but it is something future generations looking back might find curious because these preferences won't be obvious to them.

On a related note, a friend commented recently that she doesn't understand why people put up with such poor sound quality for phone calls on cell phones, and particularly iPhones. "I can hardly hear the person talking to me," she said. "I don't think smart phones are making any improvement to the quality of the phone call," she added. "Is it not important anymore?" She wondered why people accepted such poor quality, and so did Jonathan Berger, but a lot of people just don't hear it the same way.

Numbers for Digital's Rise

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 7

I talk a lot to people who don't quite understand the scale of the media shift from atoms to bits (update: corrected), so I always have my eyes open for numbers and anecdotes that illustrate the point. The latest I found are from an article on Apple's threat to shut the iTunes store if it has to pay more to songwriters:

Digital downloads grew 38 per cent from 2006 to 2007 to become a $1.26 billion business, making up 23 per cent of the market for recorded music, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Sales of physical music media such as CDs, cassettes and DVDs declined 19.1 per cent to $7.5 billion in the same one-year period.

I'm still looking for convincing numbers on film and TV movement to digital. For example, does anyone have numbers on how well Dr Horrible's Singalong Blog (the web-only offering from Buffy creator Joss Wedon) did?

I Am Trying To Believe (that Rock Stars aren't Dead)

by Jim Stogdill | @jstogdill | comments: 36

Last Friday night I attended a Nine Inch Nails concert in Philadelphia with Chris Cera of Vuzit (thanks Chris for your help with this post). At 43, Trent Reznor can certainly still grab an audience by the throat and shake it. It was a fantastic show; the kind of show that has you checking to see if there are other tour dates within driving distance.

During a short break in the sonic and visual mayhem, Reznor spoke for a moment and told us emphatically to steal his music. Later, on my way to the car after the show, a member of the band Cube Head was handing out sharpie-labled home-burned demo CD's in the parking lot complete with a hand drawn "copywrong" marking. It was an interesting contrast between established artist and emerging talent and how they are both figuring out how to make their way in the post-vinyl post-jewel-case economy.

I'll come back to that theme in a second, but first a brief aside. Chris (who has some background in real time video processing) and I were blown away by the amazing stage show; it was geek manifest and a video processing tour de force. During about 1/3 of the show the band played sandwiched between at least two giant video monitors, the one in the foreground transparent when its pixels were dormant and opaque when lit up.

The source video for the display was sometimes heavily processed local camera inputs, sometimes it was prerecorded, and sometimes it was electronically generated. Whatever the source, it was frequently and heavily modified by the audio inputs or by the movements of the artists on the stage. With a sweep of his hand Trent would wave away the static hiding him from the audience and then moments later it would fill back in. It's hard to explain but the effect was very cool. Cool enough that trying to figure it out started to distract both of us from the music. There are some videos out there of it in action but none that I found really capture the full effect. Let me know in the comments if you find one.

The next day, still curious about how the stage show was done, and with Reznor's call to "steal my music" still in my head, I poked around on the web looking for more info. One of the most interesting things I found was this story about Nine Inch Nail's Year Zero Alternate Reality Game. The way Reznor used this new gaming medium as an extension of his canvas rather than as a promotional stunt (and the nascent geekness it suggests) makes me think he has a much better than average chance to figure out the post RIAA world. Or, it may just be that with the state of distribution being what it is, he realized that while promotion might move more units, it would do it in a way so loosely coupled to monetization as to be pointless.

His comments in the story's sidebar make me think it is probably the latter. In particular: "So a couple years ago I realized that music essentially is free now. I'd prefer, it wasn't, but it is. And hey, I've had a pretty good run. I can still make a living touring." .... "I feel that the right model hasn't revealed itself yet."

Here's the thing, I'm not convinced it's going to reveal itself. Or, more likely, it has revealed itself and he already knows what it is: "I can still make a living touring."

(continue reading)