The old saying, "You got peanut butter on my chocolate!" expresses a deep truth about creativity: two things that differ in characteristics but share a common domain may yield fruitful results when combined. The people at Frontier Design have taken that lesson to heart. They've taken the wireless network and the audio control surface, spread one all over the other,...

There's a scene in the movie Crumb, about the retro-iconoclast cartoonist & musician R Crumb, in which he sketches out his belief that everything went to hell when wires were strung across the American landscape*. I'm with him. Wires are ugly, and furthermore they have a lot in common with chains. That's why wireless technology feels not just convenient,...

It surprised me to learn it, but one of my most-cited posts has been 10 Journalism Tips For Bloggers, Podcasters & Other E-Writers. It turns out there's a lot of interest in using the web not just for sounding off, but for practicing real journalism. And as in so many areas--music, video, politics, etc--the amateurs are crashing the gates that...

In a new-to-me post on his Ventureblog (OK, it as way back in Dec/05), venture capitalist David Hornik explains why the real money in Long Tail businesses goes to the companies that aggregate and/or filter content- and not to the content creators. This is the point I've been exploring in talking about the economics of digital distribution and the Fallacy...

More good news for the record industry - this via Marketwatch: Europe's two largest music recording companies, EMI Group and Universal Music Group, reported increasing revenue on Thursday, underscoring the growing importance for both firms of selling music over the Internet. Label revenues have been falling for years now, suffering from the impacts of file sharing, the use of music...

I've been listening to Moments From This Theater: Live, a wonderful album by the great Memphis/Muscle Shoals songwriters Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham. It's just the two of them, accompanying themselves on acoustic guitar and electric piano, recorded at 1998 shows in Ireland and England. They play classics including "Dark End Of The Street", "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man",...

I expected to dread a lot of what I'd encounter in politics, figuring it's where the worst people you knew in high school went. You know, the manipulative weasels fascinated by power. But I've been surprised by how deeply interesting and satisfying the experience has been so far, and by how many people I've met who are still motivated by service. The intersection of technology and politics is one of the most fascinating areas of all,

Nicholas Bentley replied to my post How Digital Production & Distribution Are Making Things Worse For Musicians, Not Better with a link to his very interesting article for INDICARE on the Rights Office distribution model.

Recently I posted about the Fallacy Of Composition (which says that an advantage shared by everyone is not an advantage) and how it applies to digital music: If everyone can make and distribute music cheaply, the price they can charge goes down and they all make less money. It should apply to open source as well. Is there an escape route?

Thanks to digital media & the Internet, anyone can record their music and make it available to the world, and that's a good thing, right? Not necessarily for musicians. One way to explain why is in terms of the Fallacy of Composition, as cited by Jeremy Siegel in his new book The Future For Investors.