Trends in Media

Ruckus
Google Story
Nonesuch
Translation
Peerflix
Future of the Internet
Mercora Story
Mercora

Looks like Ruckus is raising quite a ruckus. It's almost exactly what the EFF website talks about, and I commented on the compulsory license landscape in my 12/27/04 post. However, from what I gather, this service does not allow you to own any music. Other than that, it sounds great as long as it stays indie. I worked in college radio, we students controlled the station completely, almost everyone on campus listened to it. It's just like what is described in the article (link above), the mental hub....hmmm, maybe that's why I'm so into this shared consciousness internet stuff....

Anyway, before I digress to personal excursions in shared consciousness... are we going to moot this whole downloading thing by making streaming personalized, commercial free and low cost? I doubt it. It's not gonna be that easy. My guess is that Ruckus may be or become big, commercial interests even more invasive on the desktops of these college students; young adults already beset by beer, credit card & other groups who view them as easily exploited.

Ownership & control of one's music library is the trend I'd like to see. I've got my library on my iPod, my iBook, a separate hard disk, a separate computer and on some 500 CDs, I can use them on Garage Band or any other software, I can email them, they don't self-destruct or whine, that's pretty good ownership. However, many of those songs are tagged and can be traced.

Grokster recently made a deal with the Norwest funded ($5M) Mercora, which offers P2P streaming that is supposedly legal, subject to Big Music's stamp of approval, which is currently being withheld. BM (Big Music.... or whatever else you might associate with BM) will now probably also enter as a direct competitor in both streaming ad downloading as a NY court just cleared the way for the labels to offer their "own" music directly online.

More promising to me is Google's entry into video image search. Not content with libraries of books, Google seeps into the complex world of TV...amazing. What will they think of next? Music? No no... not goin there!! So, let's tackle a newer medium. Why muck around the medieval medium of music when we have the modern landscape of TV, child of the advertising dollar? Someday, sooner than for music or film, we'll be able to find the exact TV archive (or maybe current too!) we're looking for... now if people only knew what they were looking for. What was that Springsteen song about 100's of channels yet, "nothing's on".

In film, I quit Netflix for Blockbuster because of the wait times, and my next move is Peerflix, more of a trading P2P deal. I watch a film almost every day. I believe in paying for film, and music too, all art, as long as my cost is proportional to the sellers', and artists are being fairly paid.

In terms of movement in the labels, most promising is Nonesuch records, rumored to have beaten last year's revenues of $35M. It is actually a growing record co. within a major label. The secret, as I've mentioned in countless posts, is building from the fan base. Wilco is a band much steeped in the Dead/DMB/Phish mentality of play for your fans - they are your customers. YOUR (the artists') customers, not the labels' .... we know how they feel about their customers. Nonesuch prez Bob Hurwitz gave the OK to a stream of A Ghost Is Born, and it still sold 250k records. The savings, for the company as a whole, were made on promotion.

Anyway, that's how they did it. It's now been proven to be the one successful strategy, and those little divisions that correct will float while the backed up behemoths sink of their own weight the same way the airlines did. Remember Pan Am, TWA? The indies now own 17% of the market, more than EMI or Warner and that would have also beaten Sony-BMG, had they not merged.

Another trend, which I mention more because of it's cultural importance than it's cultural benefit, is Steve Stoute and others like him, if there are any, who have elevated talent management & promotion into the level of almost corporate alliance as I discussed in my Apple/U2 posts (11/10/04 & 12/02/04). That alliance, which apparently grew from a friendship between Jobs & Bono, gave Apple a 70% market share and gave U2 a new life, doubling sales from its last album.

Stoute's company, Translation, matches top names in entertainment and consumer product with each other, to the munificent remuneration of both. My first blush on reading the Newsweek story was that the guy was an intervisionary. I admire people who can straddle disparate worlds, who can do a Gestalt thing and make a sum greater than its parts.

On the other hand it seems to promote the wrong values, unhealthy food, overpriced status sneakers, this is the kind of stuff that lowers, not raises black culture, or white. In other ways, it's positive, it's the kind of thing that promotes hip hop culture, giving a bigger avenue out of the Brooklyn streets that bred hip-hop thirty years ago. Now hip hop owns 30% of the music industry, and these mergers will only raise its profile in mainstream culture. I prefer to see artists get the big commercial deals than athletes because many jocks have that male/violence overtone, as I mentioned in my previous post.

I think the more interesting aspect of this trend is the branding of everything. The way it's structured, the tiny group of elite musicians are indeed brands. Beyonce is a company. JayZ, her beau, is a company. He, like P Diddy, cross brands, promotes younger artists, employs marketers, VPs of strategic alliance, the whole bit, whatever it takes to get out that name, cause it sells a lot of product and employs a lot of people. No wonder the guy hung up his artistic hat after the Black Album.

We see more of this intervisionary stuff in NY as B'way rocks it up; Good Vibrations uses Beach Boys catalogue and Yoko just coughed up two unpublished Lennon songs for his upcoming bioshow. This further changes the landscape of musical theatre which seems to have exhausted the Great American Songbook and, always a step behind, turns to classic rock, as the rest of the culture segues to hip-hop culture.

Also in live performance we see more blurred edges between sport and entertainment. The figure skaters and gymnasts are getting very theatrical and touring amphitheaters as smaller venues thrive for musicians. It looks like the industry got it, momentarily, after last years' disastrous summer concert season and appears to be poised for a summer of reasonable prices as small successful venues that took up the slack continue to thrive.

Hopefully we'll see more cross pollination in this realm, possibly indie oriented websites putting tours together with several of their top draws on the bill, promote and sell tickets, all online. While some of the smaller labels may have trouble putting their own tour together, if they hooked up... there's power in numbers. Matching up music sites to venues would enhance both, just as the consumer websites that survived corresponded to major brick and mortar stores.

On the internet, the future is open source, VoIP, and the home entertainment market, as Gates has already discovered. We'll see TiVoToGo stuff, putting your digital media onto almost anything, having control over it.

IBM made 500 of its patents available to the open source community, and is thinking about aquiring open source software maker JBoss. Over 17 million people have downloaded Firefox from Mozilla. Microsoft is such crap, it succeeds only on the basis of monopolistic coercion, it cannot be that hard to overthrow a sleeping giant, in such a dynamic world.

VoIP is going to be like a game of 52 pickup as every big entity imaginable scrambles for the internet phone call market.
Phone calls will soon be much more like emails; that pick up, hang up, telephone tag feature will phase out to always on "phones" (almost any WiFi compatible device). Meanwhile, the number of possible service providers grows and prices, hopefully, drop.

VoIP provider Vonage is attracting VCs trying to clear their overhang like crazy, but it probably won't hold up well as bigger players enter the market. Flickr, one of my links is also magnetizing VCs & buyers, as is Mforma, a mobile gaming start-up. Again, clicking on any pic in this blog will enlarge it and take you to my Flickr gallery. This feature soon to be available in all aspects of reality.

And we may soon need a reality check feature in the now $9B industry of internet advertising, one of the fastest growing segments of our economy, ( and huge, all box office in this country is $11B). It is jeopardized by its very openness and anonymity as advertisers wonder if the $12. clicks they pay for are even bona fide. It's easy to defeat Adsense ads with simple programs that can click on a competitors ads, maxing out their ad budget early in the day. Other scammers hire third world firms to click on Adwords ads driving profit for themselves off the fake clicks on their sites.

Magazines and TV go to great lengths to substantiate their readership and size of audience. These web players are gonna get a rude awakening if they don't deliver viable leads. They tend not to deal with the sophisticated agency players, as much as the traditional media do. If scam talk grows and these baby business owners scare off, or sue, we'll see an exodus to these smaller sites which are pouncing on Ebay's raised rates, and see more of a P2P business model, on a smaller scale. Soundclick type sites which offer everything, not just music. Listings at overstock.com went up 50% after Ebay's prices went up between 60% and 100%.

Biggest boomer trend...blogging baby! Bloggers cost Kryptonite over $6M in sales when they demanded locks that couldn't be popped with a Bic pen. Yes, people will increasingly turn to bloggers for truth and more instantaneous reality. Do you think Hearst, my old employer, would print this blog as a column? No way! My friend, Alan Grant, writes for ESPN. He's a legit Stanford grad, in English, he also played pro football. He writes in what we shall say is a very racially aware style. ESPN is consequently edging him out and he's been quite receptive to my little pep talk on going indie on the web.

Interesting, powered guys like Steve Jurvetson (on Blogger, BTW), Martin Tobias and Craig Newmark are blogging. Soon, anyone of any interest will be blogging and that is increasingly where I get my own info, especially after SV BIz Ink left me hanging with bancruptcy after paying for a long subscription. These days you can read right off your Treo. If you like your news totally fresh, as I do, websites, not to mention print, are just too stale. So, RSS is the future there, Bloglines, in Woodside, is rumored to have some 30% of the RSS market, or Delicious, which compiles bookmarks.

Also promising is a new technology that will allow a reader to click on any word in a story to get background on that person or word and technology which allows file sharing on an exponential level to what it is today. Under the new paradigm, the more a file is downloaded, the faster the downloads will go... the opposite of the situation today.

Friday Night Fights

This film was sort of a male consciousness-raising for me. Needless to say, my awareness of sexism & racism doesn't need much heightening. If you just joined us, you can start with my 1/20/05 post. Anyway, I guess the guys are just as hard on each other as the girls.

This film was about the Permian HS football team's '88 season as they ran for a sixth state championship in a row, and the importance of HS ball in West Texas where the friday night lights shine on 20k fans. I can relate in some ways. I went to Massapequa HS on LI, where boys football & basketball drew thousands who all paid admission and bought snacks sold by 9th grade "JV Chiefettes". Sport was not quite the way out the way it is working class towns. Massapequans were willing to fork over 1/10 the value of their homes every year in property tax to pay for the lily white schools & sent lots of kids to the Ivies, but, they loved their jocks, that's for sure.

I was a cheerleader for three years, very competitive, girls cried their eyes out, it was announced over the PA in some big fucking deal every year. There were only twelve spots (unlike the dozens on the football team), anyone else who wanted jock stature had to try out for Chiefette, one of a very long yet, very good kickline (like the Rockettes, only better). We got our own singing cheerleader bus to every away game, and there were many. Our teams usually made playoffs, sometimes state.

I even wrote a column in the town paper about the HS jock scene. It was the party scene, huge jock parties of 500 kids every non-school night. It was pretty fucking wild. After high school I never saw a live football or basketball game again. The attraction eludes me for some reason, maybe because I was a jockette. I know it turns a lot of women on, maybe it's just the bods. I need some kind of brain in there. Anyway, I do understand how jocks are idolized, believe me. Let's not even go to the Kobe thing.

In this movie, there were some real pressures on these boys. Boobie was a cocky illiterate who came an ACL tear away from Hammer-like success, but ended up " a dad". I might be heartbroken for the guy but he was too cocky to learn and paid the price. Sorry your lottery ticket didn't pay out but that's what it's like in the world of high entertainment, it's all or nothing.

Others had to live up to Daddy's image. One guy had a dad who did win a state championship and wanted to relive it through his son. For lots of these HS jocks, their senior year in HS is as good as it gets, life is pretty much downhill from there. They were working class and worked hard to escape Odessa the one way they could. They ended up learning some hard lessons.

It reminds me of this story my friend told me about a conversation she had with a colleague, who had climbed pretty high, at least during boom years, and wanted to again and he goes, "Laura, there's only one way out for a guy." and then he draws a big dollar sign. In other words, girls can use their baby pass, but guys can't. They need a big cash payout.

It's true in a way. I took my pass. I enjoyed it. I still do. Just don't tell me there's no trade-offs, ok? First of all, it was the most stressful job I ever had in my life. Second, cash is cash. It's the only way out for anybody. The "pass" is just some cheap pay for a tough, thankless job. Around here, money is equity; land or stock. Those are the only real passes.

And I guess you guys do fuck with each other a bit too, I've seen it. The testosterone is fresh to me now but I can see where it might be a drag when you reach a point in your life where you want to be more than just a drone. In some ways I think being a woman is a fuller experience of life, it's like having less shock absorbers. That can be good and bad, and sometimes I do envy mens' little corpus callosums. Other times I feel sorry for y'all. Do you even know how fun life can be? I've cried lots of tears but I've also felt incredible joy & I wouldn't give up the latter, even if it meant avoiding the former.

In the end, the men are just as trapped into their roles as the women. In my own life I've met cool and full people, who go much deeper than stereotypes, of both sexes, but, they're very, very rare. Most would rather go watch their young men knock heads while girls cheer them on.

Yikes!

More Yikes
This story got me so despondent, I don't even know what to say. I mean the amicus and support from our side is coming, right? Now I'm sorry I missed that IPac party...ok, I've been told stuff will be happening... whew!

Little Black Reality

Little Black Book is a fluff vehicle for the up & coming Brittany Murphy. It was surprisingly thought provoking, mostly cause it explores reality TV, which I continue to find interesting. It seems we have an unabating appetite to watch real drama and I do wonder what this feeds in us.

Brittany works for a Springer-like show and is manipulated by a producer, played by Holly Hunter, into providing some very real and public drama, during which people are hurt and embarrassed. Of course it was all considered high entertainment, not only by the audience, but, by the producer who manipulated everyone and hurt real feelings.

Even as the ruse unfolds and people show pain, Holly cares only about the entertainment value. I understand the impetus to an extent, it is her job and function. I've directed plays, films, done interviews and tried very hard to bring out emotion and depth for the sake of entertainment.

Playing with people's minds and emotions though... that's very disrespectful, and that's where you're supposed to draw the line. I don't think entertainment value, even for millions of people, should be considered more important than people's real feelings. Once you get to that point, you've forgotten what reality is. And maybe that's a great lesson that can be drawn from this little fluff; in constantly blurring the line between reality and entertainment... we get lost and confused between the two.

Holly seemed to have all these special rules and phrases which conveniently made some things truths and some things lies. Omissions were definitely lies in her (little black) book, yet she manipulates Brittany through them. It's very hard to evaluate honesty and morality sometimes. It is all relative. I know honesty has always been important to me because bullshit is a waste of time and energy. Sometimes you have to work to find it.

It's sad in a way, people are very jaded and sceptical these days. Sometimes it seems like people hardly know what real feelings are like anymore, unless it's their own pain, that's always real. Though, I guess people also get out of touch with themselves, identifying but not understanding their feelings. Many people create drama in their own lives, causing real pain to themselves and those around them. Perhaps this stems from an unconscious need for excitement, escape, control and/or a blurring of real & unreal.

It seems to be a part of our evolution as a species that we seek increasingly realistic dramatic entertainment. I find this whole concept fascinating. Evolution goes only one way, I think (hope) we're not going back to eating with our hands, cause forks are easier. Most improvements are that easy to appreciate... wheels, fire, sliced bread... you can see why those inventions beat their predecessors.

But, why the evolution toward the desire to watch real drama? It's more satisfying. Drama, all art, is supposed to mirror reality. Maybe it's not evolution but trend. After all, painting got increasingly realistic until the technology allowed us to the level of a hyper-real Vermeer only to have realism bashed to pieces by the Impressionists.

Anyway, the real reality of this film is that Hollywood puts such a premium on youth in women that the cute little ingenue was supported by two Oscar-winning actresses, Holly Hunter and Kathy Bates, not to mention Grammy winning Carly Simon. Tell me another industry where 20-something girls get 100 years of top talent experience working for you?

Oscar Nods

Looks like a good year for the studios and biopics... and black actors. They've been surprisingly responsive to the outcry over the Oscars several years back when people of color were completely overlooked. Women haven't fared as well, especially those over 40... as you'll see in my next post.

Mel Gibson's Aramaic mess got 3 nods while Moore gets totally screwed. I guess it's his own hubris that took him out of the running, I sure hope he would've gotten a best doc nod. It's better this way, he's supposed to be the fly in the ointment. At the Globes he was all tuxed out, we don't want this guy co-opted. Thanks for screwing him, Oscar voters, all 6,800 of you. BTW, did you hear Bush just asked for another $80B?

Is the Internet the Messiah?

If God wanted to talk to humanity, how would that happen? Through natural occurrences, "acts of God", weather, earthquakes, tsunamis? I discussed this in my 1/5/05 & 1/17/05 posts. It's a bit hard to know what to do with messages like that.

Most people anthropomorphize God, having difficulty getting too abstract. So, would he send one super-enlightened person to fill us all in? Jesus tried, and then was tried, and lost. I'm sure God could have anticipated that one, I mean, some guy going around claiming to be the messiah... if he even said that....

Ok, well he gave him the super powers to prove it to everyone right? Yet he doesn't use his superpowers, or even common sense, to save his own ass, better to show everyone how bad mankind is cause you even killed God's only son? Or maybe he was just trying to show hypocrisy or greed, our base fears. Well, he did a good job, and Jesus, man, myth, or Son of God, taught us all great lessons.

Remember, his greatest contempt was for the wealthy and his greatest love was for the poor. He hated the elite and elevated, loved the masses. The lesson of his life is that it is very difficult to lead humanity higher because humans bow to fear of the unknown and can't be given enlightenment, even by Jesus. But, the happy ending was the resurrection. We can all rise above our fears and reach for something higher.

Those in the Eastern religions who try to elevate their consciousness to the point where they can exert power over the physical world say that such powers should never be demonstrated to prove the existence of God, or to interfere with the natural course of events. That, those who make such demonstrations have only reached a fairly modest level of advancement. True teachers aren't egotistical show-offs, they are trying to help genuine seekers find peace and enlightenment by pointing the way, not banging folks over the head with your message. BTW, there is much scholarly debate about whether Jesus actually performed miracles or claimed to be the messiah.

It seems like God has given up trying to get through to his creations by investing humans with unique powers over the physical world, or sending blimps or banners, particularly since the technology now exists to prove or disprove such things. People flock to Lourdes for healing from all over the world, and many are healed. Catholics must perform miracles to be beatified, but that's posthumously, as intercessionaries. I mean, if someone today were to change water into wine or walk on water, and raise the dead, and that person could prove these skills, all the while crediting God, we'd listen.

In fact, I'm sure they'd make a reality show about it, just like they did on Network. I mean, we already have John Edward, a medium who hosts a very popular show. By the way, a number of these mediums, like Edward, have been tested and shown to be the real deal. That is, they knew so much information, that they could not have known any other way, it was clinically proven that they do indeed communicate with dead people. But, these guys aren't saying they're God, they are just able to tune into a frequency most of us don't get, at least not well enough to translate.

So, if God did want to get our attention, what would she say? Hey, you guys are doing a pretty bad job of it, too much killing, not enough communicating and creating and communing? Remember, in iRobot & all the other films, we did not want to stop at automatonic robots, we wanted the next step up, robots with feelings and free will. We want the robots to understand the rules but, without giving them the ability to ignore the rules, the robots are too boring, their love can't be real unless it comes from freedom.

Same with God. God is not gonna send a big spaceship, or Jerry Falwell, to tell us all to shape up. In zoos, they used to just give the animals the food. Then they found it was better to make the animals work a bit to get their food, so now they put it in logs or other things which force the animals to affirmatively act to get the sustenance they need. The animals are happier and more motivated that way.

We humans also have to find sustanence for ourselves, if we want it. And it hasn't, generally, just been thrown in front of us unless we had misguided parents, too many advantages in life... then you end up like Paris Hilton. What we got is a system where we can easily communicate verbally, musically & visually with each other instantaneously, using tools to find the information we need to enlighten ourselves and each other. And this is why we need to be vigilant about keeping the internet open and free.

God wants to see us improve, just like we like happy endings in the movies. But, we still go to movies without knowing the endings, because it's entertaining. We hate it when folks give away the ending. The internet can be used to elevate, but, it does have great power and misused, or underused, we could crucify ourselves again here.

There's Johnny

I was sad to learn of Carson's death. I watched him religiously while living in NY, all through the sixties and seventies, and into the eighties before California somehow made me into an early riser. His hokey, midwestern humor was sometimes a bit sexist, but he was insightful and quick and totally on top of things in an understated way.

He always made his guests shine. He was shy and that came across yet he was completely loose and spontaneous at the same time. The guy was a mass of contradictions, but mostly I remember his quick and agile mind, how he could make a guest funny.

He was a voice of the nation in a way noone will ever be again. We will never see that kind of market share or longevity again. The guy was a class act. He left the spotlight still strong, pursued his many interests and enjoyed a quiet private life. It's not easy to leave such power and prominence so completely, but Johnny didn't care about the external power.

As Phyllis Diller said, "He didn't want to do small talk unless it was worth a few million". How ironic that he hated small talk yet made it an empire for 30 years. On his show, he'd do it and do it well. But what interested Johnny was the world around him, a world of knowledge and ideas. He knew that knowledge is power.

Talk about your real deal..... Bye Johnny, thanks for all those late night laughs, your jaded yet gentle eye, all the great comics and musicians to whom you gave careers and for living a life worth exemplifying.