Tim Anderson's Media Studies Gateway Page

Photos for Kathleen Battles' Podcast!

2009-03-07T18:10:00.001-05:00

Colleagues,

Dr. Battles was kind enough to send me a few photos that illustrate the rise of Police Radio that she discusses in her forthcoming book (which, by the way, is coming out in Spring 2010 not, 2009... my bad!). I placed these in a set that can be accessed here.

Enjoy!

Tim J. Anderson
Old Dominion University

Kathleen Battles' Interview is up on the Lion's Share

2009-03-07T10:49:00.001-05:00

Colleagues,

My interview with Kathleen Battles of Oakland University on her work on radio crime dramas is up at

http://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/odu.edu.1952085705.01952085716.1973831408?i=1201176259

Please download. And if you haven't already please subscribe when you get to the iTunes page.

Take care

Tim J. Anderson
Old Dominion University

Derek Kompare's Syllabus is up!

2009-03-05T13:15:00.001-05:00

As part of the Interview with Dr. Derek Kompare of Southern Methodist University and his work on CSI Derek decided to share with us his "crime tv syllabus", which was mentioned in the podcast. It is available here. Please feel free to download and check it out.

The Lion's Share, A Podcast Regarding Media Research, is Up!

2009-02-28T17:25:00.004-05:00

Dear Colleagues, Friends and Listeners,

After what has seemed to be months of haggling and work, I am proud to announce that The Lion's Share first podcast, and interview with Dr. Derek Kompare about his work on CSI, is posted and is ready to be downloaded. I am working with Media Commons and the podcast is being distributed through Old Dominion University's iTunesU. If you have iTunes installed it can be simply received by clicking here. If you do not please download iTunes at the Apple iTunes site. While you are in iTunes, please subscribe so you can the latest episodes as they are released.

The point of this podcast is to generate conversations and it will have a breezy conversational style that will help keep us up to date with what we are researching, how we are doing it and why you should care. I have upcoming podcasts from Dr. Kathleen Battles (Oakland University) on her book regarding "crime radio series" and one from Judd Ruggill (Arizona State University) and Ken McCallister (The University of Arizona) on educational videogames lined up for the next week or so.

Also, if you are interested in being interviewed please email me through the Lion's Share Facebook group or through my emails of tjanders@odu.edu or loganpoppy@gmail.com. I am open to all discussions regarding academic and non-academic media research.

I look forward to growing the podcast and working to generate better, more passionate discussions about what it means to be a media researcher.

Sincerely,

Tim J. Anderson
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication and Theatre Arts
Old Dominion University

What I Do On Mondays When I Wash My Clothes

2009-02-23T22:52:00.005-05:00

Being separated from my wife is hard. This is a no brainer, perhaps it's the kind of statement that necessitates not even one mention. The economy is "suck" and we have houses we can't move. But we do have jobs, two of them in fact. It gets depressing yet I try to do what I can, which means the chores of daily life.

My life is simple. I teach and I work, a lot. Monday is a 12 hour workday of workdays for me, with five hours devoted to lecturing. So, when I leave campus I like to do my laundry and just stare at something. It's my moment of being, just watching the clothes go round. There's a TV in my landromat, but I don't watch it. It's always on Heroes and Chuck, but they are too demanding. I haven't followed the shows and there is no entry point for me. The TV there has no cable and I couldn't change it if it did. Frankly, it's a problem. Because I am not committed to these narratives I am on the outside. However, so much "quality TV" demands commitment. I have and do commit to a few shows, but I miss my easy in easy out TV of yore. On a night like this I could really use a good variety show. And that's what I gave myself.

My trust iPhone provided me with the following: episodes of This American Life, a few hit singles, a couple of YouTube vids (Cats, lotsa cats doing silly things), phone calls to my lovely wife and wikipedia searches for trivia. It's not that I didn't want to think, I just didn't need another world system of meaning. I just don't care on a day this exhausting.

So when I wash my clothes, I try to rest a little. Put it all on pause and laugh a little. Life's too hard sometimes and, frankly, on days like today, I don't need great art. I need a little song, a little dance, and a few cats.

If You Write Your Social Graph, Can You Take It With You?: A Question of Social Networks, Private Property and Market Leverage

2009-02-05T10:13:00.002-05:00

linkfluence - social graph explained from linkfluence on Vimeo.

In January of 2008, the high-profile tech blogger, Robert Scobel, noted that he had been kicked off of Facebook for violating the service's "Terms of Use" agreement. Scobel had applied a script developed by Plaxo that could optically recognize and rip the information that users place it on their Facebook account and put it into their Plaxo account (to see Scoble's testimony of getting kicked off click here. This personal information is defined by Brad Fitzpatrick as the "social graph", "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related". While there is no one place where the social graph exists, the explosion of social networks as part of a our media ecologies is the reason why Facebook has been able to become such a potent technological, economic and social force and why companies such as Google are interested in developing APIs that allow social graphs to open up and work together .

What Scoble's experiment/stunt highlighted were two questions: 1) do you own your graph if you place it on a service?; and 2) why is this graph valued? Clearly, the first question is one of contracts legal dispute, but the second question is a point for economic and philosophical investigation. For me, it is clear to me that this not only brings up a classic "is the map the territory" question, i.e. is your social graph your social network, but it asks us to consider whether or not our social networks can be enabled without an effective representation, a graph, of who we know and how we are related. For myself the answer is obvious (it cannot), but for others in these videos and the question of what it is and what it is not, who owns it and what to do with it cannot be so easily resolved. These mappings are too valuable and hold too much at stake in digital media networks for there to be a solution without considerable debate and struggle. And as this video from linkfluence shows, graphing can be utilized as a source of power not only to understand influence but to possibly realize leverage.

PS - Note - the following is cross-posted as part of the MediaCommons project In Media Res.

Today's word cloud of the day...

2009-01-20T15:37:00.004-05:00

Obama's Inaugural Address as a Word Cloud

Back on the Horse, I hope

2009-01-19T21:53:00.002-05:00

Nineteen days and I haven't posted a damn thing this year. Heck I haven't posted much in the past few months. Maybe one item. Heck, I don't remember. My life has taken so many turns in the last year, I barely remember who I am at times let along what I have been watching and listening to. All of the traveling to and from Columbus has been great, but I no longer have down time, nor do I think I will have any for a long time. The fact of the matter is that I am adjusting to Norfolk, to being married, to being separated, to researching again and being an active part of a new department all at the same time.

Which is why posting has become less of an option. Basically it is a function of time. Maybe, one of these days, I will be able to get the time to post my thoughts. Yet after teaching three different classes and researching, the idea of a post rarely occurs. However, I am gonna get back on the host with more or less fragmented thoughts. That's about all I can give, but it feels right. Right now, that's all I have.

The Days After

2008-11-20T09:51:00.004-05:00

While I am not the Obama Zombie that was talked about in The Onion, I am suffering a post-election hangover. Then again, I think the entire country is. Yesterday the Dow dipped below 8,000 and there are reports of possible 10% unemployment by sometime next and year and all the Bush admin can do is pocket enough shit possible as they walk out the door... WTF!?!?! Ok, I'll admit it. I would love to blame Bush for this since he deserves it for being the lamest lame duck president ever. Invisible since September, Bush's incompetence has become even more pronounced in the wake of the classiest consolation and acceptance speeches in recent memory of national American politics. Can anyone imagine Bush being as magnanimous as McCain or Obama were on that Tuesday evening? This is a man who, respective of your political feelings, is simply a public embarrassment. If you are a Republican you have always known this but dare not speak it for four years; if you are a Democrat you are sick of saying it.

However, I am blaming Obama for my hangover. Yes, Obama. On that Tuesday evening I was as high as I have been in years; on Wednesday I was in love and, well, when the hell are you gonna call me Barack! Yes, I know we only have one President at a time but I need you to call me. I am waiting by the phone, the economy is crashing, Al Quaeda is calling you names and pirates, yes freaking pirates, are on the rise. On that Tuesday earlier this month it was like we had the greatest date ever. We ate a modest bistro, had coffee, you told me about how much you loved your mother, I cried, you told me not to as she was "in a better place". I shared about my abusive past, the one were I hadn't done enough to get out of that eight year relationship, and you simply nodded as you gently held my hand, picked up the check and took me to coffee and an Italian Ice. The leaves had turned, not fallen and the air was crisp. We walked, you talked and we kissed... and you haven't freaking called me since!

And now I am getting mad.

Yes, I know you are thinking of me... you think about all the time, but you just broke up with the Senate and you have to wait until after the Holidays to see me.

It's complex... you can't afford to be our president yet. I get it. But all I want is a phone call. A little pick me up. Something. Just tell us you love us won't you?

---

The truth is it is bad. The economy is in the dumps and all I am doing is waiting for Turkey Day to see my life. Being separated has been tough and budget cuts at the University are scary. My work is taking off, and I take solace in that and the fact that I have free nighttime minutes on my phone plan. The only two songs that mean anything today is the cheery march into the apocalypse that is The Arcade Fire's "No Cars Go" and MGMT's "Kids". Both of the songs do what bands like REM and Talking Heads used to do well: provide distinctly "art pop" palettes of sound upon which the lyrics splash impression after impression. They defy the pedagogical forces of narrative in order to swath listeners under the hedonistic pleasures of pop, no matter how negative they may be. If Gogol Bordello, the single best rock band I have seen in ten years, offers its listeners a positive lesson in pleasure (hey kids, have sex, get rowdy, you can change the world, etc.), then they are today's Clash as they embrace the multi-culti forces of globalization and wrap it around the punk promises of change, now for the moment and make certain it damn well counts. I can't say that about Arcade Fire and MGMT. Their very reservations, which are hardly emoesque, seem to square more with my feeling that the what we can do now is march forward, into the future, work for change and hope it comes.

---

Which brings back around me to the only media reasons to be joyful these days: 30 Rock and the American version of The Office. As the former has spun off into even greater moments of surreal comedy (last week's "Night Court Reunion" was my personal TV highlight of the year so far), The Office has shown more heart this year than I could have even hoped. Between Michael Scott's most recent lost love, Pam's return (which will bring with her impending regrets, no doubt), Andy's future break up with Angela (or perhaps not) and Kelly Kapur's recent "dream fulfilled" (sh'e dating Ryan again) have given the show a depth that I simply didn't think it could achieve. And by depth I don't mean the smarmy melodrama of late MASH. Rather it seems to me to be the only comedy on American TV that has taken Del Close and Charna Halpern's words about Truth in Comedy to their logical end. The Office works not so much because it is comedic, but rather because it is painfully true and touches nerves that, for me, were only hinted at in shows I love such as The Larry Sanders Show or early Roseanne. After The Office, I need the refresher that is 30 Rock

---

Ok, enough for now. Will talk more about research later. I should note that things have bogged down a bit as we are at the end of the semester here at ODU. Nevertheless, the writings have come and the grants are being written and submitted. Such is the life.

And Barack, if you get around to it, call me.

Sick Days, One Day, Cher Day, Bragg Day, Hey Hey Hey

2008-11-03T09:35:00.003-05:00

Let's begin with the beginning. After my wife came to visit last week with my stepdaughter, the germs they spread decided to take up temporary residence in my sinuses. It's been one limping day after another as I try to get healthy. Still, I am doing what I can to get through election day. Instead of knocking on doors, I decided that data entry was the best I could do and the whole kit and kaboodle will culminate with me working the polls beginning at 5:30am (polls open at 6am) until 4pm. I will tell you more about that sometime this week.

But with one day left, I have a few random thoughts I would like to get out of my head before I start to grade...

1) Facebook is forcing people to get connected who they never wanted to be connected with again. The result has been a rise of self-reflection about more past relationships than anyone could have imagined. Score another side effect for online social networking.

2)Obama rallies have begun to rekindle the best hopes of the 1960s. My wife went to the Obama rally in Columbus and the above picture is of about 20 or so people doing the electric slide (or bus stop to others) in the middle of High Street. The rally drew about 60000 people and my wife walked away really emotionally drained, as if this was the greatest event that she had ever attended. For what it is worth, she and the rest of her family are all Hillary supporters and she has harbored quite a bit of cynicism about Obama's campaign. That said, she has been a supporter for months but I don't think she expected this kind of feeling. But people dancing in the streets and acting positively under the direction of a leader can only energize you with hope. It can also be dangerous... but I don't think I see anything too wrong with the electric slide. It can make you feel like the future can be different if all work and dance together. What a feeling!

For what its worth. I didn't think that that feeling was possible again.

3) The A&E Cher Biography I watched yesterday was the best television I watched all weekend.

4) The Billy Bragg show, which I saw last week and will blog about this week after the election, was beyond great. Not as good as the Gogol Bordello show I saw this year, but a solid, if distant, second.

5) I really miss Fat Albert. I just wanted to say that. I think I am in need of the DVDs... anyone?

The New Job

2008-08-30T14:56:00.002-04:00

I have a number of people ask me about "how the new job is going" and I always answer, "Very well", which is true. Of course that is about as spartan as I could be, but it also convenient. It's been two weeks and to go deep into detail about how lucky I feel and how impressed I am with my colleagues just seems gushing. However, it's how I feel. I feel lucky and happy to be here.

First, I have had more interesting conversations with faculty about media that they like/love than any place since I was at Northwestern as a Graduate Student. I have my theories about this, but I will say that without naming places and persons I have worked with a number of colleagues who are positioned as media scholars who don't really seem to like it that much. This isn't the majority by any means, but I am often stunned by how negative critique dominates our field. At its worst I tend to hear about what PhDs hate rather than what they love. If I can be grateful for one thing, most everyone I know in my department is a lover fist and hater second.

With the new job comes new research agendas that I am pursuing. Right now I am developing a long-term project on popular music in the age of the end-user which will study and argue for an understanding of another economic and techno-structural change of popular music industry. If this sounds like something I have argued before, well, guess what, I have. However the difference now is I am in the middle of that change and this change has yet to completely play itself out. By the way, if you want to read about my last argument it's in my book Making Easy Listening. I am not above shameless plugs.

What I have been doing is surveying a mile of literature on "network societies", "social media", etc. It's great to start a new project. It's even better to understand that the field of literature is yet-to-be defined. "New Media Studies", which is a term that makes me gag for a variety of reasons, is wide open. My foot is in the door and, yes, I will be one of those people who make you gag in the future.

The New Job has also exposed me to the world The American South. Teaching in Indiana and Ohio I had to learn a kind of lingua franca that included understood a world of Amish people, Big State U Football, a distrust of Urbanity and a kind of given homogeneity. Working in a southern city, however, has reconfigured my sense of culture and history. From gaslights to BBQ to student-teacher relations (a couple of students insist, rather openly, on calling me "Professor", which I always discourage). It's a new world.

On the issue of pop music: I have yet to really listen to anything new in a long time. BY new I mean new pop. Moving for the billionth time I have learned to just ball up and listen to standards. I have been downloading a lot of older Calypso music (Lord Kitchener is spending a lot of time on my playlists as of late), but mainly it's AC/DC, Augustus Pablo and Felt. Somewhere there may be a psychologist who can figure out why those three, but I don't have enough money to afford him or her, I am certain.

I am certain that once I get uncoiled, perhaps when we sell the house and get the family out here (again, another year of separation from the family), then my ears will be a little more open. Right now I will just stick with learning the New Job, enjoy it and if I run into anything new in the musical vein then I will let you all know.

By the way, that doesn't mean I won't be posting. Expect more of those with a few new projects such as the one I mentioned in my last post ("The Lion's Share") as well as much on my new research issues. It turns out that this IS part of my new job as well. :-)

New Ventures in Old Virginia

2008-08-23T13:22:00.002-04:00

Ok, now I may have some time to blog. This is my first post in I don't know how long. That's both good and bad. Bad in the sense that the reason that I was unable to blog was that I was with my family and now I am living in a small room in Norfolk with my roommates. Yes, I miss my wife and my family in a terrible fashion. There is no substitute for the loving business that family provides. I couldn't blog much, if at all this summer, but I did get a lot of love.

However, it is a gift. I have a job, a good one at that, with a great set of colleagues whom I admire and seem to get along with. Also, unlike some past gigs, Old Dominion is intensely multicultural and, well, the weather is good (for now!). The university has a sense of mission, the likes of which I have never experienced and everyone has been very helpful so far. Frankly, I am very lucky. My classes start on Monday and I will be doing some things I have never done before. I can hardly wait.

One new venture will be something I am working that is titled "The Lion's Share" for now. I won't go too far into it other than to say it will be good fun and intended to build a scholarly community. My research will begin to blossom unless something terrible happens and, well, if that happens then that is life. And, finally, I am getting to live in the South, which is something I have always wanted to try. All and all it is a good thing.

As for media: well, the best thing I have heard this year is the new Girl Talk release (is it a CD, LP, Album... who knows?),Feed the Animals. Not profound, but over-the-top in terms of pleasure. The best concert I have seen all year, in fact the best one I have seen in probably 20 years was Gogol Bordello at the Newport in Columbus, Ohio. I won't even try to describe it other than to say it is a gypsy rock spiritual that everyone should see at least once. And the best dance... well, it was the Chicken Dance I did with my wife at our wedding.

Surprise movies: Be Kind, Rewind and Speed Racer.
Movies I saw that I enjoyed a ton: The Dark Knight and The Lady from Shanghai.
Movies I look forward to: Wall-E, Water Lillies and Tropic Thunder.

TV: Learned to love The Deadliest Catch and Dr. Phil; Learned to Loathe The Price is Right (Drew Carey is just horrific on that show); Still love those Sonic Drive-In Commercials and the Menard's guy.

Will miss: Mike Ricordati and constant Buckeye football coverage (even if you don't love the Bucks, it becomes the way you follow the seasons in Central Ohio); Massey's and Ange's Pizza; Studio 35 and the Wexner; The Wiggles (but they will be in my life soon).

Ok, will post on some actual issues that are pertinent to you all soon!

I got married and my bro-in-law made me this great video!

2008-05-27T11:46:00.001-04:00

Tim and Katie's Wedding Video
Originally uploaded by Loganpoppy

I try not to get too personal in this blog, but it would be wrong not to share this great video that my Brother-in-law, David, made for me and Katie. We got married on May 24th, had a great band, The Randys, play for us and a great time. And here is a wonderful composite of sound and image to prove it. Enjoy!

Always Already Affect: Social Network Spaces as Personal Sites of Comfort and Communication

2008-05-16T09:52:00.005-04:00

Ok, what I am about to type is nothing too radical, or new (scholars such as Danah Boyd and bloggers such as Robert Scoble have said it before): digitally enabled social networks are about trust. I would add to that that all social networks are about some level of trust. However what seems different about MySpace and Facebook when compared to the names I have in my PDA, family unit and the people who I talk with at the water cooler is that this trust accompanied by huge dollops of aesthetic display (particularly MySpace and, to a lesser extent, FaceBook), affect and play. It doesn't take a genius to see how MySpace differs from LinkedIn -- LinkedIn has the clean sterility of a high-priced lawyer's reception area. MySpace, on the other hand, specializes on messiness. I prefer the happy medium of FaceBook, but have profiles on all three networks. In FaceBook I get to choose my apps and pics and even possible music, but I like the fact that I cannot (or at least do not know how to) change my background imagery. When I hit my FaceBook or my soon-to-be wife goes to her MySpace there is a sense of affectionate retreat, a sort of virtual Calgon Bubble bath that washes over my eyes and "takes me away" from the kiddos, cats, jobs, whatever is pestering me. This is particularly the case with MySpace. When I go to FaceBook I often hold the illusion that I could do some "networking" and have even established a couple of groups through which I work and communicate. With MySpace, forget professional behavior. Unless it is some band, I quickly delete any attempt to solicit brands from my contacts, messages, etc. It's MySpace dammit, so let's keep it amateurish thank you.

As some of you may know I love amateurism -- I am of the opinion that expertise tends to be overvalued in our culture and many of our problems could be addressed by collective, passionate and not-for-profit discussions. I think this is called democracy, sometimes, and I like that. But online social networks aren't democratic utopias, they just give us the feeling that they could be democratic utopias (see Richard Dyer's writings in Only Entertainment as they apply here). Not all blogs and profiles are equal in influence. Nor does everyone have equal access. That said, these spaces do enable many of the similar effects social clubs that proliferated throughout the 20th century and whose spaces often morphed into private nightclubs of association and gesture, i.e. sexual flirtation and dance. In short, these are spaces of association that create specific "vibes" and "feelings" through multiple modes of selection and protocol.

It is also these aesthetic features that I find so under-theorized and examined. In all of the research I have seen about these spaces is has more to do with what people do there, who goes there, etc. That's interesting, but it's a limited understanding of how these spaces work as displays of affection, which is one of the reasons, to quote Danah Boyd's work, so many Why Youth 'Heart' Social Network Sites. And, of course, these spaces allow anyone to develop and live out their affection in what Raymond Williams once called a structure of feeling. These lived and felt relations are somewhat new in the sense that this space of affection exists in an always-already manner that can be accessed asynchronous of one's self engagement. We have always had these texts in our lives, texts such as journals, diaries, memoirs, etc. Yet somehow this combination of journal/avatar, a space of "face" and "ownership" not only seems as if we don't quite understand how these textual spaces operate, but it seems as if we just beginning to get beyond the obvious pronouncements that these are spaces of passionate amateurs but beginning to understand why these spaces allow us to best feel the passions of others.

Why the Stains of Fandom On Our V-Sleaves Mean More Than Ever Before: Value Added through Public Fandom

2008-05-09T16:18:00.001-04:00

Van Hagr!
Originally uploaded by Loganpoppy

Compared to other music fans I have found little interest in publicly celebrating my favorite bands and artists. The only time I remember putting a bumper sticker on my car for a music act was the Grateful Dead teddy bear sticker, and even then it wasn't to promote them... I just loved the images. In fact, other than t-shirts, my very strong tastes are relatively reserved when compared to, say, those who would get their car plates customized to celebrate not just a band, but a specific iteration of a band. When I saw this plate, I took the picture and talked to the driver who said that while he liked both iterations, the only thing he really hated was the replacement of longtime bassist of Michael Anthony with Wolfgang Van Halen.

Much has been written about fandom that I need not rehash. However when we live in a possible "One Person, One Channel" environment this kind of public intensity, particularly when it is on the web, is something that needs to be considered in terms of what I would like to call an "Aggregated Granularity" that illuminates how specific differences, differences of iteration, opinion, version, etc, create measurable and appreciable value. Right now the most interesting iteration of how aggregating granules of information is valued in a vast media environment is the well publicized Netflix Recommendation Engine contest. Getting 10 percent performance improvement over Cinematch is worth the prize of a million dollars precisely because if you can ferret out a manner in which you can limit mismatches in a media economy of seemingly unlimited hours then you have a product that will allow you to leverage your services in an almost monopolistic fashion. Much like Google's proprietary PageRank was only percentage points better than Yahoo! or AltaVista's, it was that small difference that has allowed Google to simply dominate search.

The aggregation of small differences is the what Google offers us better than any other search engine and it is in these granules where media fans lie, plot, speak and collect. I have been thinking more about this as it has become clear that the effect of online MP3 blogs has started to take over as a major means of distributing music. Getting the word out about a record has always been the function of the music press and as Rolling Stone, Spin and NME may have dominated a good portion of the English speaking world are losing their hold as print is suffering under the weight of MP3 blogs. And how do we know this is happening? Well, ad dollars are for print are, as Crains recently noted, dwindling:

Ad pages for the three biggest music magazines slid 26% in the first quarter. Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone, the category's iconic publication, saw a 33% drop, according to just-released numbers from Publishers Information Bureau.

The magazines are reeling from the same seismic shift that has rocked the record labels—and which has made popular music more available to consumers than ever before.

Young fans are filling their iPod and Zune libraries straight from the Internet, which is also where they can listen to music and catch the latest news and reviews.

Naturally, advertisers are following them.

“We're putting money in Pandora and other music [sites] that in the olden days would probably all have gone to Rolling Stone,” says Scott Daly, executive media director at advertising agency Dentsu America, who still places ads in the Wenner Media title. “We're trying to reach young, early adopters—which Rolling Stone reaches, but it doesn't have a lock on them.”

Music magazines were also hit hard by downward currents affecting all magazines.

Cigarette maker R.J. Reynolds, responding to criticism—and lawsuits over editorial-style ads in Rolling Stone last fall—has pulled all U.S. print advertising.

The auto industry, weathering its own crisis, cut magazine ad spending by 21% in the first quarter, according to PIB. In the past, car companies always looked to music titles to reach young men.

And as compact disc sales have continued to fall, music labels have downsized their ad presence even further.

I am not surprised by this at all. One of the things that print did very well was treat general interests generally very well. It was "mass". As we all know, Mass Media is so 20th century (insert sarcasm here). Sure, Spin, NME and RS all have online presences, but they are effectively oriented around general music coverage and today's fan, one that has grown up not only with 24 hour a day online access to information and a musical catalogue won't even buy a 12 song album if they do not have to. They are particular and aren't interested in mass consumption in the classic one-size-fits-all set of practices. They may consume large quantities, but it is one grain at a time.

Which brings me back to the above picture. I don't know if anyone will use or find this picture. I have placed a number of pics in the common terrain of public flickr groups, etc. Some get visited, others don't. However, for those one or two people who visit these pictures they are valued enough to email to friends, view, and share. It's these minor iterations that, when accumulated through specific searches, that mean more than ever. These kinds of pictures, MP3 blogs devoted to subgenres of subgenres, and remix sites mean that the anyone who has ever had a specific, pointed interest in a band's most minor recordings can find them. In the 1980s I took an interest in bootlegs of REM and Prince precisely because it was hard to hear them. This kind of scarcity doesn't exist any more and the idea of a classic bootleg like Prince's "Black Album" has very little purchase these days. If you want these recordings you can find them. The question isn't whether or not you wish to go deep into an artist's catalogue, but how deep and for how long you wish to go. Now, more than ever, there is more good music available and now, more than ever, I am listening to fewer and fewer of this music than ever before. Like sweeping the sand into the ocean with broom, it's a hopeless task. However, if you can help me find that one specific grain of sand....

Goodbye SOMA, Hello Wedding Plans

2008-05-08T10:42:00.003-04:00

I just finished my duties at Indiana University, which was a great experience all the way around. Indeed, I will write about that later, but I just can't say enough about how much I enjoyed the good people of Bloomington and my students. Even those that simply treated my classes as pre-reqs which they simply wanted to pass were a refreshing antidote to the grade-grubbing that so many other places equate with being a "good student". I would rather have a bunch of C students who work understand that they are doing C work than a bunch of C students who, instead of working hard, would rather argue that they deserve something because they worked hard rather than actually performing (as John Wooden once said, "Never confuse effort with achievement"). Now, that said, the best student at a place like IU is as good as the best student at any private institution I have been at.

The best thing about the Bloomington area is the vibrant alternative scene it has cultivated. I spent many hours at SOMA coffee house preparing lectures and reading and above it was the very nice Laughing Planet Cafe, which prepared nice organic burritos at a good price. Bloomingfoods, one of the best co-ops in America, simply has no comparison in Columbus, and Plan 9 Video is, DVD per DVD, one of the better rental stores in the Midwest. While I am happy to be back in Columbus, I will always be grateful to my year in Bloomington, the student body at IU and the faculty with whom I worked. If I ever get a chance that works for me and my family to return, it would be a place I would seriously consider again.

In the last week we have almost finished our wedding plans, which takes place in almost two weeks. The catering, place settings, band and space are taken care of. We need to stock pile soft drinks, chips and salsa (which I will most likely make). Oh, and we need to get the Alcohol figured out. That might result in some long distance travel to pick up (perhaps a trip to Sandusky, who knows?). Wish me luck and will post about media soon now that my life is getting a little more in control.

Food Art and the Incorporation of Media Imagery

2008-04-12T11:40:00.001-04:00

Bento Box Art
Originally uploaded by Loganpoppy

This image of the Powerpuff Girls in Bento Box form comes from Face Food: The Visual Creativity of Japanese Bento Boxes by Christopher D. Salyer, a great hardbound value that shows another aspect to the art of food presentation. For the most part it has art done by Japanese mothers for their children's school lunches, which reminds me of my every other year purchase my favorite lunch box, an event that culminated with a 3rd grade purchase of an Emergency! lunchbox. When people say that kids eat this imagery up, well, they're not lying.

The issue here for me is beyond representation, but incorporation. As a kid growing up I remember how scared I was by the story of the Last Supper when in 2nd grade I was convinced that it was a parable about cannibalism. I know I am not alone in this feeling, but I need not spend too much time on the issue of communion. I bring it up to simply remind us of the power of incorporation. As a kid taking his First Communion in 2nd grade the celebration of my first incorporation of the Host was not only a big deal religiously, but also was a family event that culminated in gifts and a party. This is not uncommon for Catholic children, particularly those of us who grew up within a Hispanic context. The issue of religious incorporation is an important symbolic event that is on par with baptism and marriage: It is seen as a threshold event where the symbol also literalizes a change.

I have often wondered about the symbolic terrain of the logos and brand imagery but it wasn't until I saw this book that I think it really hit me that the possibility of affective connections that can be created through the reproduction and digestion of such material. The child and adult who consumes these faces must, at some level, do so with a level of care that must resonate throughout their psyche. What it means that these are symbols that are not necessarily generated by contract, but rather by fans (or parents of fans) suggests a deeper level of affective attachment, one that I had not considered before. Why I hadn't is clear to me. On my fifth birthday I clearly remember asking my mom for a "Batman cake", which she did as best she could. It's one of the better memories of my childhood, one that, if I am lucky, won't go away any time soon. I miss those cakes, my TV show lunchboxes and my mom, all of whom swirl together in memories of TV shows shared and time spent at tables in cafeterias, birthday parties and first communions. For better or worse, these mediated images of Christ, Batman and Family cannot be disaggregated, nor would I want them to be

Funky Cool Frank Zappa Paintings

2008-04-09T12:01:00.001-04:00

Frank Zappa Paintings
Originally uploaded by Loganpoppy

Truth is I am not a big fan of Zappa's music (ok, I always loved "We're Only In It For The Money" which was one of the most underrated albums of the 1960s IMHO), but I always loved his visual aesthetic. So I ran across these paintings and have placed them in a set of Zappa paintings. Enjoy and considered this your moment of Zappa Zen.

Let's Get Recursive, or It's a New Aggregator?

2008-04-04T18:55:00.001-04:00

Yo peeps! I have been working with Yahoo! Pipes for a while and have decided to post an pipe that aggregates media study feeds that I read (and contribute to). Frankly I just got sick of not having a centralized feed so I made one myself. You can get to it by click here. I will add more to this in the future, so let me know if there are any blogs I should consider. Ciao babies!

iTune Thoughts and REM-state updates

2008-04-04T17:35:00.004-04:00

Hey guys, I am not bereft of thoughts these days, just time. I am still at Indiana University finishing the final two months of work, however I am not certain that I will be back. As wonderful as the assignment has been, and I have loved my time there, there is no guarantee for a renewal. Also, I have not scored even one academic interview... yet. The result is I am on the market in many ways and while I am making baby steps on my research agenda, I have to spend those few hours a week trying to land work in some form or capacity. That said I have no desire to give up the work and thoughts that have been germinating in the last few months and I hope to share more of them here later. I know, I know, I have promised that before. Problem is to do research you need a sense of stability and doing a 500 mile a week commute with a brand new prep and in the search for a job, well, I have little time.

That said, here are a few thoughts: if anything the recent news that iTunes is now the biggest record retailer in the nation is not surprising. However it does obscure a number of issues that we need better data on. First question: how does legal downloading compare to other the high points of the record industry? Right now people are listening to more music than ever before but are they actually buying more? Obviously those pieces of plastic we call CDs or Vinyl are done, but are people simply repurposing their CDs and sharing more DRM free files or simply stealing? The fact is that this interesting news, but hardly the most interesting news we could discover if we only asked the right questions.

Second thought: LiveNation has corralled U2, JayZ and Madonna in the last few months. That means that three of the English-speaking world's most valued live performers will essentially be handled as a sort of roster much like labels did with artists. However, LiveNation will manage the one final asset that only an artist can control, i.e. live performance. Since a U2 concert is really beyond duplication, what this means is that LiveNation in the last week has emerged, along with those EMI, SonyBMG, and Warners the 900 lb gorilla. Those aforementioned media companies can hold on due to a large number of publication assets, so don't expect them to fade away. However, the emergence of LiveNation is part of the rearticulation of music industry, a rearticulation that has been going on since the emergence of Napster in 1997 and something that I think many of us still don't understand (guess what I am studying right now, btw).

Third Thought: The way that REM has gone about their business in the next month is bot exciting and disturbing at the same time. Clearly REM wants a hit. Going on the Today Show and The Colbert Report on the same day, playing SXSW for the first time ever in their career, pressing reporter flesh... it all points to a concerted effort towards relevancy. Two admissions: it turns out I am one of about 10 people in North America that really loved "Around the Sun" and REM was, until I was about 30, my favorite band for an almost 15 year run. So take what I am about to say with a grain of salt. A) The new record is good... it has some great moments (the title cut, "Accelerate" is positively terrific), but it isn't anywhere "Murmur" or "Out of Time". Indeed, what is nice about the new record is that it actually feels "loose". I kind of wish that REM had taken this recording ethos of two takes and let's go to "Monster", which is a record with some nice songs that just never feels, well, monstrous. "Accelerate" has, for REM at least, an "off-the-rails" feel which I haven't heard since "Reckoning".

But... well, REM won't get a hit and here is the reason: they are simply Dad's alternative band. REM, for all the work that they did in their first 15 years of existence seemed to push toward the future of what rock could be. "Accelerate" feels like a nod to the past, one that actually feels like a nostalgia not for older forms of music but THEIR past form. All I can think of when I listen to this record is that the band really wishes that they had Bill Berry back, that they could get back in that van with Jefferson and simply rock from new wave club to new wave club. The problem is both Berry and Jefferson are gone, those clubs closed down years ago and the van is now a charter plane. The record, which I enjoy as a fan, feels as desperate as a lover who has lost his love and wants to win her back being the man she fell in love with. No doubt REM is the one band in the world who sis most capable of acting like "old REM, but as charming as it is, I have my doubts. Would I see them live now? After hearing some of the SXSW concert I would say yes. Will they mean the world to me like they once did? Well, I am not certain that REM means the world REM anymore... Let's hope they can prove me wrong.

Ok, I got some more to write about later... but for now ciao

Flier News: Vegan Advocates Assault!

2008-02-28T12:03:00.002-05:00

Awesome Flier
Originally uploaded by Loganpoppy

This is easily the funniest flier I have read in years. I think you will agree that this piece of ephemera tells us one thing is certain: This generation of Vegans is kickass! Enjoy!

Blu-ray victory means royalties, but perhaps not as many as you think!

2008-02-19T17:11:00.002-05:00

It's kind of silly to even mention, but let's mention it otherwise. Sony won big this week as Blu-ray's victory means royalties, royalties, royalties for a company that had been on the losing end for a while now. It is no longer associated with personal sound playback devices (the iPod has made Walk and the Discman little more than ancient memories in the marketplace) and it is now in "third" behind Nintendo and Microsoft. Indeed, PS3, if anything, has finally won something significant: a standard war. I noted a couple of years ago that the PS3 was Sony's Trojan Horse for the new DVD standard and, yes, all of those players have seemed to have crept out of their shiny black encasements and killed any chance of Toshiba winning with its HD-DVD standard. Never mind that they had Microsoft's Xbox 360 on their side, if you wanted the HD-DVD player it was a $120 accessory, i.e. another substantial consumer choice and payment. If you bought the PS3, you got a severely discounted player in your machine and you didn't even have to think about it.

So, yes, this is classic "Razor and Blades", except in this case the winnings are, quite possibly, much more substantial since now everyone must buy the same blade (i.e. Wal Mart said you have to). The promise of future royalties is just that. In the US right now we are about to go through a mandated upgrade to TV that will flummox a good portion of the population. Predictions aside, in this economy fewer and fewer are willing to load a couple grand on their cards for a new widescreen so many of us, myself included, will be left with a 4/3 29 inch TV that has a digital adapter. I am certain my TV signal will look better, but not that much better that I will feel compelled to buy a new player and all of these new discs. Sony will see its royalties, but they will severely compromised and nothing like those seen by Toshiba and their DVD consortia in the 1990s. And the reason will be simple: it's the economy stupid. I just don't want to buy another copy of The Big Lebowski until I have to. And even then, when I have watched my storebought copy of the DVD on my dad's widescreen it looks just fine. In an atmosphere where homes seem to be foreclosed in new record rates, purchasing a new, expensive TV is one thing. Replacing my hundreds of DVDs, well, that's another thing altogether. So congrats to Sony for winning the battle... let's see if they can win the war.

Socially Adept and Immersed Already Thank You: Beginning to Make the Case for Popular Music Studies as a Means of Understanding Web 2.0

2008-02-10T09:49:00.001-05:00

I am working in a very smart, interesting and relatively congenial department these days, which is also going through some identity issues, as are all telecommunication/media/mass comm departments. That old one-way media just isn't sexy anymore. I, myself, am suffering professionally as it seems jobs that once fit my description are becoming less and less so. Of course I have always published in odd areas where the issue of the "social" has always been placed at a premium. Studying what makes music popular means understanding how everyday intellectuals operate tactically with their everyday media environments to negotiate and produce everyday aesthetic expressions. In other words, how does an everyday person take the stereo systems, mics, guitars and CDs that they didn't necessarily produce and rearrange them for their own aesthetic expression? Most often they do this in groups and the means involves negotiating sets of social groups that change on the dime and conveniently dissolve when they are no longer useful. See "social media."

However, despite this fact when we say those two words many of us think point-to-point digital communication, which is both interesting and lazy. Interesting because as I blog this I am fully aware of digitals reach: it can reach far, internationally, transnationally, etc. It can reach my dad, my sister, my cousin, my enemy and a friend to be on the whim of a click or a google search. The cost of physical distribution and storage are zero dollaring themselves out. And, yes, I use them all. I use Pownce, Blogger, Facebooked and MySpaced, Goooglemapped, used various IMs and VOIPs. I have podcast, blogged, flickr'd, taught myself many We 2.0 basics and am learning more. It's not that hard and there are plenty more to come and go (average days of use for a new web 2.0 device is around 45 and then you move onto another, or so I have been told). And yes, I love them dearly because they were driven by cheap, user-oriented technologies that are designed bring groups of people together.

But this was exactly what I love about popular music. Note, I said music. Popular music has always been driven by cheap, user-oriented technologies that are designed to bring people together. Call it a dance floor, a party or even a "boomin system", a great popular music gathering was one designed to immerse you and engage people in a set of aesthetic expressions that they help alter and generate (dance, fashion anyone?). Can't anyone understand that so-called new media's sexiness is predicated on the very items that popular music culture is predicated on: sharing and alterating mass generated expressions in order to express one's unique distinct nature in a mass society? I mean, is it any wonder that the media industry most affected by Web 2.0 has been not only the music industry, but the one that media scholars understood the least?

This may be born out of frustration with the job market (where right now I am searching), but it is also generated by hearing claims claim that we have not studied this before in our field. These claims are often made by those who simply cannot make the connection between what many of them loved in their past youth and continue to love now or, because of professional biases, refuse to do so. It's frustrating. There is a literature of people utilizing these music techs for their purposes. And there is a literature to be written of how these new techs operate with people to generate not simply income but new aesthetic dimensions. There is a literature that can be written not simply drawing from sociology but a form or marginal media studies. An area of media studies that was marginalized precisely because with its many underground networks and home-grown talents it often openly worked to defy, with various levels of success, centralization and complete control. There is a lot of work to do here and I, for one, hope to do some of it.

It's all the same damn sandwich!

2008-02-07T16:42:00.001-05:00

It's all the same damn sandwich!
Originally uploaded by Loganpoppy

You know I am busy when I haven't had much time to blog about much of anything. Lately I have been putting in 12 hour prep days as my new prep is a doozy (but I am having fun!!). I plan on blogging a bit more about my research soon, but I just wanted to make a note... I finally have proof that a Sub Sandwich is the same as a "Hoagie", a "Hero", a "Grinder", a "Po Boy" and a "Torpedo". There may be slight differences but let's just all admit it... they're all the same damn sandwich. See, here's proof. See...

Local Music = Good Times

2008-02-03T11:38:00.001-05:00

The Randy's at the Rumba Cafe, Feb 2, 2008
Originally uploaded by Loganpoppy

The pleasures of live music, indeed! The Randy's are one of those local bands that every city deserves. Extremely competent to excellent players, wonderful repertoire that ranges from the standards to 1970s rock, and great to dance to. Katie, my fiance', and myself have secured them for our wedding. Certainly the most expensive part of our wedding, but they will be the most fun aspect!

So last night we went to see them at the Rumba Cafe, danced a little and simply enjoyed the evening. Yes, this is hardly criticism, but I simply wanted to pimp one of the best bands you can see in my local area. And if you get them coming to your town, you could even take your parents, and even your grandparents, to them. Check em out!

For Super Bowl Sunday Consideration

2008-02-03T11:02:00.000-05:00

Odds are I am going to watch the annual American TV Orgy known as the Super Bowl today (FYI, I am working on a house to sell and my beau's b-day is today so we are going out for dinner), but I will look forward to all of the water-co0ler breakdown in the week to come. That said, I loved this little ditty on the telestrator, one of the greatest inventions in sports TV style ever.

Cool Craftiness

2008-02-01T18:43:00.001-05:00

Felted Heads
Originally uploaded by Loganpoppy

A friend of mine introduced me to the world of "felting" today. I guess you pole raw wool with a needle and form it into stuff. The picture is just a few examples of the numerous heads she has made and I think they are pretty great. The one in the middle reminds me of Steve Coogan's "Tommy Saxondale" character, from the series Saxondale (yes Ned, I finally got to them). Anyways, I thought some of you would appreciate them.

Air Afrique Ad

2008-02-01T02:20:00.001-05:00

Air Afrique Ad
Originally uploaded by Loganpoppy

Lately I have been doing quite a bit of thinking on what I am dubbing the "Soul Economy", an economy that was devoted to empowering a black middle class that was distinctly African American in style. Not necessarily integrationist, but hardly segregationist, it was to be an economy devoted to a black middle class that was not simply integrated into accepting white middle class norms. For me the best and longest lasting expression of this is Soul Train, which is something I am dedicated to researching (particularly it's emergence in the early 1970s), but other black capitalist forms would fit into this as well (i.e. independent film and music ventures, hair care products dedicated to African-American style, black publishers, etc).

So far the best expression of this I have found in Ad form is this Air Afrique ad from 1971. The tagline, "Air Afrique. It's Black Owned, Black Operated and Beautiful" says everything. Here leisue travel is promoted as educational and, in the case, playing a double-duty role of supporting an emergent black capitalist enterprise. It's a clue among many and, I must admit, as I study this in tandem with the research that I am engaging on a post centralized music economy my head is spinning. We think we know so much more about cultural economies than we actually do...

Anyways, it's late and I will have more to say about this in the future. I hope...

Geek Night! It's Alright...

2008-02-01T01:10:00.001-05:00

The OLPC Computer
Originally uploaded by Loganpoppy

Last night I attended my first Geek Night dinner in Bloomington, an event that happens every six weeks, and I will do all I can to attend the next one if I can. First of all it was a blast. Very relaxed with a number of the geeks, not necessarily myself, drinking rather large pitchers of Cerveza and talking Ruby on Rails, Ajax and VPN. I can follow somewhat, but mainly I just enjoyed the company. The highlights, no doubt, were the great people (thanks to Michelle, Felix, Bob and Gary!), but Felix broke out his OLPC computer and the room circled around him. I had planned to buy one last year, but I ran into some unexpected charges toward the end of the year so I am waiting until they put them back on the market.

From what I saw these where a real technological achievement and far more complex than what I could even imagine. I had seen enough video on them before their release to know that these were solid machines, but you have to see it to believe it. Unfortunately you can't just go into a Best Buy and touch one, which is a damn shame. For what most people use a computer for (wordprocessing, browsing, etc.) this is more than enough machine. And you can mount drives through its two USB ports and a place for an SD card. If you need mass storage, well, there you go. I don't think I will give up my laptop, but damn if I wouldn't want this for travel.

Don't Call it A Comeback...

2008-01-09T22:46:00.000-05:00

Last fall, from September to the end of December, were four months that basically turned my life upside down. If anything, this post will try to, very briefly, explain my absence from any kind of posting or I know I only put up a few posts, two I think (maybe less) during that period, and here's why...

1) I took a new job -- As many of you know I am doing 10 months at Indiana University's Department of Telecommunications and had to get out of my house, put it on the market (where it sits today) and...

2) Move in with my lovely fiance' and her three kids -- This alone would turn anyone's life upside down. But, hey, to make it a little more challenging my new gig is a four hour drive away, so, hey, I have something of a commute. Luckily...

3) Moved into a room in Bloomington -- where I live in a house with four other really nice people. I have some clothes, books, a TV and DVD player... you know, the essentials, all the things I needed to get

4) Two new preps prepped -- Ok, only one prep per semester, but these are new courses so I am giving lectures to three large halls and doing it on the fly. It's fun, it's draining and I am learning all of this new stuff and then...

5) My Mom get's terribly ill -- Beginning in Mid-September my mother's cancer began to spread where by October her prognosis had become much worse than we would have thought even two weeks earlier when we had learned that it had spread to her brain. So, as a result...

6) I traveled back and forth to Arizona about every other weekend until early December when...

7) My mother passed and found peace from her struggle.

8) The Holidays and mourning...

and now I am beginning to write again.

What that means is that I am also back in Bloomington and I have a little more time to actually write so I am pursuing two research projects and beginning to put Scrivener to good use (if run OS X and research, then think about it!). Will talk more about those projects over time.

Anyways, I am obsessed with the Amy Winehouse record from last year since I finally had a chance to sit down with it (look, when your mom is dying you basically listen to oldies and watch nothing but comedies, which meant tons of Zeppelin, old school hip hop and one episode after another of The Larry Sanders' Show.). Will post my faves later... so later

Best Song Ever Man... Or is it Wolfman?

2007-10-29T21:06:00.000-04:00

Just in time for Halloween...

Veddy scarry!

Still Bloggers Run Deep

2007-10-16T23:31:00.000-04:00

So why no blogging? Ok, I commute 500 miles a week, have whole new preps, am on the market, I am dealing with some family issues that are the kind that everyone must deal with at one point in time (illnesses, to be as exact as I wish to be at this moment) and, well, my God, life is just piling on. I miss my blogging, but I did a whole lot more of it when life was boring and, guess, what, I aint bored!

Also, I have been doing some, ahem, thinking. Here's proof... my latest entry for in media res. Check it out and let's all hope my life tones down a bit.

This one is for Indiana! A Real Life Fab Five

2007-09-24T23:15:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted in forever and my reasons are more than many -- let's just put it this way: Traveling as much as I do these days has killed my blogging time. Between prepping for classes and all the things that go with running a huge lecture course (there is a lot to it as some of you know) and going back to Ohio just about every weekend, there just is no time. In fact, I am about to go to sleep and I have just enough in me to ask the one question that has been bugging me all week: Why is Kanye obsessed with Daft Punk?

Ok, there is more than that... so let's give you a real life fab five...

1) Bill Simmons - The BS Report - In what has become a reoccurring theme in my recent life is the sudden change that my media diet has witnessed. I gave up premium cable when I moved out of my house and into Katie's and basically all cable when I moved to Bloomington one week later. All of my CDs are in Ohio as are all of my DVDs... as for LPs forget it. Also, because I have no free time, movies are not much of an option. So I have adapted to all mobile, digital driven media, which has meant lots of podcasts. The best new podcast I have encountered so far is Bill Simmons BS report, which is distributed through ESPN. Basically it is an obsessed reporter who has spent a fair share of his time on the coasts and, as a result, has coastal concerns: Red Sox V Yankees (he is pro "Chowda Power"), NBA Basketball (say what you want, but the Midwest is obsessed with Football and college hoops) and the Hollywood set (he hangs with Jimmy Kimmel, for whom he worked for a while at the beginning of Kimmel's late night talk show and Kimmel's friend Adam Carolla of Man Show fame). And because Kimmel is able to traverse the terrain with relative ease he gets the likes of David Stern, Marv Albert, Steve Kerr, Carolla and Kimmel to discuss everything from John "The Beast" Mugabe to bad movie ideas. Simmons relaxes into his obsessions with the confidence of a man who has accepted, for better or worse, that to be concerned with NFL point spreads on a Wednesday is kind of silly, a little bit pathetic, and somehow charmingly American.

2) SOMA Cafe - It's eccentric, it's got hipster written all over it, it's not corporate and it's got a great couch and a plastic King Kong in a Television turned Aquarium. Bloomington at its best.

3) Ditching Word, Killing Office - Consider it my new project: To avoid all things Microsoft Office. I recently adopted Scrivener as my composition platform for long-term research projects and committed myself to Pages for everyday composition and finally, I feel free. My contempt from Word runs deep into the 1990s when, because of incompatibility, I was forced to give up usage of WordPerfect so I could, no pun intended, stay on the same page as my colleagues and share word processing docs. So with the debut of iWork in 2005 I became enthralled with the possibility of finally getting a solid Word Processor (I never liked AppleWorks that much). Then Writely (now GoogleDocs) showed up in my life and now Scrivener and, well, I am almost Microsoft free. Once I learn how to use Numbers I may be able to leave Office behind and be pledge my allegiance solely to the Empire of Jobs...

4) The White Stripes - Icky Thump - So far this is, hands down, my favorite rock record of the year. The title track alone warrants consideration for "catchiest single of the year". You want hooks, Jack's got em. You want blues breakdowns and some of the weird ass analog synths, look no further. You want "la la las", you get those as well, and all before track two where Jack and Meg convince you that you don't know what love is... you really don't by the way. And then you get more slacker cum garage revival cum zeppelin/pixie goodness and, well, the only other record that has made me nod my head as much in the last 12 months is Girl Talk's "Night Ripper". In other words, it has a great beat and I can dance to a lot of it, so I give it a 92.

5) The Tibetan Cultural Center- His Holiness the Dalai Lama will be speaking here in Bloomington in the next month and the Tibetan Cultural Center, where His Holiness' brother lives, will receive a the Dalai Lama in grand fashion. If you have ever wondered what Tibetans were like or what Tibetan Buddhism is about, this is the place to start. First and foremost the TCC is one of the most inviting places anyone could ever visit. I have been there twice already and plan to go back this weekend, hopefully to do some work and meditation. When my Fiance' and I visited a few weeks ago, we were greeted by the Arjia Rinpoche, which we only learned later was a real honor. He talked to us about butter sculptures, sand mandalas and invited us to lunch. It was a truly wonderful and hard to describe. It's a special place, the kind that could host both HHDL and Muhammad Ali in an address regarding the need for peace...

Citizen Journalism and I-35 Collapse

2007-08-02T21:34:00.001-04:00

Only 24 hours have passed since the I-35 bridge collapsed and the creation of a Flickr set will, undoubtedly, help many of us understand not only the damage, but, hopefully, what went wrong. Here's a few pics for your inspection...

Cell phones and Flickr sets... really, this is an amazing set of photos. I hope you click above and see what people on the scene have put together. To me, this small gesture of collaborative work is quite hopeful for the future of visual journalism.

Technorati Tags: flickr, 35w bridge, citizen journalism

Chinese iPhone?

2007-07-30T10:34:00.001-04:00

This was posted at The London Times a few days ago, and I am impressed by how wonderfully messed up it is. I would love to see Steve Jobs with one. The packaging it comes in is as unaesthetic as it comes would make Jobs freak out. But the fact that when turned on the phone sounds off with Windows chimes, well, you can just imagine...

Technorati Tags: iphone, chinese technology

Here are "The Pillars of Social Media Marketing". Who Knew?

2007-07-19T22:15:00.000-04:00

The Following is Cross Posted at TwoWayStreetResearch.Blogspot.Com

As declarations go, this one is interesting. A search for "Social Media Marketing" came up with this post from October of 2006...

this is what I define as the Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing.

The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing

Any and all forms of Social Media Marketing tactics fall under at least one of these five forms of action. Often the same channel will incorporate two or more of these:

1. Declaration of Identity
2. Identity through Association
3. User-initiated Conversation
4. Provider-initiated Conversation
5. In-Person Interaction

Ok, this is a post that is a little misleading since it is really about marketing "social media" like MySpace, FaceBook, etc. But the list is solid marketing and could look like this...

1. Declaration What You Do and What You Offer
2. We Will Know You Best By The Company You Keep
3. Let Your Clients Find a Path to Talk and You Should Listen
4. Find A Way to Talk to Your Clients and Potential Markets and Find a Way
to Listen
5. Handshakes are Still Needed

Yep, that makes sense.

Anyways, the fact is marketing is marketing and don't substitute tools for ideas and practices!

Social Media = Production of Amateur Ad Agents or Community Members?

2007-07-18T08:34:00.000-04:00

Ed Note -- The following is cross posted at a Blog I am beginning about Web 2.0 and marketing that is titled Two Way Street Research and Consultation.

Nothing new to those who market, but marketing is not the same as advertising. Many of us would argue that adverts are a subset of marketing and, well, so much more is involved in communicating your market vision to your prospective and existing clients. But if you have an online conversation with your clients that results in an online video (see Obama Girl) is that an advertisement, is it a conversation, does it matter? And, no, I am not talking about viral marketing. I am really talking about a loud, somewhat public conversation. Take a look at this article on social media and marketing in yesterday's Arizona Republic:

The line between consumer and marketer is getting increasingly blurry thanks to blogs, video-sharing sites and social networks.

These and other "social media" tools not only allow consumers to filter messages coming from companies and their marketers, but also let them create, shape and spread their own messages.

"Consumers and amateurs are really making their place in the (marketing) world as much as ad agencies," said Sheila Kloefkorn, president of the American Marketing Association's Phoenix chapter.

Ok, nothing new here, but let's take a further look...

Companies have been using "viral marketing" for the past several years, creating street armies of citizen marketers who distribute their messages for them.

Now, though, corporations large and small are trying to grab greater control of these tools.

A lot is at stake. Companies that fail, marketing experts warn, will miss out on reaching target audiences and give up what little control they still have over their image.

"Most advertisers have been conditioned for many, many years to totally control their message," said Dan Santy, president of Tempe-based marketing firm Santy. "The Web takes all that control away."

Using social-media tools at least gives firms a way to direct where their messages go.

Ok, this is an extension then of directing messages to an audience. But here is the key: you need to get them engaged in with what you do and make your self meaningful:

Cynthia Drasler, the founder of Organic Excellence, said she used to become frustrated as a guest on radio shows because she was never fully able to explain why she felt it was important for people to use chemical-free personal-care products.

So she decided to take matters into her own hands by starting her own online radio show in May 2006.

The show, Chemical Free Living, airs once a week on an Internet radio station at contacttalkradio.com. Listeners can download podcasts of the shows after they air.

On the show, Drasler discusses topics that interest her target customers, and not necessarily Organic Excellence's products.

Even though she does not promote her products during the show, she said the show is helpful in building a brand.

"By having a weekly radio show and having certain shows where I do all the talking for the whole hour, people get to know me," Drasler said. "I become a real person to them, and I think when people know you and if they get to like you, then they go and pay attention to what you're saying."

Crafting honest messages is one key to successfully using social-media tools to shape marketing content, said Francine Hardaway, a local business consultant who helped form the Phoenix chapter of the Social Media Club.

The national organization has branches in cities around the country where members meet to discuss how blogs, podcasts and social networking can affect business.

"I don't think any consultant should ever sell a blog as a way to boost sales," Hardaway said. "It's really a way to brand you're company. It's a way to give out information. It's a way to get feedback from your customers and your suppliers" [emphasis mine].

Hardaway gets it: It's about making yourself meaningful. Driving sales is hard under all circumstances and many external factors affect this. Meaning creation, though, is different. Honestly, we need to pay more attention to meaning making and this involves a number of community-oriented actions and engagement. It is the "community" that, then, is the issue at hand and it is one that is intriguing... more on it later.

The Real Alan Partridge?

2007-07-16T14:47:00.000-04:00

As a fan of the "I am Alan Partridge" TV show (I only get to see what IO torrent unfortunatelye since it isn't that popular in the US), the video below just amazed me. If this guy is doing any of this stuff even halfway seriously then they should just put him on TV 24/7. What a jerk!

LA Times On "Second Life and Marketing..." It is Overrated

2007-07-16T10:27:00.000-04:00

Ed Note -- The following is cross posted at a Blog I am beginning about Web 2.0 and marketing that is titled Two Way Street Research and Consultation. I will be doing more of these kinds of cross posts in the future as I develop that site and maintain this one...

I am kind of underwhelmed by Second Life as a gaming reality, but that's a personal preference. I tried it, didn't like it, moved on. Like many I have a number of friends who meet up virtually both here and in World of Warcraft and they tend to love it. Me, well, it's not my cup of tea. My biggest problem was time. But clearly many others love it and, as one of my friends says about World of Warcraft is that there is always something to do and, unlike real life, it is a fairer meritocracy, i.e. you work harder and better you actually get promoted!.

One of the things about these spaces is that because so many people are spending their time engaged many marketers have decided to colonize the space and sell whatever they have to sell. I am certain you can do it effectively, but many marketers are having "second thoughts about Second Life" according to the Los Angeles Times

[It] turns out that plugging products is as problematic in the virtual world as it is anywhere else.

At http://www.secondlife.com — where the cost is $6 a month for premium citizenship — shopping, at least for real-world products, isn't a main activity. Four years after Second Life debuted, some marketers are second-guessing the money and time they've put into it.

"There's not a compelling reason to stay," said Brian McGuinness, vice president of Aloft, a brand of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. that is closing its Second Life shop and donating its virtual land to the nonprofit social-networking group TakingITGlobal.

Linden Lab, the San Francisco firm that created Second Life, sells companies and people pieces of the landscape where they can build stores, conference halls and gardens. Individuals create avatars, or virtual representations of themselves, that travel around this online society, exploring and schmoozing with other avatars. Land developed by users, rather than real-world companies, is among the most popular places in Second Life.

But the sites of many of the companies remaining in Second Life are empty. During a recent in-world visit, Best Buy Co.'s Geek Squad Island was devoid of visitors and the virtual staff that was supposed to be online.

The schedule of events on Sun Microsystems Inc.'s site was blank, and the green landscape of Dell Island was deserted. Signs posted on the window of the empty American Apparel store said it had closed up shop.

McGuinness said Starwood's venture into Second Life did accomplish something. Feedback from denizens gave Aloft ideas for its physical hotels.

The suggestions included putting radios in showers and painting the lobbies in earth tones rather than primary colors. But now that the design initiative is over, he said, it's difficult to attract people to the virtual hotel to help build the real-world brand.

Ok, let's quickly evaluate this... what did the majority of these companies do in Second Life? Well, they simply put their "real world" services and stores in this world where you can fly and build things you could not build today. Mistake number one: Not matching the creative potential of your available space and the desires of the audience. Notice how the hotel chain benefited? Well, they got creative suggestions. In the real world we are all too often limited by our creative potentials. In virtual and fantasy worlds, we want to get beyond restrictions of class, gender and physical abilities. In other words, do something different and more creative in your virtual worlds when you are marketing, please.

Let's look further at the article...

For some advertisers, the problem is that Second Life is a fantasyland, and the representations of the people who play in it don't have human needs. Food and drink aren't necessary, teleporting is the easiest way to get around and clothing is optional. In fact, the human form itself is optional.

Avatars can play games, build beach huts, dress up like furry animals, flirt with strangers — sometimes all at once.

Their interests seem to tend toward the risque. Ian Schafer, chief executive of online marketing firm Deep Focus, which advises clients about entering virtual worlds, said he recently toured Second Life. He started at the Aloft hotel and found it empty. He moved on to casinos, brothels and strip clubs, and they were packed. Schafer said he found in his research that "one of the most frequently purchased items in Second Life is genitalia."

Another problem for some is that Second Life doesn't have enough active residents.

On its website, Second Life says the number of total residents is more than 8 million. But that counts people who signed in once and never returned, as well as multiple avatars for individual residents. Even at peak times, only about 30,000 to 40,000 users are logged on, said Brian Haven, an analyst with Forrester Research.

"You're talking about a much smaller audience than advertisers are used to reaching," Haven said.

Some in the audience don't want to be reached. After marketers began entering Second Life, an avatar named Urizenus Sklar — in the real world, University of Toronto philosophy professor Peter Ludlow — wrote in the public-relations blog Strumpette that the community was "being invaded by an army of old world meat-space corporations."

He and other residents accused companies of lacking creativity by setting up traditional-looking stores that didn't fit in. His column was reproduced in the Second Life Herald.

Nissan Motor Co., a subject of such protests, has since transformed its presence in Second Life from a car vending machine to an "automotive amusement park," where avatars can test gravity-defying vehicles and ride hamster balls. Sun Micro has made its participation more interactive and fanciful, Chief Gaming Officer Chris Melissinos said.

Ludlow isn't impressed. He said most firms were more interested in the publicity they received from their ties with Second Life than in the digital world itself. "It was a way to brand themselves as being leading-edge," he said.

Angry avatars have taken virtual action. Reebok weathered a nuclear bomb attack and customers were shot outside the American Apparel store. Avatars are creating fantasy knockoffs of brand-name products too.

Ok, so they don't have enough residents and the residents that are their can often resent the intrusion of the marketing world that they are probably hoping avoid altogether. Again, please, if you are going to market, be creative, do something different and understand your medium and who are audience is, which is kind of like marketing in the real world.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0 marketing, second life, LA Times, web 2.0

Winter of the Witch

2007-07-13T18:19:00.000-04:00

My fiance' was ranting and raving about this film about 10 days ago... It's pretty great to see it as it is a classic from our childhood. Plus it teaches us that one great lesson that the Ancients always wanted humanity to learn: psychedelic pancakes can create happiness!

Wii Will Rock You if You Can Get One

2007-07-10T10:41:00.001-04:00

Still having a tough time finding a Wii?You're not alone...

It's been more than seven months since Nintendo launched the Wii, but the consoles are selling so well that supply still hasn't caught up with demand. You can get one, sure, but be prepared to call around and arrive promptly when the shipments do.

"I had to get permission from work," said Regina Iannuzzi, 23, in line since 6:20 a.m. on a recent morning. She'd been looking for a Wii, a 25th birthday present for her brother, for two weeks. Every place was sold out.

Like sleeping in? Wiis also are available online, but at a hefty premium to the console's $250 retail price. A slightly used one from an Amazon.com seller called Hard-To-Find-Stuff recently listed for $595 plus $3.99 shipping. Another cost $398 from a different seller.

"The PlayStation 1 was certainly a big introduction, but I don't recall any game system more than six months after its launch still having this kind of demand," said Chris Byrne, an independent toy analyst.

Back in April, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata acknowledged an "abnormal" Wii shortage. Since then, the company has increased production substantially to help meet worldwide demand, spokeswoman Perrin Kaplan said.

But Nintendo also has to manage its inventory, said Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Lazard Capital Markets.

"Unfortunately, you can't ask a contract manufacturer to make a million a month, then 5 million," he said.

Sony's PlayStation 3, which launched within days of the Wii last fall, is readily available in stores and online, but sales have been lagging behind the Wii. Cost could be one reason: the PS3 retails for up to $600.

More than 2.8 million Wii consoles have sold in the U.S. since the November debut, according to the NPD Group, a market research company. That's more than double the number of PS3 consoles sold. And Nintendo plans to sell 14 million worldwide in the current fiscal year, which ends in March.

Nintendo's selling point for the Wii has been that it's for everyone, not just hardcore gamers or young men with impeccable hand-eye coordination. Its intuitive motion-sensitive wireless controller lets players mimic movements for bowling, tennis or sword-fighting instead of pushing complex combinations of buttons.

Rein Auh, 30, never owned a console, but he decided to buy a Wii so he and his wife could have some fun and get some exercise. He spent $350 at the Nintendo store on a Wii and some extras. Walking out of the store, he looked back at the crowd of people still waiting.

"It's kind of crazy," he said. "I mean, it's been seven months."

When I was searching for a Wii I went into one local shop and the clerk said to me that he dreams of the day he sees a stack of Wii boxes as tall as he was. At six feet tall I think he might be waiting till 2008.

Maybe they'll just give away the PS3

2007-07-09T22:37:00.001-04:00

I'm just not a fan of Sony anymore. The PS2 was great sometimes but many times unreliable. It doesn't really play my DVDs, although it is supposed to. And the quality of the gameplay was never as good as XBox or the GameCube IMHO. So it comes as no surprise to me that the PS3 has run into enough trouble that Sony is crying uncle and cutting prices on the PS3

Sony Corp. slashed the price of its current PlayStation 3 by $100, or 16.7 percent, and introduced a high-capacity model in an effort to spur sales of the struggling video game console.

Starting Monday, the current 60 gigabyte model will cost $499, down from $599.

The Japanese electronics maker also said it is introducing a new version of the PlayStation 3 with a bigger hard drive for storing downloaded content such as video games and high-definition movies.

Cutting the price and giving it a bigger hard drive won't necessarily make the PS3 any better, let alone more fun. Despite the fact that XBox 360s seem to see more flames than the average Kiss concert, it has become the "hardcore" (read "young teen male") console of choice and Nintendo is for everyone else (myself included)

Sony has said it sold 3.6 million PS3s in the fiscal year ending March 31 and expects to sell another 11 million in the current fiscal year. Microsoft said in its most recent quarterly earnings report filed in April that it had shipped 11 million Xbox 360s.

Nintendo, meanwhile, claims it has sold nearly 6 million Wiis worldwide as of March 31, and more than 40 million Nintendo DS handhelds. The company has predicted it will sell another 14 million Wiis and 22 million additional DS systems by the end of the current fiscal year.

The Wii and PS3 were released within days of each other late last year. Microsoft had a head start in the current generation of consoles, having launched its Xbox 360 in 2005.

I guarantee you that more than 14 million Wiis will be sold Everytime someone plays mine it is basically an instant sell. Heck, I think I could sell it to my parents. It just seems to me that in a flat economy where people have no desire to upgrade to yet another disc format, the PS3 has got a long, uphill battle against the Wii, which is not only fun but the best way to experience YouTube in the world.

Technorati Tags: Wii, PS3, Xbox360, Sony, Nintendo

April, May, June... July + Googlemapping Question

2007-07-08T12:11:00.001-04:00

Ok, it's back to writing, which I have missed. I won't bother you with all of the reasons I haven't been writing, but they are manifold. Some deal with trying to land a job, which is still an operation. Others have had to do with end of the school year break. But now that it looks like I will no longer be teaching any time soon (but that could change too!)my relationship with thinking about communication techs is changing. For one, I have jumped wholeheartedly into web 2.0 techs as it is clearer to me for a litany of reasons that this is something I am passionate about. Put simply, so many remind me so much of why I have always enjoyed popular music: it's on-the-ground technologies that are mobilized for social pleasures and aesthetic debate. Whenever I present so many people talk about how I rarely talk about the music and the truth is I love the music but my passion is what people do with the music and how they make it popular. The simple phrase I have always had is that "I am not as interested in popular music as much as I am interested in what makes music popular!". Web 2.0 is the same for me. More on that later.

So here is a quick call out for anyone who is interested in Googlemaps and KML composition. I have one question: why is semantic tagging seemingly soooooooo damn difficult right now for googlemap locations. I know there there are a lot of programs that allow you to make maps with tagging, but they all feel inadequate when you compare it to the relatively map oriented rather than location-oriented. Any ideas? This is a big question for me since it is key to Googlemaps really becoming a useful tool for all kinds of economic development that is niche oriented. Please, write me and let me know.

Been Making My First Google Map Mash Up!

2007-04-22T22:13:00.001-04:00

This weekend has been a lot of student writing so I haven't had much time to do any of my own thinking or reading. However, when I take breaks I have been on the web composing with Mapbuilder.net, which is an online mapping tool. It's pretty easy and in a few hours of messing around I have made this map of pop music in Ohio in the 20th century. I have taken almost all of my info from Wikipedia and utilizing my skills have composed a good beginning map. I will be looking for some collaborators and I hope to expand on it. That said, I am pretty happy with the application and look forward to learning how to develop not only the map, but my own mapping and tagging skills. I have to say, personal geographies really are the s**t if you ask me. I think it has great potential for all kinds of academics, particularly those of us who do critical theoretical/historical work on mass media. For example, one of the things that is quite interesting already for me is mapping the famous funk scene of the Dayton/Miami Valley area: How is it that the Southwestern corner of Ohio got so much funk? Just looking at the bands in this area, you wonder why there isn't a solid book on this.

Ok, I need to get back to reading and grading, but I hope you enjoy it. You can always access the map through the button on the sidebar that says "My Maps". If you have any suggestions contact me and let's talk about making it better. Oh, and remember, Cleveland rocks!

Technorati Tags: mapping, googlemaps, mashups, ohio, popmusic

I'm Taking a Break, Will be Back Soon

2007-04-20T21:58:00.001-04:00

It's the final three weeks of grading and my final weeks at Denison, so I have been blogging less. A number of issues have cropped up that I would love to comment on, but I don't get paid to do this. So, I am not gone, just distracted with deadlines. So, if you see fewer posts, that's what's up. Either that or I finally found a Wii.

With College Kids Inflicting Violence on Each Other Let's Find a Way to Blame Rap Music

2007-04-17T16:57:00.001-04:00

At one pm yesterday I wrote the following

somewhere in the rulebook of popular discourse it says, "Whenever there is a cultural crisis that indicts middle class Americans, you must point a finger at whatever popular music is lowest on the totem pole of culture capital to divert attention, see Columbine, etc."

Of course, that position today is occupied by hip hop, i.e. it gets no respect. And, of course, right after I signed off we got something worse than Columbine. And, yes, somehow, somewhere, someone is blaming rap music:

Casually flipping through the news networks last night, when little was known about the shootings and nothing was known about the shooter, I saw that those same conservatives are already using the Virginia Tech shootings as a way to lash out against culture they disapprove of. One particularly scattered conversation on CNN featured an anchor and a pundit using incident to suggest blame lies with a host of perceived societal ills: gun control, violent movies like Grindhouse, violent music, Don Imus. Yes, they somehow worked Don Imus into the conversation. The discussion made absolutely no sense, but it sure was spirited.

Eight years ago the post-Columbine debate sparked what some described as "a witch hunt" against shocking metal, goth and industrial music. If there's a similar witch hunt today, however, it won't be against metal, but rather violent rap music, which our panicky pundit was already chastising last night.

Rap is already in the crosshairs of cultural conservatives, who never succeeded in their effort to censor it years ago. This week they were already making a push against rap music after Imus stepped down: If he can't get away with using racist, sexist slang, they argued, why can rap artists? Now, in the wake of the deadliest shooting incident in U.S. history, they'll almost surely make a renewed call to censor rap on the basis of violence.

This anti-rap push probably won't make a lot of sense—based on the vague description of the shooter, who is described a loner born in South Korea, it's a safe bet that he probably wasn't a rap fan—but neither did the movement against Marilyn Manson. And, like Marilyn Manson in 1999, rap music has been slowly falling out of grace with listeners (sales have fallen steeply). With rap music already down, its longtime critics won't miss this opportunity to kick it.

The British Magazine, Q, has similar worries

So if rock bands will not be singled out for blame, who will? It’s far more likely to be hip-hop, a genre that still retains a frisson of danger and urban threat – even more so now that rap no longer dominates the mainstream. It’s easy to imagine ill-informed moral guardians denouncing the bleak, nihilistic worldview of “cocaine rap” stars such as Clipse and Young Jeezy.

The idea that somehow the violence that has befallen the most paradigmatic institution of "middle classness" in our society, the four year college, is somehow associated with hip hop is simply beyond me. Instead of looking to and blaming rappers, which I am certain people are doing and will continue to do at this very moment for this most heinous violence, we need to be honest: this was not the result of a violent hip hop culture. This was an act of violence that was committed by an English major in his fourth year at one of the top 100 colleges in America. I do not know what to blame; what culture or what attitudes. But I certainly know it isn't hip hop.

Technorati Tags: hip hop, virginia tech massacre

Songs I am Obsessing Over and other Stupid Stuff to Start the Week

2007-04-16T13:01:00.001-04:00

Between Taxes and Grading, I haven't had much time to be smart. So, while I would like to blog about how the "Imus situation" is somehow turning into an indictment of rap, cause, you know, somewhere in the rulebook of popular discourse it says, "Whenever there is a cultural crisis that indicts middle class Americans, you must point a finger at whatever popular music is lowest on the totem pole of culture capital to divert attention, see Columbine, etc.", I don't have the time... yet.

Instead here's a quick list of songs I am obsessing over. I have had dreams about and/or played these songs out in the last month and a half. I don't know what my playing these over and over means.

"The Locomotion" - by Little Eva

"Runaway" - by Del Shannon

"Baby Hold On To Me" - by Eddie Money

"Young Folks" - Peter Bjorn and John

"Here's Your Future" - The Thermals

"I'm Not Down" - The Clash

"Rebellion (Lies)" - The Arcade Fire

"Karen" - The National

"God Gave Me Style" - 50 Cent

"Only the Lonely" - Roy Orbison

"You've Got What it Takes" - Dinah Washington and Brook Benton

"Bird Dog"- The Everly Brothers

"Roscoe"- Midlake

You figure it out and if you have any idea leave a comment.

And I after last night's episode of The Sopranos I was left asking, "what on earth was that song they played at the end?" I knew I had heard it at least once, but couldn't remember at all. Thanks to Idolator we get an answer and an MP3 link. It was John Cooper Clarke's "Evidently Chickentown". Bloody awesome way to end a bloody awesome episode!

Technorati Tags: Imus, John Cooper Clarke

Ozzy Goes Willy Wonka in Order to Boost CD Sales

2007-04-14T11:40:00.001-04:00

As many of you most likely know, Ozzfest is going to be free this year. Sponsors are supposed to pick up the cost, but it is unclear if the level of talent will be as high as in years past. Nevertheless, it has kicked up some dust as another innovation by one of the more innovative people in the music entertainment business, Sharon Osbourne. In order to get some of that business kicked into high gear, Sharon and the Ozz have decided to go the route of "adding value" to their CDs. Somewhere down the line that decided to go the route of Willy Wonka and hide theire version of the "gold ticket" in their discs.

Though this summer's Ozzfest tour will cost fans nothing to attend, those who want to purchase Ozzy Osbourne's first new studio album in six years, "Black Rain," will now have a better shot at getting in the door, Billboard.biz has learned. The initial pressings of "Black Rain" will contain a code that will give fans a first crack at scoring a ticket to Ozzfest.

As previously reported, "Black Rain" will arrive May 22 via Epic. Specially marked copies of the new set will be available at participating retailers. Fans will be able to use a code found within the album's packaging to redeem two Ozzfest tickets via www.livenation.com/ozzfest starting June 8 -- four days before they're made available to the general public. Further details are available at www.ozzy.com.

Now that's added value! It's also a perfect way to increase demand and stave off some illegal trading when it counts the most: the initial weeks of release. We'll see if it works.

Technorati Tags: ozzy osbourne, sharon osbourne, cd sales, cds

The Trend Continues: Music Biz Going South... and Not for Warmer Weather

2007-04-11T14:40:00.001-04:00

You know you need to reconsider your business model when you get press press like this

The music business has to brace itself for more declines this year, Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen warned in a research report.

Overall, the "music market appears headed in (the) wrong direction," she said Thursday, estimating that global music sales fell 2%-3% in 2006.

"The slow start to 2007 (U.S. down 10% year-to-date) suggests another down year is likely," Reif Cohen said. "With digital growth naturally decelerating over time and the decline in physical sales accelerating, an imminent return to growth for the industry no longer appears likely."

Together with her European colleague Julien Roch, Reif Cohen estimates that music retail sales will decline 3% -- globally and in the U.S. -- in 2007. "This is a significant deterioration from our previous forecast of 2% growth both in the U.S. and globally, but may still be optimistic given the weak state of the market," she said. "Sales have declined in nearly all the major markets year-to-date, with the decline in the U.S. particularly precipitous."

Resuming coverage of Warner Music Group with a "neutral" rating Thursday, Reif Cohen said "the outlook for 2007 appears difficult given a weak start to the year, continued market weakness and more challenging comparisons."

Overall, she said she does not find WMG's valuation "to be attractive at these levels and continue to prefer entertainment names with a clearer growth outlook and/or company specific catalysts."

Nonetheless, Reif Cohen said music shares should get support from likely continued merger talk. "The worse the fundamentals, the more likely a merger with EMI becomes," she said.

However, the analyst also said she is "skeptical that there will be meaningful growth in fiscal-year 2008" for WMG.

Yes, we all know that we are ripping and burning you to death, but the only thing consumers are killing is the way you do business, not the music business in general. Note to record companies: think about achieving lower price points for downloads. Cheap will never beat free, but it will go a long way to getting your business back on board.

Technorati Tags: downloads, music industry, warner brothers, merril lynch

Narrative Justice and the Sopranos

2007-04-10T21:11:00.001-04:00

I caught this ditty and hope to make it a meme of sorts: How should the Soprano's end? James Jay Carafano of the Heritage Foundation has this to say in Esquire

"That's easy. Everybody should die. It's just like any Shakespearean tragedy -- Macbeth or Hamlet. When everybody has, in a sense, been tainted by evil, it's not feasible to let people live and therefore be redeemed. So what you do is just kill everybody off. Watch a Kurosawa film or go see Curse of the Golden Flower. Tony's got to be the last to die, of course. But they all need to go down in flames -- the kid, the wife, Meadow's fiance -- everybody. Nobody is safe."

Given that Carafano is aligned with an institute devoted to cheerleading our imperial moves into Iraq as well as helping to solidify the term The Long War of the 21st Century as a long-term military strategy, advocating that everyone "should die" who has been "tainted by evil" either proves this guy is A) a true believer or B) does not understand the irony of his off-the-cuff judgment.

So how should the Sopranos end? A question of normative narratives, good guys must beat bad guys, right prevails over wrong, i.e. writing straight from the pen of the Church Lady? Let me say this, I would hope that David Chase and his writers avoid this kind of easy-way-out morality play. The Sopranos has been a lot of things, but it hasn't been about how bad guys always get theirs. For me, if Tony gets killed or crushed it should come from the hands of another mobster like Paulie Walnuts or other crews from New York.

Better yet, I would like to see Tony live. I don't think it will happen. Too many forces have their resentments and are willing to damage an already-damaged man. But I say this since, at moments, The Sopranos has been one of the best critiques of American excess I have seen in years, Like the characters in HBOs Big Love, these characters live well-beyond their means (multiple wives, multiple lovers, etc) in tasteless, suburban McMansions where happiness seemingly never exists but multiple car garages proliferate. And despite their sins, the characters in each of these shows seem steeped in a misery that they could extricate themselves from if only they decided to give up their poor habits and make life choices that simplified their worlds. But, alas, they don't and they continue to struggle with how their good intentions beget miserable consequences.

Indeed, if there is any justice, it would be in the liberation of Dr. Melfi, whose death I fear most of all.

So, how should The Sopranos end?

Technorati Tags: TheSopranos, HBO, narrative justice

Idolator asks the Obvious Question: Why Free Music?

2007-04-09T14:07:00.001-04:00

While I love cheap music, I am in tune with Idolator's query about totally free music

why the rush to make so much music free, anyway? Sure, we've engaged in our fair share of shady downloading and guest-list wheedling, but the "all music should be free!" cries that have been growing steadily louder are making us wonder if there's been a fundamental shift in the way people value music, or at least a little bit of self-loathing on the part of people charged with leading music-related chatter. We can understand a backlash against the Cribs/Fabulous Life Of... bling-flaunting--heck, we're probably near its forefront--but what about allowing people to quit their day jobs and devote themselves to their craft on a fuller-time basis? Yes, the economics of the music business are currently shaking themselves out, and there's a fair amount of carnage as a result, but saying "well, no one will pay for this, so let's make everything free" is not only short-sighted, it sends out a message to consumers that music isn't worth money--or, one could argue, time.

My basic philosophy is that the music should be purchased at least once. I know that there are many counterexamples in my own collection, for example I have no idea how many "promo copies" I have purchased at used stores, but it is guiding philosophy and one I try to follow myself. Remember, you get what you pay for. And if you pay little, don't be disappointed if the quality of the music you get begins to suffer.

Technorati Tags: freemusic, idolator

Busy Busy Busy, Stuff

2007-04-07T09:05:00.001-04:00

This has been easily one of the busiest weeks of the year so far. Besides about 2 hours that I spent with my friend Yury on Tuesday and my date with the Fiance to seeBlades of Glory (standard dumb fun), that was about it for personal time this week. I'm not complaining, just explainig why blogging has slacked off. I need to finish off this semester and get a job, so that is high priority as well. A few leads here and there, but no offers so far. I think that will change soon. Don't ask me why. It's just a feeling.

Yesterday was an all-day field trip for one of my classes. We brought the students from Denison to downtown Columbus. I will blog about it when my students send me some pictures. Will be interesting.

On a media studies tip, I am just got my copy of The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia yesterday. I have a small entry on the disc jockey in the Midwest, but I wasn't given a comp copy. Given the numbers of contributors and the cost of production it would have bankrupt the press for sure. The book is beautiful. Hardbound and close to 1900 pages, the encyclopedia is a wonderful achievement. And I don't say that just because I am in it . As someone who has come to the Midwest late in life, a book like this is simply a wonderful education in the depth and varieties of the region. Hopefully your library will pick it up. Its got a $75 cover price, but I picked mine up for around $45, new, on Amazon. And it has wonderful entires on Midwestern media topics such as the Mutual Broadcasting Network, the television talk show as a genre, record labels, Essanay Studios, etc. Placed in a geographical framework, reading these genres imbues these media entities with another cultural facet that so many American media scholars simply ignore in their rush to the coasts. Like I said, get to your library and check it out!

Technorati Tags: The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia

Let's Run The Numbers... Downloads Up, CDs Down!

2007-04-05T21:54:00.001-04:00

Kids, it's called a trend. The Q1 numbers are out and plastic is losing to digital

Album sales are down 16.6% to 117.1 million units, according to Nielsen SoundScan, for the period running from January 1 through April 2. The consensus around the music business is that declines are mainly due to a weak release schedule, the consumer's loss of confidence in the CD and a reduction in store space for the format.

While CD sales were down 20.5%, digital track sales totaled 281.7 millions, outpacing album sales by more than 100 million units, according to Nielsen SoundScan. When those digital track sales are factored as a track equivalency to albums, album sales are only down 10.3%.

Technorati Tags: CDs, digitaldownloads, NielsenSoundscan

Listening for "The Game" in The Sound of Young America

2007-04-04T08:41:00.000-04:00

Killer Mike of Adamsville, GA and leader of Grind Time Official

In hip hop "The Game" refers to two issues that every contemporary performer from poor, urban American realities must negotiate: the hip hop scene and the underground business of illegal drug distribution. Knowing "The Game" is not only essential to success as a rapper (often to demonstrate one's authenticity that is part of the perpetual task of all hip hop and rock performers), but to making it in the day-to-day lives of so many poor young men and women who live in America's cities. To my mind there are only two shows in the US that have dealt with "The Game" with any sense humanity and compassion. The first is the much-celebrated HBO series, The Wire, whose fourth season, with it's depiction of how four young boys must handle the shattered social and political infrastructure of Baltimore, will go down as one of the most compelling seasons on television drama in American history. The other exists in a handful of interviews by a young, educated and ambitious radio host by the name of Jesse Thorn. While his excellent public radio show, The Sound of Young America, claims only eight over-the-air stations, his online efforts as a podcaster make the show a must-listen for anyone with broadband and an interest in American popular culture. More importantly it is the only show available on public radio that seems to have a set of ears that are intelligent and sensitive to the many issues surrounding hip hop aesthetics and culture.

Indeed, when The Sound of Young American deals with hip hop right it gets it right because of Thorn's talent as a compassionate interlocutor who loves and respects his subjects. One can hear how in recent interviews with hip hop expert, Jeff Chang , Atlanta-based rapper, Killer Mike and Philadelphia's own Peedi Crack, aka, Peedi Peedi, Thorn isolates the cultural importance of "The Game", particularly as it relates to the emergence of the hip hop subgenre of "crack rap". The result is that he is able to get his interviewees to open up speak about the many psychic and emotional aspects that "grinding" and "slinging" that bare upon their lives and hip hop in the early 21st century.

For your listening pleasure: 1) In the first clip one can hear the inner conflict that colors Peedi Crack's gratitude for his career as well as the sorrow has suffered in his time in prison and in experience many losses of peers and friends who are still imprisoned or have passed on. 2) In the second, lengthier clip, Killer Mike explains how the theme of drugs in hip hop demands an understanding of the recent social history of black, urban American that is all but unacknowledged and why "grind time", his label, has more to do with a work ethic than it does with drugs. 3) In the final clip, I draw from a recent interview I had with Mr. Thorn in February, 2007, wherein he explains that all one needs to get at these larger truths about culture is respect, an appreciation for the culture, and a willingness to listen.

Peedi Peedi interview segment from The Sound of Young America

Killer Mike interview segment from The Sound of Young America.

Segments from my interview with Jesse Thorn on February 22, 2007

Ed.Note: This is also crossposted at In Media Res.

Technorati Tags: killermike, peedicrack, peedipeedi, npr, jessethorn, thesoundofyoungamerica, publicradio, crackrap, jeffchang, timanderson

And The Wait for More Major Labels to do the Right Thing Begins... Drop DRM and Make Songs Available Even Cheaper Than They Are Today!

2007-04-03T00:11:00.001-04:00

The much ballyhooed announcement of EMI ditching of DRM is great news. But record companies are stubborn so we should be prepared to wait a while, no matter how much Steve Jobs claims that it is the right thing to do

"The right thing for the customer going forward is to tear down the walls that preclude interoperability by going DRM-free," says Jobs.

EMI's move was met with a string of no comments from reps for the other major labels. But privately, sources at rival major labels are expressing annoyance that EMI is "recklessly" jumping head first into a DRM-free environment without what they view as adequate research and testing about the impact on sales, piracy or consumer demand.

The other major labels remain concerned that selling music sans DRM will cannibalize sales. And some label sources are also expressing dismay that EMI's effort undercuts the industry's ability to correct the security problems that have plagued the CD format by creating a completely secure commercial environment for digital music.

"They're completely wrong," says Barney Wragg, head of digital for EMI Music worldwide. "This is about creating more opportunity in commercialized music by providing the right product to people who are prepared to pay for it...We think it's going to significantly increase the size of the market."

EMI is adopting DRM-free formats after Norah Jones's "Thinking About You", Relient K's "Must've Done Something Right", and Lily Allen's "Littlest Things" were all made available for sale in the MP3 format in trials held at the end of last year.

The other three majors have tinkered with selling DRM-free music in limited tests. The results of those trials have been largely viewed to be inconclusive.

But market observers say that its only a matter of time before the other majors ditch DRM. "This breaks the logjam," says David Pakman, president/CEO of eMusic, one retailer lobbying the majors for DRM-free content. “This is the beginning of the end of DRM in music."

I agree, however how quickly this happens will be interesting. Interoperability has always been a key issue for all forms of popular music. In the 1940s and 50s the question was could you get a player that ran at 78, 33 1/3 and 45 rpms? In the 1970s did you go for 8-Track or Cassette? In the 1980s did you buy Beta or VHS (yes, I know, that was TV, but same thing... in a way).

Now, one thing that does burn me is the cost per song: 99 cents seems to be high, particularly for catalogue items. I always loved the fact that catalogue items have been, traditionally, around 30% to 40% cheaper than new. So, in the 1980s you may have bought a new record for $10 but an older record that had been around for five years or so would be $5.99. Heck, sometimes you could get them 3 for 12 bucks, if not cheaper. The whole point was to get more music in the hands of listeners after the initial demand for these items had waned and build loyal consumers who felt compelled to investigate catalogue. True, I may have made tapes and bought used records, but I also dropped lots of coin on new catalogue. Lots! So, why not sell these items at half the cost? You have already made your initial profits and you want to encourage people to buy your product and make them interested in legal downloads. right? Right?

Echoing my point with a megaphone and cuss words Bob Lefsetz simply goes off on this announcement that EMI's DRM free cuts will cost $1.29 per song:

Why the fuck should they cost more?

One small step for mankind, and one half-step back. It would be like Neil Armstrong getting to the moon and not getting out. I mean if you’re going to go all that way…

This is the kind of bullshit pussyfooting that got the labels into hot water to begin with. If anything, tracks should cost LESS!

Oh, if you buy the complete album, you get the old price. But who the fuck wants a complete album of dreck by lame acts like the Good, the Bad & the Ugly that played this press conference?

You want to sell more tracks at the iTunes Store? Make them a quarter. Or fifteen cents or a dime. Then watch sales go through the roof.

Do you see cell phone prices rising? Do you see T-Mobile canceling family plans or making you include every last living relative to get them?

You don’t make half steps. You go all the way, or not at all. If you’re not willing to bet the company, then you’re not willing to win.

Take the case of Compaq. State of the art computers, using the highest quality many times tested parts, for a high price. Good plan for a while. But then Dell sold hardly tested parts in machines at a low price. So did Compaq lower their prices A LITTLE? No, they changed their business plan, and sold what Dell did at similar prices. And the company ultimately merged with HP to survive. And HP was doing badly against Dell until computers became commodity items and people preferred to buy them at their local retailer rather than call Dell and wait for a shipment. In other words, business conditions change, and you have to adjust.

This is not a new movie. It started unspooling in 1999. People can download music from the Internet. And then they started owning hand-held players en masse. Where’s the mystery? CD sales have dropped since the turn of the decade. Now they’re in free-fall and you RAISE THE PRICE??? Shit, if you’re gonna buy the whole album you might as well purchase the CD, you can rip it at ANY BIT RATE YOU WANT, and there’s NO copy protection!

Unbelievable bullshit. EMI deserves to go out of business. As for its lame competitors, they’re so paralyzed that they won’t even make a move. Edgar Bronfman, Jr. wants higher prices WITH the DRM. And Sony BMG is just trying to stay afloat, with an internal war aflame, with the Sony half fighting for its life. And Universal is so arrogant, it somehow believes since it’s got the largest market share with the biggest selling acts, it’s somehow immune. RIDICULOUS!

Start with the publishers. They’ve got to go to a percentage rate.

Go to the deals. Give the artists a fair shake, or soon none except for the most vapid no-talents will sign with major labels.

Then rejigger the economics so you can sell tracks at a cheap price.

Or, wake up to the future and realize more people want more music at a cheaper price and sell it to them this way. In quantity. Probably as licensed P2P. But not track by track, even album by album, this is even LESS than the labels had before.

Record labels? Your business model has changed forever. Why don’t you wake up and acknowledge this. If you don’t give the people what they want at what THEY feel is a fair price, they’re just gonna continue to steal. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

Yeah, what he said without the swear words...

Technorati Tags: drm, apple, itunes, emi, emusic, boblefsetz,

Sunday Fun(nies)

2007-04-01T11:30:00.001-04:00

It's Sunday and in Columbus it is sunny with the right mix of clouds and spring showers. It's also the day before another Championship Game Storm with Florida. We saw this game back in January and, well, it wasn't that nice for Buckeye Nation. Heck, the b-ball teams played earlier this year and Florida absolutely waxed OSU. This could get ugly, but I hope it doesn't... go Bucks!

On the fun note, that is Fun 2.0, we have the following...

Clancy Ratliff has hepped me to two wonderful sites that make it even easier to share and construct knowledge. Both SlideShare and JumpCut are pretty solid. SlideShare allows you to easily share PowerPoint and OpenOffice docs (not Keynote, but that app exports to PPT with relative ease) and JumpCut allows you to upload and edit video. That's amazing, just amazing!

Been listening to a number of new acquisitions, including a download from iTunes of Two of Us by Dinah Washington and Brook Benton. As good as pop music has ever been! Also notable in my mix of late is the soundtrack to Broken Flowers, Fugazi's End Hits and Steve Cropper's With a Little Help from My Friends.

I am working on a number of longer blog entries about why every researcher in the world should go with Firefox, the decline of the album as a music industry staple, and 10 top ten things that I thought about in March. And, finally, between job ap after job ap, I promise an submission to In Media Res about Hip Hop and The Sound of Young America.

Now Back to Grading! Woo hoo!

Technorati Tags: fugazi, slideshare, jumpcut, clancyratliff, mediacommons, inmediares, dinahwashington, brookbenton, stevecropper

Framing the Policy Debate: The Fight Over the Satellite Radio Merger is on!

2007-03-31T14:02:00.001-04:00

It's well known to most of you how much I love radio. Let me reset that... I love good radio. Good radio programming is coming in many shapes and forms these days. I listen to a lot of podcasts for example, a habit that is relatively new (about 24 months, perhaps). And I would listen to more radio broadcasting in my car or even over my receiver at home if I lived in a country that gave a damn about quality and variety like, say, Canada. But no, I live in the US where the only radio that is distinguished as quality and local are the sports talk stations that pepper the AM dial. It's a cliche, but if you drive through America the rule of the airwaves is similarity, not difference.

Which has spurred conversations with my fiance' about getting sattelite programming just for Air America and Stern. Of course, one is on XM and the other on Sirius, so we choose neither. In light or crap local programming and the loss of our Air America affiliate to an even crappier version of right-wing talk (does anyone, can anyone even listen to ten minutes of Laura Ingraham? Stupid and snoozeworthy is quite a vicious combo), the XM-Sirius merger is the kind of gift but you knew the NAB would fight it. After all they have a monopoly and any competition that erodes audience is to be resisted. And what we are seeing now by both the Sat Radio and Terrestial Radio camps is a lesson from argumentation 101: framing is key to any argument

How Congress and government regulators frame the debate over a merger -- specifically, whether they consider new gadgets and services such as iPods, music-playing cellphones and high-definition radio to be in competition with satellite radio -- could have a profound impact on the future of other media businesses.

The NAB, which lobbies for traditional radio and television companies, is in an awkward position, some government officials say. On one hand, NAB members argue that satellite radio's national coverage does not compete with traditional radio stations' local presence.

"I don't see how anyone can say that Clear Channel competes head-to-head with satellite radio in a national market," said NAB spokesman Dennis Wharton, referring to the radio company that owns hundreds of local stations. "It doesn't have a national footprint in every market in America like satellite radio."

But separately, the NAB is trying to make a case with the FCC that traditional radio companies do compete with satellite radio and therefore should be allowed to own more local stations than current rules permit.

Sirius chief executive Mel Karmazin, who testified before Congress this month, defines the market differently. He maintains that satellite radio is only one player in an broader "audio entertainment" market that has changed dramatically since the FCC approved the licensing of satellite-radio providers 10 years ago.

Car stereo systems, he said, are equipped to play music from iPods, while cellphone companies sell sports programming and music downloads. "I can't imagine who could say we're not competing with some of those things," Karmazin said in an interview yesterday. "If you're listening to music on an iPod while driving in your car, you're not listening to satellite radio."

My favorite part of the above block is how the NAB is resisting competition with one hand while trying to lobby for even more of a monopoly position with the other. Gotta hand it to them: too much is never enough!

Technorati Tags: NAB, XM, Sirius, satelliteradio, ipod, FCC, MelKarmazin, merger

A&R 2.0?

2007-03-30T12:57:00.001-04:00

In it's own way, not only was this a matter of time, but this is one of the bigger news items in the music biz today and for the future...

Sony BMG U.K. is getting closer to the unsigned artist community through a new interactive Web initiative.

The music major is encouraging musicians to become members of its RCA or Columbia labels' A&R "virtual neighbourhood," where users can post tracks, editorial and visual content on new community blogging Web sites columbiademos.co.uk and rcademos.co.uk.

Staff at Sony BMG U.K. are participating across the new platforms as bloggers and digital A&Rs.

The project is the brainchild of Sony BMG U.K. and Ireland chairman/CEO Ged Doherty. "This is the first step of the A&R part of our digital strategy," he tells Billboard.biz. "It immediately fitted what my personal vision of what our company needs to be, which is open, transparent, grass roots, community-based, and employing Web 2.0 technology and the spirit of it."

Ok, first things first, let's make certain that musicians know what they get into...

If you choose to do this read the small print. If you don't know what the small print means, get a lawyer to read it for you. - I strongly suspect that there will be something in these end user agreements that give these labels the "pole position" for you if you get hot. Worse yet the labels may be able to claim ownership outright, in perpetuity, like MySpace and MTV's early end user agreements attempted to pull off. In other words, "know your rights".

Think hard and see if YOU can do better than a major - Ok, so you want to be a superstar? We all do. But odds are against you and the fact is that signing to a major may get you into the catbird's seat for licensing and promotion, you will have contracts where your percentage of the cut will be low, you won't own your masters and you will spend the majority of your time toiling through a contract that can work more against you than for you

This means even more work for the artist and less work for record companies... so where will be your A&R cut? - The fact is A&R is hard work. You spend a lot of time searching for talent, traveling, promoting, handshaking and performing other kinds of social acts (some of which can straddle the law). And then there is the part that includes listening to CD after CD demo. Making your profile available online in these major label sites essentially makes some, not all, of the A&R work more efficient. That's work. That's a labor... so where is your cut? Well, don't expect any. I don't expect A&R 2.0 shifting profits into the hands of the laborers... it's about stakeholders pure and simple and this is simply another, more efficient mode of capital accumulation.

In short, if you don't watch out you will have "new boss, same as the old boss" over and over again. And worse yet, that new boss won't be the artist.

Technorati Tags: A&R, A&R2.0, recordlabels, socialnetworking, socialnetworks

Let's Hope They Get It Right This Time

2007-03-29T18:19:00.000-04:00

I have my fingers crossed that the royalties issue will be reversed to help the webcast community grow. Let's hope this happens with a second chance

Webcasters are getting a second chance to make their case against the decision to raise royalty fees of Internet radio services.

Chief Copyright Royalty Judge James Scott Sledge issued a one-paragraph order Tuesday (March 20), granting a rehearing to the groups protesting the Copyright Royalty Board's (CRB) decision to spike rates.

The parties who filed motions for rehearing - including Royalty Logic, Inc, Radio Braodcasters, the Digital Media Association, National Public Radio and SoundExchange – have until April 2 to file written arguments that lay-out their positions.

The CRB will revisit its decision March 6 setting performance royalty rates for streaming sound recordings over the Internet. NPR's VP communications, Andi Sporkin, claims that the new rates are at least 20 times more than the amounts stations were paying in the past.

Come on CRB, don't kill the golden goose. Webcasting can be part of our future, but only if we want it to. Now, do we want it to...?

Technorati Tags: CRB, webcaastingroyalties, NPR

iTunes Finally Allows Me To "Complete My Album", Enters 21st Century

2007-03-29T18:12:00.000-04:00

File this one under it's about time

The iTunes Music Store has introduced a new feature that allows consumers to buy the remainder of an album in one click after initially purchasing select tracks on an a la carte basis.

iTunes is calling the offering "Complete My Album" and it works like this: If a consumer has already purchased three singles from an album via iTunes at 99 cents each and then wants the whole album, priced at say, $9.99, the balance of the tracks is available as bundle for $7.02. The amount the album cost is reduced depends on how many individual tracks from the collection the user has already purchased.

"Its about crediting you for the things you have already paid for," says Eddie Cue VP of applications for Apple.

Next up, no DRM?

Technorati Tags: itunes, apple, album, drm

We're Number Seven! US Slips in the Information Economy, Study Reports

2007-03-28T13:20:00.001-04:00

If you follow any of this stuff, you knew it would only be a matter of time when other countries that take education and infrastructure more seriously than the US would pass us...and they are

European countries and Singapore have surpassed the United States in their ability to exploit information and communication technology, according to a new survey.

The United States, which topped the World Economic Forum's "networked readiness index" in 2006, slipped to seventh. The study, out Wednesday, largely blamed increased political and corporate interference in the judicial system.

The index, which measures the range of factors that affect a country's ability to harness information technologies for economic competitiveness and development, also cited the United States' low rate of mobile telephone usage, a lack of government leadership in information technology and the low quality of math and science education.

As one cabbie from Somalia told me recently, "Americans hate math and, well, that's a shame and an opportunity for people like me". It is and while the report notes that the, "U.S. market environment remains the best in the world in terms of how easy it is to set up a business, get loans and have access to market capital", we just aren't investing in creating that capital, i.e. minds, well enough.

Note to self... get mobile phone and brush up on calculus...

Technorati Tags: informationeconomy, USeconomy, digitaleconomy, creativeeconomy

Tall People Gettin' The Fashion Shaft

2007-03-28T12:49:00.001-04:00

As a tall person (over two meters)this was just too irresistible to not post

France's almost two million tall people cannot find shoes big enough or pants long enough, let alone buy a fitted shirt that hugs the body where it is supposed to.

"Sleeves are always too short, women's waistbands are in the wrong place and you can never find shoes," Didier Mattiuzzi, who heads an association of tall people called Altitudes, said at a media conference Tuesday.

"We are lobbying for help for tall people," said the willow-like Mattiuzzi, a slim 191 centimetres (almost six foot four) tall.

Tall people invariably had cold feet and cold shoulders in short beds, he said.

But the situation was even worse in hospitals, where stretchers as well as hospital lifts also were too short, forcing the sick to have to sit up to be wheeled to a ward. But operating tables nowadays had extensions, Mattiuzzi said.

Car roofs were too low, shower cords too short, baths never long enough and drivers forced to stick a leg each side of a steering wheel. "Tall people even have to sit on the passenger seat of scooters", he added.

Sing it!

Technorati Tags: tallpeople, tallpeoplewardrobe, frenchfashion

Make em Laugh... ONN does it Better than Them All

2007-03-27T21:59:00.000-04:00

The Onion TV is the s**t. I was really skeptical, but this kind of video is too good to deny...
In The Know: Our Troops In Iraq

As this article essentially asks, why should we even think they couldn't pull it off?

Having already blossomed as a newspaper, Web site and book publisher, The Onion — perhaps the most dominant provider of fake news anywhere — is bringing its brand of humor to the hot medium of the moment: Online video.

The dispatches on the Onion News Network, which goes live Tuesday, aren't likely to be causing much missed sleep over at CNN and Fox News Channel, unless those outlets start covering fake news stories like Civil War re-enactors being dispatched to
Iraq.

But on the Web, The Onion will be going up against several others who have already established themselves in comedy video, including Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart."

By the way, The Sound of Young America has a great podcast of the Senior Editor of The Onion, Scott Dikkers. Listen, learn and support the show as best you can!

Technorati Tags: theonion, thesoundofyoungamerica, tsoya, ONN, oniontv

Even more TV Music Tie Ups in the Future

2007-03-27T21:31:00.001-04:00

I thought that this article in not only interesting but inevitable...

The woman behind the soundtracks to "The OC" and "Grey's Anatomy" is launching her own label.

Alexandra Patsavas, the influential TV and film music supervisor who has helped put Death Cab for Cutie, Snow Patrol and the Fray on the mainstream map, has inked a deal with Warner Music Group's Atlantic Records to form a new imprint, Chop Shop Records. The label shares the name of Patsavas' 10-year-old California-based firm, Chop Shop Music Supervision.

Patsavas has been in negotiations with Atlantic about creating a label since last year. The subject was first broached in a meeting with Atlantic president Julie Greenwald at the Coachella music festival.

"It's something we came up with together," Patsavas says. "A label seems like a natural extension of what a music supervisor does . . . You can come across things very early, and there have been bands along the way I would have loved to have worked with more closely."

Yep, duh indeed! I mean, has anyone ever heard of The Monkees?

Technorati Tags: musicsupervision, recordlabels, tieups, alexandrapatsavas, juliegreenwald

There will be much later... especially about MediaCommons

2007-03-27T09:14:00.000-04:00

Still in meetings and I will post some of the things that we want to do that have come out of our three days of meetings. But we have been busy -- 9 hour meetings that continue into the night and I simply have to put the computer down. This project, I gotta admit, is important. Really important. In fact, I have not only high expectations, but some ways revolutionary ones for the way that media analysis cna scholarship can be done in the future.

Call that a tease... ciao!

Flickr Set of MediaCommons peeps playing Wii

2007-03-26T13:01:00.001-04:00

Here's a sample of some of us playing Wii...
FYI, we had had some "drink" before... and by some I mean Saki

Technorati Tags: wii, wiimotion, mediacommons

I would register for this Weddding Present

2007-03-26T12:17:00.001-04:00

From my own nerd tendencies.... I am interested and will buy!

The Wedding Present will release their complete sessions for the late John Peel's BBC Radio 1 show on March 26 via Sanctuary Records in the UK and a week later in the rest of the world.

Complete Peel Sessions: 1986-2004 spreads in-studio sessions, live sets, and band interviews across six discs, and it includes the band's cover of Orange Juice's "Felicity" as well as a venture into Ukrainian folk music.

Hardly media studies, I know. But man, I love the Wedding Present...

Technorati Tags: weddingpresent, peelsessions, johnpeel, boxsets

Let's Have a Laugh!

2007-03-26T09:51:00.001-04:00

Deadwood Pancakes... published a few months ago and good for a laugh (BTW, not "office safe" as it has Adult Language... i.e. they say the F word)

Technorati Tags: deadwood, youtube, deadwoodpancakes

Jersey Shore!

2007-03-26T09:20:00.000-04:00

It is beautiful. Woke up at six and took a long walk before breakfast. I found some shells and listened to The Church's "Starfish" and blissed out. I am working on some media posts but right now I am meeting the MediaCommons people and will talk about it later. Ciao!

A MediaCommons Note

2007-03-25T08:35:00.000-04:00

I am at a retreat with the good people of MediaCommons for the next few days. And while I will try to do some basic blogging, I would love it if you guys made your way to that site and participated. No, you don't have to have a media degree... it is a commons. The debate is scholarly but congenial and if you have any ideas we, the editorial board, are listening. By the way, there are a bunch of wonderful clips here that you can access and post comments on. I will be posting something soon, but for now, I am about to go. Rock on!

TV Guide develops an "Internet Guide"... kind of...

2007-03-24T17:00:00.001-04:00

Data aggregation is tough not because getting the stuff is the problem, rather weeding through it is. So, if you have a brand that is well known as a kind of trusted data aggregator, then you have a head start as more and more of us get our entertainment over the net, or at least that's the way TV Guide sees it

TV Guide, which has helped viewers navigate through thousands of TV shows for 53 years, now wants to do the same for Internet video. Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc. will launch a test version next month of an online video search tool that allows viewers to find clips and full episodes of TV shows now being posted on the Web. A formal launch is planned for September.

The tool will not try to aggregate the thousands of user-generated videos featuring pet tricks, skits and other antics being posted on sites such as YouTube and Revver.

Instead, it will scour about 60 Web sites from major networks such as ABC and Fox and other video portals such as AOL and Google to find network and original programming produced by major media companies.

"Everybody says, 'Who's going to be the TV Guide of online video?' and we say, why shouldn't it be us?" said Richard Cusick, senior vice president of digital media at Gemstar-TV Guide. "We're making a bet, but we think it's a safe bet and consistent with our mission."

So, using its brand power as a trusted source, TV Guide will work to maintain it's "trusted source" status by only giving us "corporate media"? Or is this simply another sign about how what was once old will work to maintain it's dominance? Who knows? All I know is that as broadband penetration grows (right now it is around 20% or US HH), I can see how there will be more and more of a market for this kind of limited-but trusted service.

Technorati Tags: TVGuide, Gemstar, internetTV, dataaggregation

Can you say "Audience Erosion"?

2007-03-23T19:45:00.001-04:00

I don't know about NBC's TV 360 initiative, but you can certainly see how the net is sweating when you read something like this

On the set of their hit game show "Deal or No Deal," NBC executives made a two-hour pitch to media buyers Thursday on why advertising on their network is a good deal.
ADVERTISEMENT

More than half of the presentation was devoted to the marketing opportunities presented by the network's TV 360 broadband initiative, which includes streaming, social networking and special features accompanying NBC's series on NBC.com.

NBC has been the most aggressive among the broadcast networks in its expansion into the digital universe, and ad buyers, in town this week to get an early glimpse at broadcast networks' development for next season, have taken notice.

NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly reiterated his belief that NBC, which is enjoying success with "Heroes," "The Office," "My Name Is Earl" and "Deal," was a step away from again becoming the top broadcast network.

Reilly also spoke passionately about critically praised but struggling new series "30 Rock," which was prominently featured in clips throughout the presentation, and "Friday Night Lights."

"Nothing is guaranteed, and the ratings are low, but I can't help but believe that '30 Rock' and 'Friday Night Lights' have the potential to be 'St. Elsewhere' and 'Cheers,"' he said.

That would be 'St. Elsewhere' and 'Cheers' without the numbers.

Technorati Tags: NBC, TV360, KevinReilly, socialnetworking

Bjork gets even uglier than that Swan Dress.

2007-03-23T14:51:00.001-04:00

Idolator has got the goods on the new Bjork album: it is in the lead for title of the ugliest album cover of the year. You just have to see it to believe it.

Technorati Tags: bjork, cdart, albumart, idolator

Andy Barker, PI and The Fear of Six and Out

2007-03-23T14:39:00.001-04:00

At my fiance's house, Thursday night is milkshake and TV night. The kiddos get milkshakes and we watch some TV. Because I had so much work on my plate I didn't get in until 8:40pm, which meant I missed family viewing (the kids were playing Tony Hawk, which they are just entranced by) and now we all we had to look forward to was 30 Rock. Well, turns out we are just screwed there as well since, like every other TV show on the nets, new episodes seem to be for sweeps only. So I don't get my dose of Tracey Morgan, but I do get Andy Barker, PI, which both me and my beau laugh at and, *sigh*, realize that this show seems destined for six and out. It's too understated, too quirky and too odd. By the way, I hope I am very wrong about it, but I just don't see it. All of my worst fears were confirmed when I when to check on the show's online episodes and there they are... all six of em, even though the net has only showed the first two. It's almost a concession that you aren't gonna get more than these six episodes. Heck, there is even an episode with Amy Sedaris that is listed as an "online exclusive". All of this, I have to say, is a big bummer. I really don't want to get into a show that won't be around and this show, while it made me laugh, seems like more of a contractual debt that is being paid to Conan O'Brien than an actual attempt to develop something solid.

All of which brings me around to the issue of narrative payoff and the commitments that viewers make in terms of time. One of the biggest issues recently bandied about by TV fans is the lack of payoff that one gets when you commit to show such as Lost... a show that seems to many audiences to be about deferred gratification. I don't watch it and part of the reason for that has to do with the fact that the last thing I need to make is another commitment with no payoff of any sort. As one pal of mine states, "Nothing sucks worse than watching a TV show only to know it will be canceled." I agree. I hate the fact that I loved so many shows that ended with loose ends.

So, if I believe that Andy Barker, PI will get canceled should I even bother? If I do, will I get invested and be left with wanting at least 13 more episodes? Or do I stay away and be part of the self-fulfilling prophecy of its doom (like it matters, I aint no Nielsen family)?

Heck, I think I will just watch all the online episodes and leave it at that.

Technorati Tags: AndyBarkerPI, sitcoms, NBC

UniTube? or Let a Million Videomakers Bloom?

2007-03-22T17:19:00.001-04:00

You knew it was only a matter of time. Variety reports that Universal is making music videos primarily for YouTube distribution

Film marketing has taken on a new face this week: music videos on YouTube.

A down-and-dirty music video featuring film footage was shot for Universal Pictures release "Dead Silence" and received more than 35,000 views. It's quite possible all the people who saw the video are the only people who went to see the film. ("Dead Silence" opened this past weekend grossing an estimated $7.7 million for the three-day frame, finishing at No. 4 overall.)

The video, shot for under $10,000, was cut to a song by post-hardcore band Aiden titled "We Sleep Forever." The band's label, Victory Records, pitched the song, and execs decided to use it, but not in the film. In fact, the song is nowhere in the film -- not even an end-title. Now, it's a value add on the soundtrack album, which also features the score of former Nine Inch Nails keyboardist Charlie Clouser. Additionally, the YouTube video will be added onto the DVD release of the film.

Kathy Nelson, president of film music for Universal Pictures, says this type of guerilla marketing is a vehicle to promote film releases online. In fact, Nelson is using this approach on the companion to the highly anticipated comedy "Knocked Up" (brought to us by Judd Apatow, co-writer/director of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin”) and she's choosing small label partners versus major powerhouses. The "Dead Silence" soundtrack is being release on Lakeshore Records, and "Knocked Up" by Concord Records.

"Lakeshore and Concord are being much more aggressive about how to market online," Nelson says. "It's all about iTunes and YouTube and cyberspace."

For me it is the economics that is the lesson and, perhaps, OK GO is to blame. Those videos are entertaining and, well, cheap. In a day where TV videos start in the millions rather than the thousands and hardly get any airplay, this is, in a way, a good sign for many low budget videomakers. In other words, have an idea, you may be able to get it funded as media companies will be more than happy to part with thousands rather than millions.

Technorati Tags: youtube, universal, musicvideos, juddapatow, lakeshorerecords, charlieclouser, nineinchnails

Calvert DeForest 1921-2007

2007-03-21T23:14:00.001-04:00

This news hurts...Calvert DeForest, aka Larry 'Bud' Melman, has passed

NEW YORK: The balding, bespectacled nebbish who gained cult status as the oddball Larry "Bud" Melman on David Letterman's late night television shows has died after a long illness.

The Brooklyn-born Calvert DeForest, who was 85, died Monday at a hospital on Long Island, the Letterman show announced Wednesday.

He made dozens of appearances on Letterman's shows from 1982 through 2002, handling a variety of twisted duties: dueting with Sonny Bono on "I Got You, Babe," doing a Mary Tyler Moore impression during a visit to Minneapolis where that television show was set, handing out hot towels to arrivals at New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal.

"Everyone always wondered if Calvert was an actor playing a character, but in reality he was just himself — a genuine, modest and nice man," Letterman said in a statement. "To our staff and to our viewers, he was a beloved and valued part of our show, and we will miss him."

Technorati Tags: letterman, calvertdeforest, larrybudmelman

eMusic can be Yours, if the price is right

2007-03-21T15:55:00.001-04:00

Idolator notes via Hypebot that my fave internet music retailer may be up for sale

Hypebot reports that eMusic--the site for people who like to drunk-download fifty indie-rock songs at a time--might be up for sale. The question comes just after Warner-owned Vice Records pulled its albums from the online retailer, meaning that people looking for the new Bloc Party album are going to get directed elsewhere.

Download as much as you are able to now before everything changes!

Technorati Tags: emusic, idolator, hypebot, vicerecords, warnerbrothers

"300" a new Icon of Sorts?

2007-03-21T11:43:00.001-04:00

Money talks and BS walks... and with the triumph of 300 at the BO this last week or so, it doesn't surprise me to see this blog entry by Anne Thompson, deputy editor or Variety

Much like such iconic movies as "Jaws," "Star Wars," "Pulp Fiction" or "The Matrix," director Zack Snyder and comicbook creator Frank Miller's "300" looks to be a shapeshifter movie for the new millennium. Beyond turning Gerard Butler into an action star and revitalizing the R rating, "300" is going to have a big impact, because it has proved the effectiveness of a moviemaking technique that blends stylized graphic and live-action elements seamlessly -- and at $64 million, relatively inexpensively. It's the birth of a new hybrid cinema, says genre marketing consultant Jeff Conner ("The Animatrix"). "Call it live-action anime. It's like doing a high school play on a stage with digital backdrops. It's a new visual language with a different reality."

I haven't see it yet but I must say that after talking to audiences about all of their responses have been tinged with a big hint of "guilty pleasure". Almost to person, I have heard, "it is big, dumb, graphic and violent... but I loved watching it." In other words, expect more, not less...

Mummy"), who is eager to give Conran another chance to prove himself with the technique. "'300,' which is the perfect combination of a story and a visual style, validates this approach. You'll see a lot more of these kinds of movies that combine heavy CGI with human characters. '300' feels huge. These movies are expanding what you can do. If you know what you're doing, you can make these movies for air."
"Transformers" producer Don Murphy thinks the technique also would work in a more contemporary setting.
"'300' shows that you can create a completely stylized world for less money than you ever could before," he says. "As long as it's the right project, you'll see films taken to some dazzling places. I have several projects set in the '60s. If done right, I could make the '60s as relevant as ancient Greece."
Few of the imitators are likely to be commercial. "There's going to be some wacko knockoffs from subcontractors in India and South Korea," says one studio producer. "The race is on."
Miller quotes author Theodore Sturgeon's law: "He said, 'Ninety percent of everything is crud.' You'll find that applies to everything that comes down the pipeline."
The danger is in thinking that a film that is the perfect match of style, story and technology can be easily imitated.
"Things can feel fresh only a few times," says producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who supervised "The Matrix" at Warner Bros. as head of production. "Fresh is another word for originality. When you utilize the same method they used on '300,' you're already one generation less fresh. The technology is evolving and opening up in different ways. But it comes down to the same thing: Zack Snyder had an individual point of view as a director about what the audience would embrace. The time was right. Whether it's 'Matrix' or 'Pulp Fiction,' it's about the iconic nature of the movie. Knockoffs of 'The Matrix' weren't iconic. That level of talent is a rare commodity."

Yeah, that third Matrix film really stunk didn't it?

Technorati Tags: 300, filmstyle, actionfilm, AnneThompson, CGI

Good News: ARSC likes my book

2007-03-20T23:21:00.000-04:00

My press informed me today in an e-mail that Making Easy Listening: Material Culture And Postwar America is an awards finalist for the 2006 Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) in the area of "Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research". Honestly, I am humbled. I had found out that someone had nominated me, although I do not know who, but to reach finalist status is just, well, it makes the hard work worth it to know that someone appreciated it. And, to be frank, when you look at past winners and finalists, you can see why I am humbled: there are a lot of good books on that list and just to be mentioned in that company is exciting. So thanks and now I need to save up for a flight to Milwaukee in May for the ceremony!

Technorati Tags: makingeasylistening, arsc, arscawards

DiMA is In the Webcasting Royalty Fightand Canadian's Get a New Copyright Ruling

2007-03-20T11:42:00.001-04:00

I haven't blogged much about copyright royalty problems, but I assure you I haven't forgotten the debate...

Billboard notes that DiMA has joined in the fight against the CRB decision with a webcaster royalty rate challenge

Add the Digital Media Assn. (DiMA) to the parties challenging the Copyright Royalty Board's (CRB) decision setting webcaster rates for streaming sound recordings. The trade group today (March 19) filed a motion for a re-hearing with the CRB.

National Public Radio also asked the CRB for a rehearing earlier today.

"We do not believe that the Copyright Royalty Board intended to shut down the vast majority of legitimate online radio services immediately when it issued its decision, yet that is the sober reality facing many services," DiMA executive director Jonathan Potter said in a statement. "We hope that the judges will re-hear these three issues as they will have a particularly negative and immediate impact on our industry."

Billboard also points out that The Canadian Government recently made a landmark music royalty ruling

The Canadian government has made its first ruling calling for mandatory payments to rights holders for the use of music on the Internet.

In a landmark move that sets a standard for royalties owed to songwriters, Canada's federal agency, the Canadian Copyright Board, ruled that in the case of permanent downloads, 7.9 percent of the price of a song must go back to copyright holders.

For downloads that require a web subscription, and for on-demand streaming music, the rates are 5.9 and 4.6 percent of the cost of a month's subscription, respectively.

The Canadian Copyright Board announced its ruling on the proposed tariff by CMMRA/SODRAC Inc. (CSI) for the use of any form of music on the Internet on March 16.

The ruling felt short of what CSI had originally proposed. It had asked for a royalty rate of 15 percent of the price of a song, or 10 cents (US 17 cents) per song, whichever is greater. For subscription-based downloads, it had asked for a fee of $1 (US $1.17) a month or 10 percent of the subscription cost.

Will have more to day about this later, but for now I am off to lecture writing...

Technorati Tags: webcastroyalties, crb, CanadianCopyrightBoard, copyright, royalties, webcasting, NPR, DIMA

This Years Model: Elvis C Reissues His Records for the 3rd Time (4th Time The Charm?)

2007-03-19T16:59:00.001-04:00

A few years ago I gave a paper on how reissuing seemed out of hand and Elvis Costello and David Bowie were cases of how labels were involved in insane (and I would say deceptive) searches for "authentic" albums. In that paper I noted that the logic of these reissues and artists meant that such definitive albums was never achievable. In fact, what we would see is more and more reissuing and, well, guess what? Here We Go again...

Universal Music Enterprises has acquired 11 albums from Elvis Costello's early catalog, with plans to re-release the artist's material via reissues, deluxe editions, compilations and box sets.

The albums acquired begin with Costello's 1977 debut, "My Aim Is True," and continue through "This Year's Model" (1978), "Armed Forces" (1979), "Get Happy!!" (1980), "Almost Blue" (1981), "Trust" (1981), "Imperial Bedroom" (1982), "Punch the Clock" (1983), "Goodbye Cruel World" (1986), "King of America" (1986) and "Blood and Chocolate" (1986).

Although these albums have already been reissued in expanded form by Rykodisc as well as Rhino, UME promises its new versions will be the "definitive reissues." The company also plans to produce limited edition releases for its Hip-O Select imprint, DVDs of videos and concerts and usher Costello's music into new formats such as ringtones.

That last paragraph is the most interesting. While selling the definitive, the company will, in turn, repurpose these mechanicals into other new media domains. I am not so certain that some 50 year old post-punk wants a ringtone of "Watching the Detectives", but I haven't done the research on that. I am certain that if, indeed, that 50 year wants an Elvis C ringtone, it better be the "definitive" version of said song!

Technorati Tags: ElvisCostello, cdreissues, mediacatalogues, Rhino, Rykodisc, UniversalMusicEnterprises, ringtones

Q: Why is Portland Indie-Town USA? A: Cause you can Live There Cheaply and Don't Need a Car

2007-03-18T21:29:00.001-04:00

I thought this was interesting: Given all of the talk about the Creative Economy, it's nice to see a profile like this one. Essentially here is the argument: labels grow in Portland because the place is full of creatives who don't need a car and can afford to live a decent life...

Eric Mast started his own record label because his car broke down. And because he lived in Portland, where he could live cheaply. That's the simplified version of the story behind the 1998 launch of Mast's label, Audio Dregs.

Mast, a.k.a. E*Rock, was on his way to performing his first DJ gig at a going-away party for a member of his rock band when his maroon 1992 Ford Taurus fired its last piston. That led to his epiphany. "I realized

that you don't need a car in Portland," Mast says, "so I saved up the money I'd otherwise have spent on gas, car insurance and upkeep to release a 7-inch by my brother."

Now his brother, E*Vax, is recording with Björk, and E*Rock is still releasing albums on Audio Dregs, a label David Byrne recently named as one of his favorites. Mast's accomplishments are remarkable, but his story-that combination of pluck and opportunity-is a common one here, according to interviews with owners of 20 of the more than 60 independent record labels that call Portland home.

Why do labels grow here? Owners credit some of the standard attributes of the city's creative culture-cheap rent, a pool of talented artists, individualized printing presses and cool independent record shops. And it's also homebase for Allegro/Nail, one of the country's top five indie distributors, representing releases by more than 100 small record labels.

"Portland has more of everything than other towns of a similar size-the whole 'more per capita' aspect; more restaurants, movie theatres, independent record stores, strip clubs, breweries and indie labels," says Chris Scofield of the Strange Attractors label, who works at Allegro as a day job.

Technorati Tags: portland, creativeeconomy, independentmusic, musicindustry, ericmast, audiodregs

Betty Hutton, 1921-2007

2007-03-17T14:01:00.000-04:00

The death of Betty Hutton this week was something of a shock since I didn't know she was still alive. Unlike most people I knew, I came to Betty Hutton through music first, not film. Specifically, I became a fan after reading this review in Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide and purchasing the compilation "Spotlight on... Betty Hutton. It was simply one if the more brassy, ballsy, fun, life-affirming records I purchased that year and I soon searched out the films, Annie Get Your Gun, The Perils of Pauline and The Miracle at Morgan's Creek, the comic masterpiece by Preston Sturges.

Her New York Times Obituary took great notice of rags to riches to rags life...

Ms. Hutton’s electric presence in films like “The Fleet’s In” and Preston Sturges’s “Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” masked emotional problems rooted in a poverty-stricken childhood. As a young girl, she sang for coins on street corners and in speakeasies to help support her alcoholic mother, who had been abandoned by Ms. Hutton’s father.

Years after Ms. Hutton’s film career ended, those emotional problems still plagued her. “I tried to kill myself,” she said in 1983, recalling her decline after fading from public notice.

Ms. Hutton re-emerged in the 1970s, when reporters learned she was working as a cook and housekeeper in the rectory of a Roman Catholic church in Portsmouth, R.I. Before being rescued and rehabilitated by a priest, she said, she had become addicted to sleeping pills and alcohol and had lost what she estimated to be a $10 million fortune.

Her life included four husbands and despite her onstage success, her offstage life could never measure up to her career. She was the proverbial Child of an Alcoholic who suffered the consequences of problems that she could not identify. She once told a reporter that...

`When I mentioned that I wanted to be a star, my mother thought I was nuts,'' Hutton recalled. ``I thought if I became a star and got us out of poverty, she would quit drinking. I didn't know (alcoholism) was a disease; nobody did. There was no A.A. then.''

You can see her desire to be liked and loved in her performances. Her mugging and shouting would get your attention and her balladry could break your heart. Like the great Anita O'Day, she wore her heart on her sleeve and that practice took its toll in loves lost and substance abuse.

When she did come around in the 1970s, she didn't want to go down the lucrative path of celebrity pity and sell her story in a tell-all. "I don't want to go into how I got here," Hutton told a reporter at the time. "I was a brokenhearted woman and didn't want to live anymore. I should be dead, but I'm not." That was it. Blunt and honest. You can hear it in her voice. She may have been viewed as zany, but anyone with a heart could see that her enthusiasm for life was honest and like may people who live with joy in their hearts and a big hole to fill, they jump into situations with those who aren't their for them but are their for themselves. It's a sin that someone who gave so much joy to so many people had to go through so much.

And it's a blessing that we had her for so long. Thank you Betty. We will miss you.

Technorati Tags: bettyhutton

The Three Ds of Media: Distribution, Distribution, Distribution

2007-03-16T23:00:00.001-04:00

I have a mantra in all of my media classes that the good students get and the average to poor students don't: Distribution is everything. Not only is it about getting your content to your audience, but distribution encompasses marketing as well since your audience needs to know that you are available to be seen, heard, read, etc. Anyways, I was glad to see that someone at Time gets this as well...

"Content is king." It's a phrase uttered repeatedly by media executives making the case that the movies, music, TV shows, books and journalism their companies produce are the core of their business.

It happens to be a dubious claim. Sure, movies, music and TV shows have value--as do, I feel compelled to add, magazine columns. But they alone have never generated the huge, reliable profits that keep investors happy and pay for midtown-Manhattan skyscrapers. No, the big money in media has always been in distribution.

Sometimes the media companies do this distributing themselves--think TV networks, or newspapers and their delivery boys. But even when others own the movie theaters or the bookstores, big media have long been defined by their ability to make sure their products are displayed prominently there. "The historical media play," says consultant John Hagel, "is having privileged access to limited shelf space."

On the Internet, though, the shelves go on and on and on. And as words, music and now video move to this new environment, the traditional economics of media are under attack. Tellingly, the most valuable media company in the world right now is not Disney or News Corp. or Time Warner (owner of Time) but Google, which helps people find stuff on those endless online shelves.

Google makes virtually all its money--$10.6 billion in revenue last year and $3.1 billion in after-tax profit--selling advertisements. But except for a few endeavors like Google Maps, it's a media firm that produces no content. Rather than take on established media outfits as outright competitors, Google has been trying to persuade them to let it help them find audiences and sell ads. Some media powers have signed up. But the prospect of a world organized on Google's terms remains unsettling to executives accustomed to controlling the path their products take to consumers.

And that's why Google is interesting to me: they are creating what seems to be the de-facto distribution platform for commercial and non-commercial media. This has consequences for artists, amateurs, pros, etc., and I have yet to find someone who has articulated what this means. Unlike other platforms for past media distribution (broadcast networks, film exhibitors, all varieties of record wareshouses, distributors and retailers, etc.) this environment is imminently permeable: media can find its way onto the net with relative ease. In fact, Google is interesting because their applications are soooo user friendly that they essentially challenge you not to use them. If you don't believe me, try out Googlepages and you will find a drag and drop application that allows you to make a decent webpage sans html and css. In other words, my Dad could do it and he would get something out of it. In fact, this Blog is published on Blogger, an application acquired by Google because of its ease-of-use and flexibility. By acquiring nodes where content can be uploaded and efficiently organized for searches, Google is becoming the best example of a neo-liberal media company yet: content is produced by a decentralized workforce (like me and you), it is distributed through a decentralized mode of distribution and it is accessed and viewed by a reader/producer. Throughout this process, Capital is deregulated as much as is tolerated by governing forces (see China for an example where Google has capitulated to the demands of the State) with public service requirements kept at a minimum.

Finally, what I think Google is aiming to become is something that most media hope to become at some point in time: social networks. I just presented on how I felt music scenes and genres are the best place to look to see how the rules of neoliberal social network media have developed (in fact, I will upload my paper and presentation later in the weekend). But this is something that media want to do and they do it by organizing around and producing new social habits. This cinema grew in America around networks of entertainment that already existed (see Vaudeville, Chataquas, Magic Lantern presentations, lectures) and produced new visual habits as well (seeing movies based on modern "stars", a standard mode of cinematic expression, etc,). The key is that this created a kind of social network where the cinema existed as a site of social discourse, organization and debate around which cultures could be debated and contested. The same could be said of TV, radio and popular music, each of which have their issues of media specificity to negotiate. What Google is doing is trying to become the Paramount, NBC and Columbia Records of our day: i.e. the premiere distributor of media for their medium. And everyone else is just beginning to figure this out.

Technorati Tags: google, neoliberalism, neoliberalmedia, socialnetwork, cinema, TimeMagazine

Back When I Was Your Age We Used to Have to Walk Ten Miles in The Snow if We Wanted to Buy a Record, Part Two...

2007-03-16T16:34:00.001-04:00

It's sign of the times buddy. The National Association of Recording Merchandisers revealed their nominees for their annual awards. Guess who got nominated... guess who didn't...

In the large retail division, the nominees are two big box stores, Best Buy in Richfield, Minn., and Target Stores in Minneapolis; two online merchants, Amazon.com in Seattle and iTunes in Cupertino, Calif.; and two multi-media merchants, Borders Group in Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Hastings Entertainment in
Amarillo Texas.

It is the first time that a traditional music specialist hasn't been nominated for this award in recent memory, going back to 1990. For the last three years, the now-defunct Tower Records won the award.

True, a lot "traditional" retailers got nominated in the small and medium divisions, but still...

Technorati Tags: NARM, musicretail, itunes, hastings, borders, target, bestbuy

Back When I Was Your Age We Used to Have to Walk Ten Miles in The SNow if We Wanted to Buy a Record...

2007-03-16T16:13:00.000-04:00

So, with the demise of the record chain, what do the kiddos today think of when they think about "buying" music (yes, I assume that people buy at least some of their music)? Well, Billboard writes that the most recognized brands in music downloading are our usual suspects...

Among U.S. music downloaders older than 12, iTunes brand recognition was at 66%, up from 57% in 2005. Napster dropped a bit from 79% to 68%, while Yahoo Music increased somewhat from 49% to 53%. But the biggest gain was MySpace, which increased its brand recognition as a digital music provider from 16% in 2005 to 54% at the end of last year.

MySpace is the one that really sticks out here. I have downloaded music from MySpace, but typically there are far fewer downloads there than one might think. I would love to see how people got these stats since MySpace is a place where people may listen to music, but download... ehhh.

Technorati Tags: MySpace, iTunes, Yahoo, Napster, digitaldownloads, mp3s, branding

Geez, A Set of Communication Regulators that Care about Consolidation

2007-03-15T20:26:00.001-04:00

There was a time when the FCC exerted regulatory teeth with regards to ownership, cared about local voices and even did more than sell off the airwaves to the highest bidder, and fine stations for playing swear words and showing the occasional naughty bit. Those were the days.

Canada, land of the best radio on earth (and it is, trust me on this) has, get this, regulators who actually care about broadcast diversity

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the Canadian government broadcast regulator, intends that the growing rate of media concentration in Canada merits public debate.

The CRTC announced on Tuesday (March 13) that it will launch a proceeding to review issues relating to the Canadian Broadcasting Act's objective of ensuring that the country's broadcasting system provides Canadians with a diversity of voices.

The scope of the proceeding will be set out in a notice of public hearing to be issued shortly. A public hearing will follow in the fall of 2007.

"The current wave of consolidation in the Canadian broadcasting industry, and the possibility of more major transactions in the future, raises important questions relating to the diversity of voices in Canada," said Konrad von Finckenstein, the recently named chairman of the CRTC in a statement. "Holding a public hearing will allow us to give these issues the thorough and in-depth study they deserve."

So if you are in Canada and reading this, strap on yer boots, do yer homework and get involved in these public hearings.

Technorati Tags: CRTC, KonradVonFinckenstein, CanadianBroadcasting, MediaConsolidation

Planned Obsolescene 101: First Get the Player in the Hands of the Customers

2007-03-15T14:45:00.001-04:00

I wonder about how quickly my DVDs will be rendered obsolete by the new formats. I have seven DVD players in my house and my Fiance' and her kids have seven themselves. I also have hundreds of DVDs and no desire to invest in a new format. Still the Blu Ray DVD association has a
three year plan

HANOVER, Germany (Reuters) - The Blu-ray disc association said on Thursday it aimed to replace the DVD storage format within three years.

"Within three years it will just be Blu-ray," Frank Simonis, the Blu-ray Disc Association's European chairman, said at the CeBIT technology trade show.

The HD DVD camp conceded it is being outsold by Blu-ray because of PS3 by at least five to one, but it claims that sales of movie titles are still level. Film studio 20th Century Fox, which supports Blu-ray, said weekly Blu-ray film sales are actually three times higher than HD DVD.

A total of 5.2 million Blu-ray discs have already been sold, said Nick Sharples at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. Hundreds of thousands of titles have been given away to consumers buying a PS3.

We all knew that PS3 was Sony's Trojan Horse, so that is no surprise. But still, we are in a mortgage crisis here in the US and new formats such as HD TVs seem to be coming on much more slowly than even I expected. So we will see if three years makes any sense whatsoever. Plus, there is that competition from HD which has Toshiba, Microsoft and Intel monies behind it, which means that those drives could be in your computer very very soon (if they aren't already in some cases).

Technorati Tags: bluray, hddvd, plannedobsolescence, sony, ps3, microsoft, toshiba, intel

Endings Anyone?

2007-03-15T12:05:00.001-04:00

My pal Derek Kompare is operating his smart machine on serial TV...

One of the most engrossing and frustrating things about serial fiction is narrative sustainability. That is, the ability to successfully continue narrative momentum across multiple segments. We take in almost all of our serial fiction in one of several standardized forms, each with particular sub-forms, which further organize how we experience them. For example, serial literature, like the Harry Potter books, not only comes in books (of ever-increasing lengths; thanks, JKR), but also in chapters within those books, as well as subdivisions within chapters. Comics today are typically organized in multiple-issue “arcs” which effectively function as chapters would in novels. Each issue is divided into a fairly standard number of pages and a relatively unrestricted number of panels. On television, series divide into seasons, seasons into episodes, episodes into acts (of relatively standard length on commercial TV), acts into scenes, and so on. Regardless of the medium, smaller narrative chunks organize our experiences of the whole.

All well and good, but completely arbitrary. Word counts limit literature. Dwindling page counts limit comics. Minutes, commercial breaks, and episode orders limit television. Each of these forms, despite expressing a pretty wide generic and stylistic spectrum, is delimited by a pretty narrow formal range. In the US, most serialized TV shows are still expected to run in seasons of 20-24 episodes. If successful (i.e., attract enough Nielsen-monitored viewers), they get to come back and do it again the next year. If really successful, they get to keep right on doing it for many years.

The perpetual problem is that stories, in all these media, have to squeeze and/or stretch themselves into these standardized forms. Thus, rather than unfold at whatever length/pace might be ideal, they’re forced to capitulate to convention. I should point out that this applies as well to non-serialized media forms: feature films generally run between 90 and 120 minutes, typical sitcom episodes run 21-25 minutes, etc. In addition, other aesthetic conventions (i.e., not only narrative ones) affect storytelling: when is a close-up a better choice than a long shot?; how does the score channel emotions?

The problem recently is that story and media form haven’t meshed particularly well in some prominent media texts. Lost is probably the most cited example of this issue today. It’s continued to pile up mysteries and clues over (to date) 59 episodes, and while it has resolved a few narrative enigmas (e.g., what the hell is in that hatch?), it has almost always introduced more along the way (e.g., what is the Dharma Initiative?). While the series’ showrunners, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, have tried to reassure viewers that all will be resolved eventually, more and more viewers have thrown up their hands and quit the show.

What's interesting about this post is that this is exactly why I don't start watching things like Lost or 24: They are just a bit too demanding for my life. Their narratives delay delay and delay away, which is no surprise. But I like payoff and I am not really interested in waiting too long. The HBO formula of 13 episodes per seasons seems to be my limit for hour long serial narratives: that's about two or three days of binging for me, which is something I allow myself two times a year.

But truth be told there is something about this form of intensity that I can only sustain for in these kinds of chunks and it has nothing to do with my ADD, thank you very much. I get exhausted after 13 hours of the same narrative arc. Even if the payoff is huge, I am pretty much done after the eleventh hour. Even the greatness that was this season's arc of The Wire was something that I think I could have handled only one or two more episodes. But 24 episodes... that's something else.

But still, I am not that impressed. I know viewers of The Guiding Light who have been fans for the last 30 years. Soaps are notorious for their pace... they tend to be as slow as molasses and they allow the viewer to caress every close-up. It's a different game and, well, much more healthy for long-term narrative embrace. You get low production values but, in turn, you get insane arcs and the ability to enjoy them in a much more leisurely pace. You can miss a day or two and you aren't punished. You can even miss a week and read the plot synopsis in the papers and pick it back up on Monday. That's right, you don't need a DVR or even a VCR and you are back in it.

Of course there are gender issues here with regards to narrative... somehow it's macho to watch all every episode of every season of 24 and The Sopranos, but not so macho to watch several years worth of All My Children. And while it would be easy to explain all of these gender issues all in terms of content and topics, but narrative form is key here as well. Men, in our culture, are notoriously outcome oriented and women are more process-oriented. I would not be too surprised that the audience that is "quitting" these shows tend to have a y chromosone.

Technorati Tags: serialtv, serialnarrative, derekkompare, television

Social Net Traffic Grows

2007-03-14T18:00:00.001-04:00

Stever Rubel reports that Social Nets Account for 6.5% of Web Traffic

Hitwise dug into the the top 20 social networks and found that they grew by 11.5 percent from January to February 2007. They now account for 6.5 percent of all Internet visits. Myspace, an Edelman client, continues to be the big daddy. They have 8x the market share of their closes competitor - Facebook

Technorati Tags: socialnetworks, edleman, steverubel, webtraffic, myspace, facebook

Vinyl Up, CDs Down? Time to Shake Your Body Down to the Ground!

2007-03-14T16:41:00.001-04:00

I still buy Vinyl when it is used and CDs less and less... turns out I am part of a larger trend...

Vinyl is again becoming the format of choice for serious music collection and ‘full focus of attention’ music consumption. The rise in record sales is not being reflected particularly well in the international literature, because counting systems such as Soundscan don’t factor in the smaller independent record stores, where most of the vinyl is being purchased.

In fact, according to this article in the Billings Gazette, a growing number of labels are choosing to release as digital downloads for the general consumer and as vinyl records for the DJ and connoisseur. They’re starting to skip the CD all together.

Some people, though a diminishing amount, still insist on the compact disc as their preferred music entertainment platform, but its popularity is starting to wane in the face of the convenience of downloads and the richness of the physical experience and collectibility of vinyl.

Well, I like the way it sounds but I hate moving it. So, in that sense, I do plan on placing all of my LPs on CD one of these days (particularly LPs released as part of local and regional scenes that could simply be lost and forgotten). But the CD was never a special experience like an LP. Even when I started buying them, it had to do with convenience and it still does. The experience of an LP has its own delights which are well known by collectors and older generations. For instance, last night I purchased a used LP of Rush's Exit Stage Left simply because I loved the jacket and the gatefold sleeve... plus it was $1. That said, I play mainly CDs and MP3s because they are convenient and I am tied to my computer. And there is a reason for this... There is something about the LP that has to do with "leisure time" that was far more distinct than it is today. Part of this is due to the fact that the LP was originally developed as a concert-substitute, something that should be played one side at a time. Of course, may saw this as an opportunity to playing albums only on "one side" (when I worked in record stores it was not uncommon to get albums that had one whole side simply dulled, while the flip side was pristine simply because it had been played maybe twice). Anyways, the fact is that you had to put on the album, often clean the album, place the needle on the record and you had to do this at home. You didn't take your music to work, you didn't even take it in the car. Albums were, for the most part, a domestic experience that was separate from non-domestic labors. And, yes, domestic labor could enjoy their albums, but the demands made on the listener to enjoy the record as an object with art and as a cohesive unit worked against the constant demands for attention that are part of cleaning, cooking and children.

For many of us, leisure time and work time are one in the same. I spend quite a bit of my time not tied to a clock, but to deadlines and how I reach them is up to me. I also spend a lot of my time writing. The result is that as computers have become more and more "musical", it has become simply more convenient to purchase downloads and burn CDs when needed. I mean, I wish I had the time purchase all of my new music on vinyl, but with my commute, constant preparation of papers, presentations and grading going to a record store becomes less and less of an option. Like I noted a couple days ago, it makes more and more sense why people buy more and more of their music at spaces like Starbucks. Heck, the last 40 pieces of vinyl I have purchased have all come from a used record store that is located in a local coffee shop in Columbus that I hit when I need to pour through exam after exam. And, heck, as much as I love those records, I still play them once or twice a year tops. Truth is, if it wasn't for MP3s I would be much further removed from music than I am already. And, yes, I understand how the computer is the device that mucks together work and leisure time for a longer Postfordist extension of the workday. Oh, I understand this all too well...

Technorati Tags: CDs, LPs, Vinyl, MP3s, musicretail, recordretail

TSOYA - "Acceptable TV"!

2007-03-14T00:02:00.000-04:00

If you are using iTunes you should simply click here to subscribe to The Sound of Young America. Why? Well, the great Jesse Thorn has a wonderful interview with the crew at "Acceptable TV", an interesting program/programming experiment that will be on VH1 for one. It's simply a great radio program/podcast. Just do it!

Technorati Tags: TheSoundofYoungAmerica, AcceptableTV, VH1

Dog Days for DVD Pirates

2007-03-13T23:40:00.000-04:00

As if the MPAA didn't have enough people fighting piracy, now they enlist
man's best friend...

SEPANG, Malaysia - Lucky and Flo, Malaysia's latest weapons in tackling rampant music and movie piracy, started work at the country's biggest international airport Tuesday, sniffing out shipments for fake optical discs.

The two black Labradors are on loan for a month from the Motion Picture Association of America, which says its members — including top Hollywood studios Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox and Universal — lost $1.2 billion to Asia-Pacific movie pirates in 2006.

It is the first time dogs have been used by authorities anywhere around the world to detect contraband discs, said Mike Ellis, regional director for the MPAA.

It took around nine months and $17,000 to train the dogs to detect polycarbonates, chemicals used in the disc manufacturing process, he added.

Although the dogs cannot tell the difference between real and pirated discs, they can detect if DVDs are hidden among shipments signed off as a consignment of something else.

As if McRuff didn't have enough to do already...

Technorati Tags: MPAA, antipiracy, intellectualproperty

Q: What's The New "Record Biz" Paradigm? A: Consumer Electronics and Social Networking!

2007-03-13T18:39:00.001-04:00

HMV, Britain's top music and entertainment chain, is in trouble.

But they have a plan...

The company's stockprice fell 11.29% in morning trading to £1.35 ($2.60) on the London Stock Exchange, after the company warned that trading conditions have "deteriorated further" since its most recent financials warning in January.

The merchant levelled particular blame at the performances of its affiliates overseas and its Waterstone's bookselling chain, and notified investors and the media that it expects total music and DVD markets to decline further.

"The markets in which we operate are undoubtedly very challenging," commented group CEO Simon Fox. "Waterstone's and HMV are great brands, but have not adapted quickly enough to the way customers are now buying and consuming media. Our performance has suffered as a consequence."

The company says its board has taken a "cautious view" for the seven weeks until the close of its financial year, and it now expects full-year profits to be below the current range of market expectations.

"The three-year transformation plan which I will outline today is exciting, radical and far-reaching," Fox says. "There is a great deal to do and I have every confidence that this plan will turn the business around."

As part of its strategy, HMV has identified a three-point area of focus across its U.K. business, comprising a mantra of cost savings, protecting its core business, and growing new channels.

The company said it planned to achieve cost savings of £40 million ($77 million) each year by 2009/10, through a string of initiatives including the simplification of the HMV U.K. supply chain, and a review of its store portfolio in Britain.

Also, a new HMV store "format of the future" is in development, and is expected to be tested in Britain this fall. Moving forward, HMV U.K.'s outlets will carry a broader, enhanced range of portable digital products.

And in an innovative new media project, the retailer is to launch a social networking site for music, film and games aficionados. The SNS will provide revenue streams from advertising, sponsorship and paid-for content. Universal Music and 20th Century Fox have already struck strategic content partnerships, HMV says.

The idea that HMV will act as a social network seems, well, umm, a bit contrived. Social networks not only provide end-users with items of value, but what is appealing is that they do so because these end users not only negotiate the terrain, but they contribute to it, muck it up and mold it. Record stores are notoriously unuser friendly. In many cases, places like Tower Records, perhaps my favorite chain of all time, seem to rely on expert knowledge as a way to overcome less-than-friendly service and design.
Which isn't to say that record stores were staffed by people who mocked the very people that put money in their pockets. Only some of them. The others would be staffed by people who offered "service" but, in reality, were simply friendly faces who knew very little about what was in the stacks (Wherehouse comes to mind as one such place). So how HMV will act as a "service" is something that ought to be interesting since, if it worked, it could act as a paradigm for other retailers who are moving away from recorded goods and into other domains.

Technorati Tags: HMV, RecordStore, socialnetworks, Wherehouse, TowerRecords

Instant Karma Action Figure

2007-03-13T09:05:00.001-04:00

I saw this in a shop in Chicago. It said it was licensed by Yoko Ono, Inc. You know it's gotta be legit and Yoko approved...

As a Beatles fan it's hard not to want this first officially licensed version of John styled after the look he had in his New York years. The figure will also include a voice chip so it can repeat a number of Lennonisms.

I want mine to say "Number Nine" over and over and over and over...

Technorati Tags: JohnLennon, JohnLennonDoll, YokoOnoInc., BeatlesMemorabilia, Beatles, ActionFigures

Girls with Guitars = Good!

2007-03-13T08:54:00.000-04:00

Rock just got another X chromosone in the mix: the guitar industry is
finally developing product for girls...

"The industry is looking for growth opportunities given the overall slump in guitar sales. Guitars catering to women is one area that we understand is showing some signs of strength," said Wall Street analyst Rick Nelson, who covers the industry.

The country's two top guitar retailers, Gibson Guitar Corp. and Fender Musical Instruments Corp., have each debuted lines with a girl/woman-friendly focus over the past few years.

Gibson has the thinner-necked, lighter-weight Les Paul Vixen and Les Paul Goddess guitars.

Why the surge of girl guitars now?

"Ten years ago, statistics showed that 96 percent of the instruments purchased were for men," said Gibson Chairman and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz over the phone. "The guitar is now becoming more a part of society in general."

There have been guitars aimed at kids before: Fender, via its Squier imprint, offers a kid pack, and Epiphone offers a smaller-sized kid's guitar around the holidays that's more like a toy, according to a guitar seller at the music retailer Guitar Center.

But Daisy Rock says its low-cost, lean and light line of electric and acoustic instruments jump-started the push specifically for girls. Guitars range from girly butterfly, heart and daisy-shaped gear for younger girls to glossy red, black, purple and pink standard guitars for women.

This simply rocks. Of course many other elements will need to fall into line, like making amps a little lighter and smaller and, well, colorful (lugging around a big clunky, weighty, dull dark amp may be "macho", but I doubt if someone who has purchased a guitar brand with the word "Daisy" in it would not prefer a better designed object). And, of course, bass guitars and drums will need to fall in line as well. The whole point is to get more and more women in bands of all kinds and this is a good first step.

And why should you care about a million more women in bands? Same reason why we should encourage women in sports. Women in sports learn how to work together, how to pursue collective goals and achieve success, how to develop their craft over a long period of time and learn competition. My experience from being in bands, if only for a few years in college, was that I learned many of the same lessons as did my peers. Plus, you get affirmation from your peers by doing something in public. In our culture we still teach our young women how to be all kinds of things like pretty, compliant and servile, not do. For the most part, anything that teaches young women that you can get respect by being excellent in a performance oriented arena where skill is celebrated, is a good thing in my eyes.

Technorati Tags: Guitars, womeninmusic, GirlGuitars, HelloKitty, GibsonGuitars, Epiphone, Fender, Squier, LesPaul, LesPaulVixen, LesPaulGoddess DaisyRock,

I'll Take a Double Decaf, Soy Macchiato with My Media Please

2007-03-12T14:49:00.000-04:00

If like me you are addicted to good coffee but are often amazed that Norah Jones is somehow always on the menu in front of you when you grab your morning brew, be prepared to get a lot more amazed. The New York Post Online Edition reports that,

the formation of Starbucks Records, as the unit is expected to be called, could be announced as soon as this week, according to these sources.

Launching a record label is something "that has been bandied about for quite a while," said one source. "They think they are empowered enough to do that."

Said another: "They have a very targeted, efficient distribution channel that allows them to be profitable in a limited way with music."

Starbusks could also take on a partner in the venture.

Unlike its Hear Music operation, which releases the Artists Choice compilation series that features musicians such as Sheryl Crow or The Rolling Stones selecting songs that influenced them, Starbucks Records is expected sign, record and produce its own artists rather than licensing songs from other labels.

Idolator chimes in

If Starbucks intends to revamp the record industry the same way it revamped the coffee industry, expect all albums to be $2-$3 more expensive than normal, and available only after a 15-minute mid-afternoon wait.

What is interesting for me is that we are seeing a continuation of what has always been the case in the music industry: the alliance of distribution with identity. Allow me to repeat that in a form that everyone can understand: THIS IS NOTHING NEW, WHEN AND WHERE YOU BUY YOUR MEDIA IS OFTEN AS IMPORTANT FOR THE CONSUMER AS TO WHAT THE MEDIA IS!

That may be a bit of an overstatement, but if you are honest, and Lord knows that is rarity, then this is simply a variation on discussions about "selling out" (aka, I was into band x before my little brother was, now they have sold out...) and community. The reasons why people buy at Starbucks are twofold: 1) they feel like Starbucks is an efficient gatekeeper for their lifestyle and 2) it's convenient. That's it. It's the same reason why punks in the 1980s purchased at their local indie shops or dubheads head on down to their local reggae shop. Starbucks has essentially corporatized the gatekeeping element and allows in only the media that they feel is "Starbucky" or has meaning for their audience. That people won't buy the same media at the shop down the street that is not quite as clean or staffed by people who sneer down their noses at them because they have "terrible" tastes has as much to do with a specific kind of identity as does the person who, like myself, prefers trolling through bin after bin of dusties when I have the time.

Now, I am not one to judge on this. To be fair, I would rather buy a great Dylan record at Starbucks than a crap singer-songwriter record at my local indie store. But I am not the key. I am an omnivore and what Starbucks is targeting is the person who buys, perhaps, 7-10 cds a year. When I worked in record stores back in the days of vinyl, this person was someone who stopped buying new music in their early 20s and has stuck with artists for a long time. On a lark they would purchase a mega-seller that was by a new artist, but it really had to have some sort of cultural import. So, for example, in the mid 1980s this person would drop coin on replacing one or two Beatles records that they had worn out (yes, kiddies, people used to wear out records) and then something new by an oldie or two (say you would have sold something by Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon), something new in pop that won a grammy (Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper) and something "new" new (Windham Hill was becoming a cultural force then, so let's say they purchased "Winter"). That's about seven records for themselves. All other purchases would be for the kids. These people are commonly known as middle class parents. Historically, record stores are not the haven for middle class people who are trying to move 200 miles per hour in their career and in trying to raise a family. They get out of work, they hit the road, listen to NPR who plays Norah Jones and it sounds nice and then they see it at the place where they buy their drugs... er, coffee and they pick it up because, like that latte, it is soothing.

But it is interesting that Starbucks is entering into the labeling business, right? That's different, right? It's a company that doesn't do music so this is odd right? Well, no... Records have, in the past, been issued by labels owned by film studios who then would produce soundtracks and 45s that could be sold at places of exhibition; record companies have worked with numerous types of consumer good manufacturers to produce records that would tie-in with the "needs" of each others audiences; comic books have been made into hitmakers in search of specific demographics. So, while this is interesting because Starbucks is utilizing state-of-the-art data crunching and marketing methods, let's just see this as an extension of a popular music history rather than something that is beyond the pale. Remember, what's really beyond-the-pale is that acoustic Alanis Morrissette record.

Technorati Tags: Starbucks, MusicDistribution, Idolator, MusicLabels, Lifestyles

SCMS, Round Up Part One: A Personal Note

2007-03-12T12:34:00.001-04:00

It's spring break for us, which means I get to sleep in, do some yoga, grade a lot, get some job apps out and take it a little easier. It's also Monday, so I am a day removed from SCMS 2007. I didn't go to the Sunday sessions as I spent that time getting caught up with some Chicago friends who I get to see once a year, if I am lucky. Thanks go out to Levi and Stacey at the Rocketship and Baseball Related, who hosted me. Also, much thanks go out to my Fiance', who rocks. She not only took care of my cats, but she built me shelves, took me to the airport, and listened to me when . So, I need to, you know, treat her right! The thing about conferencing is that a lot more goes into it than anyone sees. It's not simply a presentation and a flight. It's the people who support you, who often get no credit, that do all of the work so you can get on their and look good for 20 minutes, that need to be lauded as much as anyone. Thanks Katie, Levi and Stacey. You all rock and IOU.

So what did I get out of this conference? Well, I met some great people, some old friends, had some good meals, have agenda for new projects and feel like I am on the right path. I am still on the market, so who knows where I will wind up and how this will play out. But thanks to all of those with kind words and especially those who were so high on my work. It means a lot more than you all will ever know.

Technorati Tags: SCMS, BaseballRelated,

Girl Talk Goes to Washington

2007-03-12T01:03:00.001-04:00

Gregg Gillis, aka. Girl Talk, received some positive Congressional attention this week. Pitchfork reports

Gillis was the talk of the U.S. Congress for about 20 seconds just this past Wednesday, March 7. Usually when U.S. Congresspersons make mention of a musician it's to point out how horrible and depraved he/she is, and by extension how doomed and good-fer-nuthin the youth of America are. Usually.

This time, however, U.S. Rep Mike Doyle-- of Gillis' own 14th Congressional District of Pennsylvania-- actually made a positive example of Girl Talk's mash-up work, likening it to Paul McCartney jacking a bassline from a Chuck Berry song, and raising the question of whether art is simply evolving beyond traditional notions of copyright. He also asks why Gillis is flying high while DJ Drama's taking so much crap, which is a pretty good question.

This all happened at Wednesday's second Congressional oversight hearing on the "digital future of the United States", which addressed copyright and intellectual property issues in the age of digital media, specifically radio.

Best of all, you can watch all three-and-a-half captivating hours of the hearing-- held by the U.S. House of Representative's Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet (of which Doyle is vice president)-- on the world wide web! Or just jump to around the 21-minute mark to catch Doyle's brief statement (we wonder if that savvy looking chap behind him actually wrote it). Stick around to hear John Shimkus (R-IL) admit to being "clueless" and Jane Harman (D-CA) call Doyle "so hip."

Technorati Tags: GirlTalk, GreggGillis, MashUp, USCongress, MikeDoyle

The Future of Sound Studies, 03102007

2007-03-11T12:45:00.001-04:00

Jay Beck -- Tony Grajeda is lying on his back with a slipped disc and he has sent a group of questions for us to look at. A brief introduction about this -- let us look at interdisciplinary links with scholars and the like. Rick Altman has argued that sound studies has been able to step out from the realm of cinema studies. Radio and TV scholars asks is there a field of Sound Culture studies... she states that it only exists as a field that is always emerging. she notes that there is a lot of work on this and that it is something to deal with in a number of other disciplines. The challenge is to cohere around sound studies. Sterne asserts that there is a field of work but there is something that is due to a lack of coherence in bringing these issues. sound studies exists still in a asymptotic relationship with image studies. Let us engage to sound cultural studies and issues of film sound and media sound studies, and can they work together.

Norma Coates -- I am calling this paper, popular music, sound and media, all of the above or none of the above. My focus is on popular music and what this means. I am concerned about the material specificity of popular music and I am concerned that my work would be further marginalized. What is popular music? It is music, it is a commodity... and it is media. However, this is often not concerned the case. The issue of popular music and the idea of this is that people look at me and they note that I look too music, when I am a trained media scholar.

So why study it as media? Well, popular music allows us to explore the text - context history - audiences mode. This is key. Why do people in our students revere Jim Morrison? well, the answer is a media studies question.

For me, this is the primary issue and the idea that we need to think about. Music as well as television is key, since music is something that always gets subverted and the idea is that the music and what is a pop star becomes key in a lot of music television. Why does pop music fit so in TV genre? Well, I would ask why does TV fit so many issues in popular music? We can explain a lot about this.

Michele Hilmes -- I have to say that the pessimistic attitudes about popular music studies is reflected in the fact that I do not have any handouts, which is "Towards a taxonomy of TV sound" -- I have always thought about sound is always key since there is little specific scholarship on sound on TV. In many ways this is key and the fact that sound may be the key since so much was lifted from practices developed in radio genres. The issues that drive popular music become key. This is something that I want to talk about.

The Taxonomy is a beginning stab that is at work and it would be nice to see what is and what is not here. I was really trying to think through many of the issues that have developed in other areas such as sound. This has to do with television sound as well... this is key and when I think about sound, due to my training, I am thinking about sound in narrative.

How many here have studies in sound from sound engineers? Not many

Let us think of sound that I have taught in sound seminars? When do you see Iraqis who talk in their own voices? How many get voiced over? How many are chosen simply because they speak in English?

Think about the jingles and bits from news and how this frames the news.

Moving into the area of non-diegetic sound... there is no history of the laugh-track for instance.

What about advertising sound?

Music-based television programming? What about? The many many kinds of musical performances.

What about meta-sound where sound relates to the issue of television programming.

What about the streaming of broadcasting? This is something that is a unique quality of TV and radio.

Anahid Kassabian -- Tony sent me questions so I answered them and looked at ubiquitous music and the future of sound studies. Ubiquitous music has a long long history and there is something where we think about the way that music helps us score our lives. Music has always been the network where a subjectivity is distributed. It is not unreasonable to think of music that is the part of the organism that holds these issues together.

Let us think about the types of projects I would like to see -- a quantitative study on music listening activities and it seems to me that we need to know something about that. Right now we don't know anything about this.

Let us think of non-aggressive music deterrent. That would be varied and interesting.

These spaces where music and sound become taught are interesting in places such as "dubstep" where sound is taught.

What about sonic weaponry... you use music and musical torture where music is utilized to make this operant.

An understanding of listening as ubiquitous where sound and subjectivity can think about this -- let us think about affect seriously in these cases. I hope that sound studies decides to do this.

Jonathan Sterne -- It's good to see this many people at a panel titled the future of sound studies. I am going to produce you with a problem that is problematic when you deal with interdisciplinarity. One issue i am dealing with comes from the humanities and another is from the sciences. There are two completely opposed sets of propositions where I need to think of things as both true and false.

This is something that is dealt from MP3 where people claim that this model mimics human perception separate from issues of meaning whatsoever. I am beginning to claim that the issue really comes from monopoly capitalism and bio-power.

Psychoacoustics then become the issue -- the centrality of psychoacoutics is key and this is news only to us in the humanities. In the sciences this is absolutely true. But this is wholly absent in the work of most of our work sound studies in the humanities. Well, in the sciences you think about how people hear and think that your model is absolutely universal as the operative assumption in the work.

Most sound work of the humanities in a critical domain assumes that the universalism needs to be critiqued always and almost always with issue of meaning. Sciences are not interested in meaning this way.

Now, if I cite this stuff from psychoacousticians about how we hear humanities people nod in acceptance as if they have a monopoly of knowledge. But if our goal is to create an interesting social and historical these issues then I go history.

I am also running into the problem of text based history and oral history. I am dealing with the MP3 formats, and it is a problem for me since these engineers are alive and talk back, unlike, say Edison or Bell.

Steve Wurtzler -- I decided that I wanted to look at the voice of the teacher and the voice of the pedagogue. I looked at the issue of this from where I think it really exists and this is in our classroom. Sound studies seems to be an oddity... are we talking about a field, a discipline, a subdiscipline?

My experience in sound studies helped me understand issues in Frequency Response, Amplification, and so on that helped me underscore that the audiologist and the world of the humanities scholar, me, overlaps. This is an interesting for me. sound studies is a series of not always related to one thing in this since since this has to deal with social practices, physiology, psychology, history, etc... it is the liberal arts curriculum. Sound studies provides the possibility to make links.

Sound studies, tailor made, is perfect for a cluster of courses. You could have a multidisciplinarian set of issues -- you could use all of these issues that are key throughout. Let us embrace the messy and the disciplinary collisions in sound studies and we enact some of these collisions in these classrooms.

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