Posts Tagged: Music

Music — No Comments
27
Dec 10

The Best Album of 2010

2010 was an interesting year for me, music-wise. For the most part, a lot of my favorite albums were things from years past – not anything new.  I dug way into 70′s-era Beach Boys, discovered the beautiful Dennis Wilson solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue, finally realized that The Doors really are as amazing as everyone has said they are for the past few decades and rediscovered the beauty of vinyl records.

Throughout the year though, there were also a lot of great new releases. In particular, albums like Sleigh Bells’ Treats, Yeasayer’s Odd Blood and Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach pushed music forward another couple of steps and were quite impressive.

For me, this year, however, really was the year of T. Bone Burnett. His production was all over some of the year’s best music, including Ryan Bingham’s (of “The Weary Kind” fame) Junky Star, the revival-of-the-genius-everyone-forgot-about duet album The Union from Elton John and Leon Russell, the first record on his own label from the this-is-real-country-music duo of The Secret Sisters and, my personal favorite album of 2010 – Jakob Dylan’s Women and Country.

Back in the 1990s I had been a moderate fan of Jakob Dylan’s band, The Wallflowers, having picked up their first two albums. They were decent, but really hadn’t been anything remarkable (which is probably why they no longer exist).  I’d heard a few years back that Dylan was putting together a solo album, so I took a listen and promptly forgot about it. So, when Women and Country came out this year I really didn’t pay much attention – until I saw that T. Bone Burnett was producing – then my interest was piqued.

So, I gave it a listen and fell in love. With the sparse arrangements, Dylan’s songwriting and singing really get to be showcased here and the influences from his father are beginning to show through. This, along with some great backing vocals from Neko Case, pushed this album to the top of my stack time after time, and every few weeks I’d have a new favorite song from it.

I’d shelved the disc finally a few months ago after I kind of overdosed, but brought it back out the other day and fell right back in love.  If, like me, you’d written Jakob Dylan off years ago, or if you just skipped over this release, do go back and give it a listen or two.  You’re probably not going to find it on many (or any) major “Best of 2010″ lists this year, but if I were still running Music-Critic.com it would have been our #1 pick for 2010.

Intellectual Property / Money / Music / Web — 1 Comment
16
May 10

Jaron Lanier’s Right: The Web Needs Some Scarcity

If you’ve been paying any attention to my recent Twitter updates, you can probably tell from my constant updates that I’m really digging reading You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier. I’m a little over halfway through, but so far it’s an excellent look at how Web 2.0 and open/free culture are not only damaging our society, but destroying our importance as individual human beings.  It reminds me a bit of Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, and whether or not you agree with the premise, I strongly recommend reading it.

What I want to discuss here, however, is from one single paragraph of the book.  It’s found at the bottom of page 102 (of the hardcover) and is part of Chapter Two, “What Will Money Be?” in a section labeled, “Pick Your Poison.”  In it, Lanier says the following:

“It is a common assertion that if you copy a digital music file, you haven’t destroyed the original, so nothing was stolen.  The same thing could be said if you hacked into a bank and just added money to your online account. … The problem in each case is not that you stole from a specific person, but that you undermined the artificial scarcities that allow the economy to function.  In the same way, creative expression on the internet will benefit from a social contract that imposes a modest degree of artificial scarcity of information.”

The reason I’ve deemed this specific quote worthy of its own write-up is this: it’s one of the most eloquent and comprehensible explanations of why everything on the Internet should not be free. Continue reading →

Intellectual Property / Music / Publishing / Technology / Web / Writing — No Comments
5
May 10

My New Book: “Starving the Artist” Is Now Available

If you’ve been following my updates here or on Twitter, you are likely aware that over the last nine months or so I’ve been working on a new, nonfiction book, discussing the value of creative works.  The book, Starving the Artist, focuses on how in today’s Internet age where information can be transferred for a negligible amount of money (basically for free), the underlying creation that makes up the music, movies, books, art and other types of media that we enjoy, is being viewed as something that should be free as well.  A lot of this comes from the thought process that the actual cost of a product should be determined in great part to the physical cost of the packaged good, as well as the general philosophy of those that argue “Information should be free.”

The full title of the book is Starving the Artist: How the Internet Culture of “Free” Threatens to Exterminate the Creative Class and What Can Be Done to Save It.  It’s not a book about copyright law or an argument that “free is evil” – instead it’s a discussion of our current state of how we value other people’s work and creations, and how it should not be up to us as consumers to decide whether or not we want to pay what the creator is asking (if they are asking for anything at all). In some ways it’s a response to Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price and tangential to Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur.

Continue reading →

Intellectual Property / Money / Web — 3 Comments
18
Feb 10

People Are Probably Going to Steal Your Stuff Online

If you’re a creator (artist, musician, author, etc.), publisher, copyright holder or anyone else who deals in intellectual property, there’s one basic rule about the Internet that you should pay attention to: People Are Probably Going to Steal Your Stuff Online.

It’s been over a decade since Napster first launched, and although there have been steps forward in policing of intellectual property, new distribution deals and other major changes to the Internet, the fact remains that people steal a lot of stuff online.  Some may argue that sharing files or piracy isn’t stealing, but really, it is (of course with the exception fo file sharing of material that is approved for sharing). The simple fact is there are a lot more people online now, and it’s still easy to access unlicensed copies of copyright-protected material.

The point is to keep this truth in mind as you decide how you’re running your business.  Until there’s some sort of serious crack down by the government, or people suddenly have a major change of heart, they’re going to be taking your stuff without your permission – not everyone, of course, but a lot of people.

Continue reading →

Music — No Comments
27
Aug 09

Joel Tennenbaum and Jammie Thomas-Rasset Were Not Fined for Downloading Music

With the news about the recent decisions in both the Joel Tennenbaum case and the Jammie Thomas Rasset case, there has been a lot of uninformed complaining going on. The biggest error among the misinformed is this: they think people were fined for downloading music.

They weren’t.

In most articles you’ll read online, the act of downloading is the focus, like this one over at Gizmodo.  I understand that a lot of people online like to steal music, and that they’re upset that some people got in trouble for it – but the fact is, they’re wrong about what the people got in trouble for.  The people (Tennenbaum and Thomas-Rasset) got in trouble for downloading and distributing music.  They were found to do so willingly, and while knowing that to do so was illegal. Continue reading →

Marketing / Publishing / Technology / Web — 1 Comment
19
Dec 08

Should I Self-Publish? (Part 1)

Please note this is first in a series.

As most of you know, I work for an online publisher/retailer (albeit, for music publishing) and we sell several million dollars of downloadable content every year. Some of this is extremely popular, and some of it has a very small, but very devoted fanbase.

Our top 20 sellers make up less than 10 percent of our sales. Most of our sales comes are of products that are quite far down the long tail (if you don’t know what that is, go read The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson). They are far down the tail in a combination of actual sales numbers on our site, as well as through general public knowledge.

Continue reading →