Ramblings & ephemera
From Tim Arango’s “Digital Sales Surpass CDs at Atlantic” (The New York Times: 25 November 2008):
Atlantic, a unit of Warner Music Group, says it has reached a milestone that no other major record label has hit: more than half of its music sales in the United States are now from digital products, like downloads on [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Tim Wu’s “On Copyright’s Authorship Policy” (Internet Archive: 2007):
On May 4, 2001, a one-man corporation named Bridgeport Music, Inc. launched over 500 counts of copyright infringement against more than 800 different artists and labels.1 Bridgeport Music has no employees, and other than copyrights, no reported assets.2 Technically, Bridgeport is a “catalogue [...]
Posted on November 26th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Tim Wu’s “On Copyright’s Authorship Policy” (Internet Archive: 2007):
On May 4, 2001, a one-man corporation named Bridgeport Music, Inc. launched over 500 counts of copyright infringement against more than 800 different artists and labels.1 Bridgeport Music has no employees, and other than copyrights, no reported assets.2 Technically, Bridgeport is a “catalogue [...]
Posted on November 26th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, art, business, history, law | No Comments »
From Tom Junod’s “Steve Jobs and the Portal to the Invisible” (Esquire: 29 September 2008):
… Jobs has changed three industries forever — personal computing with the Apple II, music with the iPod and iTunes, and movies with Pixar — and is on the verge of changing a fourth with the iPhone …
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Scarcities and the [...]
Posted on November 23rd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, technology | No Comments »
From Jillian Cohen’s “The Show Must Go On” (The American: March/April 2008):
You can’t steal a concert. You can’t download the band—or the sweaty fans in the front row, or the merch guy, or the sound tech—to your laptop to take with you. Concerts are not like albums—easy to burn, copy, and give to your friends. [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Jonathan Handel’s “Is Content Worthless?” (The Huffington Post: 11 April 2008):
Everyone focuses on piracy, but there are actually six related reasons for the devaluation of content. The first is supply and demand. Demand — the number of consumers and their available leisure time - is relatively constant, but supply — online content — has [...]
Posted on October 12th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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I just had a student email me asking about Russian music download sites. Here’s what I told him:
http://www.mp3sparks.com isn’t accepting payments. Dunno why. They haven’t for a long time, so they’re out of the picture, as far as I’m concerned.
I recommend looking at http://www.mp3fiesta.com now, as well as http://www.mp3sugar.com.
There’s a huge list of Russian music [...]
Posted on July 15th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Oliver Sacks’ “The Case of Anna H.” (The New Yorker: 7 October 2002: 64):
I was reminded of a blind woman, a contemporary of Mozart and a most remarkable pianist, who, it is said, could no longer play after she regained some sight.
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Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, security, weird | No Comments »
In Clay Shirky’s response to R.U. Sirius’ “Is The Net Good For Writers?” (10 Zen Monkeys: 5 October 2007), he takes on the persona of someone talking about what new changes are coming with the Gutenberg movable type press. At one point, he says, “Such a change would also create enormous economic hardship for anyone [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, on writing | No Comments »
A coffee shop where the employees all wear platform shoes, glitter make-up, orange spiked hair, feathers, and silver spaceman pants.
It’s name:
ZIGGY STARBUCKS!
My friend Michael Krider made the following suggestions:
Drink names:
The Cafe Young Americano
Caffeine Genie
Sumatra-jet City
When employees hand your money back after a sale, they say, “Here’s your ch-ch-ch-change.”
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The value [...]
Posted on March 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, language & literature, musings | No Comments »
From Farhad Manjoo’s “iPod: I love you, you’re perfect, now change” (Salon: 23 October 2006):
Levy writes that when this happens, the music becomes a “soundtrack” for the scenery, which is a good way to put it. The iPod turns ordinary life — riding the bus, waiting in line at the post office, staring at a [...]
Posted on October 23rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Farhad Manjoo’s “iPod: I love you, you’re perfect, now change” (Salon: 23 October 2006):
… though iPods can store thousands of songs, the average iPod user’s library numbers just about 500 well-worn tracks.
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More validation of the [...]
Posted on October 23rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Nate Anderson’s “Hacking Digital Rights Management” (Ars Technica: 18 July 2006):
The attacks on FairPlay have been enlightening because of what they illustrate about the current state of DRM. They show, for instance, that modern DRM schemes are difficult to bypass, ignore, or strip out with a few lines of code. In contrast to older [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, law, security, technology | Comments Off
From Nate Anderson’s “Hacking Digital Rights Management” (Ars Technica: 18 July 2006):
A third approach [to subverting Apple's DRM] came from PyMusique, software originally written so that Linux users could access the iTunes Music Store. The software took advantage of the fact that iTMS transmits DRM-free songs to its customers and relies on iTunes to add [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, law, security, technology | Comments Off
From Alex Bellos’s “Coke. Guns. Booty. Beats.” (Blender: June 2005):
In the slums of Rio De Janeiro, drug lords armed with submachine guns have joined forces with djs armed with massive sound systems and rude, raunchy singles. Welcome to the most excitingâ€â€and dangerousâ€â€underground club scene in the world. …
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is the glamorous city [...]
Posted on July 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, law, politics | Comments Off
From Sam Dillon’s “Graduates Get an Earful, From Left, Right and Center” (The New York Times: 11 June 2006):
Wynton Marsalis
Musician
[Delivering commencement to] The Juilliard School
Realize that integrity is real, and so is starvation. Never let pay and the talk of pay occupy more time and space than the talk of your art. If you find [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Clay Shirky’s “File-sharing Goes Social“:
The RIAA has taken us on a tour of networking strategies in the last few years, by constantly changing the environment file-sharing systems operate in. In hostile environments, organisms often adapt to become less energetic but harder to kill, and so it is now. With the RIAA’s waves of legal [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, business, law, technology | Comments Off
From Christer Hamp’s “Archaeoacoustics“:
By archaeoacoustics I mean the recovery of sounds from the time before the invention of recording. This implies that such sounds would have been recorded inadvertently, while intending to do sometring else. Not much has been written about this subject and only very few experiments have been made, but I find the [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: cool stuff, history, technology | Comments Off
From The Sydney Morning Herald’s’ “Clubbers to get into the silent groove“:
For those seeking tranquillity at Glastonbury Festival, a dance tent packed with clubbers is not an obvious sanctuary. But this will be the silent disco - 3000 festivalgoers are to be issued with headphones this year so they can turn up the volume without [...]
Posted on April 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, technology, weird | Comments Off
Don’t know what the Long Tail is? Check out the seminal Wired article, or read the blog.
From The New York Times‘ “The Net Is a Boon for Indie Labels“:
CD and digital album sales so far this year are down 8 percent compared with the same period a year ago, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. And [...]
Posted on January 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, business | Comments Off