My wife Daria is a brilliant and multitalented theater-type directing her first full-length play this fall, the world premiere of Martyna Majok’s “Mouse in a Jar” at Red Tape Theatre in Chicago. She and the playwright are blogging about the production process; take a look at www.mouseinajar.com.

This is insane: the album is dead, long live the app. Who exactly wants to interface with their music collection via app? The app browsing/selection process is easily the clunkiest, most frustrating element of the iPhone/iTouch/iTunes interface, and I’d be surprised to see a majority of people interacting with their music selection via sandboxed apps as opposed to the traditional mp3 player interface.

This could work in a few cases—tween-pop stars such as Miley Cyrus that command singular devotion from their fans—but not for mature music listeners with a large collection of artists in their library. What the new band app craze reminds me of more than anything is the failed enhanced CD initiatives of yore, in which labels were going to add value to physical CD’s by forcing anyone who played music on their computers to interface with it inside of a clunky, frustrating Flash or Quicktime file that offered the exact same content you’d find on the artist’s website. (more…)

From the Times UK:

Take the music industry. You come closer to spelling out where it’s going to go.

A: Music’s already there. We don’t have to guess about what the future of music is; we can already see it. It’s interesting as an analogy. We wrongly correlated, or equated, the music industry with the record labels. It now turns out in fact that the labels are now the least important part. If you look at the rest of the industry now, from the bands to the fans from Apple to tour promoters, everyone’s doing OK, except for the labels. So there’s really nothing wrong with the music industry; we’re just redefining what it is. And I wonder whether we’re going to see a similar fragmentation and reformation of media. Right now, media is defined as those who own the presses – the presses meaning either the physical presses or broadcast towers or whatever. We’re beginning to see a new class of professional media which operate on internet economics. They’re still small, and they don’t make anything like the money.

Really? Everyone’s doing OK other than the labels? Anderson is making a common mistake here (like most people who have opinions on the future of the music business, but know absolutely nothing about it.) First off, the claim that everyone is doing “OK” no doubt extrapolates from the cases of artists like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Dave Matthews Band etc, who, of course, are doing OK. They’ve got money in the bank, they’ve got a healthy number of fans (and cross-promotional marketing opportunities) to ensure that they will continue to do “OK”. Like many a tech evangelist before him, Anderson is assuming that these rare instances represent the bulk of the music industry, ignoring the huge majority of bands out there that are operating on a working-class income level. To generalize how these bands are doing—again, the majority of working bands—by using Radiohead as a model is like trying to extrapolate how independent books stores are doing by looking at Amazon’s sales figures. The difference in scale is immense.

To determine how most of these working bands are doing would be very difficult. Collecting metrics on this would demand getting actually profit/loss sheets from working professional bands, a difficult proposition since 1) many of them don’t track that shit very well and 2) the ones that do are loath to talk about the economics of being in a band and guard their bands’ financial information with a Steve Jobs-esque level of secrecy. This is complicated all the more because it’s always been difficult for working bands. As record sales decline, gas prices rise and ticket sales soften due to the economy, are these bands really doing “OK”? It’s hard to say conclusively. Many of them would probably say that it’s always been hard to be a professional musician, and it’s getting continually tougher with each year. Unless Anderson wants to pull out some actual numbers demonstrating how the economic situation has improved in the past decade for 90% of the working bands out there on the road, he might want to think twice about using the music industry as a model for his free new world.

via the Daily Swarm

There’s been plenty of bad ideas recently on how to save the newspaper industry: forcing Google to stop driving traffic to newspaper sites, for example. But here is an idea so insane as to tempt disbelief: an argument in favor of outlawing the paraphrasing or linking of articles without the expressed consent of the owner.

Reporting needs to get paid for. But denying everything that has been learned in the past decade as to how people use and interact with content on the web is absolute unmitigated insanity. It’s almost as if the people in the business who are making these arguments want to commit career suicide.

I don’t intend to add to the cacophony of responses about the thoroughly sad life and death of Michael Jackson; instead to the cacophony over people’s reactions to the death. I’ve seen three major pillars of responses on the social media sites and blogs–expressions of sadness, jokes, and mockery/scolding of individuals expressing sadness over his death.

You know the basic argument; it’s made by your Reason Magazine-subscribing acquaintance whenever there’s a large public outpouring of grief over an event deemed unimportant by said bastion of reason and logic. And of course, it’s a bit ridiculous for your average person to experience sadness about a person-as-abstract-concept, a faraway figure of wealth and decadence. That doesn’t make the sorrow any less valid, however. And these responses don’t make a reasonable argument; instead, they’re merely the outbursts of trolls expressing their narcissism of minor differences. (more…)

Freelance writing mills are ubiquitous online: generally, they demand that you devote hours of your time building your reputation and profile on what is essentially an eBay for tedious, lifeless copywriting. The rewards are minor. While Dan Baum gripes on Twitter about being paid $90,000 a year to write for the New Yorker, writers on the other end of the pay scale are doing it for pennies—or worse—a percentage of potential AdSense revenue.

It’s seductive to anyone who writes for cash money in what may be the worst economic and cultural climate to do so since the Dark Ages (at least for the majority of writers not on the Conde Nast gravy train). With my bank account is often teetering precariously above overdraft gulch, I completely understand the argument for earning a few bucks in PayPal tender by slamming out a how-to-pimp-your-Firefox tutorial.

(more…)

The use of social media like Twitter and Facebook to organize Iranian protestors and broadcast news to the outside world is a testament to the potential for social media to break through a repressive regime’s media iron curtain. There is a wealth of real-time reporting, and aggregating of this information using social media tools online today.

Still, too much of the Stateside chatter online in the past 48 hours has treated the protests as an opportunity for social media cheerleading. Sites like ReadWriteWeb, Mashable and Gawker appear primarily interested in slapping the wrists of the American MSM while using the protests as a case study validating their pet talking points about the irrelevancy of old-school media, the world-changing potential of social media, and all the usual harangues. This is all spiced with a touch of vicarious protest pr0n from bloggers, Twitterers and the like, perhaps rueful that we don’t have a bloody riot of our own to gape at.

(more…)

My old band Mule Train did a cover of Willie Nelson’s “Bloody Mary Morning”, a song about a lovelorn Willie managing a cross-country flight from LAX with a stiff plastic cup of vodka and spicy tomato juice. It’s a great song:

Bloody Mary Morning (mp3)

My friend Leland, a will-be-well-known author who has written three novels and counting, travels around the world for work, and treats his time in the air as time to write, time to think. I envy that amount of dedicated writing time, but fundamentally hate flying: I find it terrifying—yes, I know all of the typical arguments about the safety of flying vs driving, biking, etc, but those things are on the ground, somewhere human beings are meant to be, not thousands of feet in the air, where birds and the spacemen are meant to be. For instance, here is something meant to be in the air:

(more…)

It really isn’t (only) a stereotype: the Australians love their country music, as evidenced by Australian radio, approximately 20% of which is populated by country stations. Just today, I heard Kenny Chesney, Dolly Parton doing “9-5″, and a truly abysmal modern-Nashville Dire Straits cover on Australian country radio. During the flight into Sydney, I couldn’t quite place why I was getting so many complements on my Hank Williams tattoo, forgetting the Aussie enthusiasm for American country.

I’ve yet to hear a homegrown country track, however; there seems to be a contemporary-Nashville-country-only policy dictating the playlists. Funny, since the alternative rock-skewing station seems to play a fair share of domestic hip-hop, albeit domestic hip-hop tracks featuring guest spots from Americans such as Pharaoh Monch.

One thing that the Australians appear to have a market on are surrealistically banal talk show topics. A few topics of discussion on today’s talk shows:

“What do you smell like?”

“What were your favorite candies and lollies growing up?”

“How do you feel about shopping? Do you love it or would you rather run burning spears through your eyes?”

Not that American talk radio topics are any less banal, but certainly less bizarre.

Bonus local colloquialism watch: for heavy drinking, “grogging on”, as in, “you should have thought about that before you grogged on all night.”