It is not the legal side of renting music that bothers me so but rather the technical side. You need to connect with a server every now and then to keep listening to your library of music. If you don’t the music stops playing. Not only do businesses come and go but the standards and systems they support change. They don’t always provide an easy path from one system to another either (Microsoft recently dumped their Plays For Sure system with the Zune system. Your Plays For Sure music won’t play on a Zune.)
I doubt very much that a library of music I rent now will continue to work as is in 10 years time. There will be breaking changes between now and then.
The same is true with DRM stamped media.
At least as a technically savvy user I know I can keep my non-DRM, non-rented music library playing for as long as I want. As changes happen I’ll either find tools or make tools that bridge the change.
It will be a lot harder to bridge the change with a rented or DRM stamped library.
I think all the proponents of DRM free music, the ones who say eMusic and AMIE St. and co. are great even though they don’t have 3/4 of what is in my CD pile, the ones who refuse to buy from big labels… these people should admit that, rightly or wrongly, the past few decades have seen a very successful campaign by music companies to shape our tastes and make us want what they sell. I bought the Arctic Monkeys because I like them. I can’t get them from eMusic or AMIE St. I have to go to iTunes or my local CD store. Or I have to pirate, but I won’t do that, it just gives the RIAA more ammo.
Yes, I want DRM free music. Yes eMusic has some great content. No eMusic does not have everything I want. Right now a lot of the bands I like are DRMed up to the hilt. In a decades time DRM will be a joke, a historical blip and a free market will reign. Till then keep your eyeballs from rolling please and be patient.
Tangerine is a fantastic side-car app to iTunes. Basically it creates a playlist based on the beats per minute of the songs in your iTunes library. So if you want a fast, dancy hour of music just tell Tangerine and it will create it.
I just backed up the 5.5gig of my music collection to my Amazon S3 account using S3Fox Organiser. It was largely a painless process except for any song that had a # character in its name. Not sure why S3 won’t accept that but a simple rename sorted it.
I especially liked how the transfers are atomic. If for some reason a file failed half-way then it wouldn’t leave a half-uploaded file on S3. This made transfering 5.5gig painless with no worrying about what was and wasn’t uploaded properly.
Total cost? The initial 5.5gig transfer will cost me about one buck ten cents. From there on it will cost just under a dollar per month. Fantastic!
The best bit of Inside Man by Spike Lee is the fantastic opening and closing track; Chaiya Chaiya Bollywood Joint. It is apparently from a Bollywood movie called Di Sel and features Punjabi MC amongst others. Bollywood hip-hop, I never thought I’d hear it but hear it I did and love it I am. Good enough that I paid €9.99 on iTunes for the entire movie soundtrack just to get that one track (the rest of the tracks are OK, movie background music really.)
You can watch a music video of Chaiya Chaiya here. It doesn’t have the rapping in the Inside Man version but gives you a reasonable idea of the track (minus the standard over-the-top Bollywood sequences.)
The movie itself is quite good. The usual Spike Lee touches, good cinematography and a resoanably smart plot (though you’ll figure it out a quarter of the way into the movie.) Worth watching.
It’s not another Mazda advert but instead LSD inspired rabbits for an iPod competitor from Microsoft. Plenty of noise out there about it so I won’t rehash. I just wanted to comment on two aspects.
To create a mass product, Microsoft can’t design products for the “blue badgers,” as Microsofties call themselves
Strange that. Google is successful with GMail, Google Calendar and others because the very people who make them, use them. Jobs of Apple uses an iPod, he is passionate about them and I’ll bet many other Apple employees are too. There is a strong ethos in all good companies to make products that you use and like. Many of the good Web 2.0 sites out there were created by someone with a personal itch to scratch.
Afterall, blue badgers listen to music, right?
The other is the WiFi sharing feature. Basically you can transmit any song on your Zune to another Zune user in physical range. That user can then listen to the song for three days. If they like it enough, they can buy it.
Cool idea and the technology must be fantastic. But just how many people are going to be in a situation where they can use it? It will take some time to get enough Zunes out there to make public-space sharing a real option. In the technology company I work for in Ireland only a handful even have iPods. The one guy I know who will buy a Zune has just started working for Microsoft, in Seattle.
The rest of us share music over the web with people we often have never met but are good friends with. People well out of WiFi range.
It is one of those cool demo features that work in setup situations at tradeshows and product launches. Nice to have it but…
… you remember scribbling down a business plan at 4am for self-cleaning toilets but find your notes the next day blurred into eligibility and smelling of whiskey.
What a deadly weekend. Went with Fi and a bunch of friends to the Electric Picnic music festival. 3 nights and days of brilliant music.
I did get to see Groove Armada, New Order, Bloc Party, Cold Cut, Hot Chip, Pet Shop Boys, Basement Jaxx, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Laurent Garnier, The Rapture, Grandmaster Melle Mel and The Furious Five Cut Chemist & KOOP and a few others.
Just got back now and I am a bit wrecked so won’t say much more right now. Thanks to San, John and the others for a great weekend.
“I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he says in his remarkable autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume I” (2004), and you believe him. He was, as usual, thinking only about his sound. It is always the sound that interests Dylan about a song, and one of the reasons that he is only semi-articulate in interviews is that you can’t really describe a sound. It was Guthrie’s sound that attracted him, not Guthrie’s lyrics. When he heard Guthrie for the first time, he explains in the autobiography, “a voice in my head said, ‘So this is the game.’ ” It was a lonesome sound; he knew he could get it.
Without comparing myself to Bob Dylan I have to say that is exactly my feeling towards music. It is about the sound. The aural landscape if you want to get precious. Lyrics are secondary. If I want meaning, message, philosophy and so on, I read a book. When I listen to music I want to swim.
If you want a message, buy a newspaper. “Songs are songs,” Dylan says
