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Saturday, June 18, 2005
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Sunday, January 02, 2005
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Friday, November 19, 2004
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Thursday, January 01, 2004
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Swap That Ugly Sweater, Online. Web bazaars like eBay are geared up for a 'Get What You Really Wanted' campaign. And on community sites like Craigslist, postings for holiday shopping and after-holiday unloading have tripled. [Wired News]
2:23:04 PM 
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Sunday, December 21, 2003
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Gamer Dad: Gaming with Children
http://www.gamerdad.com/
"Game reviews from a parental perspective." Includes a holiday shopping guide, as well as articles, interviews, previews of upcoming releases, a message board, and more.
[Neat New Stuff]
6:01:52 AM
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Tuesday, November 25, 2003
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Another new, clued record label
Techdirt writes up another MP3 and customer friendly startup label, Loca, and comments:
...sounds like more new music labels are going with this approach. At this point, they're all small time operations - but it's a step in the right direction. It will take time, but these new labels that are both artist and consumer friendly are going to be what kills the old time recording industry... What he said. And you know, there's another way to get to the critical mass platform that I foresee: a roll-up. Some of you M&A artistes might want to be keeping a list... [Due Diligence]
3:28:09 AM
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Score one for the good guys...
Register. Archive.org to host the independent music titles stored in collections in the now defunct MP3.com.
"Our approach is to provide unlimited bandwidth forever for free," he told us today. "There's no amount of material that frightens us. MP3.com's collection is five terabytes. No sweat. We've been adding forty terabytes a month." Kahle added that the archive.org had plenty of bandwidth too. [John Robb's Weblog]
3:18:16 AM
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Friday, November 21, 2003
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EBay Sellers Generous With Junk. Sometimes the crap you think is fit for a charity is also viewed as crap by the charity. Now, eBay has set up a way for sellers to get rid of their castoffs while still helping nonprofits. By Katie Dean. [Wired News]
9:14:03 PM
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Saturday, November 15, 2003
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Fry's is giving away the Myst 10th Anniversary set free with Uru. I told you preordering was for suckers. I noticed in the readme that Uru uses Speex, Vorbis, and OpenSSL. [Hack the Planet]
6:06:53 PM
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Saturday, October 25, 2003
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Carinfo.com: New car prices, new cars, car buying tips http://carinfo.com
"Car Information provided by consumer advocate & auto expert Mark Eskeldson, author of What Car Dealers Don't Want You to Know." Includes money saving tips for buying and leasing cars, new and used car quotes, used vehicle history reports, auto repair secrets, and more.
[Neat New Stuff]
9:46:19 AM
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YAMS: Yet Another Music Service.
Downloadable Music Floodgates Opening
"Reports say EMI, one of the world's largest music companies, is about to open its entire catalog for downloading to subscribers of wippit.com. Apple's newly Windlows-friendly iTunes system will reportedly add 50,000 new songs next week, and Napster's new legit download service launches on Wednesday." [Lost Remote]
Wow, these services are popping up like weeds. I still say they need to start differentiating themselves more, with lyrics, printable CD covers, listener reviews, and the like. I'm really surprised Apple hasn't figured this out yet, because they already have such a rabid, built-in community.
Wippit's main page touts "unlimited MP3 downloads for $49 a year (or $6.50 a month) plus 20 ringtones and a promise of no spyware or adware. That's a discounted price for the moment, as the site says the cost is normally $80 per year. It's also different from the major label services because it's a P2P engine. right now they have 60,000 titles from 96 record labels, so maybe they have some indie stuff that the others don't.
I don't see any mention of DRM or copyright protection in a quick skim of the site. Maybe I'll play around with it this weekend and see. But as I noted at the A/V panel this week, these online music services are the future, and librarians should start to track how they work, if only to understand what our patrons will be using in a few years. [The Shifted Librarian]
9:31:06 AM
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Tuesday, October 21, 2003
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The Little Audible Engine that Could.
Excellent - Audible now has The Time Traveler's Wife (sorry I can't link directly to it, but the one goofy thing about their site is the URLs)! In other Audible news, the New York Times again takes notice of the consumer-friendly company that could.
Audible Service Could Teach Music Industry a Lesson
"Reasonably priced secure downloads. Compensation for writers and artists. Peaceful alliances between publishers and online distributors.
A utopian vision for the music industry? Perhaps. But that approach, which appears to be the goal of Apple Computer's iTunes music store and others like it, is already a reality for delivering audio books and other spoken word offerings over the Internet, as created by Audible, a small company in Wayne, N.J....
On Thursday, Audible's reach grew with the announcement that thousands of hours of its offerings will be available from Apple's iTunes music store....
Persuading audio book publishers and radio producers to allow him to sell their content online was not easy at first, Mr. Katz said, particularly because many publishers were still feeling the sting of failed experiments with the CD-ROM. But unlike the record industry, book publishers agreed to share their rights long before a free alternative like Napster or Kazaa came along to make copyright violations as easy as clicking a mouse." [The New York Times]
Of course, I'm a big Audible fan because they are so willing to work with libraries. More on this soon.... [The Shifted Librarian]
4:28:10 AM
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Thursday, October 16, 2003
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Tuesday, October 14, 2003
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More Play for the Heavenly Jukebox.
The Heavenly Jukebox Cont'd
"Tonight I went to a dinner party at some friend's house, and in between the cold dry sake and an obscene amount of yellow tail and hamachi, there was more music than we knew what to do with. These are friends that until six months ago, had been sampling all sorts of free stuff on P2P networks. Not all of it was good or complete, but they buy a lot of CD's and wanted to try stuff out first, and they wanted the convenience of mixing up thousands of songs for days of play, or a few seconds as the case may be.
Anyway, tonight, we played around with Rhapsody which was totally great and lots of fun. And my friends are proving my point that if you make it easy, cool, give decent information about the music and make it cheap, people will abandon the free stuff for something much more professional. Sorting by artist, title, genre, album, play lists we made up, we streamed Thievery Corp, Gotan and Ladytron through the first course, and then went from cool jazz, to Chopin and Mozart for the second, and then we veered into Bah-bra and Barry Gibb, the GoGo's (who can resist skidmarks on my heart!), Supertramp, Artie Shaw, Radiohead, Elton John, Frank, Ben Folds Five (Kate!), Jon Cutler, the Replacements, for about three hours of dancing, everybody was in on it, clicking and sampling. There is also stuff you can't search for or directly stream, like the Beatles, on their 'radio stations.' " [bIPlog]
Heh - it's not just me and Kailee grooving with Rhapsody. I still think the service could leapfrog to the front of the pack if it would just start offering single downloads without requiring the user to burn a full CD first and without using Windows Media Player to do it. The weird thing is that Rhapsody trusts you to burn the CD - I haven't found any invasive DRM yet, so if they'd just trust me (and the rest of their customers) with the single downloads, I'd go back to purchasing music.
The Heavenly Jukebox is indeed on the doorstep.... [The Shifted Librarian]
8:41:07 AM
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Friday, October 10, 2003
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Dan Gillmor has cancelled his eMusic subscription, but I'm still hanging in there. I don't mind if I'm limited to a certain number of downloads a month, as long as the price is fair (works out to about a quarter a song). After all, if I wanted to over the last few months, I could have downloaded EMusic's entire collection - $9/month really doesn't seem like enough for that.
Why I've Cancelled my EMusic Subscription. I was becoming a fan of EMusic, the MP3 download service that a) treated people like non-thieves and b) had... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
7:23:49 PM
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Thursday, October 09, 2003
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The Music: A summary for individual action
There's more to come in our business analysis of the future of music, but I wanted to take one post for my own summary of the consequences for individual action of Kevin Law's analysis of the industry.
- Preferrably, boycott the RIAA labels and acts entirely, and let the industry collapse of its own weight and ineptness. If you need any more reasons, try this. There are lots of non-label acts, festivals, concerts, CDs and MP3s available. The production isn't as slick, but you can find astonishing quality, and have the satisfaction of putting the money straight into the artists' hands.
- If you feel you must patronize label acts, buy digital tracks online, and hasten the decay of the the channel for physical media embodiments of music. Apple and Dell Computer may have their own issues at time, but they pale in comparison to the corrupting influence of the RIAA.
- If you really need tangible media, buy online. A virtual channel like Amazon is quite capable of adapting its business model to selling digital tracks, and won't fight the vicious rearguard actions of the physical channel. Update: Or, as Tom Walker writes to suggest: "...buy from small independent used stores. That way we keep small businesses running, and our money doesn't get back to the RIAA since they already got their profits from the initial buy."
- If you really must buy a CD in a real store, go to Wal-Mart. Help collapse the influence of Tower Records and other music specialists that are holding back the industry. While you're at it, consider moving your video business to Netflix or another online source. Kevin's analysis makes it clear that the Tower's of the world are near the root of the music industry's retrograde tendencies. Let the air out of their tires.
[Due Diligence]
8:04:37 PM
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© Copyright 2005 Gail Marsella.
Last update: 6/18/2005; 8:21:29 PM.
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