Post Music

Zune vs. Turntable

Monday, November 20th, 2006

Out of morbid curiosity I was looking at how is (not) selling (#56 in Amazon electronics, beneath 13 iPod models, 4 other mp3 players, and at least one iPod accessory).

At #47 I noticed a turntable (something you play vinyl records on) with USB out. I didn’t know such a thing existed, but if I didn’t want to avoid collecting more junk, I’d buy one right now.

My only question is why anyone is buying a Zune given reviews so bad they’re hard to read or watch.

Disclaimer: I’m no fan of Apple.

Update 20061127: In the Chicago Sun-Times Avoid the loony Zune, another painful review via Tim Lee. In the meatime, the best-selling Zune model as fallen to #75 at Amazon electronics, but the Ion iTTUSB Turntable with USB Record has fallen to #116. Zune turns the table on this ferocious competitor!

Posted in Music, Peeves | 3 Comments »

Defixiones

Friday, October 20th, 2006

Last night I saw perform Defixiones: Orders from the Dead, about the , and genocides carried out by the 1914-1923.

The music was in vintage Galás style: her voice (three and a half octaves and very dark), undulating drones, hints of jazz piano. Most of the words were not English, which is a good thing — one could focus on the music rather than reel in horror. Most of the time images from the genocides were projected on a backdrop, and matching the sound, were usually mercifully undulating and distorted.

A brilliant success.

Included in the program is this atavistic screed, “published by the large circulation Turkish newspaper on 18 July 1974, just 48 hours before the Turkish invastion of Cyprus by order of the Bulent Ecevit government”, titled HATRED:

As long as the vulgar Greek exists in this world
By Allah, my hatred won’t leave me
As long as I see him there like a dog
By Allah, this hatred won’t leave me
A thousand heads of infidel cannot wash away this hatred.

My only aim is revenge
When my turn comes to go to battle
In one day I’ll butcher a thousand Giours
By Allah, this hatred won’t leave me
A thousand heads of Giaours cannot wash away this hatred.

Even if I crush thirty thousand of their heads with a stone
Even if I wrench out the teeth of ten thousand
And throw a hundred thousand of their corpses into the river
By Allah, this hatred won’t leave me

A thousand heads of Giaours cannot wash away this hatred.
The whole world knows how superior the Turk is
Who crashed the Greek’s fucked world over his head
Even if I burn in stokeholes the heads of five thousand of them
By Allah, this hatred won’t leave me

A thousand heads of Giaours cannot wash away this hatred
Even if I slash forty thousand of them with my bayonet
And send eighty thousand of them to the devil
And hang a hundred thousand of them
By Allah, this hatred won’t leave me

A thousand heads of Giaours cannot wash away this hatred.

…

A one minute excerpt of The Desert Part I from Defixiones, a list of recordings by Galás with audio excerpts. I especially recommend Let’s Not Chat About Despair and Wild Women With Steak Knives, but you really have to listen to the entire tracks, especially the latter.

Posted in Music | 1 Comment »

AOL of yore : web browser :: iTunes : Songbird

Thursday, October 19th, 2006

Someone mentioned to me today that if the web were like you could only connect to msn.com, which reminded me of speculation that earlier aggressive intellectual protectionism online could have led to a proprietary cul de sac in online services. In that post I said without explanation that aggressive protectionism is being allowed to kill or stunt online music.

People have been noting for awhile that protectionism enabled iTunes’ dominance, or as Techdirt put it “How The Recording Industry’s Obsession On DRM Made Apple So Powerful.”

iTunes’ dominant lock-in will end soon enough, that is unless we get some additional very bad copyright rulings and laws.

A nice quote that brings the general web and online music analogy full circle is this from Ross Karchner commenting on Songbird:

It’s like taking iTunes, ripping out the music store, and replacing it with the rest of the internet.

I’ll take the rest of the internet.

Check out the just released Songbird 0.2, which despite the low version number I find very usable.

Addendum 20061020: Ironically for me the company behind Songbird is called Pioneers of the Inevitable.

Posted in DRM, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Music | No Comments »

Play the web

Saturday, October 14th, 2006

I finally tried out the (I noticed that it is now available for Linux and that the developers were throwing a party, which I attended). The killer feature is web integration. Browse (Songbird is built on the same as Firefox) to a page that links to music or video files or a podcast feed, Songbird displays all available media and allows you to play, subscribe, or add to your media library immediately.

It feels as if there’s no distinction between files on your computer and those on the web. In fact the only gripe I have is that once a file is added to your library from the web, there’s no facility for getting back to the web page you obtained the file from.

Check out the , which does a good job of demonstrating Songbird’s web features (Songbird is also a good all-around media player).


Screenshot of Songbird 0.2rc3/Linux browsing ccMixter.

Nathan, I see a for Songbird in the future. :)

Posted in Creative Commons, Music, Open Source | 5 Comments »

Day against DRM

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006

Today is ‘s “day against DRM.” Defectivebydesign.org says:

There is no more important cause for electronic freedoms and privacy than the call for action to stop DRM from crippling our digital future. The time is now.

The first bit is hyperbole, but you could cover fighting DRM and several related causes by taking the opportunity to join the EFF or FSF.

I don’t have anything new to say about DRM, so see Digital Rent-a-Center Management from June.

Download DRM-free music.

Posted in Creative Commons, DRM, Intellectual Protectionism, Music | No Comments »

When supply exceeds demand

Sunday, September 10th, 2006

Tim Lee has a wonderful take on Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. The punchline, in my estimation:

When supply exceeds demand, as it seems to for both music and punditry, the equilibrium price is zero.

I think to be technically correct “at p=0” needs to be inserted before the first comma, but nevermind, read the whole thing.

Posted in Blogs, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Music, Public Goods | 19 Comments »

Peach of Immortality

Tuesday, May 9th, 2006

has been called a seminal album for many genres, but it was for me personally too. I discovered it while browsing the library’s LP collection for strange music, probably in 1985 or 1986. Having been exposed to the Talking Heads (which I grew to love despite hearing Take Me To The River first) and Brian Eno in prior year, I borrowed the record and immediately decided I liked it enough to tape it (a big investment at the time). It is one of the few listenings from that time period that I still indulge. Most of the tracks hold up very well.

This success led me shortly after to pick up Talking Heads ’77 by Peach of Immortality at a used record store. It was unclear whether it had anything to do with the Talking Heads (it doesn’t) but the store owner said it was very strange. It was the first noise album in my possession and is probably the only recording I own manufactured copies of in two formats (LP and CD). I still love it.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was recently reissued on its 25th anniversary. This would be unremarkable but for the release of sources for two of the album tracks today under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, which is great and very satisfying.

Of course I wish they had used a more liberal license and that the remix site wasn’t Flash-based or at least did not require Flash 8, which renders it inaccessible to Linux clients. Small complaints and a reminder to throw some money at , which seems to have made its first alpha release a few days ago.

Update: bush-of-ghosts.com claims to require Flash 8, bush-of-ghosts.com/remix does not and does work on Linux. Can’t say I’m sorry to miss whatever “interface” is on the home page.

Posted in Creative Commons, Music, Open Source, Peeves | 5 Comments »

CCSSF2 with Gonze & Ostertag

Tuesday, April 11th, 2006

The first Creative Commons Salon San Francisco was good, tomorrow’s should be great. Bob Ostertag and Lucas Gonze (who I’ve cited many times) are presenting. I could hardly ask for a better lineup.

Event details.

Update 20060417: Followup post on the CC blog.

It was a pleasure talking to Ostertag before the presentations got underway. Among other things I learned that Pantychrist vocalist Justin Bond has become extremely sucessful. During the presentation he said he had wanted to put his recordings in the public domain but Creative Commons seemed like a good thing to support, so he chose a license rather arbitrarily. Argh! (CC does offer a public domain dedication.) Ostertag pushed the idea that thinking in terms of “copies” is completely obsolete and more or less encouraged “piracy” — in response to a naive questioner asking if streaming and DRM together could stop copying (smiles all around). It was evident during Q&A that he had much more to say coming from a number of different angles. I look forward to reading more of his thoughts.

I thoroughly enjoyed Lucas Gonze’s presentation, though it may have been too much too fast for some people. I found the things he left out of a talk about how the net is changing music notable — nothing about DRM, streaming, P2P, music stores, or podcasting. Hear, hear!

Posted in Creative Commons, DRM, Intellectual Protectionism, Music, P2P, Public Domain | No Comments »

Bob Ostertag

Saturday, March 25th, 2006

Today avant garde musician released digital downloads of all of his recordings that he holds the rights to under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. There will doubtless be a post on the CC weblog about this, but I write here as a fan of Ostertag’s music. To my taste this is the best music to be made available under a CC license so far. It’s too bad he didn’t choose Attribution-ShareAlike instead of Attribution-NonCommercial, but I can’t have everything I want. (Via Steev Hise.)

On a slightly related (see below) note, I’m really looking forward to the performance with April 21 at Yerba Beuna. My review of a Kronos/Asha Bhosle concert last fall, also at YB.

(Ostertag performed with Kronos on All the Rage, unfortunately not one of the recordings he holds the rights to and Matmos was a contributor to the .)

Addenda 20060326: The CC blog post.

On second read I noticed this in Ostertag’s mini-essay (emphasis added):

Saying goodbye to record royalties is in any event no great sacrifice for a musician such as myself, whose music has always been too adventurous to be valued by the mass market anyway. Strangely, many musicians I know whose work lies outside the mainstream remain much more invested in the idea of selling their recordings than their actual experience in the market would seem to justify.

This rings true to me. I’ve often been surprised at just how proprietary some artists are — many being generally suspicious of capitalism and in no position to make more than a pittance selling their art under any regime. Double or triple irony.

Ostertag’s release (but not the above quote) reminds me of a concert he gave February 25, 1998 at Venue 9 in San Francisco. I found myself sitting next to Don Joyce of and tried to convince him to be more radical about IP, in addition to expressing appreciation for his work.

Posted in Creative Commons, Music | 2 Comments »

MusicBrainzDNS

Sunday, March 12th, 2006

Congratulations to for taking care of a longstanding substandard feature — a proprietary and not very scalable acoustic fingerprinting technology (Relatable TRM). Today MusicBrainz announced integration with MusicIP’s MusicDNS fingerprinting service, full details in the announcement.

Funny thing, I just cleared all the (old, mostly gathered in 2001) TRM tags from a couple weeks ago.

Creative Commons license tracking is also now enabled at both MusicBrainz and MusicIP, no doubt more on that at the CC weblog in the near future.

Belated congratulations to MusicBrainz for signing their first commercial deal in January.

I wrote some about MusicBrainz about 15 months ago. I predict the next 15 months will be very good for what I’ll call “open music infrastructure.”

Posted in Bitzi, Creative Commons, Music | 1 Comment »

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