At the Grammy Awards, the NARAS President gave his annual speech. Rather than issuing a call to artists and labels to try to meet the demands for consumers for online music, he lashed out at online song swapping. I agree that it’s illegal and that artists see basically nothing from the current crop of online music systems (including the major label systems, from what the press reports). Rather than whining about it on national TV, they should be taking some risks and trying new business models that just may be what consumers want.
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Yes, Alicia Keys won 5 awards, O Brother Where Art Thou won album of the year, but I think U2 was the big winner. For one, they won the coveted Record of the Year award. Bigger than that, I think, is that U2 was nominated multiple times for three different songs: Elevation, Walk On and Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of. Add to this the fact that they won three Grammys last year for Beautiful Day, and you’ve got 4 Grammy-nominated songs on a single album.
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Who can live without a site devoted to Miserable Melodies. Timeless anticlassics, just waiting to make you hurl. Listening to this will make you think more highly of tonight’s Grammy nominees.
Update: As pointed out in the comments, this site has moved on sometime over the five years since I posted this.
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A Whole Lotta Nothing has an article about The Future of Music. In the article, Matthew Haughey writes about how MP3s are what people want and use, but the record companies still insist on pitching products that people don’t want, at prices people are not willing to pay. I think he’s right about how an enterprising artist or set of artists will eventually break away and make a good living selling MP3s of their music… but it will take a bit of a mental shift on the part of consumers, because they’re used to getting their MP3s for free from Napster, Morpheus and MP3.com.
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Earlier this week, it was announced that Amazon.com is running an auction of the first three Segway transporters. When I looked at the time, they were each going for around $13,000. Now, they range from $86,000-$150,000. I’m not sure why there is such a large range. That’s a pretty staggering figure, and will be good for Dean Kamen’s FIRST charity. The auction still has a few weeks to go, so we’ll see where the bidding goes.
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Bush repeated his call to drill for oil in Alaska, in order to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. To which I say: why not reduce our dependence on oil, period? He said that drilling in Alaska will create jobs… putting money into alternative energy sources can also create jobs. I guess we can’t expect anything else from someone who’s grown up with oil and whose campaign was significantly assisted by oil and big energy money.
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In an interesting turn in the Napster case, Judge Patel has ordered the record companies to prove their ownership of the music copyrights. Napster has accused the RIAA’s members of anticompetitive behavior, saying that they would not license the music to online delivery services other than their own. Judge Patel is taking this charge seriously, and this could lead to a pretty significant ruling down the road…
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Not surprisingly, this Forbes article has people on both sides of the fence as to whether albums - collections of songs - will be replaced by single songs in the digital age. In my opinion, the majority of albums that are released are merely collections of single songs. Yes, that collection of songs does reflect where the artist was at one point in time. But, timestamped singles would do the same thing. Only a few albums really try to tie the songs together into a cohesive whole.
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Cap’n Wacky brings us The Deadly Follies ofn Stick Figure Warning-Man, a first person account of what a lousy job it is to have to pose for those signs. Most amusing.
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This week’s Download.com dispatch mentioned how Opera has a “Refuse pop-up windows” option. This popped-up a thought in my head: would Microsoft add such a feature to IE? Would AOL allow such a feature in their software?
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