Here’s a great pair of links from a couple days back. Salon has done some reporting on the current state of payola in the music business. Technically, what they’re doing right now is not payola, because that would be illegal. But it amounts to the same thing and it’s one part of the reason that music is priced so outrageously. Also of note is a comment in the slashdot thread, where someone pointed out how natural payola is and how those “greedy record companies” don’t really make much money because 90% of albums fail.
Archive for June, 2002It’s been two weeks since my last blog entry. Why? I’ve been working like crazy. Generally, I’m not a fan of that. But, we’re finishing up a major project at work, and starting to transition to Extreme Programming (XP). I’m really excited about the changes we’re making, and I think our customers will be well-served by what we’re doing. XP seems like a great way to develop software, because it seems that you’re almost guaranteed to succeed if you follow it. According to this article, two of the major labels (Sony and Universal) are planning to offer downloaded singles for $0.99. The article says that in addition to the price cut, the major breakthrough is that these songs can be burned to CD. To which I say: almost but not quite. I want MP3 files, not Liquid Audio files. Sure, I can burn the Liquid files to CD and then rip them into MP3 format, but that means using lossy compression twice on the music, thus sacrificing sound quality. As a regular reader of Scripting News, I find Dave Winer’s habit of looking back at previous writing to be quite interesting. That’s one of the cool things about blogs. It’s a space to keep your personal view of history. A year ago, techies were talking about Microsoft’s Smart Tags. Smart Tags got killed off in that incarnation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they show up again. This great article talks about the current state of the music business with the historical perspective of the book business as a basis for comparison: Where before you’d be happy only at gold and platinum levels, soon you’ll be grateful if you have a release that sells 30,000 or 40,000 units — that will be your bread and butter. It may sadden some to see the glamour days of the music Jon Udell does a nice roundup of news aggregators. Handy resource. The Washington Post has an article focused on Washington region of ClearChannel, the massive radio/concert/billboard company. It provides a good insight into how ClearChannel works and why everything you hear sounds the same. Here in Detroit, we still have 89X modern rock out of Windsor and 96.3 WDVD which plays mainstream music, but is not focused on current Top 40. |
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