Lagu yang telah dibeli melalui Yahoo Music tetap dapat diputar di komputer pelanggan yang telah terdaftar, namun jika pelanggan ingin memindahkan musik ke hard drive atau komputer baru tidak bisa lagi. Salah satu solusi yang ditawarkan Yahoo adalah pelanggan mem-back up lagu yang telah dibeli ke CD audio sebelum penutupan.

Penutupan layanan musik online Yahoo hanya berdampak pada pembeli musik individual, sementara pelanggan yang telah terdaftar tetap bisa melakukan pembelian melalui Rhapsody. Awal tahun ini Microsoft juga mengatakan akan menutup toko musik MSN per 31 Agustus, namun kemudian diralat hingga 2011.

Sumber: Yahoo

I decided to look at my life with a different perspective.... I looked in to the mirror to see what adorns it.....I felt as if I have turned blind.....I couldnt see anything.... not even a vague reflection....not even a silhouette.....just dark greyish smoke......thick suffocating smoke...........

I felt a pain in my back....I could feel the flow of hot blood....it was running down the back of my legs.... I looked down.... saw a pool of blood around me.....I turned around to get a glimpse of the friend who did it to me.....nobody was there....I looked again....this time more carefully.....through the smoke I could see familiar faces....happy faces.....faces of people whom I know.....my parents, my family, my friends, my acquaintances............

the rhapsody continues..........

And I love Josh Groban.

I don't know a lot about music, but I know what I like.

Yahoo Music was working fine.

This week, I was notified that Yahoo Music was becoming Rhapsody.

Uh-oh.

Change.

I hate change.

But I'm in a frame of mind these days that allows me to shrug my shoulders and declare "why not."

So I switched to Rhapsody, and so far I'm in music and radio heaven.

Rhapsody allowed me to download all of my music tracks, bought and burned by me, so I haven't lost a thing.

Rhapsody also has great radio channels--BBC, Voice of America, etc.

Life is good right now--tomorrow is Friday, and I've got my music and news.

I hope you all have a great Friday, and a wonderful weekend.

TTFN.

Carl Icahn and Yahoo have come to a settlement over control of Yahoo’s board. In return for three board seats, Icahn has agreed to withdraw his alternative slate of nominees and back down from a full-fledged proxy war. Icahn will be given a seat on the board, existing board member Robert Kotick (CEO of Activision) will step down, and the board will be expanded to 11 members from the current ten. The two resulting empty seats will be determined by vote, filled from Icahn’s alternate slate of directors and giving him three seats on the new board. Former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller will also be eligible to take one of the empty seats, and likely will. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/icahn-backs-down-from-yahoo-proxy-fight-in-return-for-three-yahoo-board-seats 7/21)

iLike, the music service with a massive following on Facebook and increasing popularity elsewhere, has introduced full-song playback on its flagship site, iLike.com. Through its partnership with music subscription service Rhapsody, the site will be offering over 5 million songs from all of the major labels and a variety of indie artists, too. In conjunction with the launch of full song playback, the site is also launching a new self-serve ad platform for concert promoters. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/20/ilike-launches-full-song-playback-and-ad-platform 7/20)

This is mad hott.

Watching full-length shows online won't destroy television viewership, according to a study commissioned by CBS. The study of 50,000 people, conducted by Magid Media Labs, finds that 35% of online watchers say they are now more likely to watch CBS on TV after finding shows online. (Iwantmedia 7/21, http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2008/07/21/online-viewing-wont-kill-tv-cbs 7/21)

Time Warner's struggle to sell AOL is putting more pressure on the media company's stock price as the advertising slowdown spreads to the Internet and the pool of potential buyers shrinks. According to one investor, AOL has "become yesterday's story in the Internet world." (Iwantmedia 7/21, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601204&sid=a7mbfoBX3u.c 7/21)

Facebook is unveiling a redesign to reflect changes in how its members communicate. Users now are apt to exchange just one-sentence, Twitter-style messages. (Iwantmedia 7/21, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080721/ap_on_hi_te/facebook_facelift 7/21)

Napster, the Internet music pioneer whose shares have plunged 95% in six years, is seen as takeover bait for hedge funds zeroing in on a cash hoard exceeding the company's market value. Napster controls half of all U.S. online-music subscriptions and is seen as "dirt cheap." (Iwantmedia 7/21, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aoh.JuHEG690 7/18)

NBC will try out incoming "Late Night" host Jimmy Fallon in brief, 5- or 10-minute nightly segments on the Internet, starting this autumn, long before the young comedian replaces Conan O'Brien, who will leave the show to take over the "Tonight" show from Jay Leno next year. (Iwantmedia 7/21, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/arts/television/21fallon.html?_r=1&oref=slogin 7/21)

Viacom's MTV is now airing clips it exclusively premieres at least a half-dozen times during a single three-hour weekday video block. MTV exec Brian Graden calls the strategy "hyper-saturation," and views the move as a way to get ahead of online outlets like YouTube in influence. (Iwantmedia 7/21, http://www.nypost.com/seven/07202008/business/carpet_bombing_videos_120747.htm 7/20)

Google exec David Eun and Web pro Mark Cuban are to appear as panelists for a field hearing that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is holding Monday to discuss "the future of digital media." Another FCC panel will probe "the broadband of tomorrow." (Iwantmedia 7/21, http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117989161.html?categoryid=1009&cs=1 7/21)

Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp is signing agreements to raise almost $2 billion to finance the spinoffs of three divisions, part of a plan to break up the company. The deal will leave $1.3 billion to invest in its Ask.com search engine, acquisitions and emerging Web sites that IAC develops. (Iwantmedia 7/21, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601204&sid=apFvWJlZQbyc 7/18)

It's always nice to see the story of a local person doing good, and in the case of Evolving Music and MixMatchMusic, two entities growing into the music industry out of the Peninsula Bay Area, seeing our long time friend, Scott Reitherman, grow in success with his new group Throw Me the Statue out of Seattle has been an excellent journey. From the first show we saw as an opening act for Jens Lekman at Bimbo's 365 club, the inclusion in the Take Away show phenomenon, to his Rhapsody commercial and now a music video for their song "Lolita" on MTV2, the growth of the band and the potential for them to turn into actual stars has reached a high pitch. Following positive reviews of their debut album Moonbeams on Stereogum and Pitchfork Media, Scott sat down with me to talk about the transition from a self-started label to an Indie label, the process of making music and the new and changing landscape of the current music industry. Enjoy!

AC: The music on Moonbeams has a wide variety of instrumentation and genre influences in there. Talk for a minute about your musical influences and what you listened to growing up that still speaks to your music writing today.

SR: With Moonbeams I was in a spot where I was trying to make a debut record that would show that I do listen to a variety of music. I didn't want to make a record that was going to be easily typecast, I guess not typecast, but I mean to say I didn't want to make something that would fit in a box easily. I also wanted to make a record that various people might be able to hear because they might like a song here or a song there, and sort of give something for everybody, if that wasn't too lofty of a starting point to attack it from. So that's what I did, and I tried to make it a collage of aesthetics because I do listen to a variety of stuff.

When I was first starting out buying CDs in the 3rd or 4th grade, I definitely had a strong pop mentality. At first it was a serious obsession with New Kids on the Block, which transitioned into Beastie Boys, Paula Abdul, Boyz II Men, Bobby Brown… Bobby Brown being a part of the record collection.

AC: Some of our readers are rolling their eyes right now.

SR: Yeah. When you're a kid, that stuff just hits on an instinctual level. You don't realize how overprocessed it is, but it was a while before I finally started listening to what people think of as Indie music or stuff that falls underneath that umbrella. More in college I guess I started finally getting turned on to the bigger Indie bands of the day and doing some homework and going back in time, catching up on stuff I needed to know about or needed to understand the history of Indie. I think looking back on high school, I wish I had listened to a wider variety of stuff, but I think that's a product of coming from the California peninsula and having a slightly homogeneous cultural background with that.

AC: Talk a bit about your musical development in terms of your instrumentation. Did you start classically with a piano or guitar, and how have you gone about learning new instruments and incorporating them into your style?

SR: I learned how to play guitar at summer camp when I was in the 6th grade. Basically I stuck with that for probably 6 or 7 years. Along the way, my brother started taking drum lessons and for a couple years, my brother, who's younger than me, had a drum kit in his bedroom and I immediately took to that and started playing his drums a lot more than he would play them. When he stopped taking lessons, the drums went away and I didn't pick back up with drums or any other instrument until college when I started fooling around and teaching myself piano through my knowledge of guitar.

From there, learning and playing other instruments just became a necessity to make your own recordings and be able to have different instrumentation on there if you didn't have a band with a bunch of multi-instrumentalists behind you. So drum machines were also a product of that, because when I write songs, I usually do it with a drum beat off of an old keyboard just as a backbone to help facilitate the whole creative process of trying to write a song. You put something like that down and then you just sort of play and riff on whatever it is you've come up with that afternoon. So leaving the drum machines in the recording was something I had grown accustomed to and really liked, but was also a way to reveal the process. Did I miss anything there?

AC: Well you covered the drums, the piano and guitar. You've got some really interesting instruments on Moonbeams. How did you pick some of those up.

SR: Well some of those like glockenspiel are just based off of piano key configuration, so piano to glockenspiel is a pretty short jump. Some of the other stuff I had friends help with. Like horns, we hired some horn players…I can't play anything on the horn. Melodica is on there a lot, melodica is also based on the key configuration of the piano, so blowing through that and playing the keys was a short jump from piano. I don't know if this is how most people go about it, but having a foundation in guitar and piano leaves you with a pretty good skill set to pick up other things and have it sound acceptable.

AC: What people that have picked up TMTS in the last couple months as you guys have grown in popularity probably don't know about is your previous work in bands. Talk a little bit about your history when it comes to the groups you've played with and how have those experiences helped shaped your direction with TMTS.

SR: I guess it started out, aside from a short stint in a band that wasn't really a band in middle school that probably sounded a lot like Bush, in high school we got more into eclectic instrumentation, playing with guys that played the horns and doing music like ska and funk and more straightforward rock laid the foundation for really appreciating various instrumentation and how you go about orchestrating a handful of sounds on one song. But I would say that the stuff that I did in high school with bands was really influential in certain realms like how do you exist in a band, how do you navigate that familial relationship with other people and group creative process. All of that is something that definitely takes practice in figuring out the harmony and the balance. So that was really good in the sense that it prepared me to play in bands later. But musically, there was a big shift in my taste once I got to college. TMTS has made me acceptable to some peoples' ears because it sort of pulls from both of those periods from me. One would be the rooted in pop accessible kind of mainstream stuff, and the other would be the recent shift in the last 5 years or so of listening to avant garde and more Indie music.

I read a couple things where people said that Moonbeams sounds like it could be a '90s rock band, I think that's kinda funny because I didn't really anticipate that, but maybe it is sort of accurate because that was the period of rock music that I was listening to a ton that was my first roadmap to figuring out what I wanted to do musically.

AC: What would you say stylistically the change was for you between Moonbeams and Liberty Market Summer.

SR: Wow.

AC: Come on, you gotta bring up Elephant Blend here.

SR: Yeah, you brought it up! That album had a more homogeneous sound from song to song, and it was rooted in a feel good California setting. Both the lyrics and the tone of a lot of those songs was a little bit sunnier and maybe a little bit more naïve. And there's nothing wrong with that, because young people are usually a little bit more naïve than they turn out to be later. Not to say that Moonbeams is a cynical version of that record, but I would say that Moonbeams felt more mature, and lyrically I would hope it is much more mature because Liberty Market Summer was the first record that I ever sang on. I was always timid of being the singer.

When you start bands in high school, it was like a revolving cast of people who were the singers and I always played guitar. At some point I finally made the shift in courage to sing the songs that I was writing already. I think that settling into that and figuring out how as a singer I was going to establish my voice in a way that felt authentic and earnest and accurate was the biggest challenge in doing Moonbeams. For me, if I were to, and I haven't in a while, listen to Liberty Market Summer, I would probably at first cringe to hear myself sing because it would sound like a very different version of my self. Not because that was disingenuous or inaccurate, but it wasn't as thought out.

AC: You guys came out on Baskerville Hill and obviously that was a pretty big step for you because you had to basically launch the label yourselves and not only record, but promote and put out these albums. What was the process of getting signed to Secretly Canadian like, and how did the preparation for getting signed differ from putting out the album and doing the work yourself on Baskerville Hill.

SR: In terms of the preparation for getting signed, there wasn't really much preparation at all. We were in the midst of releasing Moonbeams on Baskerville Hill in the first couple months and were fully intending to put it out ourselves just like we had done with our other releases before it when Secretly came out of the woodwork and approached us about it. So we were hiring a publicist for the first time to work with Baskerville Hill and help spread Moonbeams further and in the process of doing that, I think it was two months after we had put it out on Baskerville that we got an email from Secretly.

I don't mean to gloss over the fact that I had given a friend of mine who plays in a band on Secretly Canadian a handful of copies and said, "give these to whoever you want," and one of the ones he gave out was to those guys. So we knew that it had at least landed on their incoming mail desk, but having not heard anything for two or three months after that, we weren't thinking much of it at that point.

AC: A lot of people who are musicians and getting into it, hoping to make some sort of career and life out of their music, they probably think that once you get picked up by a label, everything changes. How has your day-to-day life actually changed from releasing it on Baskerville Hill to now being a part of Secretly.

SR: Well, I do less mailing at the post office everyday. That was probably the biggest shift. Everyday at about 4:45 I would rush off to my local post office and get in line before 5pm when they closed the door and mail out the orders for Moonbeams. And that went on for what seemed like a very long time. I was always doing the mailing of our orders up until then, but with Moonbeams the packaging upped a little bit. We started including posters with it, and we were getting a fair amount of orders at the beginning. So a chunk of my afternoon was devoted everyday to wrapping up the orders and shipping them out.

That was fun, I liked writing messages on each one to the people that would order them, and the amount of personal connection I felt with these envelopes going out into the world was special. But it's also nice to not have to deal with that end of the process of releasing records anymore, at least for now, it's nice to just concentrate on the music itself and steering the band in a direction that's going to be happy and good for us. So now I do more emailing. I get a fair amount of email from the label each day regarding various things that we can say yes or say no to. Like, "Do you want this BMX video to get your song in it? It won't pay you anything, but it's kinda a cool thing to do." So we'll say, "yea, that sounds cool, I used to watch videos like that as a kid, I think it'd be totally hilarious if one of them used one of our songs, I think that's cool."

Once in a while they'll say, "Do you want us to try and pursue this advertisement on television for you guys and maybe get you some actual money?" And we'll say, "Well, depending on what it is, we would love actual money." You don't get paid as often as you do when you receive the credit cards over your own record label's website and mail them out yourself. Now we get paid every 6 months from the label, so we have yet to be paid anything and I think July is our first pay cycle, so hopefully we'll get some small sliver of a check because it's the whole thing about how they have to recoup the budget that they put into it first before we get paid anything. So I would say, at least this summer, my day to day life is pretty good. I'm just working on music, trying to get the next batch of songs all sketched out and demoed and then soon we'll get together as a band and start to move on to track final versions that will end up on the next record before we go out on tour. We're also working with a new band member right now, so part of our time is spent getting him in the loop.

AC: Talk a bit about touring and what goes into it. What does the average fan not know about a musician's tour?

SR: What it's actually like to spend weeks on end in a 15 passenger van with your band mates without showering. What it's like to get your morning coffee at a gas station more often than not. How hard it is to get up early and get back on the road for another 8 hour drive after you played a show the night before and didn't get to sleep on time. I would say what people think or what they anticipate that they would like about the touring process are the exciting parts of it, which are playing that many shows and meeting that many new people and engaging with real people through your music is way more amazing than I could have even imagined. But the constant travel and the element of the road trip sometimes being a lot less laid back than you get to make your other road trips in life is the element you don't quite expect.

AC: You've obviously, the past couple months, gotten a good deal more recognition with publications like PitchFork Media and Stereogum, you had "Lolita" in a Rhapsody commercial and now you've got a music video for it on MTV2. What has this process been like and has it changed the way you looked at the music industry when you were in high school and college?

SR: I think that even when we were in high school and college, MTV was on its way to phasing out music videos and phasing in reality shows. But I would say that now, when we heard we were going to get our video for "Lolita" on MTV2 it was still a trip, and then they were like, "It will be on once at 1am on Sunday." And we were like, "Oh… ok." So it's pretty fun, and it was fun to make the video. We had a lot less to do with the production of it than the director and the actors that were in it did, but it's an interesting glimpse into how the Indie music industry still maintains this sliver of MTV's attention. It's sort of funny, it seems like too small a niche within MTV's programming world to even matter at all. But this one Sunday night show where they show Indie music videos is a hanger-on and I hadn't really paid attention to this show Subterranean before, but they actually have pretty awesome videos each week. It's kinda sad I guess, but I guess it is what it is.

AC: You were saying earlier that you have yet to see your first check from Secretly. Could you discuss the difference in terms of sales and profits between your self-promoted efforts, Secretly Canadian, and sales on iTunes. Do you have any way of quantifying or describing that right now? I think a lot of people, and specifically the record labels are pushing this point of view that if you're buying a 99 cent song on iTunes the artist is getting a good portion of that or somehow the artist is not being stolen from when really the reality is the amount that the labels give artists of that is slim. So anything you could talk about the difference in your experience in terms of revenue and sales.

SR: As far as I understand the iTunes business model, when you buy a .99 cent song, the artist, if they're with a label, hopes to get about a third of it. iTunes takes a third, first and foremost, and of the remaining .66 cents, the label hypothetically takes a third and the artist takes a third, in the case of the kind of label that we're on which is a pretty artist friendly situation. There's digital distribution company that may be a middle man there and may be taking a cut.

With us, Secretly has a pretty unique arrangement where they own their own distribution company as well as their own record label and they've built that up over the dozen years that they've been in business to a pretty good place. So they're able to maintain some of those percentages that otherwise they might have had to pay out to another distributor. As far as the difference between releasing your own record and having someone else release it and how the shakes down, it's no surprise that a record label, especially an Indie that doesn't have huge money bags lying around, they're going to have to pay you every so often, so for us, it's on a 6 month pay cycle. If people think that when they buy a song on iTunes that the artist is getting a bunch of those .99 cents, that's probably not true. It's hopefully more true if they're buying from an Indie artist versus a major label artist, but what is that really worth because a major label artist is probably selling more one-off mp3s on iTunes and in the end they're probably making significantly more money if they're a good selling major label artist than a medium selling Indie artist.

AC: Moonbeams just being released, and you being relatively new to the industry, but for a few years now we've seen a very vicious downward cycle in terms of actual physical CD sales, and the major record labels have started to freak. Have you, being a part of the music industry, seen this type of erosion, and what's it doing in your mind to the traditional record industry?

SR: That's a really good question. I guess I don't know how much interest I have in the decline of the major label record industry. I think what will be interesting to see is how musicians figure out a compelling way to release their music that will re-engage people who love music. I mean, everyone loves music, but what it's up to the record labels to do now is to figure out a way to bring that new music to the people. It's not pirating's fault, but the information age and the internet have ushered in a huge variety of new variables with how you sell art and obviously it's turned out that people are de-valuing music left and right.

And again, it's not pirating's fault, it's just one of those things that major labels didn't react quickly enough to. So if it's not the CD and it's not the vinyl record, what is it going to be that will get people to financially support artists again? I think that would be interesting. I would love to see bands start releasing books that come with download links to the mp3s themselves. If people don't care about these little 3.5" in diameter floppy plastic discs anymore that we call CDs, and there's no reason they should because it was a crappy format to begin with, then give them something else, something more, maybe a collection of photographs or writing. Just more content that's going to re-engage people on a personal level with their favorite artists so that they do feel they want to have a hard copy as opposed to the mp3 download that any person with any amount of sense can figure out how to get without paying for it.

AC: I think that on that same note, a large portion of the problem is that maybe consumers got fed up with the fact that these record labels for so many years, while I wouldn't want to say overvalued music at $17-$18 dollars a CD when it took a buck and a half, two dollars to make, but they certainly fought pirating and mp3s with this passion that somehow the consumers were stealing from the artists. But when you look at the kind of royalties and shares that the artists actually got off of those sales, the record labels were taking a huge chunk out of that and maybe the consumers got sick of hearing how they were stealing from the artists when really they felt they were only stealing from these multi-billion dollar corporations.

SR: Well I would love to think that that's true in certain peoples' cases, but I think that's a little too generous to attribute to the masses. It's sort of like if there were a riot and the police were the major labels and everyone else were the people rioting, and some people had the consciousness to go to Best Buy and break in and steal stuff that they wanted to because they saw it as an evil corporation, or better yet they went to KMart and they broke in and looted Kmart because it was political for them to do that. The vast majority of people that would follow suit get wrapped up in the energy of that riot, or the mindset of it, or the carelessness of it, they would loot from whatever was easiest which would be the Mom and Pop stores, or maybe in this case the Indie labels because there are many more Indie labels than there are major labels. So once you set off that kind of chain reaction, it's hard for people to care whether or not what they're doing anymore is right or wrong because it's just so easy and everyone else is doing it.

AC: As the Internet becomes more collaborative with greater access worldwide, not only in terms of more economic classes being able to access it, but also in terms of the speed with which you can do things online, do you see a shift coming where more music will be made online, and how do you envision that happening? Obviously the focus of this question is what the folks over at MixMatchMusic are working on.

SR: Definitely. I think it's a no-brainer to see that kind of thing on the horizon. There's been so many successful examples of that type, if not specific collaboration in music these days, at least the mixing of cultural sounds and cross-cultural musical aesthetics. There's a lot of bands and artists who have a foreign sound mixed with an American pop backbone like MIA or Santogold, who's American. Postal Service is a great example of a couple of guys who are living states apart mailing each other beats and vocal overdubs and came up with a platinum record. The Internet is going to make things like that so much easier, well it already has, it's kinda silly to talk about it in the future tense, but for MixMatch and companies that are trying to facilitate that even further, I hope that it's going to revolutionize the way that strangers are able to make music together, or people who are coming from really various backgrounds collaborate. But I do think that the other element of that is what you've seen with Radiohead recently where they commissioned a remix series and offered up the different parts of one song to their fans to fill in a blender and spit out as they wish a new version of the song is a really fascinating example of what the Internet can do these days if they present it to the people in the right way.

AC: Is that a type of remixing project that you could see yourself getting involved in?

SR: Maybe down the line. Right now, I'm too busy and self-absorbed with the next record, not to sound like a jerk, but I'm trying to focus right now on a new batch of work and we just participated in a couple of cover projects already, so we're kinda coming off of that and refocusing our energies.

AC: To finish up, in terms of refocusing your energies and your efforts, what kind of stuff are you working on now and what is your writing process like in general?

SR: Well this time will be different from the last time. Last time was a solo effort and took a while to build up the songs and having complete control over how they turned out is something that I don't want to do this time around. It's different in that this time around, I'm basically coming up with demos or sketches of the songs that I've been kicking around and working on since Moonbeams got completed, and I'm in turn giving burned CDs of those to the guys in the band and seeing which ones they respond to and which ones they want to work with and figuring out how we're going to whittle it down to a workable track listing to pursue for the initial stages of tracking the record, then go from there. Not write all the parts this time, write the parts that I have been coming up with then leave it there and let them add on to it which will make it more of a group effort. So it'll be interesting, it will be the first time in a while that I've done something like that, and I think it will be better because of it.

AC: Now is that process something that is made even more comfortable by the fact that one of the guys you deal with, Aaron Goldman, is someone you've been working with musically for quite some time now?

SR: Definitely. He and I went to high school together, and we connect very easily on a lot of levels, and in regards to the songs this time around it's going to be really fun to see what he comes up with. I know the rest of the guys are going to be coming up with a lot of brilliant stuff, and I'm really excited to step back from the construction of these songs a little bit and really see which direction they end up finding their way.

AC: When can we expect this album… any sort of time table yet?

SR: I think it'll be middle of next year.

AC: I've had one person close to me suggest that you should title it Sunrays.

SR: {laughter}

AC: {more laughter}

SR: I hope you didn't land any money on that.

AC: No, absolutely not, I didn't think it was a winner. Scott, we appreciate you taking the time to talk to us over here at Evolving Music. Do you have anything you want to talk about or plug, any upcoming concert appearances or anything you want your fans to know about?

SR: We just did a Huey Lewis cover tune. I recommend people check it out if they want a dose of '80s nostalgia.

AC: Which one did you cover?

SR: "If This is It."

AC: Where can they find it?

SR: Ye olde myspace page, www.myspace.com/throwmethestatue.

The past few years, CDs and LPs are getting more and more rare. Everything's turning into digital format. iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, eMusic (and also Amazon & CDbaby) and many other sites are doing a great job presenting us with these digital MP3s, but sometimes I miss holding the CD in my hands, reading through the booklet and reading the liner notes. And I can appreciate some creative artwork too.

I'm a child of the CD age of course, and even though I like LP (vinyl) even better, I've adapted to CDs because they're just more practical. And I'm sure, eventually the same will happen with the digital format. I'll get used to it. And in a way I'm already adapting to it. Well, it's not like it's really a choice, and when possible and I can afford it, I still try to get the CD too. Though it might be even more as a nostalgic thing or as a collecter's item.

I'm curious as to where you stand on the hardcopy (vinyl, cd) vs. the digital music. Are you still buying CDs? Or did you convert to the digital age? All these things have pros and cons, I'm just curious as to what you like best.

For me it's probably CDs, since it's the middle way. It's still practicle and you still have the hardcopy music with artwork and booklets. And a CD in a CD case to put in your collection.

He saw that a small number of hits that had been downloaded the most were at the head of the curve, which then fell off steeply but never reached zero as the long tail of the curve extended to include the total number of tracks available on Rhapsody. Even the 400,000th track was being downloaded a few times per month.

It isn’t until deep into "The Long Tail" on page 180 that Anderson sums up the significance of this new business model for the consumer:

“The Long Tail is nothing more than infinite choice.”

Anderson traces the roots of the Long Tail to the Sears & Roebuck catalog, an agent of infinite choice for late 19th century America. Enabled by the simultaneous maturity of the railroad and postal systems, the Sears catalog broke the tyranny that geography had held over consumer choice. By 1897, it offered 200,000 items to rural Americans who were previously limited to the provisions of the local general store.

Anderson portrays Amazon as the modern-day inheritor of Sears’ legacy and, by far, the most successful Long Tail purveyor of physical goods. Unlike, Rhapsody and iTunes, Amazon is a “box shifter,” and must deal with the cost-incurring problems of inventorying and distributing things made of atoms instead of bits.

Amazon has succeeded by effectively passing this buck to affiliates who participate in the Amazon Marketplace programs. Retailers and distributors of any size and stripe can have their stuff listed on Amazon, but they bear the cost of warehousing and shipping it. This aggregator strategy is key to Amazon’s success, which Anderson sites as comprising 40 percent of the company’s retail sales volume at the end of 2004.

Anderson relies heavily on the success of Amazon and other Long Tail superstars such as ITunes, Rhapsody and Google to hold out the promise of the Long Tail as a viable business model. He acknowledges that end-to-end digital offerings such as music present the fewest challenges and biggest advantages over their “brick and mortar” counterparts. In WalMart music resides in CDs that have to be shipped, warehoused, displayed on shelves and handled by clerks before getting to the customer. It behooves WalMart to devote the resources and real estate required to offer the 3000 CDs that can be displayed in one store to the “hits” most likely to be in demand that day by greatest number of customers.

ITunes and Rhapsody, meanwhile, can cheaply store and distribute an unlimited selection of digital song files in increasingly narrower genres, because there is no penalty for carrying products that don’t sell.

To Anderson’s credit, this prospect of the consumer finding a “Paradise of Choice” in the Long Tail is as close as he gets to promising any utopian outcomes from Long Tail economics. Throughout the book, he avoids the giddy exuberance that paradigm-shifting phenomena can inspire in authors and, the publisher would hope, readers. After all, books about The Next Big Thing that promise to upend the status quo would seem to have a better chance of creating watercooler buzz and becoming hits.

For example, Anderson acknowledges that infinite choice comes bundled with infinite crap, and stresses the importance of filtering mechanisms such as search tools and recommendations  to increase the likelihood of a painless, low-risk and satisfying customer experience. The consumer’s plea, says Anderson, is “Make everything available. And make it easy for me to find it.”

Anderson cites the three essential forces of the Long Tail as: the production of more stuff to lengthen the tail, the distribution to make the contents of tail available to the niche markets, and the connection of supply to demand — a process of using our attraction to hits to increase demand for niche stuff to satisfy our most individual appetites.

The way to get more stuff made, he argues, it to democratize the means of production. He cites the role of amateurs and peer production in the success of Wikipedia; the “exposure culture” of the Web, in which getting noticed is everything; and self-publishing and accessible audio and video technology as blurring the lines between producers and consumers. Yet, Anderson never adequately connects this democratization of production and distribution to a successful Long Tail business model. Wikipedia is non-profit and YouTube, the platform for all that nouveau auteur video, gets plenty of eyeballs but, to date, cashes few checks.

Toward the end of "The Long Tail," Anderson seems to be aware that he has relied too heavily on examples from the digital entertainment sector to convey the promise of the Long Tail business model. He gives us a chapter of other success stories, but these are either less convincing (KitchenMaid and Lego) or one-off category dominators (Ebay and Google Adwords), which, like Amazon and iTunes seem unlikely to be rivaled or replicated any time soon.

"The Long Tail" is a well-researched and generally balanced treatment of a very big idea, a work that intelligently frames a phenomenon that is challenging the dynamics of conventional economics. The only thing that kept me from turning the last page and exuberantly declaring that “This is the future!” was my inability to think of a fresh example of profitable Long Tail success that has emerged in the two years since the book was published.

But this is not it. I love Rhapsody for the games it allows us to play. How about the "make a wish" game. Not too long ago, Francine was over. And we tried to bit Rhapsody. "Tell me your favorite song", I asked. And there is was. This is how I learned that one of the bands I enjoy listening to is Journey, nameless until then.

And this is how Francine learned that one of my favorite songs is a James Brown song. Click below for a surprise performance, with non less than. . . just click, will you?

James Brown and Pavarotti, unbelievable performance. embarrassingly, while watching i was wondering how easy is the drumming for the song compared to, you know. . . i managed to get so far without saying the R word.

There's more. I love Little Wing. so imagine that 11 clicks on the keyboard got me the list of all version, original and covers. Clapton, SRV and Jimi Hendrix were a given, but what about Ottmar Liebert, The Corrs and Elvis Schoenberg's Orchestra? All of which are worth listening, BTW.

This experience would have been limited, if it wasn't for the comfort or spoiling offered by Sonos. I mentioned it before, so what?! Let me just say that having the ability to play the same music in all rooms, control it from one interface [computer or heavy remote], and manage all music on one's network is a lot. Spoiling indeed. Soon to be categorized under "Hard to recall life pre".

When you consume music as I do, even if i don't know the song or singer's name or biography, this is a great solution. Enjoy.

Anyways…. With all that said, it's why I haven't posted the 2^nd part of my take on stewardship yet again. But, it'll be coming soon enough now that I'm up and running again! \o/

Besides battling with evil Windows, and crazy gremlins in my machine; I had a fun-filled week of receiving roof damage to my place from last week's hellish storm, my boyfriend arguing with my over piercings and nail polish (yes, you heard that right, piercings and nail polish… apparently my take on style is as whack as they come, folks), and my truck alarm firing off three times in the middle of the night… on three different occasions… for no flippin' reason… which in return drove the neighbors absolutely crazy (can't say I blame them though).

Good news though… in the same week, Rhapsody FINALLY fixed my music account that's been going nutty off and on for a few months now (I REALLY love my music), I'm getting a new motorcycle (yippee!!!), and one of my best friends is getting married. Oh, and I saw my godson for the first time in two years, and he looks like a mini version to Tiger Woods, literally. Cute as a button I tell you!!

'Til next time….

….but in the mean time…. why don't yah go mozy on over to my blog buddy on "The Tide Is Turning" -- she always has something great to say!

He says the shift is facilitated by three factors made possible by the internet and digital technology. 1. Lowering barriers to production. This creates products to populate the tail. 2. Broadening distribution to make everything available, not just the hits; 3. Effective ways to help consumer find their way to products they want.

Anderson gave a catchy name to a business plan already widely successful at the time the book was published. He credits the concept of the long tail to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and counterparts at Netflix and Rhapsody.

Anderson begins with the conversation he had with the CEO of a digital jukebox company. The CEO asks Anderson, what percentage of the 10,000 album inventory sells at least one track per quarter? Anderson first thinks 20%, based on the theory that generally 80% of sales come from 20% of the products – the 80/20 rule. The CEO says the actual number of cds selling at least one track per quarter is 98%. This is posited by the CEO as the 98% rule. Anderson used 98% rules as a chapter subtitle.

This is comparing apples and oranges. 98% of the albums could sell one track per quarter. And 80% of sales could still come from 20% of the albums. The observation has no bearing on “end of the hits” thesis. Anderson writes on p. 131 “I’ve described the Long Tail as the death of the 80/20 Rules, even though it’s actually nothing of the sort." So why describe it that way in the first place?

Anderson employs the same bait and switch tactic by titling chapter two The Rise and Fall of the Hit and then on page 147 writing “Hits, like it or not are here to stay”. Anderson holds his idea right in front of our eyes so it looks big. Then as the book goes on he pulls the idea further away. From the new perspective we see it's not so big after all. Given that The Long Tail was written for a mass audience we can forgive Anderson for shouting before introducing the nuances.

It faces a more serious challenge from Harvard Business School associate professor Anita Elberse. Elberse helped Anderson in his research for the Long Tail. Now she says her more recent analysis of sales demonstrates that hits are more important than ever.

For example in studying Rhapsody sales figures she found that the top 10% of titles accounted for 78% of all plays, and the top 1% of titles for 32% of all plays. This would suggest the blockbusters still rule.

Anderson has responded that using percentages misrepresents the true meaning of the head. He says the head should be defined as sales of the number of items found in a bricks and mortar retailer and the tail is defined as everything else. Anderson says The Long Tail is made possible by going beyond bricks and mortar so what is the relevance of this definition?

By defining the head as only the relatively limited selection available in a bricks and mortar store, Anderson artificially inflates the tail. Defining the head as the part of a graph where the hits reside and the tail as where a steep drop off occurs, creates more valid comparison.

Elberse makes this case and runs with it, arguing that in practical sales terms “a few winners still go a long way – probably even further than before” and “the tail is long and flat and content providers will find it hard to profit much from it”. It may be that way today, but we are still early in the on-line revolution.

But why must on-line retailers decide between allocating resources more toward blockbusters or more in the direction of niche products? Can’t they easily do both? On web sites employing a good search engine and social marketing (“people who like what you’re looking at also liked….) the cross-promotion to more obscure but related products is automatic. Once the on-line description has been written and properly indexed, the retailers’ work is done. The consumer can as easily look for the niche as they can look for the hit.

Beyond his economic points, Anderson argues that The Long Tail upends assumptions about mass culture. He argues "the primary effect of the Long Tail is to shift our taste toward niches..." and away from blockbusters. He sees in the numbers consumers yearning to be free of corporate blockbusters.

Elberse challenges the culture change notion citing her own sales figures from Australia’s version of Netflix, Quickflix. Her parsing of the numbers suggests there is no particular taste for the obscure. Most of the niche offerings are rented by customers who rent many videos, including hits. She presents her own theory that we gravitate to hits because it connects us socially.

Anderson is correct to question whether such an inference can be made from a snapshot of sales figures from one company down under. But I found neither argument persuasive. Both Anderson and Elberse use snapshots of data. In the rapidly changing marketplace we need trend data tracked over time.

In the meantime it is clear that sales are to be found in the Long Tail made possible by net economics of creating easy frictionless distribution and attractive ways for consumers to find products. But we knew that before Chris Anderson wrote "The Long Tail".

Anyone who knows me is well aware of how big a fan I am of Rhapsody.  It's one of my essential tools for digesting and discovering new music.  The music subscription service model has always made a lot of sense to me and I believe is a model we're going to see a lot more of.  Especially as more and more artists attempt to circumvent labels and go direct to fans (with the help of technology like Topspin).  

After all, why wouldn't you want to pay $12/month to access a virtual unlimited amount of music - anywhere, anytime.  It's beautiful.  Especially when leveraged through the Sonos Digital Music System (in which Rhapsody is already integrated).  I have an ongoing Rhapsody playlist of new music that I add to whenever I hear or read about a new artist.  Then I just queue up the playlist and listen to it whenever I'm at work or futzing around the house.  With the combination of Rhaspody and Sonos, listening to music is no longer a dedicated form of entertainment.  

Finally, Rhapsody has added an MP3 download component, without all the DRM (Digital Rights Management) hassles like Apple iTunes.  (Which means when you download a track or album you can do whatever you want with it - no proprietary formats, limited sharing, etc.)  I still love eMusic and inSound for their great selection of Indie music.  But I find that Rhapsody is the ideal platform for most of my music research.  I'm very happy about this new MP3 service and hope that the the next iteration with include the option for monthly download bundles as part of my subscription.  :)

According to an article on Wired yesterday, the music store has opted to switch to MP3 format – which doesn't support the ailing digital rights management restrictions favoured by the big wheels of the music industry – in the interests of its music being able to “work on every basic digital music device that's ever been put out, including all the 'I' devices from Apple.”

Nice to know it's because of customer demand, then.

Neil Smith, vice president at Rhapsody, chalks the change up to “the major [record] labels [becoming] more comfortable moving to MP3 formats for purchases” in the last year. As well as making all five million files previously only accessible via the DRM enabled subscription service available for one-time purchasing in MP3 format, the company has also taken the interesting choice to offer free full-length samples for its members – although you are limited to twenty-five such 'freebies' in a given month and the service is only available to subscribers at the given time, with plans afoot to roll it out to all as soon as possible.

The pricing of the songs – currently set at the ever-popular 99¢ per track or $9.99 per album – is comparable to the popular iTunes store, with the added bonus that the lack of DRM means the songs are yours to keep forever, not just until an authentication server somewhere goes offline.

In order to drum up interest in its DRM-free offerings, Rhapsody has also decided to offer a $10 credit to the first 100,000 accounts to be created. Although the accounts themselves are free, you will have to part with your credit card details – and the offer is only valid for residents of the United States.

Do you still rely on the purchase of physical media for your music, or is sensibly-priced digital distribution really the way forward? Share your thoughts over in the forums.

Performances this week:

Monday July 7th: 6pmSLT/9pmEST: with Juel Resistance at 5pmSLT/8pmEST at Music Island at The MAX

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Saona/22/224/23 

Tuesday July 8th: 7pmSLT/10pmEST: with Charles Coleman at 6pmSLT/9pmEST at Gwampa's Pajama Party
**Location TBA**

Wednesday July 9th: 6pmSLT/9pmEST: at Kavarna 707 E Lake Drive Decatur, GA
http://myspace.com/instantkavarna
along with the Atlanta GoGirls Elite Members:
http://myspace.com/atlantachaptergogirlsmusic
**meeting starts at 7:30pm with music by various artists starting at 8pm.
I will be broadcasting this event onto my parcel on Artropolis if i can get the connection**

Thursday July 10th: 2pmSLT/5pmEST: Rhapsody Isle
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Rhapsody%20Isles/85/125/82

Friday July 11th: 1pmSLT/4pmEST: Tribute Island
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Tribute%20Island/128/128/0
Cylindrian pays tribute to songbird, Eva Cassidy:
read the blog post about Louis Volare's Tribute to John Lennon
http://primperfectblog.wordpress.com/2008/06/27/louis-volares-tribute-to-john-lennon-tonight/

Saturday July 12th:
Career Builder Sim Party
11amSLT/2pmEST

Gracie Kendal's Exhibit Closing Party at Blue Fusion Gallery
5pmSLT/8pmEST

Sunday July 13th:
12:30pmSLT/3:30pmEST
Avilion Isle's Valinor Stage

6pmSLT/9pmEST
Cylindrian performs Live at
The East Point Corner Tavern
2783 Main St
East Point, GA 30344
(404) 768-0007

http://www.myspace.com/eastpointcornertavern

So there you have it Folks. My schedule for this week.
If you live in the Metro Atlanta Area,
I would love to meet you in person and have you at some of the live shows coming up.

I am performing in Atlanta: Thursday July 17th: 9pmEST
The Atlanta Room of Smith's Olde Bar
http://smithsoldebar.com Tickets are $7.00 at the door
please specify you are there to see me.
I'll have special CDs for purchase as well as some Key chains and of course my River CD
with the "NEW" packaging.
Hope you can make it!!
Please spread the word around...and if by some chance you have some ideas on how
to get the word out about shows in SL and in RL...lets work together to make it happen.
I still haven't hired an assistant to work with me...as I've just been too swamped
and the income just isn't there to fund a paying position...yet.
One day, maybe. For now...its still a "grass roots" operation.
Thank you to all of you who have been continuously incredibly supportive.
Its exhausting, I know...but
you all are imperative to the success of indepedent musicians ability
to continue making music.
Much love to you all who read this!
Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed to stay "abreast" of the happenings/appearances
of this indie musician both in the virtual world and the real world.
Peace!!!

~cyl~

Here's an update on the sites you can find me on the web:
Subscribe to my mailing list:
http://reverbnation.com/cylindrian
Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/reqs.php#/profile.php?id=697506713
Myspace: to order CDs direct from me
http://myspace.com/gracefolk
The Sixty One: to listen to music and "vote" for it
http://thesixtyone.com/gracebuford
That'll get ya' started at least. Have fun and thanks for reading! :)

And the fun continues.

Every time I post a "chapter" that gets significantly more comments than usual, I gain an insight. Sometimes about myself; sometimes about us all. #131 was all about us, the hidden and not so hidden singers, the real players, the couch players, the armchair masters of guitars, the RockBand players, the GuitarHeroes and those waiting to come out of the, I guess, living room? The ways we find to express ourselves, openly or behind closed doors and with headsets.

And all the new songs I listen to and learn. Yesterday, over Skype, once we were done with work this and work that, and started talking music, I got this: "TtF&tF is the hardest thing on Guitar Hero 3, so I'm told..." to which I typed "Ha? Raising eyebrows". So I got the TtF&tF for dummies version: "Through the fire and the flames". Almost correct. It's "Through the Fire and Flames" Wikipedia says. MTV, in a compilation they did, added to the song's name an extra "the".

That was yesterday.

Since then, I Rhapsody-ed the song, which I've never heard of. I'll praise Rhapsody another time. Right now I'm pressing the [volume up] button and am happy that my apartment is a corner apt. and that the speakers are not next to any wall shared with the neighbors. I let it blast the whole 7:21 min. and then again. and again. and again.

Must see:

Israel, I was told, restricted access to the one above, so this one with subtitles should work with you, as it had been tested earlier today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DilAASI69Sc

The video, unlike the recorded song, is only 5 minutes long. Not that it should bother you. It's overwhelming as it is. The things these hands can do. . .

[wp_caption id="" align="alignleft" width="214" caption="YES / Tormato (1978)"][/wp_caption]

I recall my excitement and joy in high school, when I got my first "Made in the UK" album. It was Tormato, by YES. As far as my dad was concerned, it was "No, No" and then again "NO!!!" When the sounds of Rejoice, the 1st song in the album, started filling the house, joy was not part of the parental behavior demonstrated.

I recall my excitement and joy in high school, when I got my first "Made in the UK" album. It was Tormato, by YES. As far as my dad was concerned, it was "No, No" and then again "NO!!!" When the sounds of Rejoice, the 1st song in the album, started filling the house, joy was not part of the parental behavior demonstrated.

Unfortunately, having the largest of the kids bedrooms in the house, had its price. it was also the bedroom sharing a wall with our dinning room/ open kitchen area. As time went by, my dad learned to recognize the sounds of the album. For someone who insisted that it's not music, I think he did very well.

Not even "The WALL", which i played much more often, got so much negative attention. So in our house Tormato was a success. It generated the right teenager-parent conflict of noise. Sadly, Yes didn't share the same view. They never thought of the album in terms of success.

The only song with some success was "Don't Kill the Whale". If they'd only asked me. In a 2nd thought however, I'm kind of happy they didn't. Almost 30 years later, in a music conversation, I was told that the album that I insisted to call TOMATO, is called, as a matter of fact, Tormato. Another great moment of ignorance.

My apologies, YES.

And how's the RockBand doing? It's all about practice. I still suck with the drums. In vocals however, I ventured today into Medium difficulty level. Did I mention it takes practice? But the Drums... dear damn drums...

As I sign off, going for my "witchcraft" book (see #131), here's a drummer I won't compete with:

Check out Amazon, Rhapsody or ,dare I say it,...Napster.

(Via MacNewsWorld)