The Apple Store is a fascination as it's one of the most unusual stores you can find and it will always have unusual people, always the most interesting to me. It's conceivable it will be ready by the end of the day and they will do the cheapest possible fix. If the optical drive cannot be repair then terminate the connections, don't replace it.
Face it that optical drives are obsolete as Apple doesn't install them in its newer computers. Apple told you when floppie drives were obsolete and a lot of you didn't believe them but show me one now.
This is radical for music as even giving away a CD of your music will be pointless because there will be a growing probability the buyer will have no device on which to play it. Don't read this as pessimism as rather it is evolution. There are two things in the Universe no-one can stop: evolution and the sand worms of Arrakis.
Musicians played it for a while that I'll tease you with a nasty, low-quality MP3 and surely you will buy the CD to get the higher quality. Wrongo, Keyboard King, they fell in love with the crap MP3 files and still didn't buy the CD.
So, what's an enterprising musician to do. Music is almost entirely online and the process won't take much longer to complete. Do you keep hustling MP3 files even though you know they're worthless or do you move up to AIFF for the real sound of your recording. The trouble with the latter is that you have just provided the pure digital master for your heart of gold recording. Once it's on the Internet it will spread faster than a social disease … and you still won't get paid.
No, I don't have an answer but you will need to give it some thought as hustling CDs is a guaranteed loser, not now but soon enough that it matters. That ultra-elitist audiophiles tell you vinyl will return but that will happen about the same time as you see mammoths walking the Earth again. Conceivably vinyl lives for some time for super-rich buyers but consumer grade just ain't going to happen.
For example, I've got ten or so DVDs of "The Rehearsals" which was a set of recordings from before the Cincinnati concert. I decided earlier that I will rip the DVD to a flat file that can be uploaded to YouTube and put the whole mofo out there. I was going to offer the DVDs as a premium for the broke-down jammer campaign but no-one wants plastic and, besides, the stuff stays in a landfill for a million years or so before it finally degrades.
The question regarding the uploaded DVD is the same specifically as that for any music. What quality level is appropriate given this is the only place anyone is likely to look at it (i.e. online).
More to come as this is definitely evolution in action.
Face it that optical drives are obsolete as Apple doesn't install them in its newer computers. Apple told you when floppie drives were obsolete and a lot of you didn't believe them but show me one now.
This is radical for music as even giving away a CD of your music will be pointless because there will be a growing probability the buyer will have no device on which to play it. Don't read this as pessimism as rather it is evolution. There are two things in the Universe no-one can stop: evolution and the sand worms of Arrakis.
Musicians played it for a while that I'll tease you with a nasty, low-quality MP3 and surely you will buy the CD to get the higher quality. Wrongo, Keyboard King, they fell in love with the crap MP3 files and still didn't buy the CD.
So, what's an enterprising musician to do. Music is almost entirely online and the process won't take much longer to complete. Do you keep hustling MP3 files even though you know they're worthless or do you move up to AIFF for the real sound of your recording. The trouble with the latter is that you have just provided the pure digital master for your heart of gold recording. Once it's on the Internet it will spread faster than a social disease … and you still won't get paid.
No, I don't have an answer but you will need to give it some thought as hustling CDs is a guaranteed loser, not now but soon enough that it matters. That ultra-elitist audiophiles tell you vinyl will return but that will happen about the same time as you see mammoths walking the Earth again. Conceivably vinyl lives for some time for super-rich buyers but consumer grade just ain't going to happen.
For example, I've got ten or so DVDs of "The Rehearsals" which was a set of recordings from before the Cincinnati concert. I decided earlier that I will rip the DVD to a flat file that can be uploaded to YouTube and put the whole mofo out there. I was going to offer the DVDs as a premium for the broke-down jammer campaign but no-one wants plastic and, besides, the stuff stays in a landfill for a million years or so before it finally degrades.
The question regarding the uploaded DVD is the same specifically as that for any music. What quality level is appropriate given this is the only place anyone is likely to look at it (i.e. online).
More to come as this is definitely evolution in action.
7 comments:
The answer, it seems to me, is for Google, Apple, Microsoft, or whomever, to develop a method to generate ads from within the AIFF format, with the ad revenue going to the artist. Once that happens, let it spread like a social disease! It's the best of all worlds since the person streaming it gets to listen for free, and the artist gets the revenue from the ad. Unfortunately, the technology is not quite there, yet. I agree, though, that optical is dead. Heck, even the latest cars come equipped with Pandora, but not with a CD drive.
I'm sure you can see the billions that would come from such a mechanism.
This could warrant OS level modification and I don't mean hacks but rather considered design by the players you mentioned. It couldn't be a terribly difficult thing to put in a hook for the AIFF format such that some standardized header could not be skipped. Of course, Clever Dicks will find a way to get around that but they always do.
There are all kinds of security problems in this but the designers are whizkids ... they can figure it out. In the header for the AIFF, there's the link to the ad that pops up in the browser so it's visual rather than audio and doesn't disturb the play. That covers all platforms except for a car but a great many have a display screen as well.
This strikes me as eminently practical, relatively easy, and worth a shit ton of money as everyone gets a piece of it and the music is free, for real.
Understand fully how much record companies will hate you for suggesting this. Screw 'em as they couldn't have done less for indie unless they started burning witches again.
The Internet is plenty fast enough now. Full-spectrum audio is 10 MB per minute in stereo. Given typical cable download speeds, that's trivial. MP3 was designed for the speed of the Internet twenty years ago.
The only real problem I see to it from the project mgmt aspect is in coming up with the standardized header. This is absolutely crucial because if anyone gets cowboy on this then it will make one hell of a mess out of music for everyone.
In fact, I made it too severe. The musician should still have the option of being able to upload stuff without a header and the OS should play it. However, if the AIFF header is present then the OS needs to enforce page display or whatever is decided is best for presentation of the ad.
When you look at the revenue streams of social media, you can see just how successful this model would be. As to the record companies, well, they will be forced to adapt to the realities of the new delivery model for music and video. I have not searched for any statistics on content download versus physical media purchased, but I suspect by now the download and streaming delivery systems dwarf the purchase of dvd and cd media.
I wrote another article as this is billion-dollar stuff for whomever makes it work and it's really not that difficult. A talented project manager with some venture capital to carry it through could do this tomorrow.
I wish I had the drive to push a deal like that, but it's best left to the big guns. Steve Jobs would have loved it, and we saw what he was able to accomplish selling iTunes to the major players. One way or another, those, this WILL happen. It's inevitable since the physical media is dying fast.
Same here as it wouldn't be that hard. The other article goes into a number of specifics on what it would take to do it and someone's got to get cracking on it as there's too much money to be made to ignore the potential.
The recording companies did such a poor job of handling the Napster situation that it doesn't give me any faith in their ability to manage their situation. This time it needs to be driven by musicians and it will be a fight. The other article went into some detail on how that could work, tho.
Like you say, it's got to happen.
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