Just amazed at the doom-mongering that still goes on about the music industry. ‘Everything will be free and that’s the end’ or ‘why pay if you can get it for free?’. Arguments that may have had an element of potential truth 10 years ago but, bloody hell, this is the most exciting time for 30 years in the media industries. Creators can communicate with their fans in a direct way that was just impossible a few years ago. Feedback about what fans like, what they want – brilliant. Even general communication between an artist and fan builds a relationship that completely changes so many things.
And then there’s Apple who have built an entirely new empire using music as the bait. They have lovely designs and their devices work seamlessly, but without music they would be just another tech company. By integrating with a media industry that people have an emotional relationship with, Apple have built their brand into people’s lifestyle and are now looking at books, films and TV in the same way. Google and Sony, who could take them on, are either looking in other directions or just missing the point. Great article here about how Google are looking to take on Apple using music in the same way. Of course the article takes the line that the record labels are rubbing their hands, which they may be but that’s just a short-term issue.
There’s so much more to creators than just physical product but that’s never an issue the press wants to consider as the complications don’t make a headline.
Really looking forward to seeing how music, books and tv develop over next year. They will always continue to be hugely important to people but it seems they are even more important as tools for the next generation of media technologies. So many opportunities…
I use Facebook regularly. It’s more involving and you feel part of a community. With Twitter it’s more like a big noticeboard where you really don’t know who’s reading it, is far more edgy and, for me, much better to find out new things than to post views.
If I ever want immediate news on an event then Twitter will be the first place I go. Sometimes though I get dragged into twitter exchanges and the Edinburgh book festival just now is one of those times. They have a daily challenge using the hashtag #UnboundEd where you have to create a story on their given theme within the length of a tweet. Yesterday was on Dogs and today it’s Festivals. Great idea and fantastically difficult.
@synthjock: He sat on the same patch of pavement day after day, watching clods of metal fly into a hat and wondering why nobody threw a bone.
@jadamthwaite: “Lucy!” Joan stands in the porch shaking a biscuit tin. Every night she calls the Labrador whose photo yellows on the lamp posts.
@VickySpicer: The dog lovingly buried the bone. Only 205 more to go until his owner would be fully submerged in the earth. That’ll teach her
@polnoon: His eyes turned from bulging round to narrow slits as his ears dropped into streamline mode. Game or for real- do you feel lucky?
Edinburgh Book Festival #unbounded
At the recent Barcamp Glasgow, Drew Neil presented his project for new collective nouns. It works using Twitter so that if you tweet a collective noun suggestion with the hashtag #collectivenouns then his site will pick this up and post it as an open vote. His Pecha Kucha presentation was both elegantly old-school and new tech and he’s put a video of it here.
Essentially he covers the history of collective nouns and how it originated as a class distinction with Victorian’s trying to outdo each other in knowing the correct collective nouns for such as Partridge (covey). As these nouns were created by aspiring individuals they were adapted by viral popularity. To move this into modern technology of social networking is a lovely project and a great example of how some things are not really new, just quicker. www.all-sorts.org
after too long on facebook and twitter it’s time to come back to old-fashioned blogging.
Flocklocal has had a strange year. Everyone we speak to says it’s a great idea to create a tool-set for impulse volunteering but fewer folks want to actually create projects. We’re reviewing the marketing this week and will probably be launching the service just in Edinburgh for now.
how long did these take to make or prepare these?
This first one is a guy with too many post-its and too much time. Amazing to think of sticking each one to the wall for each frame.
This second one is by a bunch of students who played ‘snake’ by turning on and off lights in their block of flats. This must have been done with computer operated lights?
Something about this last track that Billy Mackenzie ever released that is so dated and yet still sounds great. (Audio only and vocals don’t come in ’til about 1.30). Poor guy never wanted to be a star, just loved singing.
I have worked in music copyright for over 25 years and I was recently reminded about an old paper from Ted Nelson on his idea for a Transcopyright Engine. Essentially it says that there would only ever be one copy of any copyright work and people would have a licence to access that copy. Given this was proposed about 20 years ago it was purely conceptual, or should have been but there’s a tale, perhaps apocryphal, that he blew huge amounts of money on the first 5Gb drive thinking this would solve the storage problems. As we know, Mr Nelson can be a bit flaky at times as many smart folk are, but I just looked this up and it’s still going as part of his Xanadu project and more interestingly he has brought Lessig into the frame to learn from Creative Commons. There’s a summary of it at http://transcopyright.org/. Given the ongoing push to the edge of network and network computers perhaps Ted was right?
Sadly my own project (for a Licensed Copyright mark that would be an active identifier, such as DOI, back to a contract licence database) that I kicked off for the UK record industry did not get moving which is a real shame. Creative commons is great for giving away for free but the problem with copyright is not the law, it’s communicating with the copyright owner (my mantra I know). Piracy of the future will be breach of licence rather than no licence at all so if the industry can’t even manage things just now then it will only get worse.
… must be better of course. I’m not usually political but it has to be raised that the UK Tories are saying the answers to the recessions come from a failed economist that was even fired by Nixon.
Good summary of thjis in today’s Independent
extract… ‘…two weeks ago, Cameron, when asked about whether the government’s proposals to increase taxes on the richest one percent would raise more money for the Treasury replied, “It’s a very difficult calculation about where we are on the Laffer Curve… We have to put this [top rate of tax] in a queue of things we would want to get rid of… and I’m always interested in topping up my study of Laffer.”
To most people, this sounds like gibberish. Who is this “Laffer” who Cameron is turning to as the measure of whether tax policy works? Arthur Laffer is an economist who was fired from the Nixon administration in disgrace and went on to invent a false economic theory. He was picked out by the Watergate-wet Richard Nixon when he made a prediction about economic growth that was way ahead of every other economist. Nixon put it into every speech – until it was revealed that, while other economists had used thousands of variables to arrived at their predictions, Laffer had used just four – and got it totally wrong. He was fired, and that should have been the end of him.
But Laffer was befriended by Dick Cheney, and in 1974 they invented an economic theory on the back of a cocktail napkin – literally…’
I know the current political leaders are failing on so many levels but that does not always mean the alternative is better.
This is a personal blog for Gavin Robertson. There’s also links to some of the sites Alison and I work on and a page for some of the domain names we will be developing although I’ll consider offers on any of them. My main background is music rights and on-line technologies. Music’s been getting sensationalised [...]more →
