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By Brian, May 13, 2010 6:52 am

I can’t help but wonder how the modern music market is surviving. As long as the Internet has been the de-facto media sharing platform, the industry has been crying foul. They’re losing all their profits so they say.  Profits which I might add that they have been making entirely off the efforts of the artists who get pittance for royalties. Sometimes the artists (Metallica for example) step up and complain as well, and who can blame them? They’re already getting screwed by the record companies and all the free downloading has probably cut into their cash flow. Not that it’s probably hurting Metallica, but it is likely hurting the other artists who aren’t yet millionaires, naturally.

As an aside – I like Metallica – which is to say, I like their music except for the Bob Rock era of pop garbage after the Black album when they stopped being a heavy metal band and sold hard-rock albums to the masses as a Metallica product. Mass appeal isn’t a bad thing on it’s own, but when music is produced solely for that purpose it makes me sick. Artists need to make their living too, but if it degrades the art so severely, what is the point? They might as well get a day job like the rest of us if they’re not going to try anymore – calling modern tracks art is an insult to art itself.

Yet somehow Lady Gaga can put out synth-pop more pretentious than KISS (at least they can actually play their songs live and put on a entertaining show) and produce like sounding tracks for other ‘artists’. How many more of these artificial tracks that the industry is pushing can the general public stand? Sadly, it seems infinite – but every popular music genre has had a time when it reaches critical mass and implodes on itself. I personally hope that time is soon.

It’s happening all over. Rap and hip-hop went from a few pioneers (Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, LL Cool J, etc.) and became this huge scene where people pretend to be gangsters (50 Cent, Nelly, etc.) so they can make money rapping about being such thugs – because that was selling really well for NWA, Tupac and Snoop Dogg.
It’s gotten so bad that nearly every song on the pop charts now has the following:

• a) A rap sequence (if not the whole song)
• b) Heavily synthesized (ie. digitally pitch corrected) vocals
• c) Few if any instruments played by a human directly.
• d) A real song sampled and looped in the background.

I’ll admit, Miss (Mr? There’s so much silly speculation) Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’ has a dancelike beat that you can move to when half intoxicated in a sweaty cluster of also half intoxicated people on a tiny dance floor with speakers so loud the beat is all you can hear/feel. Personally, I used to think Queens of the Stone Age and the White Stripes could save us – but they’ve all formed new bands that are starting to sound the same as the other crap out there… I really hope I’m wrong about this, I really look up to some of these guys as being the last bastions of rock and have paid good money to see them do it live in their old bands.

As long as there’s a ‘new best thing that sounds the same’ situation going on, please excuse me – I’ve just dusted off my record player and ordered a new stylus for it. My cassettes and CD’s are coming out of hiding. I need to spend some time with Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, Travis Meeks, Kurt Cobain, Billy Corgan, Marylin Manson, and Dave Wyndorf – to name a few – I have a large collection of physical media rivaling my digital collection. I’m doing this to remind myself that music can have passion, creativity and charming minor imperfections which benefit the recordings and make then worthwhile to purchase.

The music industry can rest easy – I won’t be downloading any of their products any time soon. It’s not even worth my time to obtain these over produced tracks for free anymore. If they do manage to scrounge out something listenable – well you know what? Given the crap out there now – I’m not spending a dime on a disc until someone makes an album actually worth my while.

My bottom line to the music industry: Market your product in a format that matches the modern digital era, stop rapping in EVERY damned song, and lose the vocoders that mask bad singers who have the ‘look’ you want to sell… Then I might consider paying for your products again. It’s called market value – obtain some.

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By Brian, December 6, 2007 1:56 pm

It’s the online sensation that has swept the world – Facebook. Up until now, the data they have collected has been only what you provided them. Now with their new Beacon project, they’ve started to reach beyond the confines of their domain, and collect information that you may not have authorized them to.

It’s no secret to anyone who has read the privacy policy that Facebook is not just a social networking tool, but a method of collecting consumer data which is used for marketing purposes. That’s why it’s important not to put anything on their site that you wouldn’t want shared in this manner such as phone numbers, business email addresses and the like. Otherwise, it seems fairly benign, or at least it was until now.

Bought a product on a Beacon partner’s website? They tell Facebook, who adds a notification onto your feed. Sure, you can opt-out and delete the message – but Facebook still knows, and have been unresponsive to questions as to what happens to that data after you delete it from your feed. Is it really deleted, or merely hidden?
The plot thickens – not all of the Beacon partner sites are collecting just purchase information. Some are collecting information on your interests based on your browsing activities on their websites.

What all of this means is that Facebook is collecting personalized data on you that you didn’t explicitly give them. They are using it to aim targeted ads at you and your social circle – and quite likely they’re selling this marketing data to their partners.

A further questionable move on their part is that this new initiative is enabled by default for all users – you must edit your privacy configuration to opt-out of the program. The motivation behind this is fairly obvious – not too many people would likely go out of their way to add Beacon to their profile since it has no appeal to the end-user, only the advertisers.

Apparently some of the initial partners (such as Coke) are cooling to the idea and taking a wait-and-see-what-happens approach to Beacon. They claim they where led to believe it would be an opt-in program – but the cynic in me thinks that’s just PR spin to distance themselves from Facebook in case it crashes and burns.

All and all, I can honestly say – shame on you Mark Zuckerberg.

Edit: It's come to my attention that Facebook has partially reversed it's policy and allowed for a global opt-out, instead of a site-by-site opt-out... However you are in fact automatically added to Beacon services unless you ask to be removed.
To do that: Go to Privacy > External Websites and put a check in the box.


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By Brian, December 6, 2007 12:06 pm

Computers and the Internet have revolutionized how we communicate and share. Messages can be sent nearly instantaneously. Entire songs can be reduced to small files and portable storage devices can hold thousands of them. Video is rapidly joining audio in compact portability.

Somehow the entertainment industry has fallen behind. They continue to attempt to enforce outdated copyright laws which where written and designed before current technology was even conceived.
Lets face it, the harder they try to control how things are shared online, the harder someone will work to subvert the system and do it anyways. Hollywood and the music industry should spend more time and money trying to conceive of a new business model that embraces the new capabilities of Internet technology. Instead they keep fighting a losing battle to preserve the current.

It just boggles my mind.

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