I’ve recently finished a couple of remixes using some of the generously-offered vocal samples from MC Chris. MC is a nerdcore hero, was a writer for Sealab 2021 (one of my all-time favorite shows), voiced Hesh in Sealab, and voiced MC PeePants for Aqua Teen Hunger Force. He’s also smart enough to see the value of his music and understand that it’s a good thing that his fans want to remix his work.
What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that’s not bad news for music, and it’s certainly not bad news for musicians.
…We’ll always want to use music as part of our social fabric: to congregate at concerts and in bars, even if the sound sucks; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency; to build temples where only “our kind of people” can hear music (opera houses and symphony halls); to want to know more about our favorite bards — their love lives, their clothes, their political beliefs. This betrays an eternal urge to have a larger context beyond a piece of plastic. One might say this urge is part of our genetic makeup.
…For existing and emerging artists — who read about the music business going down the drain — this is actually a great time, full of options and possibilities. The future of music as a career is wide open.
Notice that Madonna’s now being brought to you by a concert promoter that makes most of its money by getting bums in seats. Every time a Madonna song is copied, it increases the market for her concerts. Talk about a 21st Century business model.
Musicians and labels make the bulk of their money from concerts. Madonna’s angle acknowledges and leverages this fact to free up the diminishing value proposition of trying to protect her content. So the content actually becomes a form of viral advertising which does it’s job whether or not people pay for it.
And over at Wired there’s a cool interview/conversation between David Byrne and Thom Yorke, principally talking about Radiohead’s pay-what-will distribution model for In Rainbows. They discuss the real value of content, the inability of the music industry tolook beyond profits and understand what the listeners want, and the honest admission of Yorke that Radiohead is uniquely positioned to dictate the terms of their distribution.
Thom Yorke: Well, yeah. The only reason we could even get away with this, the only reason anyone even gives a shit, is the fact that we’ve gone through the whole mill of the business in the first place. It’s not supposed to be a model for anything else. It was simply a response to a situation. We’re out of contract. We have our own studio. We have this new server. What the hell else would we do? This was the obvious thing. But it only works for us because of where we are.
Korean scientists, clearly infected with toxoplasma, have brought the feline species one step closer to world domination.
The two Turkish Angora cats now glow red when exposed to ultraviolet light. The scientists believe the process could be used to develop treatments for human genetic diseases and could help reproduce rare animals.
…To clone the cats, Kong’s team used skin cells of the mother cat. They modified its genes to make them fluorescent by using a virus, which was transplanted into the ova. The ova were then implanted into the womb of the donor cat.
This is why the total information state will lose. There’s always some young hot-shot punk kid with a limber mind that will slip right through the chink in your black wall of iron.
An Icelandic teen, MSNBC reports, figured out President Bush’s private phone number, and called it recently, leaving a message saying he was the president of Iceland and wanted Bush to call him back. When police visited the teen, after being alerted by Secret Service, he would not say how he learned the top-secret number.
A lot of the music mashups out there are noisy, inelegant, and poorly encoded. Not so with Nemozob. I highly recommend checking out these tracks for your listening and culturally appropriative entertainment.
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I saw this post on Boing Boing today wherein Mark Fraunfelder talks about his unexpected emotional empathy for the Pleo robotic dinosaur that his two daughters have fallen in love with. What strikes me is how we humans naturally want to imbue life and feeling into the things around us. Mark and his family know the Pleo is a robot and yet it’s behavior is real enough that they instinctively come to regard it as having feelings. It makes me suspect that the animistic quality of a thing is a very real property that is not simply a quality of the thing itself, but is an emergent state between the thing and it’s witness. In other words, the Pleo becomes real by it’s interactions with sensitive humans.
We want those quality interactions with our world so we give life to the things around us. Hence, the Turing Test which postulates that any AI that can be mistaken for a real human in a natural-language conversation is, effectively, as intelligent as a human. So the validity of a thing’s intelligence or sensitivity to it’s world is based in part on the human observing and interacting with it. Furthermore, I would suggest that it’s irrelevant to discuss whether or not animism is real. It’s as real as the real effects it has on the behavior of those who witness it as such.
I’m impressed with the robot’s behavior. It snuggles when you hold it. It falls asleep when you cradle it. It gets frisky when you scratch it under the chin. It’s much more lifelike than Sony’s discontinued Aibo.
My wife didn’t want to watch the video. She said that even though the Pleo was incapable of feeling anything, watching the video is “bad for your psyche,” and that the people who hit the Pleo were damaging their pscyhes, too.
Wednesday December 05th 2007, 5:45 pm
Filed under: ape dynamics, slag
I’m very much undecided on the ‘08 election but I do like the tone of this John Edwards advert. I must, however, include the caveat that I’m quite cynical about _all_ candidates and how so much of their electioneering tends to be little more than clever marketing, sadly left behind once they’re in office.
But taken on the surface, Edwards’ statement that a crowd of corporate Democrats will be no different than a crowd of corporate Republicans is right on and side-steps the general pandering and/or short-sightedness of most political discourse in the country today. Every single presidential and congressional platform must role up to the question of corporate power and influence. Right now, I don’t believe that John Edwards or anyone else running for federal office in America will have any true power to serve the people. Nor do I believe that any of the mainstream media outlets will disregard the editorial requirements of their corporate masters and actually give us some real, unbiased news coverage.
Democracy will fail without radical campaign finance reform. Corporate interests should not be allowed to buy representation.
One plan, which has already tentatively started, entails making literally everything in the world accessible at the click of a button. For now, this means every book, piece of music, film, TV and radio broadcast, official document and photograph.
But eventually… Google boffins believe it can be extended to people and their personal belongings.
The idea is that we, and our treasured possessions, will be fitted with minute microchips which could be linked to the internet, via computers, by a digital radio frequency.
In this way, you would only have to type “Where is my watch” or “Find Joe Bloggs” into your PC or handheld computer, and Google could assist you.
…More immediately, Google is switching its main focus from PCs and laptops to mobile phones.
NEC’s latest software is far beyond the drawing board… the firm has developed a system that can understand around 50,000 Japanese words and translate them to English text on the mobile’s display in just a second or two. The software was made compact enough to “operate on a small microchip mounted in a cellphone,” and was designed especially to help users convert common travel phrases.
Google… recently announced Android, a platform that allows people to build software for a variety of mobile phones. The alliance could spur the creation of mobile applications geared toward cloud computing… People want to seamlessly move their data between computers, the Web, and phones, Vander Wal adds. “If Google is starting to solve that piece of the problem, it could have an impact because that’s something no one’s been able to do yet.”
“I think every generation of application sort of peels away another layer of the computer,” he says. Initially, people interacted with computers using command lines, Schillace explains, then used a graphical interface; now people can do much of their work in a Web browser, which can be on a personal computer or a small handheld device. “It’s about letting the computer get out of our way so we can work with other people and share our information.”
We are in the midst of a computing shift from desktop and laptop devices towards mobile handhelds. Increasingly, the cloud will be where the data and processing power lives, with thin clients wired up to plumb it’s depths.
A lot of the music mashups out there are noisy, inelegant, and poorly encoded. Not so with 