O'Reilly Digital Media

I wasn’t really expecting the Tiger CDs to show up via Federal Express on Friday. To me, the “release date” of software is usually the day that the company plans on starting to ship, not the day you receive it.

However, about 11am on Friday we received several packages from Apple via FedEx. Since we have AMPs on all of our Macs, both client and server, it was interesting to see what arrived:

• 7 OS X Server 10.4 Disc sets with license keys
• 1 OS X 10.4 DVD

Not only did these all arrive in 4 different packages, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to how they were shipped. Even though we have a 10-user AMP for OS X client, there was no reference to that in the single DVD that arrived. Strange.

Well, we were excited. It’s always fun to get packages you weren’t expecting, especially when they give you an opportunity to possibly break your computer!

I spent the early part of the afternoon backing up my PowerBook to a Firewire drive. Since I have a lot of MP3s it took quite a while, but it’s better to be safe. Besides, I planned to completely wipe the drive and start clean.

It’s not that I don’t trust the upgrade process… or maybe it is. I’ve had bad luck upgrading OS X, older versions of MacOS (7 to 8 to 9, anyone?), Windows (although my coworker Jerry has me beat there, having survived an upgrade from Win3.11 to Win95 to Win98. Yikes!), and I’ve even had problems upgrading Linux distros.

So my standard procedure for new operating systems is to start with a clean slate. Sure, it usally means more work getting preferences and other things set up the way you like them, but it guarantees less problems in the long run.

Once I had everything backed up, I rebooted and booted off the DVD. No muss, no fuss. There aren’t a lot of installer options, which I actually like, unless I’m building a server and I want to be very selective about what’s installed. Remember the ability to pick every single thing in MacOS 9?

One thing I did do is run Disk Utility before installing, and partitioned the drive into 45mb for OS X and 10mb for me to experiment with the latest release of Ubuntu Linux. I love Ubuntu on my Dell laptop and I want to see how it runs on Apple hardware.

The install went without a hitch, and I booted back into the initial configuration. My only complaint here is that Apple uses this time to really sell you on a .Mac account. You’re asked at least 3 times to go and buy an account if you don’t have one. Leave it alone, Apple! Once is enough.

After config, you’re back in the Finder. Everything looks pretty much the same as 10.3. Some icons have changed: the Apple Menu is a brighter blue, iChat now looks like a bubble window, and of course the Spotlight icon in the upper right corner.

So far I have had only a single program that does not work: Now UpToDate/Contact. To give Now Software credit, they warned us beforehand that the current version would not work on Tiger. I find this interesting, since many other programs that I figured would not work have absolutely no problems:

• Timbuktu Pro 7
• Toast 6
• iStumbler
• OSXPlanet

These are all programs, or types of programs, that have given me grief in other OS upgrades. It’s a credit to both Apple and all their developers that this was a pretty smooth transition by comparison; but I’m sure that there are other applications that don’t work yet in Tiger.

I’ve spent a bit of time with Spotlight, enough to know that I like the ability to search for things so quickly across files and programs. A caveat, though: if you use Entourage, Thunderbird or Eudora for email, you’re out of luck. Spotlight won’t return any results from these programs, except for Thunderbird and Eudora, where it will return the name of a message folder.

I understand why Entourage is a problem - like Outlook on the PC it stores everything in a single database-like file that has a proprietary format. Go figure.

But Thunderbird and Eudora use a well-known text-based method of message storage - one that has been around for years and which should be dead simple for Spotlight to search through. I don’t know if this is just an oversight on Apple’s part, or a deliberate snub to other popular mail clients. Either way, it’s a useful feature that needs to be added in the next update of Spotlight.

I’ve only played with Dashboard a very little. It’s pretty eye candy, but it’s usefulness to me is limited. While there are some nifty applications, I don’t see me using them in the Dashboard. I will more likely use the method described here at OS X Hints and detach the useful widgets from Dashboard so I can use them standalone.

Possibly the neatest eye candy feature that also is useful is the RSS Reader screensaver. You specify a news source, and the screensaver shows you in a really wild sort of Matrix-like display the latest items from that RSS feed. If you see one you want to read, you hit a number that it tells you on the keypad, and it drops out of screensaver mode and into a web browser with the page. Definitely cool, and there is a hint here that tells you how to change the background color from the default blue.

I do like the new Mail.app. The interface is cleaner, they got rid of that stupid drawer and adopted a more clean three-pane interface like other mail applications. The toolbar buttons are a little odd. They look like controls for a media player instead of a mail application. Mail.app is screaming for skinning to make the toolbar better looking.

One major improvement in Mail.app seems to be the IMAP support. IMAP folders open and display much faster than previously. You don’t have to do any poking around in the Advanced setup to make Mail.app understand subfolders in your Inbox. So far, it doesn’t seem to have the problem that 10.3 Mail had where my mailbox would suddenly just go offline and not be able to be brought back online. All of this makes me happy.

Safari seems faster in 10.4. I didn’t have much time to play with Safari 1.3 in 10.3, and when I did I wasn’t happy with it. There were Java issues and strangely Safari would crash with SSL pages. I have not yet seen that behavior in 10.4. Crossing my fingers… but if Safari doesn’t work I will happily go back to Firefox.

Conclusions? The upgrade went flawlessly. I haven’t had any application or data issues. My PowerBook seems a little zippier than it did before, but that may just be due to a fresh install with no cruft hanging around like I had from the previous 9 months of 10.3.

Next up is installing Ubuntu. But that’s another posting.

Related link: http://www.fatman.com/ftpguest/Dumass/a-pretty%20much%20done/Viva%20La%20Resolut…

VIVA LA RESOLUTION

This is a beautiful story–I’m proud to tell it.

When we found out a few weeks before GDC (the Game Developers’ Conference) that Microsoft (X-Box specifically) was going to give the keynote address this year, my friends and I put out kind of a collective eye-rolling via e-mail. Predicting that the take-home ideas of this presentation would likely once again be the relationship between technology and profits, I suggested an alternative keynote, and Linda suggested a fringe (or “fridge”) conference based on it. Here’s the proposed topic:

> “If the primary point of your gaming career or even your trip to GDC is to maximize profits, then you haven’t spent nearly enough time in a near-death situation. I assure you that your problem will someday solve itself, and you will be embarrassed at all the great gaming opportunities that you threw away.”
>
> –fat

This topic resonated well within our circle of friends. It even went so far that one person who had acted as an advisor to the GDC committee promised to suggest the idea of the Fridge to them.

A few days later, my good friend Mark Terrano called me. Mark is pretty much as high-up at X-box as you can get and still be a gamer. Not only that, he’s a champion of risk-taking over stagnation, of art over ignorance, of gameplay over technology. For gamers, this translates to “Love Over Money.” Mark even gave a speech that ended with a two page rant on “spirituality in gaming.” He was for it. Eloquently.

Mark had called me because he was involved in planning the dreaded X-Box Keynote. He was charged with creating a 4-8 minute slideshow of screenshots of games through history, from the ’70’s to the present. The idea was that Microsoft would introduce High Definition (HD) at this GDC. The slideshow would set this up by implying that first there were 2-D games, then 3-D games, and now, HD. I was asked to make the music for this slideshow. Something that started sounding like the ’70’s, then the ’80’s, then the ’90’s, etc.

In my mind, the mission for me was to work the message of the “fridge keynote” into the Microsoft presentation in a way that would elevate Microsoft’s standing in the developer community. Maybe even provide a little cultural icon for the Microsoft workers to be proud of. Mark was willing to support me in this. I was optimistic.

While I was laying down tracks, Verin Lewis called. Verin is the custodian of Josh’s World and a longtime GDC regular. He had called in the middle of my session to tell me he was reading my book, and that he wished he’d been in it. He had no idea what project I was working on, and for whom. I asked him why I should put him in a book, and he said he had lots of “myths and legends.” So I told him I was taping, I hit the record button, and what you hear is what I got. Exactly where it landed on the track. I didn’t even scoot it to the left or right.

-Man!-

Then Fortune smiled upon me, and the hook “Viva La Resolution” came to me, so the song wrote itself.
I didn’t hear back from Mark for a while after I sent him the first version of the tune. I figured I’d have to scrap it and start over. Then he called me with “bad news.”

He had been directed to ask me to remove the line about the boobs.

That’s it? There’s no problem with “up against the wall” and that?

“Nope! Just the boobs!”

Well, I’ve done harder things than taking out my boobs. I wrote “Will you use it to make smarter troops/or will it be the perfect robot girlfriend for you?” Got it recorded, got ready to ship and…

PROJECT CANCELLED! But we’re willing to pay you in full anyway. And the Direct X team decided they really don’t like the spoken introduction, they’d like to forget that day ever happened. And since we’re paying for it, we still need the boobs out of there.

Well…

I _really_ wanted this song to get heard, and if I sold it, there wasn’t anybody at MS who was hot to use it, modified or not. But just in case, it had to be modified.. After much deliberation, and after listening over and over to the line, “Did we do it for the dollar bills? NO!!!” I decided to buy the song back and just cancel the contract.

The punch line:

An email was sent to Mark saying, more-or-less, “Let’s let The Fat Man cancel the contract on the condition that he take out the intro and the boobs.”

!!!!!!!
No worries. I felt bad for about a day, and then figured out how to say it: “Hey, it’s your choice. You can pay me, and own the song if you want it. You can not pay me and not own the song if you want it. But to not pay me and still control the song, well, that’s just silly.”

They saw the light, I got my song back, and, among a few of the great game developers, it became the unofficial theme song of the GDC this year.

Once again, here it is. Enjoy!!

Viva La Resolution

Oh, and…do you need a song? It’s available!

–FAT

What will YOU do when the Resolution comes? Will you use it to be Hollywood? Or will you use it for the Ultimate Good?

Related link: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200503/msg00441.html

Last week I had a little dummy-spit about the
interpretation of some survey results about XQuery
(see here)
and I have been in a statistical frame of mind all week.

So the recent "http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/magazine/04/12/griffith_poll0418/"
>Sports Illustrated survey on
"http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/magazine/04/12/survey.expanded/?cnn=yes"
>Homosexuality and Sports engrossed me.
Only 14% of respondents didn’t want to accept openly gay male players.
Apart from the surprise that respondents were less tolerant
of openly lesbian sportswomen, many of the other results
are difficult to reconcile. Subtle wording differences in basically repeated questions resulted in very different results: I’d love to know whether this reflects nuanced views
or knee jerk reactions to certain words.

The results are online, but here’s my interpretation,
joining the dots:

• 50 to 60% of people are positive to neutral about gays, whether in or out of sport. They probably have
  a gay friend, collegue or family member.
• 10 to 20% of people have misgivings,
  but don’t support discrimination
  or stereotyping. They think that greater
  acceptence would be a good thing for the country,
  and that it is the private business of the person,
  who they would prefer to be discrete.
  Don’t ask, don’t tell, especially if you are
  a lesbian.
• 10 to 15% of people make some kind of distinction
  between “gays” and “homosexuality”: I suspect
  they are make a distinction between tendencies
  and activities.
  Love the sinner but hate the sin.
  Even this group does not believe in policing
  the bedroom however.
• 15 to 20% of people are strongly against any open or private gayness, and are uncomfortable around gays.
  They believe that children will turn gay
  from exposure to role models.

SI’s poll seems to have used random sampling,
as distinct from a voluntary survey.
When the numbers are reliable,
conjectures interpreting them have some substance.
When the numbers are unreliable, interpretations of the
figures are
>mere puff.

Related link: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/digaudio/

Digital Audio Essentials, O’Reilly’s “comprehensive guide to creating, recording, editing, and sharing music and other audio,” is out, and you can read the Internet Radio chapter right now for free. I did, and learned a lot.

The authors go all the way from basic Internet radio concepts to setting up your own streaming audio server. There’s also a detailed discussion of Live365’s services, which enable even people with wimpy upload speeds and zero knowledge of the draconian online broadcasting rules (PDF) to get into the game.

This chapter is all I’ve seen of the book, but it looks very promising—detailed yet digestible. From the table of contents (PDF), it also looks like a good complement to musician-oriented books. Despite the subtitle, the emphasis seems to be more on manipulating music than making it. But that’s a good thing. Many of the numerous skills covered are ones that musicians and active listeners alike should know.

What are your digital audio essentials?

What are the three most important things to bear in mind when telling a joke about the Space-Time Continuum?

Location, location, location…

…

…

…

…And timing.

Go ahead, let me have it.

Today, not long after I made my first post to any blog (see previous post), I received this email from Rob Landeros, co-creator of the first-ever million-selling CD-ROM game, The 7th Guest:

——Rob said——–

I look forward to the glorious day when YOU, the FAT MAN, starts blogging off your current site. You can be assured that I would be there often contributing irreverent, snide, but insightful comments to your posts.

Roberto

—–End—————

Is it a coincidence that a pioneer of digital media would encourage me thus to write a blog, right out of the blue, at the very moment I was wondering if I had made a good post?

Perhaps it is coincidence.

But I must say, things like that seem to be happening all the time around here.

This leads us to my first bit of practical advice for creating digital content that they wish to affect Humanity, that they want to be worth something, that they want to be considered Art: Be conscious of “coincidences” like this. Notice when things like this seem to happen. Tune in to the Universe. Be thankful to the Angels or the Spirit Helpers or the Quantum Laws or whatever.

Why, Fat Man? How does this count as practical advice, Fat Man? Where do you get off putting this stuff in my face, Fat Man? Why are you wearing those funny shoes, Fat Man?

Because it will help you use the new media to make Great Art.

And on that topic, it must be said that your best creative work, the work that will matter the most to Humanity, is NOT going to come from you. It’s going to come through you.

Let’s delve deeper for a moment.

It has been said that a person is not truly rich if he knows how much money he has.

I would like to extrapolate further and try out a correlary to that idea: Perhaps a person is not truly a great writer if he understands the meaning of everything he writes. Perhaps one is not a truly great artist if he carefully constructed each and every one of his artistic ideas in his own mind. When something comes from the Human Mind, it can only be as great as a single Human Mind. Great Art needs to be bigger than that.

When it comes from the heart, when it comes from the collective unconscious, when it is inspired by the infinite, your expressions in digital media will carry the weight of the Mysteries of the Universe.

Did John Lennon know what the lyrics “yellow matter custard” would mean to every person who heard it? No. Did each splash of color in Van Gogh’s works indicate a specific star in the sky? No. Their works represent what it looks and sounds like when we tap into the Infinite.

On the other hand, an advertising copy writer likely calculates and tries to know fairly accurately how all his lyrics will strike the listener. A technical artist will have a specific purpose for each line he draws. You can keep all that for the Business Blogs.

On this blog, we encourage each other to tune in to the Universe. We try to recognize miracles when we see them. We try to open our hearts to the largest ideas that we can, and those ideas are bigger than the Human Mind can handle. A dog will never understand algebra, yet it exists.

On this blog, we will recognize the idea that sometimes it’s more important what you don’t do than what you do. Because how can the Universe work through you if you’re always planning out every move and every thought and every line and every word?

Here is the first practical step. Look out there. Notice things that are there. Notice things that might be there, but that you can’t prove. Notice things that seem to be there, even though you know that they can’t be. Because, to quote some poet or another, “these are the wild leaps of imagination that fool us out of our boundaries.” These are the things that will let us make works that are bigger than Life out of bits that are smaller than any grain of sand ever was.

I could be wrong, but I think that’s important. And for me, crossing the line from “content” to Art-capital-A is one of the very few things I find interesting about digital media anymore.

What did the Universe tell _you_ today?

The Manifatso:

In 1995, Team Fat signed this Declaration of Principles. It seemed to me a good way to get my first blog off on the right foot.

———————————-

Multimedia is a frontier for music. Along with the Internet, Multimedia will become important in a way that is historically significant, for tremendous numbers of opportunities for, and different and new ways of listening to, creating, and interacting with music.

As the settlers come to this frontier, it is incumbent upon us pioneers to make sure that this becomes a place that is free and open for musical expression. It is Team Fat’s intention that the music in this place be expressive, touching, and made for the sake of the human spirit, not repetitive, imitative, mechanical by convenience, nor needlessly enslaved by styles imposed by fashion or limited machinery.

The musical precedents we set, and the tools we use and help create, the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, and the things we say should all promote this vision.

Signed by Team Fat,
8-20-95

Y’all can swear yourselves to uphold the Manifatso, too, if it fits your way of thinking.

Related link: http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/20050414/index.html

Tom’s Hardware Guide has an article on In-Car Infotainment, including a detailed video of my Mac Mini installation into a Dodge Caravan (a MacMiniVan!).

It’s a good video; you get to see how the in-dash Mac Mini install is wired up.

Related link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/11/politics/11letter.html

Following this article in the New York Times Monday (April 11, 2005), the question has popped up on some music lists: Is President Bush, inadvertently or not, participating in illegal file-sharing?

“…The president also has an eclectic mix of songs downloaded into his iPod from Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy and his chief media strategist during the 2004 campaign. Among them are “Circle Back” by John Hiatt, “(You’re So Square) Baby, I Don’t Care” by Joni Mitchell and “My Sharona,” the 1979 song by the Knack…” (Emphasis is mine.)

If Mr. Bush didn’t pay for those songs, it’s not just a gotcha for the man who could probably claim the title of the world’s leading defender of private property. It’s an indication of the challenge the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and others are facing in trying to get the public to remember that easily cloned digital files are, officially anyway, not free.

And come to think of it, it also raises this question… Would the RIAA sue him?

CopyRight or Left?

Two of my MP3 players have built-in FM radios, but the reception was so awful I never used them (the radios, that is). I tried several approaches to improve the signal, from draping the headphone cord (which serves as an antenna) around my body in weird ways to wrapping a bare wire around the base of the headphone plug. But nothing worked.

Then, one recent evening as I was washing the dishes and my playlist had started to repeat for the second time, I looked up and noticed a glass suncatcher hanging over the sink. I clipped the MP3 player to the mobile’s string, stretching the headphone cord up to the ceiling in an arc, and suddenly experienced excellent radio reception.

Granted, I was now tethered to the sink like a patient on an IV drip, but I had a mountain of dishes to wash, so it was okay. Microsoft’s lame “Let a professional make your next playlist” line notwithstanding, there’s still some cool stuff on radio.

The player I strung up is a Creative Muvo Micro N200, which is unbelievably small and light. I’m not sure I’d want to try this trick with my burly MadPlayer, especially given the threat of a soapy plunge of doom, but I’m enjoying the new sonic options.

Where have you installed your portable player?

Related link: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/0,39023165,39187609,00.htm

“Because of the Internet, you can have thousands if not millions of individuals around the world share information about whether that invention actually took place years and years ago. You’ll find volunteers and others interested in a public inspection of patents. The technology [currently] exists for that.”

“We are saying that the granting of it, inspection of it, challenge, and post grant should be enhanced to take full advantage of new technologies and also the brain power of people around the world to make sure it is truly new things that are coming out.”

-Jim Stallings, vice-president, intellectual property and standards, IBM

Interesting and practical - he suggests that it isn’t just the responsibility of the patent office; that it should be the responsibility of the academic community and others.

I think I agree. What shall we call the collaberative site where people go to evaluate patents? WikiPatenta? WikiPriorArtica? IsThisPatentNovelOrNot.com?

1) I was thumbing through the latest Remix magazine and happened upon a five-page fold-out car ad. It was for a Toyota Scion. I paused, then wondered why I paused, and then it hit me: The number of people making music is now so large that it makes sense to run consumer advertising in a music magazine. In particular, the number of people making music with the assistance of tech tools like loop-based composition software or turntables.

2) Later the same day, I happened to be looking something up on the ASCAP web site. I noticed that ASCAP’s web pages are now sponsored by Guitar Center. ASCAP collects performing rights money, mostly from radio & TV, for songwriters, composers and music publishers. Guitar Center is a mass-market musical instrument retailer. ASCAP now has so many members that it makes sense for Guitar Center to sponsor their web site.

3) Then, in the latest Electronic Musician, I came across an ad by Mackie, who make very good gear and also have a not-bad sense of humor. The ad was for their new recording software. The headline: “IF YOUR MUSIC SUCKS, IT WILL STILL SUCK. YOU’LL JUST MAKE IT A WHOLE LOT FASTER.”

And as the supply approaches infinity, the average price approaches zero…

Related link: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.…

Good flash movie about promoting Hitachi 10x’ing the size of their hard drives with higher-density storage. Styled like “I’m just a bill” or similar 80’s public service announcements. Cute.

Related link: http://www.digitaldivide.net/articles/view.php?ArticleID=378

Simple hack using Skype as an audio interviewing and archive tool. Instead of needing phone interview recording hardware (which you might not have) you can use computer tools (which you have in abundance).

I’ve always been interested in approaches for home-grown creation of media, but A/V media in particular. Conventional radio/TV media channels have already had to take notice of blogs. My hope is that podcasting and videoblogging will expand to the same level of penetration as blogs have.

Related link: http://news.com.com/Teachers leave grading up to the computer/2100-1032_3-565936…

Article on a neat product for sale that automates grading of essays in school. Nifty. Took him 6 years. Yikes.
I’m investigating some similar themes for a Ph.D. thesis.
Tags: artificial intelligence

Related link: http://carhacks.org/

If you need a daily dose of information about in-car computers and computing (like I do), or want to help provide one, i’ve just kicked off carhacks.org and I’m looking for contributors (contact damien@robotarmy.com).
The site is tracking what’s going on in the car computing space from all angles: computer-like features going into the car; entertainment features such as satellite radio going into the into the car via computers; Mac Minis going into the car, iPods going into the car, Playstations and PSPs installed in the car, and pretty much anything that looks, smells, or acts like a general purpose computer in the car.
I’ve completed work on the upcoming book Car PC Hacks and I really believe 2005 is going to be the breakout year for in car computing (of course, I’m biased…)

Related link: http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2005/04/06/sprint_ceo_predict…

I was consulting for a company a while ago that was predicting this - and now it seems like it’s going to go mainstream. Once you have flat fee data over your mobile phone, why not use a Vonage or a Skype over that link? And the first cell provider to dodge that bullet by embracing it will hopefully not cannibalize their own per-minute-billing business.

You down with VOIP? Yah, you know me.

Related link: http://www.mi2n.com/press.php3?press_nb=78567

Commoditization Watch: A few more billion and every person on the planet could have their own individual CD.

“Gracenote Global Music Database Identifies 2 Billionth CD
Gracenote, a leader in global digital entertainment technology, celebrated over 10 years of the Gracenote CDDB helping consumers identify and enjoy digital music around the world by surpassing two billion CDs identified. The two billionth CD was by Rusted Root, a neo-hippie band, for the album, “When I Woke.” Launched in 1995 as CDDB, Gracenote’s Global Music Database is part of a complete content solution that enables users to identify, manage and enjoy their digital media collections. Widely adopted by consumer electronics and PC application companies, Gracenote’s technology is an “essential” ingredient in the world of digital media.”

Have you made your CD yet?

Related link: http://www.streamingmedia.com/east/program/session.asp?id=729

I’m delivering an all-day tutorial on the first day of the Streaming Media East Conference (Monday, May 16, 2005) and I’ll be covering Windows Media streaming in depth. Like O’Reilly conferences, the Streaming Media conferences have a very high signal to noise ratio (i.e. few vendor pitches, only actual do-ers are there). It’s actually a very interesting time with MPEG-4, Windows Media, and the evolution of High Def DVD and media standards(*), so if you’re interested at all in net video I recommend it.

* (For the record, I actually don’t think standards are as important anymore because dvd players are pretty much general-purpose computers and can download any “new” codec that comes along - it’s more a matter of licensing, and the vendors are often actually happier to be able to sell bits after the fact (and have longer to optimize them) then to have to burn them into silicon before they’re fully baked.
If you missed my earlier blog on the “death” of MPEG-4 and rise of Windows Media, check it out. )

Do you think the Internet is a viable delivery mechanism for moving pictures?

Related link: http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2005-03-09-internet-jukebox_x.htm

File-sharing advocates often argue that they’re furthering a grassroots rebellion against the corrupt corporate music machine. That sounds good, but if it’s true, why do the tops of the traditional radio charts and the download/file-sharing charts feature the same artists? For example, see the comparison done recently by USA Today, at the end of an article called “Music Fans Reach For The Stars”. Furthermore, the movement across charts seems to be in one direction only, from the traditional market to downloading. I don’t know if there’s been even one artist from the digital grass roots to hit the traditional top 40. (Garageband.com and its partners are doing their best with Geoff Byrd, and I hope they succeed).

I think that raises this question: Is file-sharing able to generate a viable business from the bottom up, without feeding off the marketing efforts of the major media companies?

Below the top 40 or so, there are a lot of success stories about artists discovered and promoted through word of mouth, such as My Chemical Romance, also cited in the USA Today story. But below the top 40, there’s not much money being made.

Many fans have an exaggerated idea of how much money recording artists make — and in the past most artists have done little to disabuse them. Certainly the artists at the very top — the ones who repeatedly top the charts and sell multi-platinum — are doing great (although there’s no one in the music business who does oil tycoon great or software billionaire great). But below the top 10 or so, income from airplay drops rapidly from six or seven figures to five, to four, to three, and then sampling error takes it to zero pretty fast. In the case of sales income, if an album sells platinum or below, most performers end up just breaking even, or actually owing future royalties to the record company. Many make most of their money from touring and merchandise sales, areas that record companies — trying to protect their margins against file-sharing — are now beginning to cut in on. Touring and merchandise for a cult band is not exactly a gold mine.

Maybe it’s just early days, and we need to allow more time for the masses to wake up and throw off their mental shackles. But if a file-sharing backed artist does crack the traditional Top 40 and make some money, that success will depend on the traditional Top 40 still existing, i.e. it will depend on old-fashioned airplay and sales royalties being collected. If on the other hand file-sharing fully takes over and recorded music becomes essentially free, I worry that that artist is going to be poor.

Is there a file-sharing business model that could generate real money — for the artists, that is?

Related link: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/03/30/EDGN1BV…

Mandatory meds

For a kid who grew up with the DARE program (Drug Abuse Resistance Education, aka “drugs are really expensive”) I’m amused that we gave up on drug abuse prevention and now we’re on the road to making drug use mandatory.

“[There has been] an unprecedented call for mandatory mental-health screening of schoolchildren in [the] recent budget. Violating the rights of parents to just say “no” to psychiatric diagnosis and treatment of their children, this idea originated in the President’s New Freedom Commission. (from the article linked)

(Link to the President’s benign announcement speech of the New Freedom Commission)

Dystopian Cynicism

Putting on my cynical dystopian commentator hat, I guess I have several comments:

1. Apparently you SHOULD use drugs to solve your problems - DARE was wrong.
2. Don’t buy cheap drugs from the people in your neighborhood; Self-prescribe the drugs you see on TV or in magazines, which are covered by your insurance, and get them only through authorized distribution channels.

The Great Psychopharma Blamestorm

The interesting thing to watch is the massive blamestorm visible on the horizon. The FDA is already backing away (with warning labels) from potential liability suits for all the crazy/dead children cases that are pending for antidepressants. While there were a bunch of cases against Prozac in its early days, one of the weaker cases got dismissed and that was used as a sort of domino to knock down the others in a clever defense strategy.

Lately, though, there has been an notable increase in Columbine-like activity and a groundswell of increasingly critical public attention. I wouldn’t be surprised if the FDA eventually finds a link between aggressive and destructive activity towards OTHERS (not just suicidal) and antidepressants. I can see the headlines now:

“Guns, pot, and steriods don’t kill people - adolescents on meds do!”

Or,

“With kids like these, who needs terrorists?”

One of the greatest catalysts for change in the USA is the powerful combination of dead children, grieving parents, and lawyers.

I imagine lawsuits will first go after deep-pocketed pharma manufacturers, and may possibly try to make the government/FDA share some liability. When that starts to happen, the government will launch inquiries, and pharama may pass the buck to the authors of the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), and the scientists who develop diagnostic procedures and categories.

Adolescent Psychosis and Science

Nowdays, kids “go crazy” and kill innocent people at an alarming statistical rate. There’s some sort of epidemic (contagious?) psychosis, and the real crazy thing is: THEY’RE ALL ON MEDS WHEN THEY DO IT. Clearly we haven’t applied the best medical/scientific technology to the situation, otherwise we’d have it under some control, just like AIDS or any other epidemic. And I think we all agree that it takes more than D&D or 3D video games to make somone psychotic.

I long for the good old days in the 80’s when kids just robbed their grandmas to pay for their crack addictions, or maybe a half dozen gang members might shoot each other.

Although a very controversial idea, I’ve had drug legalization advocates argue to me that that no one goes crazy and kills people on pot or even other “dangerous” street drugs. While I can’t agree with that, I can hardly agree with how it’s being addressed now. Some of my favorite musical artists (Kurt Cobain, John Lennon) have been victims of ineffective pharma - and a friend of mine from P2P days (Gene Kan) was also tremendously un-helped by our primative technology in this area.

I’m very hopeful that the best minds among us will get to the bottom of the recent exponential increase in adolescent psychosis. I hope our brightest scientists can quickly discover what sort of mosquitos are spreading this mental malaria.

Related link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1583370

I’m just catching up with a great NPR series on creativity called Intersections, which you can listen to online starting here. I think it applies not only to art but all forms of creativity, including engineering, product design and more.

Sample quote from the first instalment by reporter Elizabeth Blair: “The public often thinks of artistic inspiration arriving in a sort of thunderbolt moment of creativity. The truth is, almost nothing is created out of thin air.”

Quoting California State University Northridge art professor Edie Pistolesi, Blair reports “[Art is] a visual language and we learn language by copying… [Pistolesi] says art teachers and students are still struggling with this lingering perception that creativity comes solely from innate talent. She points out that a painter as original as Vincent Van Gogh told his brother that art, like algebra, has fixed laws that one must learn. Pistolesi says Van Gogh literally copied Japanese prints and other art that inspired him in order to learn technique.”

Blair also refers (with some audio examples) to the Beatles learning rock and roll by copying American bands, Stephen Sondheim memorizing some Bernard Hermann movie music, and the famous quote attributed to both Picasso and Stravinsky that “Lesser artists borrow, great arists steal.”

I’d add these points:

1) Creative people don’t copy just to learn, they do it because it engages the creative part of the brain in a mode it understands. I’ve done this exercise with corporate clients: First, try to play a simple group percussion piece by reading a simplified notation that anyone can learn in a few minutes but which forces you to think logically. This leads to failure, even for people who actually have musical ability. Then, have the group learn the piece simply by mimicking me as I show each person his or her part. Success, even for complete non-musicians.

2) Although anyone can learn to think creatively, there is a qualitative difference between a genius and everybody else. We can all learn to take bigger steps by following the masters. But when a genius copies, the next step is likely to be a giant leap.

Related link: http://www.digitalhollywood.com/%231DHSpring05/WednedayReception.html

Imagine how cool it would be to call up your musical heroes and just rap about creativity for an hour. Kelli Richards and I got that chance two years ago, and the result is our new book and DVD, The Art of Digital Music: 56 Visionary Artists & Insiders Reveal Their Creative Secrets.

This week, the book had its release party at the Digital Hollywood conference, and several of the contributors graciously drove out to help celebrate. Among them were Joe Chiccarelli, the Grammy Award-winning producer who’s worked with everyone from Beck to Frank Zappa; Stewart Copeland, who recorded five multiplatinum albums with the Police and is now an Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated soundtrack composer; Dr. Patrick Gleeson, who helped introduce Herbie Hancock to synthesizers before becoming a successful film and TV composer (Knots Landing, Hard Copy, Unsolved Mysteries); and Albhy Galuten, who racked up 18 #1 singles as a producer and then co-invented the enhanced CD format.

Here are a few photos of the event.