March 2007

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Bob Lefsetz

March 29, 2007 in music, podcasts, web | No comments

Bob Lefsetz is a pop music industry analyst who’s been writing his Lefsetz Letter for 20 years. Whether your a fan or not, he’s always worth reading.

Lefsetz can talk knowledgeably about pop music from Loggins & Messina to Fugazi and back. He’s got opinions on the industry you wouldn’t expect from someone with his background and experience (I didn’t say age), certainly not what you’d expect on DRM or on file sharing. He’s passionate about his music and it’s always fun to hear him get in lather over a seminal album in his weekly Rhinocast segment [RSS] for Rhino Records.

This week on his blog, Bob’s taking on the music industry’s broken economic model and making some excellent points on free music.

I’m positively stunned at the blowback from business regulars about that chap giving his music away for free. Oldsters can’t understand the economics!

I’ll clue you in, THERE ARE NONE!

This is your worst nightmare. People who can follow their dream on sweat equity. Who with their computer and the money from their day job or mommy and daddy can compete with you. It’s like the North Vietnamese, all our military might couldn’t defeat individuals who would fight to the death. Same deal in Iraq.

link: full article
Bob Lefsetz on CBC’s The Hour: full interview

CBC bolsters podcast offerings

March 26, 2007 in podcasts, radio | 1 comment

From Tod Maffin’s Todbits blog:

Next week, CBC Radio will add new podcasts and increase the frequency of shows available to listeners. Starting Monday, April 2, CBC Radio will add 12 new podcasts. In addition, the flagship network programs The Current, Sounds Like Canada and As It Happens will move from weekly to daily highlight podcasts.

It’s encouraging to see our national broadcaster embrace podcasting as it’s done. Hats off to Tod for his efforts on that front.

Link: full post
Link: CBC Radio podcasts

Twitter

March 26, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

… was fun for about a week. Peace. Out.

The Henry Rollins Show

March 26, 2007 in dvd, internet, music, video | No comments

I stumbled across IFC’s Henry Rollins Show a few months ago. I can’t recall exactly how. Henry’s already got a 20 episode season under his belt with a new season beginning in April. The shows are 30 minutes long and each episode features a couple of patented Rollins rants, an interview, and some awesome musical guests. Last season included live in-studio performances by Frank Black, Ben Folds, John Doe, Dinosaur Jr., Thom Yorke, New York Dolls, Ani DiFranco and Rollins Band, natch. Most of the music segments are viewable online, including bonus sessions not aired on the TV show. The Rollins Show first season is available on DVD.

Apple store stat

March 26, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

From Business Week, via my brother on Madison Ave.

Annual sales per square foot:
Saks: $362
Best Buy: $930
Tiffany: $2,666
Apple Stores: $4,032

ArtsJournal video

March 22, 2007 in diversions, ipod, itunes, music, theatre, tv, video, web | No comments

‘Back in Ottawa after a quick trip West, and I feel oddly compelled to to keep postings here going, so here’s a ‘content quickie’:

ArtsJournal.com maintains a page of arts and culture videos culled from YouTube. Clips rotate through the page over the course of a couple of weeks and you can find some really great stuff. And those videos will lead you to other videos in the same vein, and, can you say, “where did the afternoon go?”

Currently featured are a wide range of clips; from Donald Byrd and Stan Getz in 1957 to David Sedaris on Letterman. Check out the hilarious Rachmaninov Had Big Hands clip.

Link: artsJournalvideo

Don’t forget about TubeSock if you want to move some of this video to iTunes, your iPod, or simply save them to your computer.

Is the end nigh for Internet radio?

March 14, 2007 in internet, music, podcasts, radio | 1 comment

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Jason Fry outlined last week’s ruling by the US Copyright Royalty Board which proposed new performance royalty rates for online radio stations.

An online radio station would pay .08 cent per song per listener for 2006 (the rates are retroactive), .11 cent in 2007, .14 in 2008, .18 cents in 2009 and .19 cents in 2010. Seems like little enough, but it adds up — and this small change is a big change for small Webcasters. Under a deal brokered in 2002, small Webcasters had met their royalty obligations by paying artists and record labels 12% of revenue, but the new rules would do away with that exemption.

These rates would in effect kill Internet radio. For services like Pandora and “indie” stations like Radio Paradise, fees would surpass revenues. The ruling would also affect terrestrial radio stations that simulcast on the net as well as XM/Sirius satellite radio. Podcasters now operating under the ASCAP/BMI podcast licenses would also have new fees heaped on. The issue can be traced back to … The Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, natch.

This is not a done deal and Internet stations and listeners are preparing to fight the ruling.

Full WSJ article: here
Computerworld article: here

Do something when

March 14, 2007 in applications, itunes, os x | No comments

Here’s a really cool application, aptly named Do Something When (’DSW’ to his friends).

‘Ever made a mess of your iTunes library because you didn’t have your external library disk mounted while iTunes was running?

Well, Do Something When should take care of this, and some. DSW is a preference panel that allows you, well, to do something when. For example you can set it to launch iTunes when you mount your external music library disk, or have it quit iTunes when you unmount the drive. Same for VLC and your video library hard drive. Have DSW launch Final Cut Pro when you mount your pristine, totally defragged media drive.

Update: jaywest brought to my attention the fact that there seems to be an issue with the way DSW works under the Mac OSX 10.4.9 update. More soon.

HandBrake, was MediaFork, was HandBrake

March 9, 2007 in applications, dvd, film, ipod, video | No comments

As part of our continuing discussion on media tools for the Mac, Martin Jones, MiFi.ca’s resident Über Geek, offers the following report on HandBrake-MediaFork (ed).

While there are many DVD rippers out there, for a long while HandBrake was the best of the lot for the Mac. HandBrake was more-or-less a front end for a set of command line tools that decrypted the DVD stream and then compressed it into MPEG4 or MPEG4-AVC (advanced video codec, AKA h.264) format in a single shot, ready for playback on a portable device (read iPod).

That was the good part. The bad part was the relatively ancient encoding library it was based on. This made MPEG4 encoding pretty slow and h.264 encoding unbearably slow. The settings were ambiguous, even cryptic, and it took much trial and error to get the desired results. HandBrake’s development stagnated about a year ago and it seemed like there would be no more updates forthcoming.

Then, new developers took it upon themselves to build an application heavily based on HandBrake. They called it MediaFork, and it was Good. MediaFork brought many bug fixes, and leveraged updated libraries. Encoding became reliable and fast. The interface is still ambiguous, even cryptic, but now you can tab through the video preview to see the effect of your settings on the media, and the program won’t crash. Overall, MediaFork is a welcome improvement on the work begun with HandBrake.

Last week the HandBrake developers posted that they had joined forces with the MediaFork development team and that a soon-to-be-released version of the software, the result of their combined effort, will be released as HandBrake 0.9.0.

HandBrake is dead! Long live HandBrake!

– Martin Jones

Ira Glass on storytelling

March 7, 2007 in diversions, internet, podcasts, radio, video | No comments

I’m huge fan of Ira Glass. I could listen to This American Life for days on end, no problem. And now that TAL is available as a podcast, I’m planning to do just that this summer [rss]

Here are four short videos of Ira Glass on storytelling courtesy of Your Daily Awesome, awesome in its own right.

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