Bits and Pieces – November 30, 2004
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these bits-and-pieces entries, so…
Universities and colleges have the right to deny military recruiters access to their campuses without suffering the consequence of the government yanking their government funding. The 1995 Solomon Amendment tied the two together, essentially extorting the schools to allow recruiters full, free access to university grounds so they can sell a military career to students on campus.
A federal appeals court, using a rather odd precedent, decided for the educational institutions–but the government is not backing down. The government is still acting as if the amendment is in force pending their decision to appeal further. And schools know that no matter what the courts say, the government will use its muscle anyway. No one is daring to defy the government for fear of “coincidentally” losing funding (or losing funding should a higher court reverse the decision). Even the plaintiffs remain anonymous.
Music corporations are challenging KaZaA in court. For those of you who are uninitiated, KaZaA is one (and the most popular) of several companies that make software and/or run web sites that facilitate illegal music downloads. The industry is still claiming that their loss of sales is due to online piracy, and not because of the economic downturn that just coincidentally began at just the time their sales dropped.
Already, the industry fights back by using fake song files–that is, files that are the same size and have the same titles as pirated songs, but are fakes–they play the song promised in the titled for a short time, then cut to an annoying high-pitched beep or other alternate sound. Because of the similar name and size, they infiltrate downloads of the real thing.
In both of those respects–suing KaZaA and faking song files–the industry is a bit behind the curve. KaZaA may be the “new Napster” in a way, but there are now a plethora of web sites and software one can use to download music. And just as KaZaA replaced Napster after Napster got sued out of existence, something else is bound to take KaZaA’s place if and when it falls.
The U.S. Congress, salivating at the chance to please their big music- and film-industry donors by passing more and more draconian legislation, almost got a bill through Congress that would have taken the music industry’s lawsuit frenzy against downloaders and made it a federally-funded program (like that’s what we need our law enforcement people doing instead of catching violent criminals).
I tend to agree with Orson Scott Card on this one: downloading MP3s is illegal, but the music industry are parasitic blood-sucking leeches. Additionally, I agree with the argument that the downloads are not really hurting the industry one bit–they’re just so greedy that they did not offer an alternative that enough people would accept, although the online music stores are slowly changing that. They’re still parasites, though.
It’s VHS vs. Betamax all over again, this time for the next-generation high-capacity HDTV DVDs. (Why do new recording formats always come in pairs?). We’ve had a similar which-one-should-I-buy format battle over recordable DVDs, that being the plus-versus-minus war (now you can get DVD recorders that read and write both formats). The new standards are made by Toshiba and Sony. Toshiba (with NEC) has the “HD DVD” format (really called “AOD”), which can save up to 20 GB of data, a bit more than three times what today’s DVDs can save. Toshiba just got the backing of four major movie studios for their format. A consortium led by Sony makes the “Blu-Ray” DVD format, which can save up to 27 GB. Both technologies use a blue laser beam to read and write the data; the higher-frequency blue laser can etch smaller holes into the DVD disc, allowing it to save more data than a standard red laser today.
Toshiba’s advantage is primarily that it will likely hit the markets first, before Sony. But Sony, which lost the videotape war to Victor’s VHS a few decades back, looks like it will probably win this battle. The Blu-Ray format not only saves more data, but it has a consortium of ten companies, not two. Also, the studios that just decided to back Toshiba can also back Sony’s format at the same time to cover their bets.
Meanwhile, Steve Jobs’ plan is working. It seems that more and more Windows PC users are switching to Macs because of their iPods. A survey done by a financial analysis firm found that 6% of iPod users have already switched to Macs, and 7% intend to the next time they buy a computer. This trend is expected to continue–but only as long as Apple “keeps that ‘cool factor’ going.”
But there are also people switching for security concerns, and that is also why more and more are switching browsers, from Internet Explorer to Firefox. Now that Firefox has v. 1.0 out and has been very favorably reviewed–with many respected writers urging users to dump Explorer–many are doing just that. Explorer’s market share is now between 90% and 93%, and Firefox should have a 10% market share by the end of the year.
I wish I could corroborate that with my own site’s stats, but actually my own numbers tell a different story: Firefox mostly takes away from Mozilla, not from IE. Of course, that’s just my own little microcosm with a specialized readership. Here, consistently 60% use IE. Mozilla used to get around 20%, but when Firefox came in, that share dwindled to about 10% as Firefox shot up to 10% (in just two months). Apparently that is not market-wide, but at least from people who visit here, the people who are already cool are just getting more cool, is all.
Not only did the economy turn down, but the record companies also blather about their loss of sales while leaving out the inconvenient fact that CD sales were artifically high for a long, long time.
Why? Because people were buying all the albums they previously had on LPs or cassettes.
So someone who was a big Rolling Stones fan, for example, would go out and buy all their old Stones albums on CD format.
Once CDs had been around for 15-20 years, most everyone that was into music had replaced most of their collection in the new format… and sales dropped back down to only NEWER records and such.
The record companies also miss the fact that they rape the consumers for what it takes to make an album.
Think of a movie, and think of what it takes to make one. You have rougly the same number of people who’re lead actors in the movie as you have number of people who’re main dudes in a band.
But a band might only have a few “extras” (like a studio musician or something), and then a few engineers, few recording studio specialists, and a few producer types who mix the album and crank it out.
Compare and contrast to a movie, which is going to have dozens of people working during the filming- makeup, sound, lighting, set building, decorators. Gaffers, best boys, all of those myriad of names you see scrolling past on the screen at the end of a movie- they’re all getting paid.
A movie takes a lot more people working a lot more hours and costs a lot more money to make than an album.
And yet… you can buy older DVDs for $9.99 at the counter of the store, but for a CD? Forget it. And the regular price for both is 15-25 bucks.
Where’s all that extra money, for the CD, going? To the studios.
Nope, I have no sympathy for them whatsoever. They’re getting what they deserve, and the digital revolution is only going to continue.
Paul
Enumclaw, WA
Not only that, but consider actually the cost difference of buying a DVD and the music CD of the same movie’s soundtrack!
Pleasantville is an excellent example. The soundtrack CD, at Amazon, costs $15. The DVD for the movie costs $8, and it actually includes the musical score for the movie on a separate sound track–more music than is on the soundtrack CD! So for $8, you’re getting not just more music, but the entire movie as well–while the soundtrack CD, at nearly DOUBLE the price, not only has less music and nothing but music, but it did not even cost ANYTHING in terms of production–all the costs of writing, performing, and producing were part of the cost of making the movie. Maybe just a tiny bit of remixing was needed, but other than that, all they had to do was slap it into a CD case and sell it.
Absolutely outrageous, when you think about it. And one of the reasons I buy a lot of DVDs, but never buy music CDs any more. What music I buy, I get off of the iTunes Music Store.
Also Music has turned crappy. I tell friends that Rock and Roll age ended in 1995, or I think that’s what historians will say. Just guessing of course. But when Hooty and Blow Fish “Cracked Rear View” came out, a nice cd that caught on nicely, but its really just 1970s style Rock and Roll – my sense was that if Rock and Roll is retreading older styles, then perhaps the genre has died out.
Keep in mind I am talking historical perspective – remember that the Roman Empire was dead 50 – 75 years before people realized that it had really collapsed.
Thats not to say that there isn’t rock being produced, and of high quality. In my mine Huety and the Blow Fish was just that, I bought two CDs. But from an historical perspective, I think 1995 will be seen as the end of that artistic age.
As an analogy or an example I submit to you Impressionism in art nearly 100 years earlier, mainly in France and England. It covered roughly the same time only 100 years earlier. It was immensley popular and drew people to art that otherwise were bored with it, and still does today. But the art itself moved on to “post impressionism” and abstract art etc… And while the post impressionistic age had its rock stars with compelling works, Picasso, Georgia O’keefe, etc, it was nothing like the impressionist age.
So too we are in a post Rock age, and yes we are still getting good Rock, and we are getting equally good post rock music its nothing, nothing like the compelling works in the 1950s (rockabilly), 60s (Beatles, Psychadelic, Folk, R&B, Motown), 70s (Rock, Disco, Funk, Punk), and to a lesser extent 80s (Punk, New Wave). The early 90s, gave us Rocks last new branches Grunge and Hip Hop. Grunge died out without spawning new branches, Hip Hop has more leggs but is not nearly as compelling and one has to wonder “is it really Rock or post Rock”. The late 90s till the current age is given us great ballad formats, but its not new or innovative format or subgenre of rock.
“Hey hey, my, my, Rock and Roll will never die” or “Rock is Dead”?
What music needs is a new compelling format. As one of the prior post said, DVDs are a superior value to CDs. I suspect that that suggest the direction things will go, it will lead to artistic convergence of sound and sight – perhaps more Rock-Operas: Stories, Songs, Beautiful immages all converging on the DVD format. That would be new format, but maybe not a new sound, and requir more money, as the first post pointed out.
In the end you have to have a killer app. And for music Rock was the killer app, but Rock is dead, we are in a post rock age, and if you look at the history of painting, nothing really replaced impressionism, nor generated the demand. This happens in all art genres. Its a passing of an age and alot of times it is not supersceded. I imagine Shakespearing London being similar – for a while lots of new art came out, and it got better and better, but then the play writes died, out, Shakespear retired and that was it. People still wrote plays, but it was no longer the art sensation it was during its hey day.
Unless there is a new sensation, the money pool in music will continue to shrink untill it finds a new plateau.
the last post on the end of rock was by me, forgot to sign my name in. If you hate it, feel free to blast away.