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Monday, January 09, 2006 |
Benton Headline:
BUYING MUSIC FROM ANYWHERE AND SELLING IT FOR PLAY ON INTERNET
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Robert Levine]
The Orchard is seeking to make money by purchasing music from small
independent and foreign labels, and then distributing it to digital music
services. In most music stores, CD's of, say, Chinese or Kenyan pop music
would be consigned to the world-music bin as a good will gesture. But the
economics of online stores is changing the financial calculations of the
music business, making it profitable to sell a relatively small number of
copies of a song, as long as a compact disc is not manufactured and
distributed. So instead of trying to sell millions of copies of hundreds
of
albums, the standard music industry strategy, the Orchard hopes to sell
hundreds of copies of thousands of albums. In that way, the company is
anticipating that sales will follow a pattern known as "the long tail," in
which a large number of only marginally popular items can eventually
produce significant revenue.
3:28:37 PM 
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David Byrne Radio:
What Country is This?
Post-60s country music was sort of fragmented. In the early 70s you had hippies like Gram Parsons and the Byrds and Bob Dylan recording songs in a country vein, sometimes even working with Nashville vets. It was initially a radical move for these folks because, as I mentioned last month, country music was seen by many in their audience as the music of rednecks, racists and reactionaries — the enemy. So to do songs in that style and by those writers with love and without a trace of irony — well, not everyone thought that was cool.
Many of the artists on this playlist grew up with the songs on last month’s playlist. They may have also been listening to rock, R’nB and folk, but their own writing was grounded in a music that came uniquely from that place. The “classic” country spoke of hard work, honky tonks, trains, and stuff people outside of New York and L.A. recognized as being what used to be their world. But now that world is mainly nostalgic memories.
There are hardly any songs from this bunch about standing by your man or simple lost love — the poetry of rock and the beats and the changes the country had been going through meant those innocent bygone days could be evoked in the music, but no longer in the words. These writers used this music as a way of reasserting a claim on music that they grew up with and now realized they loved. Music that was being dragged away from truth and real feelings by the Countrypolitain record men — or so it was felt. Kind of like the way Republicans have laid a claim recently on the flag and on Jesus, but in this case they didn’t get away with it, not completely. These younger (at the time) musicians took the music back.
As a result there emerged parallel streams — mass-marketed country, which gave birth to Shania Twain and Garth Brooks, and this other more erratic more handmade stuff, that had one foot in the weird here and now and another deep in tradition.
6:22:22 AM
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Can pharmaceuticals be developed without patents?.
"No possible good can ever come of a Patent Law, however admirably it may be framed." - The Economist, 1851
Many people can imagine a world full of innovation that does not have patents. But when they think of pharmaceuticals, this seems like an exception. Pharmaceuticals are relatively simple to produce but have high research and development costs. So it’s obvious, surely, that there have to be patents in pharmaceuticals.
This exception, however, may not be as necessary as people think. Two economists have researched the history of chemcial and pharmaceutical innovation. Michele Boldrin (Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota) and David K. Levine (Armen Alchian Professor of Economics at UCLA and co-editor of Econometrica) argue (PDF) that it is not the case empirically that patents increase pharmaceutical innovation. Among the examples they give, they point to Italy. In Italy there were no patents on pharmaceuticals until 1978. Bear in mind that countries like India and even African nations are told they need patent protection in order to develop economically. Yet between 1961 and 1980, 9.28% of the world’s new molecular entities (NMEs) came from Italy. NMEs are the most important advances in pharmaceuticals as they represent leaps rather than just gradual progression. The authors suggest that after patents were introduced, Italy actually became less innovative, not more.
The example of Italy will be puzzling to many because it is totally contrary to everything the pharmaceutical industry says. Interestingly, before Italy introduced patents, its pharmaceutical industry contained lots of players: patents quickly reduced the number of companies involved. No wonder Big Pharma likes patents: they restrict competition.
By Alex Singleton at Samizdata.
[PJM - Top Stories]
6:13:18 AM
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Welcome to the Long Run.
How Can DRM Be Good? is the most depressing thing I've read in some time:
I'm not going to pick a fight with the Cory Doctorows of the world because they're far more informed and cleverer than me, but let¹s face it: we're going to have to have some DRM. At some level, there has to be an appropriate level of control over content to make it economically feasible for people to produce it at anything like an industrial level. And on the other side of things, it¹s clear that the people who make the consumer technology that ordinary people actually use - the Microsofts and Apples of the world - have already accepted and embraced this. The argument has already moved on.
That's by Lloyd Shepherd, Deputy Director of Digital Publishing at Guardian Unlimited, which has long been one of the most clueful, least locked-down and open of the newspapers that publish on the Web.
He asks,
what are the best implementations of DRM out there, which balance the needs of the provider and the consumer without getting in the way of either? Does such a thing exist? And who is advocating it with as much conviction, homework and intelligence as the copyfighters?
What's extra bumming here is that Lloyd credits the "copyfighters" with "conviction, homework and intelligence" — and dismisses them as losers in an "argument" that in fact has barely happened.
And jeez, why the hell does Apple, Microsoft and other Bigs using DRM mean that it's good or that it's "won" a damn thing? Hey, they sucked up to Hollywood for distribution of mass-media Hollywood-type crap. And they're going to screw it up, too. You'll go to Google for your CBS, Apple for your NBC and Microsoft for your ABC. The old sources will be distributed through a mess of incompatible systems, each isolated by their own DRM, and will flush their costly, inefficient and ossified old industy into the hell we've had on the Net with instant messaging for the duration.
Go ahead, guys. Make my decade.
I'm with David Smith, who writes, Hang on a moment! Who's had this argument? Did I blink and miss the great national and international debates?
David points to more required reading from Tom Coates and Julian Bond, both of whom also see a world of Darkness settling upon the Net.
Like I said Saturday,
the fight in the long run will be between the pyramids and the former slaves that have grown tired of helping build them.
As Neo said to the Architect, it's about choice. If you don't like what they give you, make some of your own.
We need to do with video what we've started doing with music: building a new and independent industry.
Yes, the next generation of PCs and Macs will have DRM cripplecrap in them. Hey, who needs WIPO, Congress and the U.N. to mandate copyright craziness, when Intel is glad to put it right in the hardware for you?
But current PCs already have DRM too, truth be told. (Try getting a screen shot of a DVD frame on your Mac.) But you can still make music and movies that can be heard, watched, produced and distributed outside The System.
And that's what matters most.
Because in the long run, the indies will win.
That's how we got the Net, folks. And that's how we'll keep it, too. Even if our dawn's early light is years away, it will come. Meanwhile, we have to endure this winter of dissed content. [The Doc Searls Weblog]
6:12:59 AM
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