A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

Martin’s admitting that he watches the Apprentice (Deep Green Crystals: The Apprentice Episode 7: Tammy’s turmoil) has motivated me to come clean. Besides The Apprentice, we are in love with My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancee (what a finale last night!!); Smallville; 24; Friends; Judging Amy; Law and Order SVU; The Practice. And we have minor fetishes for Average Joe: Hawaii, The Ellen Degeneres show, and The Batchelorette. And March Madness is fast approaching, it is a fulltime job just to keep up with TV.

Inspired by this announcement, MediaGuardian.co.uk | New media | Coke puts fizz into music downloads, our dog is launching a music download service next week. As he explains it, existing codecs trim out too much high frequency sound, leaving most downloaded music sounding too flat for him and his canine pals. And iTunes offers very little from dog-themed record labels, dog classics, or new age dog music.

Having Reshaped Broadway, Disney Readies a Second Act — I will make a special trip to New York to see a good Mary Poppins musical. That movie was HUGE when I grew up — Dick Van Dyke was brilliant in it.

Kim Mathers ordered to wear electronic tether; missed court date on drug charges

Good call to action at Due Diligence — let’s not sit around whining about the state of the music industry — let’s hasten its decay! I’ll add another point — if you must buy cds, buy them used, don’t send more money to the music companies.

JD’s New Media Musings: September 14, 2003 Archives — of course this will happen, I scanned all the software choices this weekend for more private file trading (purely for personal non-infringing backup use in my home) and it is going to be easy to go dark. 


I saw a quote from David Bowie this weekend in the NYTimes where he said (from my memory, forgive any misquote) “in the future, recorded music will not be a moneymaker, but be an advertisement for live performances by the artist”.


Finally, Mitch Kapor points to this quote by Adam Eisgrau — “it’s time for the R.I.A.A.’s winged monkeys to fly back to the castle and leave the Munchkins alone”

We live in fascinating times. The channel for recorded music is collapsing. JD’s New Media Musings points to Moby’s advice for the music industry, all good points. I am especially intrigued by his counsel to stop spending large sums to produce music and videos. As music prices drop, it would seem like we’ll have to get back to fairly raw recordings with very little production, and videos will either have to get very simple, or alternatively will be funded in other ways — by advertisers, as part of going to a movie, etc.


Personally I think this is all good, we get back to music for the sake of music. The funding for all the other ancillary “value-add” activities around the music is just going to dry up. 100 years ago there was no recorded music industry — you went out and listened to artists if you wanted music. It would not be terrible if we ended up listening to more live music.

Frank nails it — pseudorandom: “A Kind of Cockamamie Sincerity” — we couldn’t stop watching Johnny Depp. Some of us have seen the movie twice now. I want to see all the rest of Johnny’s work now. Pirates may not be the best movie of the summer, but Johnny’s performance is clearly among the best of the year.

I find this article fascinating — One Music Label or Several? Pearl Jam Weighs Options. Pearl Jam has found a way to create a constantly renewable, inexpensive source of content — their nightly recordings.  Given the file sharing networks, you have to wonder if more bands don’t move to live recordings as their primary recorded output, instead of studio recordings. Studio recordings are expensive to make, and in a sense they discourage consumption of live music. Pearl Jam seems to making the right steps as artists to respond to file sharing networks, by emphasizing the live experience and unique (and low incremental cost to produce) recordings from these live experiences.

From the NY Times — The Most Popular Magazines. Wow I guess this says something about me — I don’t even know what 5 of these magazines are. Other fascinating top ten lists on this page as well — the number one advertiser on the Web is Estee Lauder?

This movie is in trouble. While watching The Hulk, two 20-something guys in the theater fell asleep and were snoring. When your core market for comic-based movies can’t stay awake thru the film…

Contrast with Bend It Like Beckham which was just great.