Tag: itunes

Dear Music Industry: I Can Draw Diagonal Lines, Too

~ Chris Cocca ~ 6 Comments

Okay, so the music industry is suing LimeWire. Sue away, Lars Ulrich, sue away. You should, I guess.  But you have to admit that this image, supposedly showing how much dough the biz has lost since the creation of Napster, is pretty convenient:

Isn’t it amazing that projected sales based on historic growth show none of the, er, historical plateauing you expect from any healthy graph and in fact see as having occurred here many times pre-Napsters and then NEVER AGAIN IF NAPSTER HADN’T HAPPENED.

Please.

Guess what, MusicTown?  Even if Generation Y hadn’t happened, and even if the youngest members of Generation X kept buying music instead of (okay) stealing it in college, the economic still would have gone in the crapper at least twice since then.  You’re not really saying that incing Napster early would have stopped the dotcom bubble burst or the downturn after 9/11 or the mortgage crisis, are you?

And remember how you abandoned all the Baby Boomers once you got your hands on their kids’ allowance?  Remember how you stopped producing Adult Contemporary, remember how you colluded with radio stations and sales tracking companies?  Remember how you gave us post-grunge? You’re saying that would not have happened?  Are you saying MTV and Vh1 would have kept showing your ready-made commercials instead of banking easy cash from reality shows and nostalgia trips (which ironically tended to feature the very artists you’d stopped promoting)?  For real?

Music Industry, you can do so much better than this.  Throw in some downward trends to make this graph realistic. I’m disappointed in you, frankly.

Napster or no Napster, there’s no way I buy seven albums this year, friends.  Radio is free, dynamic, and serendipitous.  I do iTunes, but almost only when I have gift cards. Last album I bought?  Neil Young Live at Massey Hall (digital download).  Before that?  No Line on the Horizon, physical copy.  Both were excellent choices and lived up to the album mystique.  But I knew that beforehand. Buying albums from new acts is, like, seriously committing.  I don’t know.  Though now that I think of it, I did buy a Taize album for someone for Christmas, and that was a good call.

Sales graph shenanigans aside, what do you think?  Are albums (even digital ones) obsolete?  Has Steve Jobs (not Napster) really killed the music business like His Royal Joveness says?

Related Articles

Touché, Apple. Touché. And also William Faulkner, Barack Obama, 1995 etc.

~ Chris Cocca ~ 6 Comments
NYC - West Village: White Horse Tavern
An actual genius bar. God bless you, Dylan Thomas. Image by wallyg via Flickr

Remember the Tom and Jerry cartoons where Tom and Jerry and a little mouse I always assumed to be Jerry’s nephew were set in 17th century France? The little mouse thinks he can beat Tom with his chivalry and ethics (and musketeer pastiche), and goes around saying “touché, le pussy cat?” at the most hilarious moments possible. The best. So that’s what I was thinking of with the title. (Also, I am finishing a paper about The Sound and the Fury, and it strikes me that Quentin Everloving Compson is not unlike that nephew-mouse).

On to the main thrust of this post so that I can get back to finishing that paper.

My power adapter died for the billionth time. We took the whole deal over to the Apple Store. Even though I knew that the only way to make an AppleCare (ha!) appointment at an Apple Store was via the internet (and since my computer wasn’t working, I had no such thing), it still bugs me. That’s gripe #1. Yeah, I actually booked my appointment via a public library computer. If Apple made an e-reader it would be even more ironic. Oh wait, right.

So we go to the Apple Store on time and are not seen for 35 minutes. I had no idea that Apple was looking into taking over cable. I mean, I know they swiped most of their early ideas from Xerox (oops, Xerox, that one’s on you), but who would have thought they were cribbing the finer points of customer service from the great approximation school of temporal theory. So then blah blah blah, and we get the computer back today.

We specifically told them not to mess with our desktop icons. They specifically did not listen. My desktop, my comfortable, messy, organized-to-me desktop, has been wiped clean by conformocrats and I don’t know where they put the stuff. Quite frankly, that’s unacceptable. There will be a visit to a manager after I finish my paper, because I’m sorry, that’s an arrogant violation of my expectations. Blah blah blah it runs faster if we do this…yeah, whatever. Fix the power cord issue, friend. You don’t have to be a hero. In fact, faceless backroom tech who I haven’t met, you’ve become a villain with your cavalier approach to my long-established and well-articulated organizational preferences. You waved them away like they were so many PC users, didn’t you? How’s the weather up there, thou ascendant Form? You know better and you have the shirt to prove it, smarty. Quite frankly, I’m embarrassed that we probably have the same glasses and iTunes library.

Yeah, those were all easy shots. I know. I actually think this is Apple’s way of messing with me because I sort of called them the devil last week for maintaining a squeaky-clean and hipster-certified ethical veneer all whilst enabling the sweatshop gristmills of Shenzhen, China.

If you’re keeping score at home, that’s:

  • Tom and Jerry
  • The Three Musketeers
  • Dylan Thomas
  • William Faulkner/The Sound and The Fury
  • Apple
  • Sweatshops
  • Xerox
  • cable companies
  • customer service
  • Hip stuff (see other items)

all in one compact post.  I just do what I do, friends.

If you think I’m being too hard on the good folks at the Apple Store, know that I have no idea who worked on my computer.  The friendly chap who processed the work order must not have written down the specific instructions to not go ahead and assume their tech dudes had the right to mess around with my stuff.  That’s so…preemptive.  Bam, I just added Obama to list of things this post is about.

Speaking of, I had a dream the other night that Barry O and I chilled over pizza for like two hours.  He did some explaining.  We solved a few world problems.  But the first thing I did was ask him how we’re going to prevent this government shutdown. He punted to John Boehner, who was not available in my dream for comment, so that kind of wasn’t fair of you, Dream President Obama. And you said you didn’t come to town for politics as usual.  By the way, I know I’m late to this party and all, but a note to the Republicans: 1995 called and it wants its epic fail back.  It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re doing what you think is right according to the kind of fiscal conservatism that got you elected in November.  Government shut downs don’t seem to spin out in your favor, fellas.  Take no solace in the fact that Obama isn’t Clinton.  Thing is, friends, he beat the Clintons.  He’s the uber-Clinton and the anti-Clinton all rolled into one.  Good thing you have one strong front-running candidate ready to get geared up for 2012.

But seriously, Apple, WTF? Touché, le corporate giant? Just wait until I dispatch Quentin Compson. Then we’re gonna dance.

Why Pay Even This Much?: Murdoch and Jobs Set to Launch “The Daily”

~ Chris Cocca ~ 1 Comment
Like you don't go here every single time.

You might know that News Corp. is set to launch “The Daily”, its much-anticipated (because everyone says so) daily iPad newspaper project next week.  According to Cutline, Steve Jobs will be joining Rupert Murdoch for the big event.

As Courtney Boyd Meyers notes at The Next Web: “‘The Daily’ is expected to cost .99 per issue and will implement a new ‘push’ subscription feature from iTunes that automatically bills customers on a weekly or monthly basis, with a new edition delivered to your iPad each morning.”

I have one very basic question.  Are you willing to pay .99 a day for content you can get elsewhere for free?  Sure, “The Daily”‘s content is exclusive according to a passing definition, but this only matters if you believe that people will pay to read “Daily” writers instead of their analogs on free news sites and marquee free niche and general interest blogs. While it’s true that the who and how of written content have been reasons for preferring one print publication over another, the same rules don’t apply when deciding what might compel you to buy a print magazine or paper instead of finding comparable web treatments of the same issues, trends, and interests .  If online (largely free) content is killing print, why should people pay for “The Daily”?  I won’t discount the pull of novelty and the excitement people muster about having the latest new thing, even if that thing is ephemeral (not to mention ethereal).  And I haven’t forgotten how the experts said “no one will pay .99 for a song” and how all of those experts were wrong.  I also haven’t forgotten that no one I personally knew was saying that, that most people wanted a cheap, easy, legal way to get songs online. There was a need, and Steve Jobs filled it.

I don’t know anyone who feels badly about reading free online content instead of plunking down subscription fees or cover prices for print.  It’s been said so much, but the rising (really, already risen) culture of consumers expects this kind of content to be widely available and largely free.  $30 a month for a newspaper, even a really cool, Steve Jobs-enabled one, doesn’t feel like a solution to anything.  It’s neat that creative people built the device and creative people of a whole different skill-set are using it for what will be, I’m sure, an intuitive and even beautiful publication.  But unless the endgame is the movement of all relevant content everywhere behind a handful of corporate pay walls…well, actually, that doesn’t even matter because it can’t ever happen as long as the net is neutral.  Crap.  I told you penmanship was the engine of democracy.

In any case, in 2011, most people have a daily newspaper they can read across all of their devices, and it even includes super-localized updates about the people they care most about. It can be custom-tailored, with very little effort, to their specific interests.  It’s free. It’s huge. It’s Facebook.

An Open Letter to Apple

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Dear Apple,

I love you.  And I love the Beatles exactly as much as I’m supposed to (that is, you know, a lot).  Congratulations on settling your differences, but this is hardly “A day I’ll never forget.”  When you promise earth-shattering things, I’m expecting some new paradigm shifting device.  Or moon colonization.  Not Rubber Soul, great as it is.

–  Earth