Now that I’ve gone and hyped eMusic Selects, I feel I’ve earned the right to make a suggestion, for any eMusic poobahs who may be reading this: As I understand it, eMusic will have monthly Selections, which at two per month adds up to 24 Selections per year. eMusic also has a fairly substantial group of people into classical music, and has been successful in getting subscribers to try out classical releases (as noted in this recent story). ...
I thought I should say a little bit about the new eMusic Selects program. eMusic really wants people to know about this; in addition to a link on the eMusic home page, there’s a press release, an eMusic Magazine article, a 17 Dots blog post, and a message board post. Presumably the folks at eMusic feel that eMusic Selects is strategically important to the future of eMusic, and we should take them at their word. So what’s going on here? ...
In the past I’ve discussed several ways in which I think eMusic could improve itself for the benefit of both its customers and its suppliers (i.e., the music labels and the artists). Recently I read three interesting posts that touch on this subject. The first (to which this post is dedicated) is from Ian Rogers of Yahoo!, recapping his presentation at the Aspen Live conference in December: Today users are creating tremendous value and for the most part we’re ignoring it. They’re writing blogs about your artists, putting bios on Wikipedia, documenting last night’s concert on Flickr and video sharing sites, showing what songs are most popular by their behavior on Last.fm, building “box sets” on community sites, etc. How has the music industry leveraged this? What tools have you created to enable or encourage it? ...
The migration of Swindleeeee!!!!! to wordpress.com is now complete. The domain swindleeeee.com now redirects to the new blog, as do variant spellings such as swindleeee.com (four ‘e’s) or swindleeeeee.com (six ‘e’s). Your RSS newsreader may show you the last few posts again as it picks up the new feed, but otherwise everything should just work without any need for you to change feed URLs, bookmarks, links in your own posts, etc. If you do encounter any problems please send me email at hecker (at) hecker (dot) org. ...
Currently Swindleeeee!!!!! is hosted on a server I administer, and uses the WordPress blogging software. Over the years I’ve grown tired of maintaining my own blogging configuration, and some time ago I wrote that I was considering moving this blog to the wordpress.com blog hosting service. That time has now come. I have imported all my old blog posts and comments to my new wordpress.com blog, and am about to throw the switch on the actual move. ...
For the most part I resist writing about the actual music on eMusic, because I’m really not a very good musical critic. However from time to time I do feel the urge to recommend something, and this is one of those times. Courtesy of eMusic I’ve been listening to a lot of “contemporary classical” music (or “new music” to insiders), a taste I came by through listening to electronic music (techno, ambient, etc.). The most well-known and influential movement in classical music over the past half century is of course minimalism, and I think everyone interested in either classical music or (especially) modern electronic music should have an acquaintance with the classic works of minimalism. I’m referring here not to Nixon in China-style “minimalism” but rather to hard-core “let’s play that phrase a few dozen times and then introduce a new element or two” minimalism—or as suggested by someone in response to a Kyle Gann rant, the-music-formerly-known-as-minimalism. ...
No, Alex Ross (of “The Rest is Noise” fame, both blog and book) isn’t being mean to eMusic; in fact to my knowledge he’s never mentioned it, at least on his blog. What I mean is that several of the releases on Ross’s list of recommended CDs (CDs? how last century!) can be found on eMusic: ...
I know it’s only marginally eMusic-related (though it does include a quote from David Pakman, as noted below), but I can’t help commenting on the recent Wired interview with Doug Morris of Universal (not yet online, but excerpted in a blog post on the New York magazine site). Two points struck me in particular: First, the willful cluelessness of Morris and associates about technology and its effect on the music business; as New York magazine notes, it’s “like if your grandfather were accidentally hired to run Google.” Second, Morris’s claim that the major labels are just poor innocent victims in all this, comparing them to Al Capp’s famous Shmoo: ...
As noted by Digital Audio Insider, lots of economists seem to think that what Radiohead is doing is analogous to working for tips; Bob Lefsetz thinks so too. Folks, let me ask you something: When you last went out to dinner, did your waiter or waitress ask for your name, email address, postal address, telephone numbers, and for permission to contact you with information about other services they could provide to you? And will they use this information to create a customer database to do targeted direct marketing to you and all the other people they’ve served, using the amounts of your tips to tailor their marketing appropriately? I’m guessing that they didn’t and they won’t. ...
Now that the hubbub about Radiohead’s new release has died down, there are a couple of things worth adding to the analysis from various sources I’ve read, including Hypebot, Bob Lefsetz, Digital Music News, and Contentinople. (I haven’t of course read every commentary on Radiohead, so it’s possible that someone has said these things before me and better than me—I don’t do this for a living, you know.) First, I think people are missing a crucial point about Radiohead’s “name your own price” strategy. It is not all about giving listeners what they want, namely DRM-free music that’s free (or nearly so); it is also about giving Radiohead something it apparently wants (and that it could not get working through a major label): deep information about its listener population beyond the hard-core fans (i.e., those who’ve already joined the Radiohead fan club), including in particular information about which listeners are good candidates for up-selling strategies aimed to move more Radiohead merchandise, tickets, and other Radiohead-related products and services. ...