July 22, 2007

Jon Pareles of the New York Times has penned (keyboarded ?) a comprehensive and interesting piece on the ways more musicians will (I believe) control their artistic and economic destinies in this new era for the music business.

I’d argue that we are beginning to see clear signs of this wherever what people produce … stories, articles, video, music, photographs and so on … are published.

While it’s not a direct analogy, the "he’s multiplatform" point reminds me of various examples of changes we are witnessing all around us …  how fruit juice has become an industry of many different blends, how fusion cuisine keeps innovating and expanding culinary repertoires, how salsa, ketchups and chutneys now offer a wide range of blended ingredients and can be found in grocery stores, delicatessens, restaurants and other places where people buy things to put into their bodies, how coffee shops and sandwich vendors hawk their wares in department stores, gas stations, airports and public-purpose buildings … etc.

With the crucial difference that this one producer … Prince … seems to be making the decisions about where what he produces is sold and how it is sold.

The proliferation of social music sites online, notably those allowing independent artists to showcase their work and encourage social networks of people interested in music discovery and sharing what they find, will I think accelerate more musicians to follow Prince’s lead.

That’s how I interpret the title of Jon’s article.

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The Once and Future Prince

JON PARELES
July 22, 2007

I’VE got lots of money!” Prince exults in “The One U Wanna C,” a come-on from his new album, “Planet Earth” (Columbia). There’s no reason to disbelieve him. With a sponsorship deal here and an exclusive show there, worldwide television appearances and music given away, Prince has remade himself as a 21st-century pop star. As recording companies bemoan a crumbling market, Prince is demonstrating that charisma and the willingness to go out and perform are still bankable. He doesn’t have to go multiplatinum — he’s multiplatform.

Although Prince declined to be interviewed about “Planet Earth,” he has been highly visible lately. His career is heading into its third decade, and he could have long since become a nostalgia act. Instead he figured out early how to do what he wants in a 21st-century music business, and clearly what he wants is to make more music. Despite his flamboyant wardrobe and his fixation on the color purple, his career choices have been savvy ones, especially for someone so compulsively prolific.

[ Snip ... ]

Prince’s priorities are obvious. The main one is getting his music to an audience, whether it’s purchased or not. “Prince’s only aim is to get music direct to those that want to hear it,” his spokesman said when announcing that The Mail would include the CD. (After the newspaper giveaway was announced, Columbia Records’ corporate parent, Sony Music, chose not to release “Planet Earth” for retail sale in Britain.) Other musicians may think that their best chance at a livelihood is locking away their music — impossible as that is in the digital era — and demanding that fans buy everything they want to hear. But Prince is confident that his listeners will support him, if not through CD sales then at shows or through other deals.

This is how most pop stars operate now: as brand-name corporations taking in revenue streams from publishing, touring, merchandising, advertising, ringtones, fashion, satellite radio gigs or whatever else their advisers can come up with.

[Snip ... ]

But Prince is different. His way of working has nothing to do with scarcity. In the studio — he has his own recording complex, Paisley Park near Minneapolis — he is a torrent of new songs, while older, unreleased ones fill the archive he calls the Vault. Prince apparently has to hold himself back to release only one album a year.

[Snip ... ]

Prince gravitated early to the Internet. Even in the days of dial-up he sought to make his music available online, first as a way of ordering albums and then through digital distribution. (He was also ahead of his time with another form of communication: text messaging abbreviations, having long ago traded “you” for “U.”) Where the Internet truism is that information wants to be free, Prince’s corollary is that music wants to be heard.

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Tags: Prince, Jon Pareles, new media economics, online music, fusion cuisine, IP control

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Via the Guardian Online’s The Observer …

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Faceoff!

In an American courtroom this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will stand accused of stealing the idea for the site from three fellow Harvard students.

David Smith
July 22, 2007

It could be described as a poke, but not a friendly one. For those who have not yet succumbed to Facebook, the latest craze on the internet, a ‘poke’ is an electronic greeting sent, for example, to an old friend from university. In the case of Mark Zuckerberg, who stands to make a fortune from the website if and when he sells it, the contact made by three of his former student colleagues represented an aggressive jab to the ribs.

Facebook has been described as the most sophisticated and powerful socialising device on the internet, growing so rapidly - with 150,000 new members every day - that Rupert Murdoch, owner of the rival MySpace, is said to be worried. The fact that its millions of British users include not only David Miliband, Orlando Bloom and Tracey Emin but senior members of the media - such as Jonathan Dimbleby, Andrew Neil, Spectator editor Matthew d’Ancona, and even Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth - has helped guarantee its high profile.

MySpace was bought by News Corporation in 2005 for $580m, now regarded as a bargain. Facebook is expected to sell for more than double that, turning Zuckerberg, its 23-year-old creator, into the latest dotcom millionaire and darling of Silicon Valley. But there is a glitch. This week, at a federal court in Boston, Zuckerberg will be accused of snatching the idea for Facebook from under the noses of three fellow students who believe its wealth and influence should be theirs.

Cameron Winklevoss, his twin brother Tyler and their colleague, Divya Narendra, recruited Zuckerberg to their social networking site when they were all students at Harvard University. They now claim that he deliberately stalled its progress, stole the source code, design and business plan, then set up his own rival. Facebook sped away while their site, now called ConnectU, was still in the traps. ‘It’s sort of a land grab,’ Tyler Winklevoss has said. ‘You feel robbed. The kids down the hall are using it, and you’re thinking, "That’s supposed to be us." We’re not there because one greedy kid cut us out.’

At the first court hearing on Wednesday they will ask a judge to shut down Facebook and transfer all its assets to them, plus damages. At stake is a large slice of pride, one of the most coveted prizes of the Web 2.0 goldrush and potentially millions, or even billions, of dollars. Last week Facebook signalled its ambitions by making its first acquisition, reportedly beating even Google to buy a web-based operating system called Parakey and fuelling bloggers’ suspicions that Facebook could threaten the web’s diversity by sucking the best of it into one place.

[ Snip ... ]

Both ConnectU and Facebook declined to comment on the case last week. Zuckerberg is thought to be taking it seriously but has said: ‘I don’t really spend much time worrying about this. There is a lawsuit going on, but, like, we know that we didn’t take anything from them. There is really good documentation of this: our code base versus theirs. At some point, that will come out in court, and they’ll compare the two.’

Tags: Facebook, Mark Zuckerburg, ConnectU, FaceOff, plagiarism, IP

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This, from that deliciously mad cow who reads, is so much better a rebuttal than my earnest attempt, because it is smarter, more real and uses examples.

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He brings up Max Weber a number of times and refers to his treatise on Authority. Yeah, good old Max Weber who argued in favour of inserting Article 48 into the Weimar Constitution. This article was later used by Adolf Hitler to institute rule by decree, thereby allowing his government to suppress opposition and obtain dictatorial powers. Authority indeed. We So Need The Experts to tell us what to think.

He used the word tripartite at least three times. Old skool Tony Robbins.

Reminds me of something Burroughs used to say. "The fucking English, if they ever managed to land on the moon the first thing they would do upon leaving the spaceship would be to start looking around for inferiors."

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I’d like to think and write like that, but am constitutionally incapable because I am so earnest.

Maybe I should change my name to Earnest, but it’s likely that would be problematic given my last name.

Tags: La vache qui lit, Andrew Keen, David Weinberger, The Cult of the Amateur

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