On the passing of Michael Jackson, pop legend and total enigma
Posted by barb dybwad in digital entertainment on June 25th, 2009
“His death may have stunned the world of music, but those who knew Michael Jackson say the warning signs of his fading health were clear. They claim his long-term addiction to painkillers is the obvious underlying health issue which – combined with the considerable pressure of attempting a showbusiness comeback - may just have claimed his life. Only last month, the Daily Mail reported that Jackson was struggling to make even a handful of the rehearsals for the comeback tour which was due to start in July at the O2 in London. He had been to just two out of more than 45 rehearsals.”
He’s steeped in my memory from childhood but I lost total interest during the creepy years (which, sadly, were the majority of the past 2 decades). Why is it then that his death finds me suddenly fascinated by such a strange personality and bizarre larger-than-life life — a sad, twisted product of childhood abuse and resulting psychological disorders, the intense pressures of superstardom, almost continuous medical treatment morphing into 25 years of prescription drug addiction, a disturbing obsession with plastic surgery and the peculiar two-sided coin of unrelenting media scrutiny combined with a reclusive, self-delusional private fantasy world enabled by wealth and a sycophantic entourage of opportunistic handlers.
Michael Jackson was a completely and utterly fascinating icon of the ravages and consequences of the American supermedia machine and resultant hyper-celebritism. He was also a phenomenally talented musician, singer, songwriter, dancer and entertainer who was loved around the world and broke so many records we’ve lost count. Whether he really was a child abuser or simply a psychological and emotional child himself unable to grow mentally into adulthood due to physical and emotional abuse from his father from a young age and complete sheltering from adult reality (or both), it was a sad and terrible long decline for a star once so bright. Whatever he became, it’s clear he so long and so desperately wanted to become someone else. It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world.
Thoughts on re-imagining the music retail business
Posted by barb dybwad in digital entertainment, technology on June 23rd, 2009
Digital music kiosks take another spin
Reading this gives me crazy ideas about completely transforming the music retail experience into more of a social experience — get rid of 80% of the CD racks, keep some premium inventory around like box sets and limited editions, put in a coffee shop (seems to work wonders for brick and mortar book retailers) and create a space for music lovers to hang out and share tunes with each other. Put in digital “jukebox” computers, let people stream whatever they want (volume might be an issue… maybe the tables have headphone stands, or hire a brilliant sound engineer to baffle everything properly so tables/stations don’t bleed too much audio), and some percentage will buy MP3 files on site (and continue to buy some physical media). Others won’t buy anything but the occasional coffee but will be 100% free and avid promoters to others. Have concerts and special events in stores constantly. Hold workshops for would-be and independent music makers.
Even better: provide a celestial jukebox service to any customer who buys anything from you, ever. Store whatever tracks and albums they buy, ever, and let them stream it from any device they own. Let them re-download anything at any time when they have a hard drive crash, clean system install, get a new computer/NAS/PMP/phone/game console/etc.
Layoffs at MySpace… shocker!
Posted by barb dybwad in digital entertainment, social media, web on June 16th, 2009
MySpace slashes head count by 30 percent | The Social - CNET News.
The tagline reads “MySpace is a place for friends.” No, it’s not. It’s a place for scum-sucking, bottom-feeding, spam-spewing trolls to post mindless blinking affiliate marketing links all over creation. If “this hurts me more than it hurts you” Van Natta wants to turn that ship around they have to start treating the social network like a community that it sadly once was, heinous crimes against HTML and all, instead of like a wishful money-printing machine that occasionally requires light watering for maintenance.
Seriously, that place is a cesspool.
iPhone 3G S pricing kerfuffle shows phone subsidy not widely understood
Posted by barb dybwad in gadgets, mobile on June 10th, 2009
Current iPhone 3G users are up in arms about not getting the same discounted iPhone 3G S price as new customers would. Their argument is that AT&T should be “rewarding them” for being loyal customers. Man, I sure wish the world worked that way. I’ve been a “loyal customer” of Time Warner High-Speed Internet for over 6 years and my monthly plan keeps going up, not down, even as infrastructure upgrade costs fall. I’ve been a loyal customer of Apple for years too, and don’t get any special discount on my next MacBook Pro simply because I’ve bought one before. And phones don’t work that way either.
I wonder if the current spate of anger relates to two things: 1) a conflation of the general hatred being levied towards AT&T right now over their completely craptastic reception and service, and 2) a new market of iPhone 3G owners who have never previously purchased a smartphone, and thus don’t have much direct experience with how cell phone subsidies work in the U.S. and on carriers around the world. The actual cost of a smartphone device as sophisicated as an iPhone or G1 or Nokia N97 et al is many hundreds of dollars — I tend to think of it like “car trouble” price: whenever something goes wrong, I steel myself to be out $500-600 no matter what the heck it is. Some phones climb as high as a cool $1k for an unlocked GSM handset. The only reason smartphones can be had cheaper is because the carrier subsidizes them: you agree to be locked in to this 2-year contract and the carrier is guaranteed to extract $XXXX from you over that period, in exchange for which they discount the price of your phone because they’re guaranteed to make that money back from you (unless you cancel early, which people seem loathe to do even though a $150 early termination fee (or less, depending on how much of the contract has elapsed) is far less than you’d pay to stay stuck in the contract… maybe it’s the principle of the thing).
Thus, if you want to pick up a new phone before you’ve completed that 2-year contract you signed, you’re just plain SOL. There is no special deal for you, and if there were the whole phone subsidy house of cards would fall apart. What would stop me from popping in every month to pick up the latest hot smartphone on deep discount, and what incentive would carriers have to support that?
What these folks are really angry about is the underlying racket of the phone subsidy. It’s spurious to blame Apple or AT&T for “allowing” this pricing scheme — this pricing scheme is typical for the mobile market. Still, neither Apple nor AT&T have done much in the way of educating a First Time Smartphone Buyer market about how this works, and they could have softened some of the blow if they had. Nevertheless, it’s a rude but entirely fair wakeup call to phone buyers about how the subsidy system works.
Publishers continue whining about how Google “stole” distribution on the web
Posted by barb dybwad in digital entertainment, publishing, technology, web on May 6th, 2009
“Spanfeller: For some time there have been murmurings about the relative value generated by Google vs. the parasitical nature of its business model. In short, is Google being disproportionally compensated for what is fundamentally other people’s work?”
via Forbes.com CEO Spanfeller Attacks Google, Stumbles Into His Own Cesspool.
First of all, this entire article from Danny Sullivan is a great and astute dismantling of Spanfeller’s “argument” — very enjoyable read. Second of all, I just wanted to comment on how it’s a very fascinating time to be covering technology news and witnessing a lot of huge companies from the analog era still floundering and failing to comprehend how and why the internet is eating them for lunch. As Sullivan aptly points out in the article, these companies and these industries have had years to see all this coming. The writing has been on the wall for some time, yet in all the content industries that stood to be most affected, very little was done to adapt. First in music, then in film, now in TV and publishing there appears to be some critical mass of desperation. Avoidance, massive lawsuits, walled gardens, inflating prices and whining for bailouts haven’t panned out. What’s next? Innovation or collapse.
To pick apart the above statement more finely — it’s curious to me that the CEO of a financial publication can unironically be doubting the value proposition of distribution. Are cable providers being disproportionally compensated for what is fundamentally other people’s work? Is Amazon.com being disproportionally compensated for peddling other people’s wares? Is Apple unfairly being enriched by that whole iTunes Music Store thing where they distribute content made by other people? Even as the cost of distribution falls, the value of distribution is still as high as ever — perhaps even moreso, as the flood of available content continues to increase and it becomes ever more difficult to filter. Google devised a solution to a problem they had the foresight to envision emerging. Twitter offers an intriguing and new twist on the concept of distribution channels, an idea so powerful that Facebook flat out copied it.
What publishers are really saying amidst this mess is that “people ought to like and find valuable our professionally-produced content.” While there’s a shadow of logic in there somewhere, no amount of stepping up to a podium and saying “people should read us” is going to move the needle whatsoever. A hungrier technology industry with less to lose and everything to gain has come in and offered people a treasure trove of alternatives to what “professional” publishers are offering (many of them becoming “professional” themselves along the way) along with new, interesting, fast and ultra-convenient distribution methods to find, filter and consume it. The game has changed completely and content industries are still devoting exorbitant resources in a vain attempt to roll back the rulebook instead of cultivating some hussle, summoning some hutzpah and diving into the game. Stop whining, start playing!
Microsoft launches ridiculous campaign to pad Mac’s cost versus Windoze
Posted by barb dybwad in technology on April 10th, 2009
Oh you have got to be kidding me. Only cretins dumb enough to think price is the only consideration when buying products in the world would take this idiotic campaign at face value, and even a cursory glance into the fuzzy math behind the “study” reveals an obviously disingenuous amount of padding in these “comparisons.”
And gosh, despite having been a Mac user for a decade now I have never spent one red cent on any of these “mandatory” Mac expenditures: Quicken, Office, Mobile Me, Airport Extreme, Radeon 4870, external Blu-Ray drive — will the Apple Police Force be arriving at my door any moment to drag me away? In total all of those dubiously optional “mandatory extras” total a whopping $1864 of the supposed $3367 premium I spend to buy 2 Macs versus 2 PCs. And anyway… Quicken? What? Why would that be mandatory for… anyone?
Not to mention, nowhere is included the annual cost of the anti-virus software the average user is actively encouraged to purchase at point of sale by most retailers as a convenient method of “protecting” you from the nasty scammers that Microsoft sold you out to in the first place while writing the pile of crap code that passes for an operating system, that nags me to install very important upgrades to its software and restart every damn time I sit down at the thing, has me constantly trying to chase down auto-start TSR crapware from mysterious unwanted sources, stops processing network calls periodically for no fathomable reason (again requiring a restart), requires a “hardware test” every time I plug in a microphone and has a registry the size of Greenland — I could go on, but I have more important things to do. Like Actually Get Work Done… on my Macs.
I tried to leave a comment to this effect on the original blog post, but the comment form wouldn’t load — guess it only works in IE… jerks.
What would it look like to fall into a black hole?
Posted by barb dybwad in science on April 8th, 2009
via New Scientist.
Managementthink is killing MSM
Posted by barb dybwad in digital entertainment, publishing, technology, web on April 8th, 2009
“We’re looking, of course, at ways to extract payments from the consumers of our news — micro-payments, subscriptions, memberships, licensing, even voluntary donations,” Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, said last week in a speech at Stanford University.
Time Inc. EVP John Squires used strikingly similar language in a recent statement about figuring out how to “save magazines”: these guys are busy scratching their brains about how to “get a payment from a consumer.”
So what’s missing here? How about any discussion of how to actually provide better value to the consumer? Or perhaps how to reach consumers in the new landscapes they’re inhabiting? Nope. We don’t hear much about that. It’s all fire and brimstone about how consumers have the audacity to skim headlines to absorb the news (did these guys think people read newspapers cover to cover when they come on paper?) or how Google dared to invent a way to find stuff you were looking for on the internet easily. Serving customers better value for less cost? The nerve! That’s just downright sleaz… oh wait, that’s one of the fundamental tenets of business.
This is symptomatic of a larger disease going on in business that Bob Sutton describes astutely in a piece on Why Management is Not a Profession. Business schools teach future management that the game is almost solely about “extracting value.” Mr. Keller and Mr. Squires apparently both paid attention in class, and they’re not the only ones. This model reveals capitalism in its ugliest form — an elaborate shell game in which value is artificially inflated to harvest more payment from consumers, who often have poor alternatives to forking over that $0.10 carriers tell them is reasonable cost to send 160 characters of data, or who live in areas monopolized by providers who decide 40 GB of data at the same price as the previous unlimited plan is completely logical.
If these MSM goons want to save their businesses they’d better get schooled in how to make themselves relevant to the consumers they so desperately want to extract more value from, because at the moment it’s entirely logical to sympathize less, not more, with their plight.
AP throws tantrum, lashes out at… well, it’s not quite clear
Posted by barb dybwad in publishing, technology, web on April 7th, 2009
“We’re frustrated with the way amateur and professional outlets are appropriating AP content,” the organisation’s director of strategic content, Jim Kennedy, told Forbes. “When the Red River in Fargo rises, we want people to go to the Fargo Forum. But searching for the Red River on Google might also send you to the London Telegraph.”
This just in from the Hail Mary Pass department: looks like the fourth estate is still following suit on the suit strategy of the RIAA/MPAA; they apparently plan to take legal action against a host of unnamed perps using their content inappropriately. Who these news-thieving bastards are the Associated Press doesn’t specify, and although they struck a deal several years ago with Google for use of AP content online the above quote is a very strangely passive aggressive dig at search engines who apparently are guilty of having the audacity to lead users to legitimate news sources the AP would rather you not visit.
Very curious, indeed.
