Music is a Service. Not a Product.

okay.  been a while since i ranted….  here comes.

tami mentioned to me the other day about how prince was getting paid $4+ million to play at coachella the other weekend.

i said, “amen!”

now, some people may think that’s a little excessive to pay a musician that much.  i say, dammit, it just puts artist demand in perspective.  i’ve bickered with people before about how an artist’s recorded music is a promotional device and not a product to be sold.  i firmly believe that.

it’s only been in the last 60 years where the “music industry” has duped musicians into thinking that they’re all “rock stars!” and to start believing that they don’t have to play music to get paid.  and recording music is totally different than playing music, i might add.

for thousands of years, musicians actually had to do this horrendous thing called “performing” to get paid.  now, just because some powerful lobbyists have tricked everyone into thinking that just because someone spends a week in a studio once every few years, they deserve money — we need to pay them to listen to their music.

shit in one hand.  demand in the other.  see what you have at the end of the day.

there’s a reason that since the dawn of man, musicians have been performing music.  (doh!  there, i go again.  using the p-word!)  that’s because it’s a viable business model.  recording something, duping it infinitely for damn near free and then charging $18 for it?  i’m surprised there hasn’t been an riaa executive lynching yet!

does anyone out there know how much it costs to stamp out discs from a glass master?  pennies!  yes, pennies per disc!  even with packaging and sleeves and the whole nine yards, production for cds are < $1 per disc at scale.

so, the artist, gets pennies.  the discs cost pennies to make.  where does all that money go?

duh!  marketing and distribution!  you know, the stuff that is super-duper cheap on the internet. 

note to upcoming musicians:  there is such a hunger for new music, that if you’re good, you will succeed.  if you suck?  well.  just stick to doing it for fun because you’re not going — and don’t deserve — to make a living at it.

arg!  so.  now that i’ve gotten my take on the current state of the music industry out of my system, let’s talk about performance.

you know, my wife and i usually get season tickets every year to the philharmonic.  here it is, 100 some-odd people playing music for an audience and getting paid for it.  not whining about bittorrent.  not spending a few days in a studio and then resting on their laurels for the next year.

they’re working.  they’re playing music.  they’re getting paid.  not as much as prince, mind you.  or most of them even enough to live on. 

therein lies the trick.

just because you get paid to play music doesn’t mean you deserve to make a living doing it.

hell, i love painting.  i’ve even sold paintings to galleries before.  i’ve done work for hire before.  in short, i’ve gotten paid to paint.  do i do it for a living?  nope.  i’m not good enough.  do i whine when other people use images of my paintings somewhere else?  nope.  (dude!  free publicity for me!)  do i care?  nope.

i don’t think i deserve to be making a living painting.

not with how much i do it.  now, if i was scheduling several murals a week and taking payment for them, sure.  that’s called working for a living.  call me a sellout, but: you do work.  you get paid.  it’s called a service industry.

do i paint a wall and then demand money from everyone who looks at it?  no.  that’s the stupidest thing i’ve ever heard!

should someone record a song and then demand money from everyone who hears it?  no.  that’s the stupidest thing i’ve ever heard.

making a living through music is work for hire.  period.

• if you’re a musician, you get paid to play.
• if you’re a technician, you get paid by a musician to mix his music.
• if you’re a promoter, you get paid by a musician to promote his music.

this whole “downloading music is theft!” crap has to end.  it’s stupid and flies in the face of thousands of years of human history.  not to mention, it’s not even theft!  plenty of people make plenty of money making music.  just ask prince.  or trent reznor.  or the guy who played on stage last weekend.  or the guy who was dj’ing at the club last night.

welcome to work by the hour, musicians.  you know, like it’s been throughout the entire length of recorded history.

m3mnoch.

The Kid Movie Mess

as everyone knows, i’ve got these two curtain climbers running around the house.  since we can’t play legos or trains or star wars all the time, sometimes they just watch a movie or two.  (not more than an hour or two a day, tho — that passive stuff rots your brain)  and, well…  like any parent in this day and age, we have a crap-ton of kid’s dvds that get handled by people <=4 years old.

that means scratches.  that means misplacement.  that means irritation.

for example, only 8 or so of the 15 baby einstein dvds will still actually play in a dvd player.  and then, only if it’s a REALLY forgiving one.  (stupid, picky sony dvd players!)  like how the beginning of monsters, inc. is completely hosed.  and our aladin disc, one of my top-5 favorite movies of all time, doesn’t play at all.

in the days of vhs, parents didn’t have to worry about that stuff.  vhs movies are sturdy and unbreakable in their hard-plastic shell.  as a kid, you could just about stack them up to build stairs in order to climb up and reach the vcr.

anyway.

i figured with my kid’s affinity towards all things digital — the computer, my 360, cameras, you know: the usual — it was time to start ripping all the kids’ dvds.  little did i know it’d take about 3 weeks to figure it out!  good lord….

okay.  i shouldn’t say 3 weeks to figure out how to do it.  i should say 3 weeks to get the x264 options and production pipeline just right.  my requirements:

1. it not look like ass.  meaning, none of the blocky compression artifacts or the streaky horizontal motion lines.  (”telecine judder” is the nerdy term.)
2. at least 640×480 and at least 23fps.
3. it have a relatively small hdd footprint.  these are kids movies after all.  a half an hour show needs to be less than 200mb.
4. the final product needs to play on my 360.
5. it needs to have a “one-click” encoding pipeline.

see?  not too much to ask for at all.  and, to top it off, i’d seen it done.  for a delusional-but-brief stint, i thought it would be easier to just bittorrent the movies instead of rip/encode them — um no.  bittorrent sucks for the long tail.  you should try to pull down a baby einstein with utorrent.  ha!

i’ll spare you all the painful gore of me moving from solutions like automkv to megui to mencoder to avidemux and about a hundred others in-between.  movie mucking misery.  so, about 500 test encodings later, i have some success to report:

handbrake is the bomb.

the end product looks fantastic and the audio syncs up perfectly.  here’s the killer features it had that helped me to meet my goals:

• it will rip specific chapters. (key for discs with 5 or 6 1/2 hour episodes!)
• it has a one-click mentality.
• it has an xbox 360 preset to start with.
• it’s batch-able.

after a substantial amount of testing, i’ve even boiled the settings down even more finite:

1. rip the disc with dvdshrink first.  nothing anywhere does anything before you get the video off the stupid physical disc.  handbrake reads iso files, so there’s not need to mess with messy TS_VIDEO directories and their ilk.
2. start with the 360 preset. (it also has psp, ipod and all the other standard presets)
3. change the level to 41 instead of 40.
4. set the bit rate to 900.
5. set the audio to 128kbs and 44.1khz.
6. uncheck the two pass video option.  one pass works just fine for low bit rate kids cartoons.

click “start” and you’ve got a half an hour cartoon encoded in about 30 minutes (well.  at least that’s how long it takes on my laptop….) and the file was 185mb.  i then dropped them on my media center and successfully watched them — and they look HOT! — on the 360.

woot!

now, if only the powers that be would discover this huge, huge market just waiting for picking, i’d be a happy camper.  i want to buy kids movies cheap, small and digital.  and, i don’t want to stream crappy versions of them for god’s sake.  mr. future retailer, it’s to your benefit because you only pay for the bandwidth once instead of the 20-billion times a week we watch book two, chapter two of avatar.  and, i especially don’t want to be locked in to some stupid proprietary format. 

and, most of all, mr. future retailer: please see the success people are having selling cheap mp3s vs. streaming vs. drm’d files.

just make it easy.  you should know by now that most people (especially me!) are lazy and value our time.  easy and cheap (not the same as easy and expensive) trumps hard and free.

m3mnoch.

My Web 2.0 Panel

i’m heading up to san francisco next week to speak on a panel entitled “Children of Flickr: Making the Massively Multiplayer Social Web.”  i’ll be arguing with such luminaries as justin hall, rajat paharia and gabe zichermann.

okay.  prolly not “arguing” per se.  i bet we’re all gonna be pretty much on the same page and bouncing ideas around at about a thousand miles an hour.

…maybe even a million.

this super-killer-fascinistic talk is summaraized as such:

Flickr was one of the first popular Web 2.0 web sites: a social photo sharing web site that helped popularize tagging. Flickr was born of an attempt to make a browser-based Massively Multiplayer Online Game about information exchange: “Game Neverending.”

Today, the children of Flickr are continuing to work massively multiplayer game mechanics into social web sites. This panel will discuss strategies, models, and pitfalls for harnessing the power of play to promote the social Web.

Panelists include people working on backend server architecture for adding game functionality to social networks, inventors transforming non-participating sites into online games, Firefox extensions making play in the web browser, and other people sneaking fun into everyday online life.

we’ll see you there on wednesday, april 23rd from 10:50am - 11:40am.

m3mnoch.

Back From the Dead

so.  after a substantial hiatus where i was architecting what you guys know will be The Next Great Thing™.  i’m talking, of course, about my part of metaplace — the webby parts.  all i can say right now is “holy-kick-ass-batman!”  it’s certainly one of the most awesome projects i’ve ever been a part of.

anyway.

i’m going to make a concerted effort to get back to my long-neglected blog.  especially since we’ve announced and i now feel comfortable talking about webby things again without giving anything away.  hoo-ray!

talk to you soon.  (real soon, actually, i’m going to write a quick post pimping my upcoming web2.0 panel)

m3mnoch.

Pumpkin Quest

to commemorate both halloween and my recent, maddening addiction to puzzle quest on my 360, i decided to carve out the tutorial girl.  unfortunately, the pumpkin version isn’t nearly as hot.  (i loves me some redheads….)

oh, and hey, cuppy.  does this count for your contest?

m3mnoch.

Quentin’s Wall Mural is Final

hooray! finally found time to get back to painting — after taking almost a month off… is now finished and we’re pushing his dresser back against the wall.

oh, and that’s the last time i ask one of my kids what they want on their wall. holy-tons-of-work-batman. the painting is about 12 feet wide and took almost 30 hours to complete. and as a disclaimer, his name is green because that’s his favorite color and not because i thought that looked good in the composition.

m3mnoch.

Some Quick Post-launch Notes

1. evidently, winning the techcrunch20 techcrunch40 is only for serious business. kinda like the oscars, the fun stuff never wins.
2. there is lots of crazy, shots-in-the-dark speculation as to how we’re doing what we’re doing. it’ll be nice to get a technical faq out to the public. send your questions to cuppycake so we can answer your top concerns.
3. as always, compromising your layouts for internet explorer sucks. the way i originally wanted to layout the site looks great in every browser EXCEPT ie — both 6 and 7. camino, konquerer, safari 3 (1&2 blow goats), firefox, opera, etc…. i especially find it funny that a guy can fix ie (version 6 no less) with javascript where the entire ie7 dev team fails.
4. when putting a site live that will generate crap-tons of traffic, make sure you have swapped your apache dev conf (our platform does play with the web afterall) with your live conf. failure to do so results in downtime due to the interweb hordes. luckily, after smacking myself in the forehead, and changing about 6 characters in the apache2.conf, our server is now comfortably sitting between 0-2% cpu used at 2300 page views an hour. we appreciate all the offers of hosting, guys, but, i’m just a dork. sorry, all. my fault.
5. boingboing sends twice the traffic of slashdot. the bbc sends twice the traffic of boingboing.
6. look closely at the form html on our application page. i wrote it in dl/dt/dd name/value pair definition list magic.
7. yes, i too have a pet project i’m building on our platform.

m3mnoch.

Today’s the Day!

whew.  it’s been a lot of work in a short amount of time, but, we’re announcing today at the techcrunch40 event.

feel free to vote for us to win the audience award, tho.

m3mnoch.

Runescape and WOW

i’m totally in crunch-mode right now, so i’ll make this short.  just noticed something on the mmog data site.  world of warcraft has 26% of the market, runescape has 23%.

um.  wow.

m3mnoch.

Lightning Down. Mater, Luigi and Guido to go.

two weekends worth of work and i have quentin’s wall mostly done.  the biggie was lightning mcqueen.  the other three (mater, luigi and guido) are much smaller and much less detailed.  they’ll go fast.  hopefully, i can finish them up during the evenings this week.

whew.

m3mnoch.