I walked past Mario Batali this morning as he turned up University Place from Washington Square North in the village. I’m not used to recognizing famous people, so I spent a few seconds trying to look without looking — but I saw a small shopping bag in his hand with Babbo written on it, and his route was the most obvious to take from his restaurant Babbo on Waverly to his higher-end pizza joint Otto on 8th Street. It was further confirmed when I got to the office and Googled for: Mario Batali orange shoes. Looks like he’s his name attached to a line of Crocs shoes.
April 24th, 2008
Digital distribution of music.
The major record labels have fought it to protect the market for their CDs. They grudgingly signed deals with the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Walmart, Napster, and Rhapsody, with each of those vendors supplying music with DRM. 4 of those 5 chose one vendor’s technology, the other went it alone.
The iTunes Music Store can certainly be called a success, whether that’s attributable to the store or the devices made to integrate seamlessly. The others? Not so much.
A site in Russia, allofmp3.com, sold non-DRMed music, claiming legitimacy through the protection of the laws of its country… some customers may have been assuaged by the cover of claims of legitimacy, but I certainly got the sense that the convenience, price, and quality were key, along with the fact that customers could compile their collections without worry about device compatibility or the prospect of having to fight to get what they bought when a DRM license file goes on walkabout.
Of course, allofmp3 got shut down eventually…
But it did show one thing — for whatever reason, people were actually paying (albeit far less than retail) for the music they were downloading. It may have been illegal, and everyone may have known that, but people paid rather than download from a P2P network. I guess that it’s impossible to tell how many did so because it became difficult or risky to acquire their tunes illicitly, but there was definitely a market for DRM-free music.
Enter Amazon, purveyor of everything from dog food to silk scarves, paperback best sellers to personal armored vehicles, bicycles to computer cycles…
No DRM, all MP3. No DRM means no need to customize the actual files (anyone know if they watermark? if not, their S3 platform is perfect for this). Amazon’s the master of the long tail — they made their reputation on having the largest selection of books.
I’ve seen a few claims about the size of the music libraries of the big players… I haven’t explored very much to compare music services against each other. I realize how trivial it is to inflate the song count with things nobody will ever buy, so song count by itself is quite irrelevant once you get to the “enough” stage. By the same token, though, bytes take up very little space. The disk throughput for the long tail doesn’t need to be anything special — if I’m downloading something I can’t find elsewhere, I’m not going to notice a few extra seconds spent to retrieve it, so it doesn’t need to be on “enterprise class” tier-1 storage. For that matter, since I have a checkout process involved in purchasing, that offers even more time to ready my download.
This is more of a rant than a question, but why aren’t the smaller labels all on top of this? I went looking for the Damien Rice song The Blower’s Daughter. I could find some Damien Rice, or other artists performing The Blower’s Daughter, but not his rendition of that song.
The song was in the 2004 movie Closer, went multiplatinum in Ireland, and I know that it got airplay in the US on mainstream stations.
Where is it?
It’s a song lots of people don’t know by name, but if you give it a listen over at damienrice.com (30 second preview), most of you will recognize it.
I guess I’m just frustrated, but I’m not looking for the magic of the internet to bring me Timbaland and Britney. I’m not looking for someone to magically divine what I want to hear, or to expose me to things I might buy. I’m talking about looking for a song the artist and title of which I know and which I’m not likely to find at the K-Mart across the street.
Isn’t *that* what was supposed to happen with the Internet? The digital age? The pocket-sized terabyte?
December 27th, 2007
Apple gets lots of things right, some wrong, and makes a lot of decisions that I don’t understand.
Why should I download a patch for something and also a newer version of that same product?
And while I’m at it… 58 megs to get to the latest version of iTunes? Holy poop.
November 3rd, 2007
I’ve just received a call at work from a company from which I’d downloaded some software to take a look at it. I’d forgotten downloading it, and it wasn’t really for anything but my own curiosity… though it’s for a product for which my employer already has the bases covered — we have a company-wide license for one vendor’s version, and we have licenses for a competing product for some specific cases.
The differences are mostly “flavor”-related — the major functionalities are the same for all three vendors (the two we have and the one who called).
I mentioned that I think that I’d been doing some investigating of options when it was time to renew one of the contracts with a vendor we’re already using… and the software (and more importantly, annual support) certainly isn’t cheap. After explaining our situation, the gentleman offered something which stuck in my craw as a bit of an ethics issue…
He said that the next time license/support renewals came around, that we should have them give a competitive bid which will be quite low (which makes sense if you’re trying to win business), but then he added that even if we had no intention of switching, he’d be happy to provide us a lowball quote with which to beat up the other guys — he’d be happy to have his competitor make less money even if we continued to use their product.
While I know that there are lots of “games” played in business, this one left me feeling icky. I think that it’s one thing to play games to save yourself money, playing games to hurt your competition… might just be another.
October 22nd, 2007
In case any of you were wondering what the vehicles look like which are doing the Windows Live Local street-view mapping, Ry Jones was kind enough to share some pics on Flickr.
Edit: OK, I was an idiot and didn’t post the link… here you go…
September 24th, 2007
