Vivisecting Media

Tales From SXSW – Day 1

Niki and I got up around 8am in the morning to get ready for the 3 hour drive down to Austin. After a quick bite to eat at this killer Mexican joint that made the best home-made tortillas, we got on 35 and headed to Austin. Once in town we stopped by the hotel to check in and I had this foreboding sense they would mess up our room buy giving us a King or some shit. I was 100% on and they only had a King room left. It ends up that SXSW had the hotel down for a lot more double/doubles then they really have. Luckily they had a spare roller-bed we could use.

After we dropped our crap off, we headed to Niki’s friend Dani’s place, picked her up and then headed downtown so that I could grab my badge. I had to wait in this long ass line to get the badge but it was organized well and it moved pretty quickly. The one thing that had me rolling with laughter on the inside while waiting in line was the sheer number of hipster haircuts. This place is hipster mecca and they all are heading here to see the bands.

Of course I can’t really say much since I was wearing a Threadless t-shirt and a knit hat and Niki has the whole indie drummer “I am so emo it hurts” look going so I am sure everyone was thinking the same about us (he actually isn’t emo we just like to joke about it).

After we grabbed the badge we headed off to the Industry Of Music day show at Tap Room Six on Colorado. There we saw Patty Hurst Shifter from Raleigh, NC and then Scott H. Biram who did a one man grit blues/rock set that was so over the top and good that I was floored and he totally won over the whole crowd.

After a few pints of local brew we grabbed a bite to eat at Noodelism where we chowed on the nitro noodles, be warned they have 3 chilies next to them for a reason. Super tasty but I think I lost all sensation in my lips. After getting some food in us it was time to head over to Stubb’s for the fucking killer Matador show.

Stubb’s is a BBQ joint that has an outdoor back area that can fit around 1000 people. You may recognize Stubb’s from your local supermarket where you can buy their sauce. Anyway, the sound system and stage was perfect for the size of the venue and Jennifer O’Conner was on when we got there. She is a blend of old Liz Phair and a hint of the Flaming Lips.

After Jennifer went one, Brightblack Morning Light came up. I was pretty disappointed with their set, it was way too mellow for the crowd and people were there to see a rocking show. The next in the line-up was the New Pornographers. I have wanted to see them play for a long time and they came out and laid down a non-stop jamming 40 min. set that just left you wanting more. The thing about SXSW is that the New Pornographers were an opening act that and that just amazes me!

Belle & Sebastian were next up on the stage and they played an hour and a half set. It was a packed house and the crowd was really into the whole set. Once the set was over a lot of the crowd started to bail. Niki and I were surprised at this since Mogwai was the final act. Mogwai came out on stage and just laid it all down. Unfortunately, one of the guitarist was having monitor issues but even with that the show was amazing. The shear sonic wall of melodic distortion and delay was the perfect way to end a line up like that.

At that point we had been standing on gravel for 6 hours and our feet were killing us. We headed back to the car and tried to find the ATX after party. The original location was closed (rumor of a police raid) but as we wandered back to the car we say they had just moved the party to a parking lot. We popped in to see what was going on with the free beer but the crowd was all slammed up trying to get to the kegs. It felt like a bad high school kegger in the woods and our hunger for food and sleep kicked in.

After stopping for some 3 am pancakes at Kirby Lane we finally came home and crashed. It’s about 12:30pm right now and we are cleaning up for the next round. We are going to the “I heart comix” day party, then we are going to see Morrissey and Goldfrapp.

And as Niki just commented… “What’cha doing suckas?!”

Tales from SXSW (pre-flight check)

I am currently sitting at a bar in the Oakland Airport with a Jack and coke at my side and a lack of internet connection. They “claim” terminal-wide WiFi and I see a network but it won’t give me a valid IP or when it does it won’t provide a DNS server or gateway. Why am I not surprised?

So, I spent last night prepping for the trip, and by prepping I mean formatting my iPod, getting it configured to my Wintel box (I used to have it sync to my old work Mac) and getting my music catalog in shape. Lord did it need a lot of work.

Niki, my SXSW partner in crime, old band mate, and good friend hooked me up with one of the SXSW torrents that contain all the MP3s that are posted on the SXSW site. 712 tasty tracks, 2.94 gigs of new music and all in one place that you can download. Sweet. So that had to go on my iPod, plus there is all the amazing FS material that I could finally load onto my iPod since I am lazy and never got around to updating my iPod for over 6 months (see above).

Anyway, I jumped on the AC Transit 15 this afternoon, plugged into my iPod and started peeping all the bands that I won’t have time to see. Seriously, it is ridiculous how many bands are playing and there is no way I will be able to see a 1/10th of what is out there. But, even if I won’t see the bands this week I will be hearing all this new music and its already paid off with the band “Why?”. They are on Anticon Records, and they will be a feature on the Lab Report for sure (thanks Shaun).

I will be trying to blog from SXSW but I make no promises. I have a feeling if I still know my own name by tomorrow night I will be lucky. I mean what the fuck, free open bars to badge holders… oh my god I can’t wait.

(this was posted later from Dallas, once I got the “internets” and yes I know SXSW is in Austin and not Dallas, we are driving down tomorrow thank you very much…)

Commercial Credit

Recently I have been watching a lot more TV. I mean, a LOT more TV. It’s one of those things that happens to you after a long day on the hill and all you want to do is sit back in front of the fire and veg out.

The major problem with this habit is that I don’t have a Tivo hooked up at the cabin and this mean I have to watch the commercials. Gah. One thing I have noticed while watching the commercials is that more and more of them are actually putting up the name of the artist and song that was licensed for the music in the background.

Some of the commercials doing this are obvious, like eMusic or Verizon pushing their new online music downloads, but I have seen a few other non-music commercials that are giving credit. I feel this is great for both the artist and the consumer.

A good friend of mine, Anna, told be me a story about hearing a song on a commercial. It was a VW commercial, the one were everything syncs together while they are driving (this was a long time ago). Anna was so taken by the song that she jumped online and ended up in a forum that was full of people asking the same question. It ended up being Air and she went out and got the album, all because of a 30 second commercial.

I would really like to see more of this. If a PR firm thinks that the song represents their client so well they should be willing to facilitate this back by listing who the artist is. I hope more licensing firms push for this in the contract because this is a great way to expose an artist to a very large audience.

Creative Commons Salon

Last night was the first monthly salon that the good folks over at Creative Commons (CC) are putting on. The idea is to gather people that are interested in CC to come and meet up to talk about issues and uses of CC. They also have featured speakers to talk about what they are doing and how they are using CC in their projects. This month they brought in Joshua Kinberg of FireAnt, Eddie Codel of Geek Entertainment TV and Wagner James Au who is an embedded journalist for the MMO game Second Life.

Actually, I probably should take a step back and give a little intro to CC and why it is cool and important to us. Creative Commons is a project that was started by Lawrence Lessig to help facilitate a more easy to use system to share copyrighted material. One of the major challenges (and of course benefits) with copyrighted material is that it is All Rights Reserved. This means that if you want to use anything (from text to video) that is Copyrighted you have to get explicit permission to use the source. This is great protection for the copyright holder, but if you want your material to have some freedom this creates a lot of headaches and hurdles for both the copyright holder and the person wishing to use the material.

With CC, they have created different levels of “permissions” for copyrighted material. This allows the copyright holder to quickly license something as CC and instead of All Rights Reserved the material is now Some Rights Reserved.

For example, I have a song that I wrote and I want to allow people to remix it but not make money off the remix (because I still want to retain some of my rights). I could then post my song on my site and put up the CC badge that states in the license that you have to credit me, it must be non-commercial, that you may make derivative works but you have to post it under a similar CC license. We now have a quick and easy way to share material and still retain rights.

So, back to the salon. Joshua of FireAnt showed what their project is all about. FireAnt is both a web based and software downloadable aggregator that focuses on Video casts. One of Joshua’s goals for his presentation was to get feedback for the folks at CC and FireAnt about how they can better use CC to help facilitate video editors. From the presentation one of the bigger challenges they have to face is standardization of Metadata when tagging material as CC. This is important because when a video cast is made and posted on FireAnt and the creator wants to mark something as CC there should be a super simple way to do this via the tool. Also, the metadata should be standardized so that other tools and sites can use the data to inform end-users quickly what rights they have with the material.

Eddie, of Geek Entertainment TV (and the man behind Webzine which I was a panelist at) showed us an episode of Geek Entertainent TV and talked about how they are using CC material in their shows. One big use of CC content is images that he pulls from Flickr to be used in the episode. What’s cool is that Flickr has a search system that allows users to find CC’d material of different licenses and then you can search inside that license to find images that are tagged with different keywords. By creating such a system Eddie is able to quickly find material and then he can follow the license and integrate the images into his show.

The last speaker was James, an embedded journalist for Second Life. Second Life is a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) that users can download and play for free. In the game users have the ability to create 3D objects and write scripts that can then control these objects. Once the object is created the user can then pay using an in-game monetary system call Lindens for their object to become permanent. Once the object is permanent the user can then use the object or even sell it. On top of that, the user retains the IP rights to any of the objects they create.

An example James used was of fashion designers. Some players of Second Life began creating custom fashions in the game and then selling them from stores they built in the game. Here is were it gets interesting, you can turn around and sell Lindens (the money) in the open market for real money, right now the rate is about 250 Lindens to $1 USD.

At this point some of the designers are making about $60,000+ a year just selling their online clothes. In fact, some of the designers have been approached by real life clothing companies to take the online fashion into “analog” forms.

As I mentioned, James is an embedded journalist. He plays the game, talks to players and then blogs about what is currently going on in the world. He was brought in by Second Life’s developers, Linden Labs, to do this and let them know about what is going on in their own game. One of the challenges the developers were facing was that there was so much going on they did not know what people were doing or how they were using the system. By bringing someone like James in, they can then get detailed information about the good, bad and the ugly in their world.

The reason James was speaking at the Salon was that CC and Second Life are working together to provide the rights and licensing system for the creations by the users. Since the user retains the IP rights to their creations, CC helped design a simple in-game way of licensing the creation as CC, giving other gamers rights to the creation if so desired. It was impressive how integrated this all was into the game and by playing the game you were actually performing licensing. On top of that, you can actually go to the CC office in the game and then donate Linden dollars to CC that will then be converted to USD and PayPal’ed into CC’s bank account. Wild.

Overall, I had a great time at the first CC salon and learned a lot about how others are using CC and what potential CC provides not just for the obvious things like music or video. Also, Jon Phillips of CC has asked me to speak at the next Salon and I am really excited to talk about podcasting and the using Creative Commons inside this medium.

The Return of the 45?

The other week I was sitting at Dalva for the XLR8R monthly with my good friend Maer. We started talking about the FS model of selling full albums vs. al la carte sales of music (ex: iTunes, Napster, Yahoo!). The growing popularity of al la carte song sales reminded me of the days of the 45 rpm singles and then I get an email from Cyrus pointing me to an article that said exactly the same thing, interesting…

I don’t feel singles are bad but I don’t like the concept of pushing singles as the future model for music’s success. The beautiful thing about al la carte is that if you know what you want you can just get it. One concern I have about al la carte is that if you get only what you want will you be willing to experiment more?

I feel that a few people will, but at the $0.99 price point, the possible $2.00 price point proposed by the big 5 or $2.00+ that mobile providers are using; I don’t think most people will.

Over the years we have been hearing more and more complaints by consumers saying that they don’t want to buy whole albums because only one or two of the songs on the album are any good, the rest are filler and/or awful. This is a legitimate complaint because a lot of what has been coming out by the majors has been filler and they are pursuing the big hits, especially now that they have a growing sales model that pushes singles.

At the same time, buying only the hits you want can make you miss out on some amazing works. For example, Kanye West’s albums should be heard in their entirety. The albums are well thought out and are designed to be heard as a whole, but if you just bought “Gold Digger” and never heard another single would you be willing to pay more knowing that the majors have been putting out a lot of filler?

Another argument against al la carte is that full album purchases are beneficial to both the artist and label in helping establish a fan base. Here is an example, I heard the pre-release track “7/4 (Shoreline)” of Broken Social Scene’s newest self titled album. I had never heard of them before and my friend David told me I should check out the track. I liked the song so much that I risked it and pre-ordered the album.

I was stunned how good the whole album was. So good in fact, that I bought their first one just because the current one was so amazing. Since then I would put Broken Social Scene as one of my top favorites for 2005.

If it wasn’t for listening to the whole album and releasing how good it was I would probably not have pursued the rest of their content nor had the experience of learning the entire album. If we continue to push the al la carte this experience is lost and you could lose (or never gain) a supportive fan base and this is very important for independent labels and unsigned artist.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of benefits of singles and I think al la carte is not inherently bad, but it should not be the de facto way to purchase music like the big 5 wants. Artist take a lot of time to make an album, there is a lot of thought put into it and a well crafted album is a great experience from beginning to end.

A Change in Focus

For the last 6 years I have been working full time at Macromedia (now Adobe) and three weeks ago I put in my resignation. As of last Tuesday I am now unemployed. Well, technically I am partner and CEO of Fake Science, but we are a new startup and few new companies are known for paying their employees.

The reason I made this choice was to really focus on making Fake Science the best company that it can be. Trying to juggle two full time jobs was getting a little much. This is a massive change for me and I am excited and scared shitless at the same time. I feel that this is normal, or at least I have been told this is normal and if I wasn’t a little nervous something would be wrong. This will be the first time since leaving college (I decided to change majors, some people call it “dropping out”) that I will not be working a 9-5 job, and that is a pretty long time ago.

I haven’t mentioned my affiliation to Macromedia in the past posts because I wanted to keep my day job and side company separate, but now that I am done I feel I can mention what I did there and how it will effect what technologies we use with the Fake Science site.

For the last 3 years I have been working on the Flex Builder team as a Senior QA Engineer and team lead. If you haven’t heard of Flex or Flex Builder check out the new public beta. I may be a little spoiled and an inside man but seriously Flex is the hottest thing I have seen and worked with in a long time, and it has drastically changed how I develop Flash applications. You can check it out at labs.macromedia.com. Before I was on the Flex Team I worked in the Technical Support department. During my 3 year stint there I have supported almost every product Macromedia made over the years (minus a few server products and such).

It’s been a long run, and the people I worked with at Macromedia are amazing. In fact I was tempted to leave about a year ago, but I enjoyed working on the team so much I decided to stick it out for another year.

Well, that time is over now and I am on my own. The next two months will be on the chiller side to kind of detoxify from working 18 hours a day 7 days a week on two projects. I want to take some time to refocus and look ahead at what we will be doing with FS. Once we get into April we will start back into some serious dev work and expect to see some amazing new features and functionality on the site.

In the meantime we will still be adding things here or there, fleshing out the catalog (we are averaging 4-5 releases a week right now and gaining steam), continuing to post here and the Scientist and I will be heading to SXSW and the Winter Music Conference. If any of you are going to these conferences let me know. A’ight, back to “work”…

An Intimate Performance

This weekend I was invited over to my friend’s house to enjoy a “home concert”. The concept behind the event is that the host opens their home to friends and colleagues and invites musicians to perform a show in the home. For this evening we were entertained by an acoustical set by Subimage and The Great Auk.

The beauty behind home concerts is the intimacy between you and the musician. There is no need for amplification, no need to strain for the words, no need to decipher the expression of the performer. You are there in the same small room enjoying it with a small group of others.

This wasn’t the first home concert I had been too. Roger Linn has been putting on similar events for many years now. He opens his home to about 70 people (he has an amazing living/music room) and brings in some of the best musicians in the world that just happen to be in town for other shows. I was able to go with Josh, Chris and Reba and we saw the Robin Nolan Trio with Howard Alden. These gentlemen are considered some of the best jazz guitarist out there and sitting in a room with them was a truly humbling experience as a fellow guitarist and musician.

One comment that was made at the Subimage/Auk show was that these home concerts are a growing trend. I hope so, not because of a certain “musical elitism” that could be interpreted, but as an opportunity for both the artist and the listener to really experience each other. With the growth of mega-concerts and the drive of musicians to sell out bigger venues, this concerts goal is exactly opposite. It felt more like the time you spend sitting on a couch writing the material then it did as a show.

I am still a fan of the big shows, and I really want to see a lot more in the Bay Area. But I would love for more people (with the space) to put on these kinds of events. Its great for everyone and it helps promote sharing the musical experience.

SF Podcaster Meetup

I received an IM the other day from my friend Dave C. over at Libsyn. He told me there would be a podcast meetup going on in the city and that Dave M. from Libsyn was in town to talk at it. I have heard of the meetup before and I decided that Dave being in town was exactly the motivation I needed to head over and see what it was all about.

I met up with Christopher and Elise at Sauce (the location of the meeting) grabbed a cocktail and we headed back to the supper club to see what was going on. Walking into the back room I was impressed by the number of people there already. Christopher whipped out a business card, made a button hole in the card and then proceeded to create a name tag. This action instantly got Steve (from WildBeat) and Martin’s (from Network Security) attention and we started mingling with the crowd.

The crowd was made up of a fair mix of current podcasters, people looking into podcasting and people providing services to podcasters (from hosting to advertising). Michael Butler from Podshow headed up the meeting and started out the official gathering by asking all the new people to talk about what they are doing with podcasting.

After we went around the room Michael asked if anyone had any technical questions about podcasting. People asked questions like how to get cost-free hosting when your show grows or how to get more attention to you podcast.

Once all the questions and comments were done Dave from Libsyn and Jonathan from Kiptronic talked about the new integrated services provided by both companies. Kiptronic has a new technology that allows podcasters to charge for advertising space in their show and when an advertiser and podcaster agree to feature a spot the system will automatically insert the segment into the podcast audio file. Libsyn has integrated the Kiptronic module into their servers and they also have seamlessly integrated Kiptronic’s interface into their content management system.

There is a lot more to this but I will save that for another post. After Libsyn and Kiptronic talked, the CEO of Podomatic and the VP of Client Development talked about their hosting and online podcasting technologies. One of the most interesting technologies that Podomatic talked about was their ability to do real-time video capture from web cams using Flash and then convert this to MP4 which is the supported video format for the new video iPods.

Overall, I had a great time meeting fellow local podcasters and talking about different technologies and services that are being introduced everyday. Christopher and I agree that we definitely need to start going to these on a regular basis and I look forward to hearing more about what is going on.

O’Reilly FooCast Podcast Posted

About two months ago I got an email from my friend Jack Herrington asking if I wanted to join him for a podcast session. Since I am always down to work with Jack it was a no brainier. It ends up that Jack had worked a deal with O’Reilly and KQED to allow us to use the KQED studio to record the session. A few days later I met up with Jack around 8pm and the next thing I know I am sitting in a brand new world-class recording facility to chat about audio production, podcasting and how we started Fake Science.

Jack mentioned that we would also be talking with Doug Kaye from the highly regarded IT Conversations. Doug has been running IT Conversations for around 2 years now and it is considered one of the premier and ground-breaking podcasts out there. It was a great experience to talk audio tech with Doug and what was most impressive about the conversation was that we were doing all remotely. He was patched into the studio with an ISDN line that allowed him to sound like he was in the same room as us. I have read about ISDN remote recording for a long time but it was a lot of fun to actually experience it first hand.

Jack has broken the night’s conversations into multiple segments. The interview with me about Fake Science called “Jack Herrington Interviews Founder of Fake Science”, and you can find the Doug Kaye conversations under the “Pioneer Podcasters Share Insider Tips” titles. Currently Part 1 and 2 of four are up. Check it out…

Technical questions and ramifications of DRM

Here is an interesting list of questions posed by the CEO of a software firm about the legal ramifications of Digital Rights Management (DRM) and how aggressive DRM can affect hardware and software security. Some of the questions may seem excessively paranoid but with the recent Sony/BMG fiasco we now know that media companies will do almost anything they can to protect their profit.

As we go forward into a more instant access environment we will be seeing a larger push for system and media protection. With the ever growing popularity of subscription based distribution models, DRM must play a major role in protecting the media; otherwise companies will not be able to manage their customer base. Sadly, as this article points out, the people that suffer the most from DRM are often the people that are playing by the rules. I understand the conceptual purpose of DRM, but as Josh points out why should we treat our customers as thieves?

There are more then just technical and security issues with DRM, there are actually philosophical and cultural assumptions that are being made by large corporations. With the demand for 10% growth per quarter every quarter in the market we see a push for success that can far exceed what is reasonably possible. As this pressure increases we are seeing desperate acts being made by media empires and they are seeing thieves in the shadows, and they must protect their wealth.

One of the benefits of the instant information culture is that more people are becoming aware of the issues sooner then ever before. As we saw with Sony, there was a demand for a fix within a week of finding the problem. It’s amazing how fast the pressure was applied and Sony had to scramble to try and resolve the problem. Hopefully, with knowledge and a movement towards more conscious corporations we can see a movement away from doing anything to succeed to focusing on doing the right thing to succeed.