Apple Martini

Alright, let’s talk about this Cocktail thing.

“Cocktail” is a codename for a new Apple product, a hybrid album concept that will certainly revolutionize the music industry and harken back to the “heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork while you listened to the music,” according to an unnamed executive.

Really?

People don’t sit around in a room and look at artwork anymore; they sit around in a room and play XBox.  The closest this could be is a Guitar Hero-styled game, a hybrid concept that actually *is* helping the music industry.

This initiative sounds like something crafted up by executives who’ve long since become obsolete, dreaming of the days when they could expense coke and women without having to use codenames on their expense reports. (These days you call them Fruit and Flowers, if anyone is keeping score.)

Ideally this new product would roll out on the new Apple Tablet device; oddly enough, it sounds like many industries are hoping this is their silver bullet.  This is the Kindle killer, the netbook decimator, and now the music industry’s saving grace.

The Cocktail concept, it sounds like, is enhanced PDFs that come alongside an album that provide extra content.  Adobe has built the PDF platform to be able to embed video, enhanced links, etc — I’m sure this is the technology they’re hoping to harness for Cocktail.  My question is, do people really care that much about PDFs and extra content?  The executive quoted above used the term “ancillary” to describe the pieces; most of the time only superfans and geeks try out ancillary concept products, and most people don’t care about a PDF.  I have a sneaking suspicion this is going to be content that most people expect to get for free on an artist website and are now being asked to pay a premium to see it on a pretty Apple screen.

Of course, Apple’s an expert at content delivery - providing an incredible experience to deliver the mediocre content of the music, film, photo, and TV industries, not to mention holding onto all the content that you and I generate all day long.  This could be really cool, assuming the music biz doesn’t muck it up.  That said, Fake Steve thinks this thing is fake and just another rumored add-on to another killer Apple product.

I’m not holding my breath that this will do anything amazing; I think it’ll just be another piece of product Apple can sell in their iTunes store.  From tracks to albums to videos to movies to apps to whatever this is, and beyond, Apple is just adding more incremental sales to what started as a track-based music store.  The best content on each platform will rise to the top and everything else is just going to compete in the noise.  This noise is already resonating all over record labels, with executives e-blasting these articles around and closed door meetings taking place to get ready for it — and we don’t even know what the product is yet!

Seriously, though — I bet the only way this “cocktail” will keep people in a room staring at it is if it’s a literal drug cocktail. Maybe Apple’s become a medical marijuana dispensary and this is their new rollout of that product line.  Elegantly packaged dimebags stamped with “Grown by Apple in California”, the iPot will revolutionize the music business; you heard it here first.

[quote via Financial Times]

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Access vs. Ownership

There’s an awful lot of talk about mobile computing, the cloud, and streaming content and media these days.  I hear all the time how in “the future” we won’t have a hard drive in our computer, but rather a giant RAM bank that accesses a super-fast wireless internet connection and pulls content from remote servers.

Sure, I think that’s true.  However, I don’t think people (yes, even young people) are quite ready for the switch to happen.  It’s evident in the numbers: Rhapsody, the dominant leader in streaming music, boasts their 800,000 subscribers as real progress. Meanwhile iTunes is reaching for 7 billion track downloads in the lifetime of their service…. Something doesn’t add up here.

Streaming music pundits call access the future, triumphing over the concept of ownership.  At the moment I think access is overwhelming people: you have everything in the history of recorded music at your fingertips, but you can’t seem to get past the first few search terms you enter into the site. That or you build a static playlist that stagnates and becomes obsolete as you find out about new music from other sources.

On the other side, the concept of “ownership” is all around us and is far from being over.  Even a toddler, the streaming music industry’s future generation of hope, calls a toy “mine!” and understands that concept through and through. It’s going to take a major sea change to reverse this concept with streaming content, and not many have gotten it right yet.

I believe there are two problems here. The first one is oddly enough, hidden in user interface. The second is in the concept of music acquisition and choice.

First, user interface:

Companies like Rhapsody, Hulu, Zune, etc., all tout the enormous catalog beneath their collective hoods.  Zune even uses this as a marketing point against the cost of filling an iPod (a preposterous statement, but that’s not why we’re here).  The problem I see with these services is that there hasn’t been a beautifully simple option to “bind up” all the music one enjoys in the service.

Like I mentioned earlier, you give someone limitless choice and they stare at you blankly; paradoxically, let them open up their vast iTunes library and they can still find something they like.  The obvious reason? That individual loaded their library and has the ability to add, modify or delete songs or albums as they so choose.

The “library” in Rhapsody or other major streaming services only holds content that individual has purchased from that service - a la mp3 or full length download, not content being streamed in the service.

I fully believe that if a streaming provider can generate a library-style experience — one where a user knows what they likes and can corral it all together.  I’m not talking about playlists (like imeem), I’m talking a “this is what I always want nearby” section of a streaming service.  If a company can do this and get it launched globally (I’m looking at you, Spotify), the streaming nut will be cracked.

Oh — I mentioned Hulu earlier, and I also think they and Netflix have it wrong: do people really enjoy a “queue” of streaming content they can go through linearly? I surely don’t; my Netflix instant queue has a random assortment of films in it and I’m constantly jogging up and down the list to find things.  That’s another user interface mis-step that probably won’t change because the “queue” concept is Netflix’s core philsophy. Oh well.

Now, the second issue about choice.  Today music consumption is at an all-time high, despite record business declines.  The reason here is that the consumer has a nearly endless source of consumption outlets.  All these outlets - Amazon MP3, iTunes, emusic, heck, even BitTorrent - are all trying to gain users and market influence.  They often do this at their own expense, offering deals and discounts (or in BitTorrent’s case, free) on content to gain a user base.

So far what we’ve seen is a digital consumer who’s not afraid to try multiple services.  If you buy an Amazon album for $1.99, they’ve gotten you to install their downloader on your machine; their logic is, next time you’re browsing you might just hit that buy button now that the initial pain is out of the way.  That said, the digital-savvy consumer is really more of a music consumer than anything — they just want the song.  So, why isn’t Rhapsody’s limitless catalog dominating our computer speaker lifestyle?

The answer is because digital-savvy people don’t spend their life in front of one application, in front of one computer.  They often have a home computer, a work computer, a car stereo with MP3 jack, an iPod, maybe a cell phone with MP3 capabilities, a satellite radio, on and on…. There are so many places with music literally adding to the noise; how is one streaming provider supposed to cut through?

Rhapsody believes the answer is ubiquity. Not only do they have their web-enabled service and their client app-based service, but they’ve also reached into third party hardware like Sonos, TiVo, plus cable boxes from Time Warner, Comcast and Roadrunner.  They’re trying to find other places their subscriber lives and offer the experience there too; they do this because they get, 100%, that people don’t sit in front of their computers to experience their music.

They also have a major partnership with Verizon Wireless and you’d be a fool to think they’re not working on mobile applications to work on various popular smartphones.  They’re hoping for a userbase that always comes to them first for their music because Rhapsody is anywhere they might find themselves.

Honestly I think that’s the only way a streaming provider like that can claim dominance in a world where every soda cap contains a free MP3: the streaming service has to beat everyone else to the punch.

[inspired by this crunchgear article, which I don’t agree with at all]

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Faking the Unemployment Boon

So local and national news outlets are reporting that for the first time in six months, our unemployment numbers have improved. The employment rate ticked up a couple percentage points (totaling 6.69 million unemployed in the US alone) — which on the surface actually projects hope in a desperate time.

Problem is, the Labor Department generates the unemployment data on a shaky set of conditions.  The big hole one can poke in their data is the term “extended unemployment” - this is a group of people who have not found, or stopped looking for, work in excess of a six month period.

Basically, if you’ve been out of work for longer than six months, the government no longer counts you as unemployed - since you’re not really trying to find more work, right?  What this means is, our career unemployed masses went from one Labor Dept spreadsheet to another, which showed the net gain.

The news is trying to spin this positive but the bitter truth is we’re still losing jobs.  The actual unemployment rate with these extended unemployment individuals counted in… it’s a staggering 16.4% unemployed. 14.5 million people.

Meanwhile, Tennessee’s unemployment rose to 10.7%, a 26 year high.  This is terrifying.

You know what makes me feel better? That’s right, The Brokers with Hands on Their Faces Blog.

[Positive stats via New York Times]

[Soul-crushing, negative stats via NPR]

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For old time’s sake…

A blog my former co-worker and friend Matt Burns and I used to run.  This blog focused on corporate productivity, efficiency and development when our jobs often didn’t.  It was a good source of personal development and research and led us to some cool things, like being featured on many productivity blogs online, including our favorite Lifehacker (and Lifehacker Australia, too).

Matt and I both loved the site but the constant work on it over the months we kept it going just couldn’t be sustained.  We folded mid-way through May 2008 and haven’t looked back since…except now.  I think the site has some decently useful information in it and has certainly helped me in my own development.  Just sayin’.

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Nashvillest posted a link to my hot chicken writeup again - big thanks to them for that.

Slashfood did a piece on them earlier and it looks like they’re trying to make hot chicken the new “it” food. I’m all for it, frankly.

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To Boldly Go is a Split Infinitive

I’ve got a huge mancrush on JJ Abrams.  Seriously, the guy can do no wrong.  I loved Cloverfield, I faithfully watch Fringe, and I’m beyond obsessed with LOST.  Like, holding meetings at work to deconstruct theoretical physics and hieroglyphics obsessed.

He’s got this thing, the Mystery Box, a concept and object that I’m enamored with. The basic story is, his dad bought him a grab bag style box from a magic shop when he was a kid - just a plain, brown box with a big question mark on the front.

Most kids would open it up right away and play with the handful of baubles waiting inside — but JJ Abrams is not like most kids.  He still has the box TO THIS DAY, unopened.  This is what his whole creative philosophy hinges on: the mystery of what’s in the box is infinitely more enjoyable than what’s actually in the box.

Brilliant, right?  It works, too; I’ve spent numerous hours mining information on seldom-visited Wikipedia pages and discussing theories to prep for 42 minutes of television each week.  The man’s a genius.

And so, with this in mind, I literally sprinted into the Opry Mills IMAX theatre to secure a middle-of-room, center-of-row seat for his revival of the Star Trek franchise.  I was expecting a lot, and I’m proud to say he delivered well above my expectations. The mystery this film presented contained some familiar terms: time travel, destiny, relativistic physics…. I was thrilled.

Since I’m kind of a film sound geek, I have to dork out on this for a minute.  Things I noticed that blew my mind:

• The mind meld soundscape was incredible. I was jealous of whoever got to chop up the iconic voice of Leonard Nimoy and swirl it around in the surrounds.
• The red matter sequence at the end. Unbelievable, crazy sound design, which I hope was conducted by Ben Burtt. My jaw dropped, literally.
• I’ll say it again — Ben Burtt did sound design. Enough said. I hope he dragged a big box of old tape reels into JJ’s office and started playing him handcrafted sounds from ‘77.

On a related note, the courtroom scene (yes, the one with Tyler Perry) had a slew of Blue Microphone’s Mouse all over every podium in the room. It was comical, but to their credit they’re a futuristic little mic.

Visually the film was stunning, too. I was surprised to see a slick action/sci-fi outlet use so many handheld shots and anamorphic lenses (which generate those crazy lens flares). It was just a hair distracting but they nailed the style they were aiming for.

I think the cast was incredible; the casting was spot-on and the acting was totally believable.  In every character, you can see the beginning blossoms of the future characters from the original TV series and movies. Just amazing.  There were just enough of the original catch phrases to keep us geeks happy without making it inaccessible to everyone else in the theatre.

All in all I thought the film was a knockout, a perfect balance of homage and new interpretations of an old classic.  It’s a flag firmly planted in the ground of US pop culture, at last declaring sci fi to be cool.

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The Protomen - Mercy Lounge

Monday night I went to see some old friends perform at Mercy Lounge for BMI’s weekly 8 off 8th Showcase.  They’ve done the showcase before but this night was special: everyone in the venue got to vote on their favorite band and the winner gets a slot at Bonnaroo 2009.

Needless to say the competition is pretty fierce, including local favorites How I Became the Bomb and Autovaughn.  The crowd was pumped up and loving a free mini-show from some of the best bands in town.  It was a brilliant show, all-in-all….

…but I have to say, the Protomen just destroyed it. They have tightened up a lot since I last worked with them and delivered a solid (albeit short) performance. Their cramped-stage antics and incredibly epic songwriting just works for a venue like this; the place just went nuts and fell right in line, chanting and fist-pumping along to each song.

They energized the crowd like no one else could that night: flooded in smoke machine bursts and flashing light, the Protomen turned video game schtick into an epic saga of the battle of good versus evil, and the crowd ate it right up.

Anyway, I guess that’s all to say I’m darned proud of these boys; the new songs gave me chills and I can’t wait for their new album to wrap up.  Check out their insanely brilliant (Flash monstrosity) website and be sure to listen to a song or two.

It feels like after years of writing, rehearsing, playing (music and video games), touring, and just being their weird selves, things are finally starting to click.  It was no surprise when I got an ecstatic IM from Commander Hawk (pictured above in sunglasses and bandana), who simply said “WE WINNED!!!!”

Yes Commander. You winned. Can’t wait to see them at Bonnaroo.

I’ve had the pleasure to work with the Protomen on several songs, tracking, editing, mixing and making loud noises onto analog tape… it was all a blast.  Check out the first track I helped them on, Hope Rides Alone:

The Protomen - “Hope Rides Alone”

OK, so looking around on Flickr, these guys have amassed some amazing photos on the road. Check it out:

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My dear friends at the Nashvillest blog have posted another write-up of mine, this time on one of the greatest food experiences I’ve had in this town.

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The Rock n Roll Intern: Rush

So, one time I met Rush.

This one’s not as ridiculous as my Albini story, but I still like it.  About, oh, two weeks after I started interning at the wonderful East Iris Studios, I found out that everyone employed there was a major Rush head. 

Myself, I’ve never been much into them, but I could understand the general buzz of excitement around the studio when we learned Rush would be in-house to listen to (and mix part of) their new album (circa 2003 or so).  You know, the weird covers record; or maybe you don’t. I don’t, to this day.

Anyway.  I kid you not: Rush rolls up outside the studio, on MOTORCYCLES. Black Honda crotch-rocket style motorcycles. And they’re all in black leather / dark denim with black helmets on.  Repeat: I am not making this up.  They all get off their bikes and mosey inside, followed by their manager, who is of course on the phone.

Our studio manager, Mike, asks the manager if they needed anything, or if they wanted a drink.  Remember that Mike’s job is to make the client as happy as possible, so he continues to ask questions to meet their needs.  “Water? Soda? Coffee?”  Mr. Manager says water would be fine. Mike: “Sure, cold or room temperature?”

Now, this is a valid question since we have fridges all over the building plus a kitchen stock of room temperature beverages, and some people don’t like cold water. I digress. The manager says that Rush would like BOTH cold and room temperature, but that the water be Evian.  He turns back to the band who are shuffling down the long hallway to the studio, leaving Mike and me in the foyer.

Mike looks at me and just says, “I don’t know where you’re going to get that. We don’t have Evian, and I don’t know where we can get it two different temperatures… Good luck.”

Oh great.

I grab my keys and head out to my grandma car (the ‘89 Mazda 323) and tear off in the direction of some grocery stores.  As I’m heading my mind is racing; I’m speeding, looking all over to find an idea of where to get both cold and warm Evian.  Suddenly, I remember that drug stores have a warm section plus a freezer section, and I pull into a Walgreens and rush inside.

Success! I find four bottles of cold, four bottles of lukewarm, and run to the front counter.  I tell the clerk to please not mix the bottles together since I need them at two different temperatures.  I pay (using the East Iris credit card, mind you) and run the bags of water back to my car.

I plow out of the parking lot, cutting off somebody trying to turn in.  As I’m speeding away, I wonder to myself if this is what my life will be like working in studios….

Mike is shocked to see me back so quickly, but helps me setup the Evian to make it obvious and appealing to the Rush guys that yes, we have this Evian, and please, help yourself.  They are, of course, oblivious to it and never touch it the entire time they’re there.

After this ordeal went down, I met the guys in the band. They tell me their names, but don’t ask for mine; it’s obvious what the pecking order is here.  My only proof of this is the above photo… No, I’m not IN the photo; I took it.  What a thrilling moment, right?

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The Rock n Roll Intern: Steve Albini (Part Four)

Mtsu's Otari Console


Minutes after Steve Albini tells me I’m for sale, Doug calls me and tells me that due to Steve’s flight delay, the local restaurant we’re planning to take him to is closed for the night.  We call around several other great local places… all closed.  We finally find a TGIFriday’s or some chain crap and take him there.  Great.  He orders a steak, medium rare.  Of course he does.  I’m still shell-shocked and am just glad to have more cavalry around me.

Doug casually converses the evening away and Steve actually seems to enjoy himself a little bit.  We take him to his hotel, which he loved because it had four or five huge American flags in it’s courtyard.  We drop him off and everyone relaxes a little bit. I don’t know what it is, but that dude can make other people tense.  Oh, and he still hasn’t given his talk yet. Another day with him, tomorrow.

That day was a bit of a blur, as we spent the time setting up the auditorium, putting fresh batteries in his microphone, and feeding Steve lunch.  He took a quiet tour of the studios at MTSU with us and was probably underwhelmed considering most of the studios are centered around Pro Tools rigs or, blasphemy upon blasphemies, a digital console in the flagship studio.

His talk was delivered to an over-full room of several hundred eager recording students. He was funny, smart and said probably more information than many of us could take in during one session. He also took the time to rib at a few of his employees (including projecting some funny images of them on the giant screen behind him).  I’m trying to find the video online, as the apparent source has since been taken down.

After the talk, we took Steve to a final lunch. I handed him a huge check and picked his brain about a great band I love, the Danielson Famile.  It was about as animated I’d seen him the whole time - he was excited about them and loved discussing the characters of that band and their crazy antics and costumes.  Maybe it was the band, or maybe it was the huge check… I’m betting it was his legitimate love of the music (honestly).

We wrapped up our time with Steve and it was time to get him back to the airport. I was due in the studio to help mix a project I was working on, so I bid farewell and thanks to Steve.  I left him in the capable hands of Nathan, another professor at the school and our resident, uh, Pro Tools expert. Awesome.  Nathan drove him all the way to the airport, talking to him the whole way about digital music production.  Nathan later referred to Albini as a caveman, considering how antiquated his methods seem to someone using a DAW system to record and how little he knew about Pro Tools.

You can debate digital and analog all you want, but Steve knows what Steve likes and that’s good enough for Steve.  I think that’s a good summary of the whole experience.  Like him or not, Steve is Steve and doesn’t put on anything for anybody.  In hindsight, I think he had a little more humor and sarcasm in him than I gave him credit for; I was just young and scared of him! 

I’m working on finding a copy of the video of his talk and I’ll post it here when I find it.


Previous posts:


The Rock n Roll Intern: Steve Albini (Part One)
The Rock n Roll Intern: Steve Albini (Part Two)
The Rock n Roll Intern: Steve Albini (Part Three)

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Themed by: Hunson