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“I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”
When Musicology came out a decade or so ago, anyone who went to see Prince live on that tour received a copy of the album. It was certainly not the first time an artist got creative in getting in distributing his or her work, but it caught my eye at the time in, after reaching number one on the charts, causing Billboard to reevaluate how they count album sales.
Never being one to do things the way they’ve always been done himself, Jay-Z has now partnered up with Samsung to offer his new album, Magna Carta Holy Grail, free to anyone with a Samsung smart phone. Much like Prince before him, the powers that be did not take kindly to having another weird distribution channel.
My first thought was that this is a great way to promote his new work. It gets people talking and puts the music into the hands of hundreds of people who otherwise would probably not have sought it out. But the devil, it turns out, is in the details.
Say you’ve got a Samsung phone and want to hear Magna Carta Holy Grail. How do you go about it? This being 2013, you download an app. This app then digs into your phone in a way that is downright preditory.
It demands permissions, including reading the phone’s status and identity, which made some users, notably the rapper Killer Mike, suspicious: Does Jay-Z really need to log my calls? It also gathers “accounts,” the e-mail addresses and social-media user names connected to the phone. Those permissions are often part of a typical app package. This one got worse.
When installed, it demanded a working log in to Facebook or Twitter and permission to post on the account. “We would like fans to share the content through social networking sites,” a Jay-Z spokeswoman said by e-mail. (E-mail to Samsung Mobile’s customer service address for the app was returned as undeliverable throughout Wednesday.) But the app was more coercive.
Frankly the whole thing skeeves me out. They say that if you’re not paying money for something, you’re not the customer. And if you’re not the customer, then you’re the product being sold. I’ve got nothing against marketin stunts, but this one crosses a line from seeking out new customers to seeking out new product.
Update:
Ars Technica has more.
Ain’t Nobody’s Problem
The Lumineers turned me on to this song during their Bonnaroo set (which was an experience I’ve been meaning to write about). It’s one of those tunes that sounds so natural you’d think it had always existed.
Sawmill Joe – Ain’t Nobody’s Problem from Humble Monster on Vimeo.
The Never-Ending Tour turns 25
Bill Wyman (no, not that Bill Wyman) points out that Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour has turned 25. I can’t think of any other well known artist who tours as obsessively as Bob.
Since 1988, Mr. Dylan has played more shows than Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones and U2—each of them a marathon touring act—combined.
I stopped counting how many times I’ve seen Dylan over the last 15 years or so but I’m sure I reached 30 shows some time ago. Seeing Bob perform live so many times has been a formative part of my life. I’ve seen him as far away as Memphis and as close as walking distance from my apartment. I’ve seen shows that were transcendent and I’ve seen him phone it in (fortunately I’ve seen many more of the former than the latter). But I can say that what has always struck me about seeing Bob Dylan and His Band out there, night after night, is the sheer joy of performing.
Bob clearly delights in surprising his audience and confounding expectations. After 25 years of creating set lists on the fly, digging into rarities and obscure covers, I’m constantly surprised that there are folks who go expecting to hear a Greatest Hits set. Some of those audience members will never appreciate the radical re-arrangements and the loose, raucous interplay between band members (notably between Bob and Charlie Sexton, who has occupied center stage the last few times I saw them play). I think what impresses me the most is how Bob has learned to accept that. Instead of second guessing himself, he seems to constantly rededicate himself to putting on the best show he can on his own terms.
Tsunami-like wave in N.J. being investigated | NJ.com
Tsunami. Here. In New Jersey. Fucking tsunami.
Summerfest 2013: Artisanal Software For Writers
You don’t need great software to be a great writer, but it helps. That’s why I was excited to see Eastgate Systems partner with a number of other indie software developers to offer special deals on software designed for writers.
I haven’t tried most of these titles, but I can vouch for Scrivener. It is expertly designed to help you organize your thoughts. Notes on characters, places, themes, or any other subject live in harmony beside your text, always accessible, never getting in your way. I use it whenever I’m working on any prose longer than a page. Scrivener is well worth the money at full price. At 20% off it is a steal 1.
Typing furiously into Microsoft Word can certainly get the job done, but it’s a blunt instrument. It’s nice to know that there are tools designed by and for authors to help with some of the heavy lifting 2.
If A Gun Is Fired In The Ghetto, Does It Make A Sound?
David Dennis on our society’s uneven distribution of empathy.
This is the largest mass shooting in the United States where the shooters were still at large after the crime was committed. Think about that for a minute. From Columbine to Virginia Tech to Fort Hill to Aurora, all the shooters were either killed or apprehended on site. But the person or people responsible for shooting 19 Americans are still free.
So why am I allowed to go outside? Where‘s the city quarantine or FBI and Homeland Security presence for this act of “terrorism”?
Because this is an act of domestic terrorism right? Just because the alleged shooter was wearing a white tee and jeans does that suddenly make the shooting a gang-related affair? And we all know how irrelevant gang-related shootings are in America. The Mother’s Day shooting is so irrelevant that politicians haven’t even bothered to mention it to further their anti-gun agendas. If the shootings aren‘t even important enough for politicians to spin, then it’s truly reached a black hole of irrelevance.
It’s a sad reminder that, in America today, some folks are deemed worthy of our attention and some are not.
Switchblade, Machete, Molotov Cocktail
It’s been a tough couple of weeks. Everyone is a bit on edge. We’ve had bombings and manhunts and Elvis impersonators mailing poison to the president. Which is why I think one little hostage crisis in Long Branch touched such a nerve.
I’m not going to say this is a quiet part of town. The West End is probably one of the more diverse neighborhoods on the Jersey shore. We’ve got old money, college kids, crust punks, Brazilians, Wall Street types, Hasids, and a handful of old drunks. Needless to say, we’ve seen our share of excitement. But there was something different about today, when a man was accused of stabbing his father and then holing up in the area around one of my favorite neighborhood haunts, the Brighton Bar.
The scene outside this stand off was half tailgating, half watching-the-space-shuttle-launch. The unnamed suspect immediately became a sort of boogey-man. I heard that he had a pipe bomb. That he had a machete. That he had a room full of hostages. College kids started chants. One kid watched the whole thing smoking a blunt, not 100 feet from a damn swat team. He knew they weren’t worried about him.
We’re told that it ended fairly peaceably. No one died. It doesn’t sound like he had a bomb, and he may not even have actually stabbed anyone. But for a second it seemed like Watertown. After a week of national panic, high alert becomes the new normal. Every previously unthinkable scenario suddenly seems perfectly plausible. America today becomes a world where anything could be explosive.
Re-Inventing The Wheel
Now that we’ve all had the weekend to digest the Apple vs Samsung verdict and it’s become old news, I thought I’d chime in. John Gruber doesn’t see this ruling being harmful to consumers.
But I don’t think there’s anything in this verdict that would prevent Google, Nokia, Microsoft, Samsung, HTC, Sony, or RIM from creating a new phone that is way better than the iPhone. Better necessarily implies different. What this verdict should prevent is any of them making phones that are disturbingly similar to Apple’s.
I don’t buy it. The iPhone is not a monolithic thing that a competitor can be judged “better than” or “worse than”. it is a collection of details. Other smart phones, likewise, are the sum of their collections of details, both obvious and subtle.
Matt Yglesias likens today’s smart phone race to the early days of automobiles.
Think about cars and you’ll see that, of course, lots of different companies make cars. But they all have some very similar user interface elements. In particular, there’s a steering wheel that you turn left and right to shift the wheels and there’s a gas pedal and breaks that you hit with your right foot. Imagine if the way the automobile industry worked was that each car maker had to devise a unique user interface. So maybe GM cars would have a steering wheel, but Toyotas would have a joystick, and Honda you would steer with your feel and use your hands to control the gas and breaks.
Cars today don’t operate drastically different from cars created 50 years ago, but it’s hard to argue that technology has stood still. But let’s consider what would have happened if Ford had been granted exclusive rights to the steering wheel some time during the past. Sure, it’s possible that, faced with the prospect of being unable to simply try to iterate, making a steering wheel that turns smoother or is angles more ergonomically, they would go back to the drawing board and invent the next big thing. Instead of cars, we could all be moving around on giant family sized Segways today. but I doubt it.
Invention is great, but day to day progress is made through innovation. Taking an existing idea, tweaking it, then putting it back out in the world. Call me a dirty pinko, but I think technology moves fastest through novel collections of existing tech. This verdict just means we’re going to see companies settling for inferior solutions so as to avoid a lawsuit. Any time a designer spends worrying about the fine line of IP infringement and not about making the best product they can is a huge waste.
Home of Proto-IndoEuropean Language Found?
Linguists believe that the first speakers of the mother tongue, known as proto-Indo-European, were chariot-driving pastoralists who burst out of their homeland on the steppes above the Black Sea some 4,000 years ago and conquered Europe and Asia. A rival theory holds that, to the contrary, the first Indo-European speakers were peaceable farmers in Anatolia, now Turkey, some 9,000 years ago, who disseminated their language by the hoe, not the sword.
The new entrant to the debate is an evolutionary biologist, Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He and colleagues have taken the existing vocabulary and geographical range of 103 Indo-European languages and computationally walked them back in time and place to their statistically most likely origin.
I’ve always been fascinated with the idea that such disparate cultures share a common mother tounge, and the idea that we can, to some small extent, reconstruct it. Now we might be narrowing in on a place of where it originated.
Like Geocaching For Music Nerds
Sometimes… something just sticks in your craw. An obsessive can stare at a beautiful painting for ah hour, agonizing over a single brush stroke. A reader can find themselves going over and over a particular passage in a novel, looking for it to suddenly reveal a hidden meaning. We are born to see patterns and trained to solve mysteries. I understand these impulses.
So I link to Bob Elgin’s blog, PopSpots, with no small degree of jealousy that he was the first to create a project of finding the original locations of some of rock and roll’s most famous album covers and photographs, and that he did it so damn well.
Scroll down a little bit. Skip the Billy Joel section. I won’t tell anyone. Then do yourself a favor and click on the individual entries. Bob writes an engaging narrative about each photo, going into exhaustive detail on his effort to track down the exact wall, intersection, or doorframe that appeared in photo taken generations ago. Excellent detective work leading to pieces of history. It’s like a Dan Brown novel that isn’t terrible.
We’ve created such a mythology around this classic era of rock and roll, decades later it all seemed a bit larger than life. I’m glad someone is out there setting these images in concrete.
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As a side note, I am particularly shocked to find that the cover to Highway 61 Revisited was taken outside. I always pictured that to be backstage in some historic theater, or in a hip brownstone.
Nothing Was Delivered 