ethank

My son (2.5) has quit with books at his bed time and insists on iPad books (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fantastic-flying-books/id...) and videos (mostly Pixar shorts). We also sometimes compose a Garageband track together.

The first generation iPad is plenty durable for his use. We just handed down one of our older ones when I got a iPad 2.

lsof comes in handy to match pid to socket and thus things like apache proc to running MySQL process.

But imagine if the product teams were united.

YouTube and Google Music are separate product teams. Google Music is run through Android.

Of all the bone headed product decisions made at Google, the fact that Android owns Google Music makes me say "WHY?????"

Its not an RIAA limit (and somehow, you all extend much more power to the RIAA than they have in these matters). It's a Google endemic product org issue.

Something along the line of Nuçi's Space, in Athens, GA which provides these types of services for musicians: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuçis_Space

Because of the tuesday-tuesday nature of the record business, working at a label necessitated this.

Monday->Engineering maintenance for records. Lots of email blasts and such, site maintenance.

Tuesday - Release day, also radio promo meetings. Executive meeting

Wednesday - Marketing meeting. This was when results of the last week's sales were finalized so also reconciling retail with stats and such.

Thursday - typically a big launch day for us.

Friday - clean up, product dev work, department stuff. It was a 0 launch day.

Testing and development cost so much because it had to work on 60 phone models and in most cases required rewrites and compiles from device to device.

This is also the reason most efforts on "artist apps" are for iOS. Fragmentation hurts!

Not much to tell. The cost was because of testing, but by the time the app actually ran, the band wasn't interested anymore and people's interest in handset games was waning.

Sadly this doesn't work whilst on a plane.

I had worked for a company that spent 1 million dollars to make a J2ME game. It never even came out.

You haven't been in mobile long then.

Pretty funny how the ones that didn't hit big are the ones that are still hard to explain in 10 seconds. Attention economy and semantic web.

Wouldn't it be nice if the people behind the things we loved were as pure and perfect as our love for the products they created?

It doesn't happen.

I ended up great friends with someone who created a body of work I hold dear. He isn't perfect. His faults make the relationship between who he is as a person, as an artist and the body of work he's created complex. But that fissure between the creator and the created is what makes the work that much better.

Jobs seemed to be similar.

The art of creation is a messy thing indeed.

Youtube Partners != labels.

My consolation with my GoogleTV is that I didn't pay for it, and its transparent enough in terms of day to day use of the TV where I don't usually see it, and I'm too lazy to disconnect it.

Our one and only use of it has been to rent content on Amazon VOD.

I live under the climb out path for LAX north bound flights and landing approach for Burbank. Lots and lots of planes overhead.

Both

EMI has been a shell of its former self for years though. No real new signings, and only Coldplay. They had a progressive streak when they hired some digital natives, but they left out of frustration quickly.

It's been tried. Hurley did this for a bit in Costa Mesa.

Labels provide one or more of the following to various degrees of capability:

- Management

- Tour support

- Publicity (photos, PR, etc)

- Radio promotion

- Video promotion

- Tour routing and agent of record

- Marketing

- Distribution and Sales

- Websites, fanclubs and direct-to-fan

- Merchandising (physical and e-commerce), including distribution/sales (Hot Topic, etc)

- Art

- Video production

- Online marketing and community management

- Partner relations

- Licensing management (sync, etc)

Not all labels do all of this, it is case to case. Even labels in the same parent corp (UMG, EMI, Sony or WMG) don't do all of these. Indies vary as well.

It isn't.

No, ADA also ships to indie retail world wide, manages relationships with about 70 DSP's, plus the rights of those relationships (i.e., some get the full record, some have to bundle, some only take AIFF files, etc).

TuneCore or The Orchard or CD Baby sort of do the same thing, but without international reach and without all the DSP relationships.

Stuff doesn't just magically show up on iTunes, Spotify, Rdio, MOG and god knows how many other places (including promos to radio, etc). It also doesn't automagically show up with cutouts and exclusive tracks depending on the retailer.

Also who do you think manages publishing catalogs for bands like Radiohead (Warner) or Arcade Fire (EMI)?

Best Buy will likely eliminate music from their planograms by next year. So will Target and Wallmart at some point. They mostly have. That doesn't mean that an upstart can disrupt the space. There are huge market barriers to entry.

Piracy is actually lower now on the list of how people get music for free. Number 1 is YouTube. Ad supported streaming and radio are also up there.

Piracy has been falling as a primary mover of free music for quite a while now.

The shifting of the market to branding and merch has been going on as long as I've been in the industry. I was a big part of it at Warner for a while, in our direct-to-fan initiatives.

The problem is where money in these companies is invested. They need to be technology oriented entities, but don't want to be. Apple cleaned the clock on that, and they let them.

I would like to see the quantified evidence of an Internet band making it through full ascension without ever touching one of the big 4/3. It is REALLY hard to find.

It's a great time to be a recording artist and be self sufficient. If you want to be the next U2 (or if you are U2) it's rather difficult and will remain so.

People speak about disruption. This industry is ripe for it, but it won't happen until a lot of the past is weeded out through attrition and better players take hold. It'll take an inversion in corporate structures.

Right now its too easy to never sign a band and just mine catalog for a long, long time. Hence the value in publishing assets, and the value in mechanical for catalog.

This is a common argument among those that have never worked at or with a label.

Matador for instance is distributed by ADA, who, guess what, is owned by Warner Music Group.

The music business is much, much more complicated and convoluted than any glib comments like "who cares?" can summarize.

In your world, but pop-radio and top-40 still drive a majority of music sales.

You do realize a good chunk of the DMCA takedowns on YouTube are via audio fingerprinting?

This will lead to a war, but in the end, this war shall be good.

A war with a 500 watt amp driving it.

On this note, I wish Sonos had an API. You can hack in UPNP commands to it though, so that might work.

It always struck me that Jobs would have made a really, really good A&R executive and label president.

An Advent was a three tube projection system. It had a triangular arrangement of the CRT's, one red, one green, one blue. You had to focus and align them yourself, but with a good screen you could get a pretty good looking 60" television. It required a dark room.

Since it sat in the middle of the floor, it was subject to kids bumping into it (in my grandparents home anyhow) and also then subject to grandfathers shouting.

He later replaced it with a front projection set that bounced the CRT projectors off a mirror onto a screen. It was a beast.