Death of the Music Industry

I just had a fantastic conversation with a co-worker about the Music Industry. It was fueled by this recent graph and discussion from Business Insider:
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real-death-of-the-music-industry-2011-2
Which was fueled by this less-recent incorrect graph by Bain:
http://laughingsquid.com/charting-the-death-of-the-music-industry/
Basically the music industry has seen a lot of action in the last 40 years and the info presented on Business Insider is pretty vivid and tells an interesting story. Read the info in the first link, well worth it.

1999 was not only the peak, but also the year that ripping CDs became cheap and easy. It's been a downhill slope from then on; the appearance of Digital Downloads only looks like a dying battle as it rode the back of the CD sales it was helping to destroy. It may be too early to tell how Digital will do in the future. Digital growth appears to be declining with the death of CDs; Digital is showing its own growth.

The really interesting peak is ~1978; 8-Track, vinyl and the new Cassette all shared a peak, and then (I can only assume) the ease of copying tapes, and copying Radio songs to tape, happened. This strangled the Music Industry until the invention of the CD, which for a few years kept the songs on lock down. You could still copy songs to tape off the radio, but then you had a crappy tape version, and all your friends were listening to the shiny CD version. This brings us to 2011, I haven't bought a CD in about 10 years, I have bought digital tracks in the last year (rarely a full album), and I very recently acquired a new vinyl disc from a local band.

So what happens to the Music Industry now? It's not like the industry is losing money, it just isn't quite making as much. I'm in a band and I'm going to record and release a new album this year,,, what do we do? At a quick glance it looks like we should jump ship now, but after further study I think there are niches for a band like mine to thrive.

First of all, recording equipment and software is at an all time low cost. So if bands can't afford to purchase the tools they need to record themselves, there are currently lots of small studios at great prices to do the work for you. Recording obviously isn't the issue. So you paid a little to get the recording made, but according to the graph there is little hope in you actually making any of that money (definitely not all) back. Seems like bands are primed to make a recording but at a loss to release it. Is Digital the only format we should focus on?

After a little analyzing here is my plan. After recording is done, pick the 2 best songs to be mixed and mastered early for digital release. These 2 songs will be released as singles digitally, they will be available a couple weeks before the full album release date. What album, in what format? CDs are currently just a bump in the music fans' road from purchasing songs to getting them on their iPod, after that the CD is landfill. Tapes are obviously obsolete; I had plenty of tapes that warped over time and easily broke (too many small moving parts. Vinyl was the last physical media that was worth owning.

Vinyl has its advantages: large album art, simple media format and an audio quality better than CD. So when our full album is released it will only be sold as a 12" Vinyl LP, and the sleeve will contain the download codes for the digital version of the full album. A short time after the Vinyl is released (maybe one week or less), we will then make the Digital version available for purchase. Digital music fans and pirates will either get the digital versions for free or for sale, but by that point it honestly won't matter. We will have sold the Digital Singles, we will have sold the Vinyls, and by the time the Digital Album is available for purchase we will already be working on writing our next album.

What does the next ten years look like for this graph? Perhaps all bands will be involved in a subscription model where you subscribe for a year; all year you get to listen to all the music you love on all your little digital devices, but the product lives in the cloud,,, you don't actually own it. This model exists now, but it hasn't really taken off yet. The next decade should prove to be pretty exciting in the Music Industry.

This was shared today too, 'burning' used to be called 'taping,' amazing!
Home Taping is Killing Music (ca. 1980)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music

Go Watch Exit Through the Gift Shop

This Banksy image could be seen from New York's Wall Street, it was put up during America's financial collapse of 2008.

If you have not already watched the film "Exit Through the Gift Shop," please stop looking at this posting, open a new tab and watch it streaming on Netflix or grab it from a torrenting site.  I will definitely be spoiling a few things here in the lines that follow.

Exit Through the Gift Shop is authentic documentary (non-fictional) footage, used to create a fictional story by Banksy, that exposes a non-fictional truth about the art industry at large.  This film focuses on authenticity, and if the formula of being authentic can be determined, it can be used to gain popularity and capital.  In the film, amongst many well known street artists, we are introduced to Thierry Guetta.

Thierry lacks authenticity; he is not a fashionista, he is not a street artist, but he becomes L.A.'s next big art hype.  Thierry is from France, is related to a very well known street artist, and knows enough of the formula to capitalize on those prepared to shell out a few bucks for what's hot.  The most authentic thing about Thierry is that he carries a video camera around and captures footage of everything around him, including the here-today-gone-tomorrow street art of his brother and then later Shepard Fairey and Banksy.  Thierry also proves to only be a camera man with a talent of keeping the camera running,,, when it comes to editing and producing a coherent film he fails.

In this film it is hard to determine what is documentary and what is silver screen fiction.  Did Thierry and Banksy really have the awkward falling out we saw after handing over his footage?  Or are they good friends and the fallout was created for the setup of the message of the film?  We may never know and it doesn't actually matter.  What matters is that Thierry's manufactured street art show brought in 1 million dollars in one night, and was asked to remain open for weeks longer than the original 3 days it was scheduled for.  The hip art community of L.A. was fooled and fell in love with the same unauthentic junk Thierry sold them a decade before with an inflated price tag.

Exit Through the Gift Shop exposes a lack of authenticity in our current culture.  From fake fashion clothing with a high price tag, to Disneyland's fake adventure and experience for our young,,, all the way to creating an art hype out of someone who only knows an artist about as well as we all know Andy Warhol, but is not actually an artist himself. 

Banksy is supreme authenticity; however you might ask, why did Banksy hold an art exhibition in similar fashion to the one Thierry held?  The elephant in the room is when you remove Banksy's art from the wall in West Bank during a troubled time and sell it in an art gallery.  Calling Banksy a street artist and leaving it at that misses the point of Banksy completely.  Banksy is a street activist who uses art, time and space as his medium; remove this art from it's time and space and you are actually left with nothing of value.  In fact I would argue that the most authentic items in our culture are probably priceless, and hence if you are being sold something you think is authentic you should most likely close your coin purse.

This film is the perfect massconception.  For further information read the book Authenticity, or read Adbusters.  And if you bought something by Mr. Brainwash, I hope you are aware, enough prints were made so everyone in the world could own one,,, so you better love it.  "I have an Andy Warhol, but I think it's in the closet?"

Bloom Box Scam

I thought I should drop the hatchet on Bloom Energy before they drop the bomb with the unveiling of their new clean energy fuel cell the Bloom Box this Wednesday. If you need to know a little more about the Bloom Box and Bloom energy, you should watch this video (http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6228923n) from Monday night's episode of 60 Minutes. Seriously,,, watch it then read on. (So fitting to be sponsored by Pfizer, biggest scam of the human species).

So what's the scam right? If these Bloom Boxes are a scam and they don't work then no one will buy them,,, so the scam will be over almost as soon as it starts; not too much harm, not too much foul. Perhaps not the case? Part of the scam is that I think these things actually work (meaning they run more efficiently than our community/state coal burning facilities and are cheaper to run than paying for energy from the grid), and so does Mr. John Doerr (he's the Gandolf-like character that is about to unfold in this story, he discovered and funded Netscape, Amazon and Google), and with the help of 60 Minutes,,, so will you. 60 Minutes brings this amazing breakthrough in energy production to the mainstream *investing* public. OK, so it sounds good, but the best scams are complex and this one has 2 parts.

Part one is financial. The seed has already been planted on 60 Minutes. 60 Minutes reports a single Bloom Box costs about $700,000 but John Doerr (the wizard) thinks he can reduce that cost to as low as $3000 in the next 5 to 10 year time frame. This last sentence (the spell) does two things: it assures investors that this is both an advanced technology because crappy tech doesn't cost 3 quarters of a million dollars per unit,,, AND it ensures that this advanced technology will be brought to people's homes in the next 5 to 10 years at a price the lower-middle class could afford. For those of you who don't invest regularly, 5 year and 10 year prospectus of stocks are very important for long-term lazy investors, in fact they are often all that novice investors look at when investing. An investor that doesn't want to work the stock market on a daily basis likes to find good steady growth over 5 or 10 years. John Doerr is basically saying the 10 year prospectus for Bloom Energy looks really good. And it will look good (perfectly timed juxtaposed against our currently failing market); you know and use Google because Mr. Doerr and Google both did what they said they would.

So you might be thinking you don't see the scam. It's true, technology-wise and financial-wise we are not being scammed quite yet. It's part two, the execution of the scam that hits us pretty hard: ecological impact. Bloom Energy and the Bloom Box would be successful no matter what happened at this time. They have a product that not only is assumed to work but is much more efficient than our current energy grid. Bloom Energy does not need a wizard (John Doerr) to make money and be successful. However, if they want to make ungodly amounts of money and rule the world,,, it helps to have a wizard to cast a few spells. While Bloom Boxes cost $700,000 they will only be bought by large corporations like Walmart, Ebay, and your local energy companies,,, during this time people like you and me will only be able to invest in these companies and the corporation Bloom Energy. Let's say in 10 years the Bloom Box does drop to $3000, then today's investors will also become owners of a Bloom Box. Sounds killer but there is a catch.

A Bloom Box is presented as a more efficient and compact way to produce usable energy. When compared to our current grid, the Bloom Box allows more efficient energy at a lower cost to be made and used. This is fine if only the largest top 500 companies used Bloom Boxes, it's more efficient than the energy they were using before the Bloom Box. But once you put many Bloom Boxes at every company in America (corporations and startups), and 1 or 2 at every home in America, the efficiency is lost. The total net emissions for all Bloom Box units at that scale will completely out-weigh the current emissions of our old grid (this is speculative of course, but I think it makes a good argument,,, at least good enough for someone smarter than me to crunch the numbers and do some possible comparisons). This scam has a quick financial turnaround and a slow ecological turnaround, which means it is perfect to exploit and capitalize on.

It's cool that Bloom Energy has created this advanced technology. We should embrace it and ask our energy companies to get on board and use Bloom Boxes to power the grid. This will make our monthly energy bills more affordable and we can sleep better at night knowing that the grid is running cleaner than it used to; perhaps stop using coal all together in the US. That's not a scam,,, everyone wins; people get a better product, Bloom Energy capitalizes in an acceptable way, America energy becomes cleaner, and nothing is exploited. Most importantly the wizard goes home and the investors looking for easy money look elsewhere (or they buy PG&E stock, after PG&E purchases a ton of Bloom Boxes, and cross their fingers).

We can't let this scam work. Scams are bad, it's that simple. Don't invest when Bloom Energy unveils on Weds,,, they first need to adjust their deployment strategy before our culture should be on board. And don't buy a Bloom Box when the price is reduced in 10 years. This is a dangerous scam. This scam will cost us our ecosystem at a time when we need to be working harder to preserve it. As a final note I do think Bloom Boxes are a good step if implemented properly and used in the correct manner, however we should not waiver from our ultimate energy goal, which is ironically pointed out at the beginning of the 60 Minutes report: "The Holy Grail is a power source that is inexpensive, clean, with no emissions." This goal is out there it just requires the involvement of our entire American culture, not just a few scientists with a price tag and our pocket books. This holy grail will be discussed in my next post.

By the way, in case you are curious,,, in this story K. R. Sridhar, Bloom Box creator, is Frodo,,, and Michael Kanellos, the skeptic,is definitely portrayed as Gollum.

*FYI, I am not qualified to give investment advice, these thoughts are just speculation based on my opinion. I think the scam could go a couple ways: investors will turn a quick profit and pull out in less than a year since the Bloom Box proves not to work as advertised, and the company goes down in flames,,, or investors stick it out for 10 years because of the success of the Bloom Box, and the slow destruction of our ecosystem speeds up just a little more. Either way I'm bummed at the end of the day/5 to 10 year time frame.

One Hour of CNN

Now is the time to buy a Toyota. If I actually believed what the American news told me, I would say you could read that comment as sarcasm, unfortunately American news is crap and now really is the best time to buy a Toyota.

Last weekend I had the un-pleasure of watching an hour of CNN. The news hour that was on was building up to a headline story concerning faulty accelerators in certain Toyota models. During this hour's un-breaking news stories I also had the displeasure of watching commercials,,, I watched about 6 minutes of Buick ads during this entire news hour. It seemed odd but it didn't hit me until after I saw the headline story. To highlight the accelerator issue CNN interviewed a proclaimed victim of the faulty Toyota accelerator. When it turned out to be just a young, inexperienced driver (with the worst looking neck-brace I've seen since Brenda was rear-ended on 90210), I realized I was witnessing a smear campaign.

Obviously the Toyota Prius has stolen the car spotlight for most Americans over the past 10 years, all this while the American car companies are being bailed out and losing all credibility with the American car buying public. So a woman who is accused of being drunk or speeding while losing control of her Toyota down a steep hill, says the car was at fault (3 year olds get away with this kind of lie, not mothers with 3 kids). This incident is quickly swooped up by our national news networks and the same network sells ad time to the American car companies,,, brilliant! Cars with an automatic transmission have an idol speed of a couple mph, this idol speed is quickly increased when matched with a steep inclined plane. I have never been in a car where this idol speed couldn't be controlled by the brake, she was a bad driver and she's lucky to be alive.

If your national news source has advertising in between news blocks, I recommend you find a new news source. Now couldn't be a better time to buy a Toyota, boycott American car companies.

It's been a year,,,

,,, since I last made an entry in my Blog. I would like to change that starting this new 2010, I actually really like this Blog. To start I will be adding my shared feed from Google Reader. I figure it's something I add a bunch of articles to almost everyday, some funny, some mind expanding, and some I just find important tidbits of information, oh and LEGOs. Sounds fantastic right? So this is where I plan to start. I don't know how regularly I will be adding Blog posts, but rest assured the shared feed will be continually active, RAD right?

I hope this Blog finds you all well, and if not, get well soon. Blam!

Extra Terrestrial Life Forms, Part I

I recently watched a series of videos on YouTube of an episode of Larry King Live with Bill Nye shooting down a bunch of UFO believers and followers.  I wanted to make this blog post in support of Bill Nye's skepticism.  Bill's main point is that all the evidence we have shows the proof that unidentified things are seen and reported, to make the jump that these unidentified objects and recorded images are otherworldly is pretty drastic.  

It brings to mind the belief in faeries.  A long time ago faeries were considered the unexplainable trouble makers, causing all kinds of mischief while our backs were turned.  An example would be: let's say you lived in the forest and you just finished your laundry, you hung it to dry and while it was drying you decided to take a walk.  When you get back from your walk to gather up all the dry linens you find they have been strewn about the forest and dragged through the mud.  Who did this?!  There is no one else around; you know this because you were left in charge for the day.  Well, there could be a couple explanations.  One, the wind picked up and after tugging on the hung linens for a few minutes they were ripped from the branches and fell in the mud.  Or two, maybe a wild animal came through and pulled the linens down and drug them through the mud as it was scared away by you returning.  The problem with both of these explanations is that they require that the story include that the linens were unattended or poorly hung.

Since you don't want to get in trouble for leaving the linens unattended, you decide to say this happened while your back was turned.  But an animal wouldn't come through with you so close by, and if the wind was blowing hard you should have been close enough to catch things before they got to the mud.  The result is to make up something impossible.  Faeries were often described in these kind of situations.  Not only do they fit the bill, something mischievous happened in an impossible circumstance,,, but who doesn't want to hear more proof about something that would be amazing like faeries.  

Faeries and extra terrestrial visitors on Earth are very desirable.  (The biggest reason why magic shows work is because the audience wants magic to be real.)  Even if you don't believe in either, the existence of these things would be very cool?  We all wish for these things to be true.  Watching the men that were up against Bill Nye on Larry King Live, I saw some guys with a really good story.  We love having good stories, these guys' story got them on Larry King Live 40 years after the event took place, that's a pretty good story.  The second half of the program features a PHD in Physics who is the author of a book about UFOs and the Director of a film about UFOs.  Both capitol driven media based on stories similar to the old men from the first half.  When you have something to sell for $29.99 you get a little protective of the subject matter, you have income to worry about.  I support Bill Nye, there is a universe of possibilities for these sightings, why does extra terrestrial life have to be the obvious answer?

Part II, my theory for the possibility of extra terrestrial life.

Telepathy Part II

Part I brings me to the belief that we have been developing our telepathic abilities for millions of years now.  Today our ability to see and hear are incredibly advanced.  We have spent many years working out equations on how both of these systems work, these discoveries are used to create the incredible picture quality of our modern TVs and the spectacular sound quality of our music and films.  And to think all these calculations are basically done on autopilot in our own minds.

To hear the voice of the person standing next to you first the sound has to be made.  The person's mind sends electrical signals through the nervous system to make the larynx function in just a way in which the air we are standing in is disrupted by a specific vibration that makes it from the person's mouth to your ears.  Your ears are designed to collect these vibrations and turn them from mechanical energy into electrical energy and send a very precise signal to a very specific center in your brain.  This area of your brain will register the signal and decode it to be the message, "hello."  And that happens all the time and as far as we are concerned we don't even flinch at having to decode the vibrations from our neighbors' larynx, we just know it.  Yet scientists and audio technicians have spent hundreds of years to figure out what our mind knows instinctively.

Our ability to read what people write to us might even be more amazing.  First we need the person next to you to write or draw something on a piece of paper, then light from the Sun or a nearby lamp reflects off the paper and into your eyes.  Your eye has receptors called rods and cones in it, these will recognize the very narrow range of visible light and turn the minute waves from mechanical energy into electrical signals which are sent from the retina to the sections of your brain responsible for vision.  This signal is decoded in these sections of the brain then distributed to other parts of the brain (our memory) to decipher the signals as a word we know or an image we recognize.  All this happens in the blink of an eye.  Our video cameras are getting pretty good at mimicking this task, but that technology is just about 100 years old, this is all very new to humans.  But for our brains this is old news, a child's game.

Telepathy is here, we use it everyday.  This blog is a perfect example.  I am allowing people with similar interests as me to read my thoughts.  You are being allowed to see what's on my mind.  Unfortunately many people lie and are deceptive with the things they say and write,,, so the truth is often very difficult to attain.  I promise you, I am not a liar.  I might be wrong about stuff but I do not think I am lying, this is the truth as I have come to understand it.  I would imagine if you read enough of my writings perhaps you would become skilled enough to predict other things about me.  Or at very least gain enough insite to predict what I might write about next.  So, can you guess?