Music – Page 6

Livin’ in the Reality Distortion Field

Today, Steve Jobs posted an essay on his company’s usage of DRM and his stance on the technology. It’s a 5 or 10-minute read, but anyone interested in online music should give it a read. For the rest of you who don’t care, I’ll bore you with a quick recap:

Apple catches a lot of flak from customers, competitors and governments for having a “top-to-bottom” distribution model: you own an Apple iPod, which (mostly) only works with Apple iTunes. If you want mainstream music or movies, you have to download them from Apple’s iTunes store. Since they got into all of these markets at the right time, they have almost the entire user base by the throat.

In fact, right now Apple is in deep legal water with a few European governments, notably France, which is calling on Apple to essentially eliminate the DRM that ties users to this model.

According to Jobs, Apple agreed to encode all files sold on the iTunes store because it was the only way that the 4 big music labels (EMI, Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal, AMG) would agree to license their music collections. The hot case of P2P filesharing had just finished with Napster losing big in federal court, and the rights-paranoid labels didn’t want “unprotected” files being downloaded and leaking to P2P networks.

Jobs argues that while Apple went along with the music industry’s demands, “…DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.” He points out that 90% of all music is bought in the completely DRM-free CD format, and those files are easily placed on the P2P networks, as well as iPods. DRM-infected files from iTunes account for 3% of songs on the average iPod.

As far as Apple’s invovement, Jobs sees three ways to go:

Keep with the current, all-Apple model that keeps the DRM secure
License Apple’s FairPlay DRM to other manufacturers, potentially drawing labels to revoke their music licenses if the DRM is compromised
Convince the labels to go DRM-free: “Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.”

Now it’s pretty clear that this is a strategic move to sway European governments to redirect DRM-related heat to the music labels. But here is the CEO of the world’s largest vendor of files with DRM saying that it is in the consumer’s best interest to abolish the technology, and that should mean something.

Biting the hand that feeds you

I’m tired of doing business with companies that treat their customers like dirty criminals.

Read this: Teen Accuses Record Companies of Collusion (Associated Press)

Robert Santangelo… claims that the record companies, which have filed more than 18,000 piracy lawsuits in federal courts, “have engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud the courts of the United States.”

The papers allege that the companies, “ostensibly competitors in the recording industry, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and public policy” by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency “to make extortionate threats … to force defendants to pay.”

I know I shamelessly plug eMusic a lot on this site, but right now they are pretty much the only responsible online vendor that actually respects both their customers and the artists who work to make the music.

I know that a lot of good artists are on the “big four” music labels that mistreat their customers so much. Instead of buying online and supporting DRM, there are a couple of things you can do:

Check their record label status on RIAA Radar. This site will tell you if an artist is a member of the RIAA, a conglomerate of labels that promotes practices like harassing and suing their customers (even after they’re dead), infecting music with fair use-limiting DRM, and slashing artist royalties. (Just to be fair, the labels shouldn’t hide behind an advocacy groups. The following labels actively support such practices: EMI, BMG, Sony, Warner, and UMG)
Buy it on CD. This promotes a DRM-free avenue that shows labels that you are willing to pay for music you like, but won’t accept DRM limitations.

If you’re still actually reading my whining, you may be interested in what the Electronic Frontier Foundation has to say. They’ve got a good guide to DRM and have proposed a method to actually reduce piracy and get artists paid.

Recent Acquisitions

Here’s some stuff that I’ve been putting in heavy rotation recently:

Play – Moby
I don’t listen to much electronica, but this guy is pretty popular. This album actually samples a lot of folk and blues, so it’s very interesting. Downloaded on eMusic subscription.

A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out – Panic! At The Disco
These guys are pop-punk, if anything. I recently tried to find some current acts that I like (instead of my typical pre-1980 tastes) and this was the only attempt that didn’t thoroughly disgust me. Their lyrics are less than amazing, but at least they’re a musically original group playing on the top-40 stations. Downloaded from iTunes.

PERCoLAToR – Jim Weider
Very similar to Steve Kimock, with more mellow guitar lines. The rhythm guitarist (Mitch Stein) and the drummer (His Awesomeness Rodney Holmes) are from SKB, in fact. Downloaded from eMusic subscription.

Dub Side of the Moon – Easy Star All-Stars
A really good reggae cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Usually you don’t mess with the classics, but this one is actually really good. Downloaded from eMusic subscription.

Begin to Hope – Regina Spektor
Think Tori Amos, but not annoying as hell. OK, there’s more to Spektor, a Russian Jew with an absolutely heavenly soprano and an interesting approach to the piano. Good late-night music. And hey, since she’s from Russia, I downloaded her album from there as well (wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more).

Three Quartets – Chick Corea
Great jazz improv, with monster drums care of H.A. Steve Gadd. From the eMusic collection.

eMusic

So I now get the majority of my music online, since it’s a better deal overall when compared to the price of a physical CD. There are a lot of places out there to get your music legally, but most of them have to tie down their tracks with loads of DRM in order to get contracts with the “Big Four” record labels that control 80% of the U.S. music market: Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony BMG, and Universal Music Group. Basically, these guys got paranoid with the first peer-to-peer filesharing networks, like Napster, and believe that the only way to sell music online is to treat their customers like criminals by policing the usage of files that they already purchased.

The truth is, this DRM does nothing to stop people who are pirating music, and makes life a lot harder from the people who do legally acquire their music. Depending on the store, you are limited in how many times you can transfer your songs, what devices or programs they will play on, and how you can back the files up. And then add the Digital Milennium Copyright Act, which makes it illegal to circumvent such inconveniences on the tracks you already own, and DRM-infected tracks just become one big nusience.

The other problem is that the major music labels are doing a very bad job at supporting their artists. Courtney Love has a very interesting insider account of how these companies, who are nothing without their musicians, take the money and run. And the picture is getting even worse: the RIAA is lobbying to reduce the royalties that music labels are legally obligated to pay their artists.
These labels were already pretty bad when people were just buying CDs. But now that everything is moving online, and they are treating their customers like criminals with DRM while they themselves are stealing profits from their artists, it’s a combination I’m not willing to support.

Enter eMusic:

eMusic is the largest online retailer of independent music and the second largest online retailer overall, with over 1.4 million tracks (at #1, iTunes has over 3 million). They are not signed with any of the four large music labels because they don’t put any DRM on their tracks – instead, everything is a high-quality file (192kbps VBR MP3) that plays on any device or music program. They are subscription based, giving you a fixed number of downloads per month. Other subscription-based services require you to renew your tracks, and once you stop paying, you lose all of your music.
eMusic’s cheapest plan gives you 30 tracks a month for $9.99 – on iTunes, this much buys you one DRM-infected album.

So this isn’t without that major hangup- the major labels aren’t signed on, so there is a lot of stuff that you can’t get here. Pop and classic rock fans need not apply. But what many would view as a weakness, I am thoroughly enjoying: I get a taste of a bunch of stuff I haven’t heard before. And if you are at all into Jazz or Classical, their collection is humongous – and with many big names and rare recordings: look at their Miles Davis or John Coltrane collection. Like reggae? Check out their pile of Sly & Robbie. And there’s lots of current “indie” music to like, as well: Barenaked Ladies, Alkaline Trio, and Sufjan Stevens come to mind.

Mainly, though, I feel like I’m voting with my dollars to show that there is a demand for music that supports its artists and gives customers power to do what they want with their purchases. I think that the labels are starting to see that DRM-free is the way to go, and are experimenting with the idea of unchaining their music. Once they do so, I’ll be a glad buyer.

So if you want to stick it to The Man, support some artists, and expand your collection on the cheap, give eMusic a try. If you drop me a comment, I can e-mail you a link to a trial with 25 free songs.

Mirrors & Smoke

I don’t post lyrics much, but this is a good Jars of Clay song that I guess applies to me right now somehow 😛

You can listen to it here – the song is called “Mirrors & Smoke,” click the little grey play button.

It sounds very Bob Dylan-esque musically, but the lyrics are nowhere near his caliber.

I’m feeling older than my years
I’m feeling pain inside my chest
It’s love that keeps me silent
It’s my silence that you detest
Rivers flow into the oceans
And oceans never fill
I want to kiss your lips, but I know I never will

Love’s a hard decision to risk impending choke
But love will keep you wishing
And my heart will keep me broke

I blew flowers, gave you candy to even out the guilt
I sent you greeting cards with messages that I could never write
Rivers flow into the oceans
And oceans never fill
I want to let you know me
But I know I never will

Love’s a contradiction
Many mirrors and smoke
Love will keep you wishing
My heart makes me broke

You will always want me
And I’ll always want to leave
Even though I cut your wounds
You still deny they’re real
Rivers flow into the ocean
Oceans never fill
I want to lay my life down
But I know you never will

Love’s a strange condition
With all the doubts it can invoke
Your love keeps me wishing
And my heart keeps me broke

Baby, don’t you cry, ’cause I got it all figured out
You always make me sad
But that’s what true love is all about
Rivers never fill the oceans
But oceans always feel
The waters reaching deep inside them
I guess they always will

Love’s a constant mission to a world you never spoke
Love, it keeps you wishing
My heart, it keeps me broke

A few more thoughts.

So, the coffee on CSU campus has always sucked. I generally steer clear of any coffeeshop that serves Allegro coffee, but for some reason, CSU Allegro is really… nutty.
When I was going to MHS, Gold Bar was really the perfect spot: good local coffee right between me and class. Now there’s nothing acceptable between me and school, so I’ve been going without (and avoiding the highly productive study sessions that coffeeshops yield for me).

But Rockwell Hall (the business college) just opened up its own coffee cart, which I’ve been saying they needed to do all semester.
And they don’t use the same old crap. It’s some local coffee brand. And it’s really good (or at least the first cup was).
This is the building where most of my classes will be.
This is the building where I work.
This is a very good thing.

[warning: meaningless nerdiness ahead. feel free to skip.]
I’ve been running Windows Vista again… the OS itself is stable, but right now the third-party drivers really suck. As in, I get the Blue Screen of Death on a wired ethernet connection, and if I want to use the wireless at CSU, I have to track down some beta software that works about 70% of the time. I got really frustrated with it again today, and booted back into Ubuntu Linux…
I swear. Ubuntu is like a breath of fresh air. It takes up a THIRD of the RAM that Vista does, boots twice as fast, and is way more stable. It helps that it’s fairly barebones, and you just add the components that you need. I guess computers are like cars: XP is the sedan that everyone drives- it works well for everyday tasks, breaks down once in a while, and is a good day-to-day vehicle. It’s not good for big demands, and forget cramming a lot of people in it.
Ubuntu is a Jeep. It’s light, versatile, and you can add or subtract parts to your fitting.
Vista is a blinged-out Escalade with chrome spinners. And horrible resource usage. And yes, it’s ridin’ dirty.

Sorry.

But seriously…. this thing has CRAZY resource usage. In Ubuntu today, I was able to convert a gigabyte of FLAC files to MP3. That’s a decode operation followed by an encode one. It only took 12 minutes.
And this is with really good SMP support built into the kernel, so it was chugging along, devoting the whole task to one core at 90% usage, while the other one happily processed my other tasks at the same time: playing MP3s, running about 4 tabs in Firefox, chatting in Gaim, and some more stuff, too. No noticeable speed impact whatsoever.
Oh, and did I mention that this whole time, I had over 60% of my RAM free? This thing is a beast when I get it away from Windows.
[/nerd rant]

I’m girl-crazy again. It sucks. I think I’d rather be single. Relationships get so lame when they get so crazy. Damn hormones.

I’ve listened to nothing but The Beatles for the last two days. It rocks. I have the complete collection now – every Beatles song officially released. In MP3 form, it weighs in at just under a gigabyte, so the money-wasting side of me is tempted to buy an iPod shuffle just for Beatles tunes.
(I won’t do that. I’m not that crazy.)
I’m realizing that in order of frequency, when it comes to Beatles songs, my favorites are most often written by George. Then Paul. I’m kind of wearing out on John- he gets annoying when he’s whiny (although there are many, many, many exceptions).

I really wish I could take a couple of weeks off and do nothing but drum on a good acoustic kit, as if it were practice for a profession. I desperately need people to jam with. Canned music is getting very, very old.

PS360

I’m having an enjoyable break. I still have work, but it’s work where I’m not bothered every 2 minutes, so I can actually get some stuff done.

Dabbling in drumming on my acoustic drums, which I had only played once since moving in to CSU. It’s totally different than electric drums, which have been feeling rather limiting recently. But I think that the electronics are forcing me to focus on my technique and rhythm, since they aren’t so boomy and loud to play. Less fun to play = more focus on improving my playing.
But banging the crap out of my Ludwigs today felt really good. I played some solo grooves for a while, then Rush, then The Who, then Steve Kimock. I’m in a classic rock phase where super-technical fast fills and ghost notes are less fun than just straight-up old rock beats with fat tom fills.

Having fun with Ubuntu Linux, as well. If OS X doesn’t come out for x86 systems in January (I have a completely unrefuted suspicion about this) I might opt to ditch Windows instead of upgrading to Vista. I’ve basically decided to experiment through the end of the semester, and then migrate to the system I’m happiest with over the winter. The contenders include XP Professional, Vista, Ubuntu 6.10, openSuSE 10.2, Fedora Core 6, and (maybe) OS X Leopard.

I’m also looking at the new video game consoles, as well. For the last ten years, I’ve been a straight-up Sony PlayStation gamer. I don’t play video games too much, but all of the really fun games have come out for PSX or PS2. Stuff like Gran Turismo (I’ve owned 1-4), Ape Escape, Crash Bandicoot, and the Final Fantasy series keep me coming back (every game I mentioned has also been Sony-exclusive). The Xbox gained a lot of network play with the likes of Halo, and many “simply fun” games have dominated the N64 and GameCube. I’ve never had much of a thing for first-person shooters or the bright colors of Mario Party 36.

But now there are next-gen consoles for each system. The Xbox 360, after some rough (and fiery) starts, has emerged as a great console overall. It’s really easy to program, and great games are coming out for it. Gears of War has to be the most beautiful game I’ve ever seen. And it’s a cheaper system, too- it’s been out for a year, Microsoft has already started to turn profits on these boxes, so prices are likely to go down sometime soon.

Enter the PlayStation 3. It has come a year after the 360, and pushes hardware limits so far that manufacturers are unable to make too many at a time. We’re talking about an 8-core PowerPC-based processor, plus a crazy 533-MHz graphics system. Compared to the 3-core 3.2GHz Xbox 360, this unit blows the competition away (and three cores is nothing to cry about!)
But that’s just hardware. Programming multithreaded games- forget 8 cores – is very difficult. Basically, once developers actually learn how to program the darned thing, it will definitely blow the 360 out of the water. But it’s gonna take a lot of time.
Not to mention that the PS3 costs $600. Forget it. My strategy for now will be to wait at least a year and see if the PS3 flops or flourishes. In the meantime, it’s really annoying because I have no PS2 of my own (it was the family box and I moved away) so all I have to game on is my old PSX emulator on the laptop. Which is totally fun- I mean come on, I have Final Fantasy VII! But I want to play XII now, and have nothing to play it on. I don’t want to wait a year or more to find out about the PS3 to be able to play these games. I would almost rather buy a 360 and a PS2 now (total: $429) than a PS3 later ($600).

I have the opportunity to score a $100 Xbox this week. No, I won’t tell you how. But if it doesn’t go through (limited supply) then I will wait the extra year to see if the PS3 is worth it.

Unless I cave and buy a PS2 just to play Final Fantasy XII and Gran Turismo 4.

*chirp chirp*
Yes, I know that nobody is reading any more.

phlegm

Last Friday I went to Littleton and saw the Rhythm Devils. They are:

Bill Kreutzmann (Drums – Grateful Dead)
Mickey Hart (Drums – Grateful Dead)
Steve Kimock (Guitar – Steve Kimock Band)
Mike Gordon (Bass – Phish)
Sikiru Adepoju (Talking drum master)
Jen Durkin (Vocals – Deep Banana Blackout)

A pretty heavy-hitting list. It was a good show. Horrible venue, drunk crowd, but a good show. It makes me wish I had been born a few decades earlier to really appreciate Mickey and Billy’s drumming. Those guys have some crazy solos, and they have an amazingly synchronized style (anyone who has tried to keep 2 drumsets going at once will understand how hard that is. I think I started to develop a little bit of this with Pat after 3 years of drumline, but only in a small degree.

Not much happened this weekend. That’s OK.

But now I’m sick again. I hate dorms because they’re a complete bacteria breeding house.

What a long, strange week it’s been…

This week has been really weird. I haven’t been doing much… And I don’t feel very stressed (perhaps I should?) but I am definitely in the mid-semester going-through-the-motions. Meh.

Today all of the residence halls ditched their powdered eggs and deep-fryers for “A Taste of Colorado” – everything was homegrown in-state. And everything was really good. I had excellent pesto, chimichangas, Mexican rice, apple pie…. lots of stuff. At least nicer-restaurant quality. So tasty, mi estomago está en el cielo.

There was a local folk-rock band playing, too. It would have been bluegrass, except that they had someone playing drumset (the rare occasion where I prefer drums to be absent). Now I go to a lot of shows, as my parents are ex-deadheads with great taste in music. At most of these jam band shows, pretty much everyone dances… But there is no specifically named style.

So you hippie-dance.

The short of the matter is that the band tonight launched into Shakedown Street for their second song. And I hippie-danced in front of about half my hall. And I didn’t care.

Usually I only feel comfortable hippie-dancing in front of people my parents’ age. Which is weirder: the fact that I hippie-danced in the first place, or that I would only feel comfortable doing it around my parents?!

Hmm…

I like my bass LOUDY, LOUDY, LOUDER!

Teh Spearhead was awesome.

(Click for the whole album)

The first night had the worst crowd ever. People have no sense of common courtesy any more. But the second night I got right up on the rail and had a much better time.

The Wailers (as in Bob Marley and the Wailers) were also there on Friday night… I really enjoyed hearing that music live. They had an awesome sound, and those songs are so fun to hear live… Especially stuff like “Trenchtown Rock,” “War,” and “Jammin’.”