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So, last I posted, I was trying out the streaming music services, starting with MOG. Which wasn’t bad; they’ve got a decent Android app, a Roku channel (FTW!), and a nice service; plenty of tunes. But it’s $10 a month (if you include the mobile app; $5/m if you don’t want mobile). The $5/month charge DOES include the Roku channel, which is cool. But I’m just not feeling this price level in my gut, you know? For $9/month, Netflix gives me a 1-DVD at a time checkout service, plus on-demand streaming of anything in their Instant library to my computer,  TV, and multiple other devices (soon to include an Android app.)

So to me, $5/month is probably the top end of what I’m willing to pay for a jukebox in the sky. If MOG drops the premium price to $5, I’d probably give it another whirl, but most of the sites appear to be hovering around there.

Not Grooveshark. The basic (computer only) service is free (!), and the VIP service (which includes no ads, and the Android app) is currently $3/month (set to increase Dec 1st). Now we’re talking! It’s a bizarre service, which allows file uploads of music, but also negotiates with the labels for library access. I don’t know where exactly it’s going to go, but for three bucks a month, I’m willing to ride along for awhile!

So far, so good. I’m using the Android app, building playlists, and generally enjoying it. And I can skip Starbucks once a month to pay for the service! Friend (follow, whatever the heck they call it!) me at kkennedy if you try it out!

Extra added bonus: they have a official WordPress plugin. Here’s Fireflies, by Owl City, which has been stuck in my head for a week or so. Catchy song!

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H.P. Lovecat

Yes, folks, that’s H.P. …Lovecat! AWESOME. Courtesy of Chet Phillips Illustration and his Literary Pets collection, Lovecat graces the wall just outside my bedroom. I love it.

Chet Phillips does some great frame-able artwork and trading card sets, primarily of animals; dogs, cats…even Sinister Simians!

Mercurial Goodecurdle, Inventor, of the Society of Sinister Simians

I love Chet’s stuff, and the prices are very reasonable. I look forward to his updates when he releases a new series…there’s always something I want. You can also find his work in online quizzes, calendars, and other fun places. This art rocks.

Addendum: yes, my photography skills are terrible, and in no way do these illustrations justice. I’ll try to take better photos and update, but in the meantime, links below to the Chetart Etsy store gives a MUCH better idea. Just a couple clicks there and you can purchase your own!

H.P. Lovecat

Mercurial Goodecurdle

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I’ve given my music purchasing a pause; Amie Street has closed. They were basically folded into Amazon’s music site (Amazon had been an investor in Amie Street). I’m bummed…it was a great site, with a cool twist and a lot of promise. Usually my first choice when looking for new music. Oh well…

Since I’m starting from scratch, as it were, I decided to give some of the music streaming sites a try. These are the jukebox in the sky services like Napster, RDIO, Grooveshark, Rhapsody, and MOG. I decided to give MOG a try for starters. No real reason to pick it, other than I know it has a decent Android client (that allows offline access to downloaded music). Oh, and it does have a Roku channel, which is cool. So I have lots of options.

Been using it for about a week; still trying to decide if I will keep it after the free trial.

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The Diaspora open-source social network is supposed to release code tomorrow! Should be interesting; I’m looking forward to it. Still seriously in developer mode at that point; basically, they’re flipping on the public bit to their git repository. Nothing yet for non-geeks.

But it’s an interesting project…worth checking out if you’re into controlling your own info:

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I just made a wonderful find, thanks to EFF Deeplinks: the Musopen symphony project on Kickstarter.

Musopen has a great mission; to create an online library of music available in the public domain. Many great musical works have expired copyrights, but most of the modern sound recordings of these works ARE under copyright. Musopen solicits donations in order to make (or obtain the copyright to) recordings that they can then release these into the public domain, for all to enjoy.

For their latest project, they are using Kickstarter to try to raise $11,000; if they can raise that amount, they will be able to fund a recording of the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky! Amazing.

I’ve made my donation, and I wish them luck. I also find Kickstarter to be a really interesting funding approach. It’s an all or nothing model…the donations are aggregated and tallied by Kickstarter, but no money changes hands unless the project is fully funded before it’s time expires. Great concept; it allows for experimentation with low risk for both sides. I’m poking about the site looking at some of the other projects. Some cool stuff.

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So, another DRM scheme bites the dust. Last night, I got an email from Napster, whom I’ve bought music from over the years not a lot, but there were times when they were the only site I could find a song on, and most of the [non-iPod] mainstream MP3 players sold during the mid 2000’s supported the WMA Secure digital formats pretty transparently).

I’ve always known, however, that those formats can have issues if you buy new PC hardware and try to move songs, etc. Napster has since moved to MP3s…and then one just waits for the other shoe to drop, as it did last night.


Important Information About Your Secure WMA Digital Music Purchases
...
We're writing you with an important message about any music downloads
you purchased from Napster prior to May 2008. Due to evolving digital
music technology and related rights, Napster will no longer be able
to provide support for these downloads as of Sept. 1, 2010.

((nice!!! Thanks, Napster!))

...

Be aware of reasons your DRM-encoded WMA downloads may stop playing:

   * Changing or reinstalling your operating system
   * Purchasing a new PC
   * System crash or failure
   * DRM corruption

((ok…I’ll just keep this 8 year old desktop around…forever. Yeah.))

...

Back up your WMA files. If you haven't already, we strongly recommend
that you back up all of your DRM-encoded WMA files by burning them to
audio CDs. Doing this will allow you access to your music on any CD
player and generally have a maintenance free permanent copy.

Please note that if you don't back up your files, you risk permanently
losing access to your purchased music.

((and if you _do_ back up and re-rip your files, you lose your ID3 tags. FTW!! Oh, they didn’t mention that, did they…?))

...

Thank you for your understanding as we make this transition and strive
to bring you the best subscription services and download store
possible. And as always, thanks for listening.

((*sigh*))

In fact, a DMCA exemption for breaking these files for precisely this reason was requested at this year’s review process, but turned down. Thanks for waiting just long enough that you weren’t another example, Napster!

Note: I always back everything up to CD, so I’m set; but you do lose your ID3 tags when doing that (the custom playlisted CD you burn won’t be found on CDDB-type databases.)

There are ways to fix this; last.fm recently updated their song fingerprinting api, and I’m just about finished with a little python wrapper app that lets me identify, rename, and tag (at least with artist and title) the songs ripped off on these custom CDs. It’s pretty neat to watch 01 Track.mp3 become Cutting Crew – One For The Mockingbird! There are other tools that do this, but the last.fm API is easy to use and pretty accurate; I’ll upload my utility script to my gitorious account over the weekend, if anyone wants to check it out.

Short of it: get anything DRM’d burnt and re-ripped ASAP. Those servers ARE going away, and content providers don’t see any problem with it. MP3 or Ogg Vorbis FTW!

UPDATE: My git repository for this tool is here: http://gitorious.org/pyfmid/pyfmid

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*grr* I’m sorry, but I just flat-out don’t believe what some of my friends and fellow travelers seem to; that the reason the publishers want to control and initially raise the prices of e-books is that they need that control and increase…in order to DECREASE prices in some indeterminate future. Not buying it, folks.

What I’m seeing on the ground is that they could do that now if they wanted to, but they don’t. I had been waiting to buy So Damn Much Money by Robert Kaiser (had heard good things) until it dropped to $9.99 for my Kindle, but I failed to catch that text-to-speech is disabled. So in car last weekend, and wanted to just listen…no joy. Yes, I know publishers have to protect audio-book sales. Spare me.

So, already irritated by that this morning, nevertheless I thought about buying a digital copy of a book I already own, in hardback; Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America. I’ve started the book several times, and I always get so angry I have to put it down…not a good choice of book to carry physically and double my bag weight. But dumped on the Kindle and available whenever? I just might get through it.

I found it in the Kindle store; excellent! Then, all downhill: “Digital list price”, $30; crazy! Kindle price, $16.50; insane! “Text to speech, disabled”; not going to happen. I’ll finish it in physical form, someday. I suppose.

Note: this book was published in 2001. It’s no longer in print, as far as I can tell. I bought it as a hardback on a bargain shelf a couple of years ago for I think about $7. I would have bought the book AGAIN if it had been available for the Kindle for $7 (with text-to-speech enabled; without it, either no-go, or maybe $4.99 or less). There’s no hardcover in print for e-book sales to parasitize; this e-book pricing makes no sense whatsoever, in my opinion. They just lost a sale is all I know…and at a current ranking of 140,479 in the Kindle store, they’re not exactly making a huge case for the price discrimination strategy.

As for the text-to-speech issue; yes, I know I can crack the DRM and listen to these books…that’s not the point. Get a clue for how I might want to use a book, and I might even pay more! (O’Reilly, for example, sells technical books without DRM, in multiple formats whenever possible, allows you lifetime updates, and use on any supported device. The last e-book I bought there was almost $21 on sale…but with copies I can put on my phone and my Kindle, and updates forever, I was OK with that.)

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An inspiring publishing experiment continues to move forwards:Cory Doctorow’s pending release of With A Little Help.

Cory has long been at the forefront of experimentation regarding the future of writing; he was the first novelist to release a work under a Creative Commons license, and he continues to release all his novels as such. With this newest experiment, he not only explores the tipjar, micropayment, and print-on-demand possibilities that are now available, he also opens the books on his efforts and allow others to see his results. Should be great data for other authors.

His January status update showed that his release schedule may have been a tad optimistic, but that’s ok. I look forward to both reading the stories, and to seeing the underbelly of the process.

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Zoinks! I was offline for much of Saturday, so it wasn’t until Sunday morning until I caught up on the Amazon – Macmillan feud: Amazon and Macmillan go to war: readers and writers are the civilian casualties. Amazon, in a disagreement with Macmillan over a change in pricing model (brought on primarily, IMO, by the sense of increased leverage that the release of the iPad has given Macmillan) has temporarily removed ALL Macmillan books, both printed and electronic, from the Amazon website. Panic ensues. *grin* (UPDATE: Amazon has already [as of Sunday night] acknowledged that they’ll have to capitulate to Macmillan’s new [and higher, in some cases] pricing model.)

It’s been REALLY interesting to watch the reactions, though. One of the main US science fiction publishers (Tor) is a Macmillan line…so they were affected. And a number of the bloggers that I read online are science fiction writers; many for Tor! So the comments have been flying fast and furious; some of the best at Charlie Stross’ blog. First, Charlie wrote up his own thoughts, which begat a giant, interesting thread of comments. Then he went and gathered up links to several other thoughtful responses (mostly authors, but also lawyers, editors, etc.). Great stuff.

I love most of these guys, but I do find it interesting to see them dealing with business model changes, technology shifts, digital rights management, etc. within their own industry, after having seen them discuss the issues from a safer, more objective vantage point for years with regard to music and movies. Not to suggest that these guys have never talked about how this will affect publishing; they have. But now…I think the enormity of the change is starting to sink in. Think about this passage from Cory Doctorow’s essay Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet in Content. (note: I wouldn’t say that Cory speaks for all authors here, but the point, to me, is clearly relevant)

Technology giveth and technology taketh away. Seventy years later, Napster showed us that, as William Gibson noted, “We may be at the end of the brief period during which it is possible to charge for recorded music.” Surely we’re at the end of the period where it’s possible to exclude those who don’t wish to pay. Every song released can be downloaded gratis from a peer-to-peer network (and will shortly get easier to download, as hard-drive price/performance curves take us to a place where all the music ever recorded will fit on a disposable pocket-drive that you can just walk over to a friend’s place and copy).

But have no fear: the Internet makes it possible for recording artists to reach a wider audience than ever dreamt of before. Your potential fans may be spread in a thin, even coat over the world, in a configuration that could never be cost-effective to reach with traditional marketing. But the Internet’s ability to lower the costs for artists to reach their audiences and for audiences to find artists suddenly renders possible more variety in music than ever before.

Those artists can use the Internet to bring people back to the live performances that characterized the heyday of Vaudeville. Use your recordings — which you can’t control — to drive admissions to your performances, which you can control. It’s a model that’s worked great for jam bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish. It’s also a model that won’t work for many of today’s artists; 70 years of evolutionary pressure has selected for artists who are more virtuoso than charismatic, artists optimized for recording-based income instead of performance-based income. “How dare you tell us that we are to be trained monkeys, capering on a stage for your amusement? We’re not charismatics, we’re white-collar workers. We commune with our muses behind closed doors and deliver up our work product when it’s done, through plastic, laser-etched discs. You have no right to demand that we convert to a live-performance economy.”

Technology giveth and technology taketh away. As bands on MySpace — who can fill houses and sell hundreds of thousands of discs without a record deal, by connecting individually with fans — have shown, there’s a new market aborning on the Internet for music, one with fewer gatekeepers to creativity than ever before.

Point that same argument at authors rather than musicians, and I see a lot of resonance. It seems to me I read a lot of statements from authors that want the status quo to remain in place; who want what technology giveth, but not what it taketh away. But honestly…I’d love to see some of them strike out with really wild ideas, things outside the status quo. Maybe Amazon’s new Terms and Conditions for ebooks; maybe Cory’s experiment With A Little Help...I don’t know. But I know that, for example, I’d much rather see Peter Watts get State of Grace published on Lulu, or in Amazon’s e-bookstore, than not at all!

And I don’t think all the criticism of Amazon is wrong, by any means. This is a complicated story. But times, they are a-changin’.