収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

The old record label system isn’t stupid. It’s surviving only on artificial scarcity at this point, but it isn’t stupid. Never forget that.

They’ve been working with Google/YouTube over their new music streaming service. It’s a big change, and there’s a lot going on – and it was negotiated with the Big Four labels on their terms. That’s never good. Zoë Keating‘s post is going around, and is well worth reading. SJ Tucker – in our release show on Sunday – is looking for ideas. Hell, so am I.

But for now, what you need to know is that Google is telling indie musicians that they have one of two options:

1. Take their new deal, which includes things like “ads always on every video,” “YouTube is a required point of first release” (not exclusive first release, but no more crowdfunding rewards going out first), “complete catalogue required,” “five year contract,” and so on, or
2. Have your channel blocked and all your music deleted from the service.

Now, there is a caveat here: this refers to artists who participate in the ContentID programme, which gets them a share of royalties for uses of their music, as is more or less required by law. If you want to forfeit that money, then you can continue to be Some Random Youtuber, but at that point you’re just handing YouTube all that money that’s owed to you, and none of the infrastructure that’s built up around YouTube music will work for you. That’s not really a bonus.

For the record, even with all those downsides, that’s how I’m currently set up. I have been thinking of changing that, however. But to do that, I have to deal with this new ring of hell, and it’s a pretty good strike against crowdfunding and indie/self-funded artists. And against anyone who wants control over their how their work is released and to whom.

One thing I’m seeing is a lot of people commenting with variations on, “Fuck ‘em! They aren’t worth your time!” Except that the last numbers I saw had YouTube at about 70% of online music plays. That data is a few years old now, but Pandora was already huge, and even with that, it was still All About YouTube.

I’m sure that number has moved around a bit. Soundcloud wasn’t as big then, for example. But I don’t imagine it’s an overwhelming shift – and there are all these newer music streaming and DJ systems which use YouTube as their infrastructure, to balance it. It’s why Google are pushing this new system: to make money off of all of that.

So yes, you absolutely can ignore 70% of the online market or whatever it is. But that’s a serious decision, and not even a little bit the “no-brainer” that people seem to think. It’s just not.

Honestly, I don’t have a good answer. There’s a suggested hack floating around in comment sections – starting a little company that is separate to but controlled by the artist, having that company sign up for the service, and only leasing some of your work to that company, and then that company leases all of its music to YouTube. It’s clever. It might be legally viable. It’s certainly an extra layer of expense, trouble, and time, and having to do that kind of hack is certainly yet another barrier to entry to new musicians.

Which is, of course, exactly what the labels want.
 
 

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This is Part Ten of Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment, a series of essays about, well, what it says on the tin. In the digital era, duplication is essentially free and there are no natural supply constraints which support scarcity, and therefore, prices. What the hell does a recording musician do then?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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Some of the problems I outlined in the afternoon post yesterday are cleared up, or at least accounted for – plugin status being saved and loaded is working, the asterisk cycling thing is seen by other people and also can be made to go away, loss of synchronisation when changing playlists during playback has been reproduced by dev and they’re interested – but the plugins are still problems. But I can work with this now.

Which means, I finally got to hear some percussion being done by one of our guest artists properly embedded into a mix, and wow, I am totally excited about this track in ways I wasn’t before. :D I left some space intentionally for this to be brought in, but knowing ‘a thing will go here’ is not the same as ‘an awesome thing is actually here.’ And the awesome thing that’s awesomeing around in this mix now is pretty awesome.

Because it is. :D

Also, lots of Norwescon stuff, including this year’s new stage banner, which still isn’t huge but is the largest we’ve had – and we’ve never actually had a dedicated stage banner before, we just reused the concert directions. I thought I’d fix that.

Now if I can just fix those damned plugins…

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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So. I have a Windows XP partition on my digital audio workstation. It exists to run two things: imgcopy and lightscribe. The machine spends 98% of its time in Ubuntu – but XP support is ending, and 0% is about to be the right amount of time.

However, received wisdom (and every other time I’ve done this) says you have to install Windows first, in a dual-boot configuration, then install clean Linux. A fresh install of Linux is unacceptable, because of reasons. Good reasons, not bullshit/ph33r reasons. Don’t argue with me about that; if you want to, you are wrong.

Now, if I have to, I can just yank the network drivers, not even turn on the external network card YES YOU READ THAT RIGHT EXTERNAL NETWORK CARD AGAIN REASONS and keep running XP, but wow, do I not want to do that. I’d like to turn this into a gaming machine as well – it has l33t specs in many ways, and with graphics card upgrades, could be a tiny goddess.

So. First: is there a way to keep my Linux partitions and still end up with a dual-boot machine? I know I can’t upgrade WinXP in place, but I have enough room in the current XP partitions for Windows 8.1, if the spec sheet isn’t lying. I don’t mind wiping the XP partitions, If there’s a way to accomplish this, that would be awesome; how, specifically, do I do it, and if you’re proposing a method, have you done it?

Keep in mind that given that the supposed XP-and-Vista binary to check your machine for Windows 8 compatibility failed to run because it doesn’t support XP, my confidence in my former employer is not high right now.

Second: Failing that, and I think we can assume failure there, are there reasons of which I’m unaware which would make it insane to install Windows 8 to a USB drive and just boot off that when I need to run Windows? Preferably a flash drive? Obviously I’m not an Enterprise Customer ™ so I don’t have Windows To Go, so only have Windows 8.1 Pro, but does it really matter since I’d be only using it on one computer ever?

Or, again, is that crazytalk? I don’t have USB 3.0, so this might be crazytalk, and honestly, I’d prefer a regular non-USB-drive install. But as a workaround, this would be fine. I’d have a Windows partition on the drive and use that for swap and My Documents and and and.

If neither of these are options, but you have another option that does not involve reinstalling Linux, I’m all ears. Maybe some sort of VM solution, I could see that. Please, tell me. Because right now I’m looking at lol winxp 4eva, or, more accurately, winxp until it decides it really wants to register again and can’t because it has no network, and tells me to DIAF.

I’d rather avoid that outcome. Because reasons.

Anybody?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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I swear to you, I am not reorienting the compass in this video. I’m keeping it as much at the same angle relative to the room walls as I can.

"honestly, what, or, superpowers are not all they're cracked up to be." (Watch on YouTube)

Whelp

there y’are

I guess the mistletoe is gonna explode again, too.

I know about metal effect on compasses, but this looks more like every piece of metal in my studio is magnetic now. Honestly – these mic stands are magnetic enough to use the compass to identify their poles. My shock mounts, too. And I think I can feel the magnetic attraction to my wire-cutters on some of them.

Is that normal? It doesn’t seem like it could be normal, because I don’t see how anyone could use high-gain preamps and cables. I remove the mic stands; no radio on the pre-amp. I bring one back: radio on the pre-amp. Magnetic induction, somehow.

I am officially at a loss.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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It’s my birthday! At least, my legal one. There’s another date which is candidate for Actual Birthdate, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

And I’m spending it moving boxes and files and hard drives. YAY. I can’t entirely believe I’m still moving files around from the techsplosion and Ubuntu upgrade farce, but I am. No, no additional hard drives have failed, we seem to be past that for the moment. But new drives mean larger drives mean the old backup drives aren’t big enough anymore means moving things around means playing Towers of Hammurabi with archives.

And y’know, moving a few hundred gigs at a time over USB2? That’s… not the fastest thing ever.

Home stretch, tho’. Home stretch. I should set up a Hall of Remembrance for all the dead drives. The Lord of All Drives could preside over it.

17 Years Good Service

Seriously, that’s the weird little what-is-this-doing-here 2G hard drive from lodestone that was serving as lodestone’s swap. I looked it up. It’s seventeen years old. And in fine working order! I figure that makes it RULER OF ALL HARD DRIVES, because damn.

And on a not-entirely-dissimilar note, what do I do with 160 and 40 gig EIDE hard drives in good working order, anyway? The small one is really slow, to be honest – it’s a total dog – so it kind of sucks and I’m not unwilling to drill it, but the 160g is reasonably fast and low milage and everything! What do you do with stuff like that?

I also have three dead drives, and one 500G EDIE drive that got yanked but which I’m putting into a housing and back into service in a new capacity. (Archives.) That’s six hard drives I’ve had to pull out of machines to get this all back together.

“Digital is forever,” they say. “Once it’s online, it’s eternal.” What a load of crap. Reality? Everything is super fragile and needs constant maintenance.

Even if you’re not a supervillain.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

Trying to work in the studio in August was not my best idea. We lack A/C and we’re having a severe heat warning, and, well, yeah. GENIUS!

It’s more time for me to be putting together autumn shows. I just got back from a Far Away tour (next part of that on Monday, previous instalments here and here) so I’m wanting to tour more around Cascadia this time.

And in general I’m feeling pretty stalled out. I guess that’s part of post-tour letdown and not being able to work much in the studio because of the heat (and the associated resulting noise, and also dayjob crap) but it’s weighing on me.

So if anybody has any ideas or suggestions? I’m feeling adrift. Throw me a sign.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

So the Mac Store called, and as expected, the HD is toasted, unrecoverable. That set it close to the $350 flat rate anyway. So since that hit the flat rate they said it's much better to ship it off to Apple and let them fix everything including the case at that same flat rate.

But then I got nervous because as I made a big point of telling them when I dropped the machine off, it has 1G RAM and 160G hard drive, not the stock 512M/160G. So remembering cow experiences, I called them back to see whether they remembered that. And no, of course they didn't. And yes, it'd bump it up a teir in the flat rate, a big jump. And The Mac Store's solution involves putting back in my old 60G drive (that I still have; it was kinda-sorta working but dying hard), letting Apple "repair" that, then charging me to upgrade it to replace the 60G with a 160G drive, or rather, a 250G drive, since they don't stock 160G, for an extra $240.

To wit: fuck you guys. Seriously.

The one remotely good thing that came out of it was that the 160G I have is under warranty, as it turns out. This unfortunately makes some things cheaper but many things worse, as it means a two-extra-week-or-so wait while the old drive goes to California for replacement.

To wit: Well, fuck me.

So I'll go pick up the machine and dead drive tomorrow morning and ship it off to California and generally be without useful computer and non-crappy shell-account email and hello no calendar and hello h8. Then I'll presumably install the fucker myself and reinstall OSX myself and hope the Time Machine restore works, because pay to replace the drive twice = fuck that. I'll deal without a CD burner. And with case cracks.

bah.

Oh, I found out why WinXP install disc wouldn't boot repair on kimo. kimo's optical drive decided it didn't like DVDs. No reason; just decided to say fuck 'em.

I hate computers.

In personal economic news, annathepiper just got a layoff notice from the Seattle Times, along with 149 other people, effective the second week of December. Article here. annathepiper post here. And the Slog talks about it here.

Well, fuck.

I need an icon for when a gig sucks.

First set, we kind of stank up the place. Rehearsal in the AM went pretty well, but then we got there and played like we'd never met before. Second set was significantly better, after a break, but still not great.

I dunno why; it was stinking hot, which does make me stupid so couldn't have been helping, and they had us play right in the sun, so we couldn't keep instruments in tune for more than about one song. (Literally. First set, we kinda put up with it until we had to stop, second sent we were retuning every song.) Plus, there was this weird gusting wind that wasn't really enough to cool us off - much less keep the instruments from inventing new keys - but was more than enough to knock things over - repeatedly - and screw with my ability to keep tone control over my flutes. Still, the show went on.

A friend of mine (who does this for reals) told me there'd be gigs like this, and he was right, and I was prepared, but god damn, it's the kind of thing where you just want to slink away and never appear in a venue again. We did get some applause second set (no, not sarcastic, we also got more money), so I guess they sympathised. But damn that sucked.

I hate Zoology very, very much. The best part is when your first lab practical (which counts as much as a midterm) is worse than your first midterm, which was previously the lowest grade you could remember getting on a science exam. No, wait; the best part is when your professor tells you on Friday that she was really surprised at how well you did and that you only lost 5-10 points (out of 50), so you're thinking you got a B until you get the paper back with a score of HA HA FUXX0R J00, by which I mean me, by which I mean my chances for graduate school.

And there's nothing else in this stupid class so far. It really is just "what's this?" We're starting to see some processes and some systems. She's all "now I know this is complex" and "A lot of people have problems with this figure" and I'm going CHRIST I'M BORED and answering all of her in-class challenge questions (which count for zero) and going THERE IS NOTHING TO LEARN IN THIS CLASS WHY AM I HERE?!

Oh right, it's a requirement. Crap.

And to cap it off, my left ear is really acting up today. Loud and screechy and full of hate. Joy.

Monday's miles: 8.3
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1686.3
Miles out of Rivendell: 1229.3
Miles out of Lothlórien: 774.3
Miles past Rauros Falls: 357.4
Miles to Isengard: 110.3

In other news, biking back from Shoreline turns out to be pretty easy, and only mildly terrifying, and that mostly at 15th Avenue NE. Biking to Shoreline would be not happening, at least via this route. Here's the way; on the left side of the screen find "Elevation: off small large" and click on "large" and you'll see why I won't be reversing that. It's particularly worth noting that the huge elevation change over time is on a road (NE Perkins Way, mostly) with somewhere between tiny, tiny shoulders, and no shoulders at all. At least there isn't much traffic - at least, not at this time of day.

A pleasant surprise was finding a deeply, deeply early-1950s sign-and-planter into a pocket development at 10th Ave NE and NE 195th. My guess - and it is a complete ex recto guess - is that this was developed around that time, and was kind of upscale, and that then 10 years later the freeway came through, wrecking the place - possibly cutting some of it off, I don't know - which is why there's a pedestrian bridge over I-5 there. The original owners might have been the sort to say, "You're screwing us with this freeway, the least you can do is not cut us off from town!" and get that bridge. Given that there just aren't any other pedestrian-friendly crossings that I can think of until you get to, oh, Ravenna Boulevard, it's the best theory I've got.

(Well, okay, 185th is doable. But it still sucks. Four lane + turn lanes + on/off ramps? Not so much fun for pedestrians. Christ, I-5 is a scar on this town.)

Oh, speaking briefly of pedestrian overpasses, I biked down to and over the new one Shoreline has built over Aurora at 160th, as part of the Interurban Trail project. It's very nice. The noise control works really well. +5 to Shoreline's trail development team.

( Scattergories meme )