Category: music

United Artists, redux

Wired News: Just Say ‘No’ to Record Labels:

“CANNES, France — Rock veterans Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno are launching a provocative new musicians’ alliance that would cut against the industry grain by letting artists sell their music online instead of only through record labels.”
[ . . . ]
“I’m an artist who works incredibly slowly,” Gabriel said. “If some of those (songs) could be made available, you don’t have to be so trapped into this old way of being confined only by the album cycle.”

The former Genesis singer and world music promoter is interested in putting multiple versions of the same song online. He’s also looking forward to being able to hear unfinished music from other artists.

“We tend at the moment … to try to find a moment when a song is right. You stick the pin in the butterfly and put it in the box and you sell the box,” he said. “Music is actually a living thing that evolves.”

Find more here: the NPR clip is worth listening to. And there’s a reference to music-based United Artists here as well.

[Posted with ecto]

the thin edge of the wedge

P-I Focus: Farming is a net-loss proposition — ecologically, socially, and economically:
“The moral of this story resonates far beyond the farm salmon debate, coloring all of industrial agriculture: There are no shortcuts. So long as market forces alone shape how our food is produced, we will be faced with similar reality checks with increasing frequency and magnitude. Market forces only work when truthful product labeling and public understanding of all the costs accompany them.

Indeed, the current crop of toxic farm salmon stories appearing in this paper compete for page space with mad cow disease coverage, transgenic crops and the like — all born of the shortsighted demand for more with less.”

Who knows what foods will even be around in 100 years, at this rate?

And as I increasingly find, I have thought and written about this before.

[Posted with ecto]

are we less connected or more?

Steve Johnson on conventional wisdom: I think he makes a good argument. We do have many more options of where and when we get our information, and the barrier to entry is sufficiently low as to allow the likes of the Drudge Report and yours truly an equal presence . . .

stevenberlinjohnson.com: Our Fragmented Web:

“Slow down and work through the logic here: spam filters are invoked as yet another indication of the echo-chamber effect. Now, who is winning right now: the spam or the filters? Obviously, the spam is winning — nobody’s walking around complaining that they miss the days when they’d get a completely spontaneous penis-enlargement ad in their inbox, despite the fact that they’re opposed to penis-enlargement in general. The filters are there because there are so many voices flooding our inboxes and our browsers that we need tools to fight back. You don’t have filters on television or old-fashioned newspapers because you don’t need them — there’s not enough diversity and chaos to justify them. But the web — and particularly the blogosphere — is far more eclectic and cross-pollinating than any of those older media. That’s the real story. Writing about the rise of filters as a sign of web insularity is like writing about the heat wave we’re having here in New York right now because everyone’s bundled up in parkas.”

OK, the last analogy doesn’t register for me, but I think I see his point otherwise. The argument that we’re all typing into the darkness and losing touch with our physical human selves — our need to connect with others — may have been true in 1997 or so, but the technology has come far enough to lower the barrier to entry and motivate people to create MeetUp and similar ideas. What is Howard Dean’s internet presence about but the use of these technologies to link up like minds and get their physical owners together for a shared purpose?

[Posted with ecto]