Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan. The big content companies are TERRIBLE at doing both of these things, so it’s no wonder they’re not doing so well in the current environment.
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And if you can stand me sounding even crazier, here is this: making money from art is not a human right. It so happens that technological and societal blahbity bloos have conspired to create a situation where selling songs about monkeys and robots is a viable business, but for most of human history people have NOT paid for art.
Most people move to Hollywood with the hope of making it big, but Zonday is helping show the way to something strange and new: making it small. He says he does recognize that (borrowing a line from Chris Rock) “you aren’t really famous until someone’s mama knows who you are.” But a narrow, lucrative fame is the path that has opened up for him and for the thousands of others like him. After going viral, they’ve figured out how—against all expectation—to stay viral.
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Will all of these people get rich on YouTube? Not a chance. But unlike previous waves of aspirants hitting LA’s shores, Zappin insists, they aren’t wasting their time waiting tables or watching someone’s kids. They’re working on their craft, doing what they love, and making some decent money in the bargain. In an economy without much opportunity, they’re trying to join an uncharted and expanding demographic: the YouTube middle class.
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Not surprisingly, mobile ads are up. No one can put the damn things down. But including tablets into ‘mobile’ feels like a bit of a misnomer, considering how they’re generally used. (via Mashable)
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Whenever I listen to music, I am not actually enjoying the aural experience. Instead, I am trying to figure out whether or not I endorse the product. At this point, I wouldn’t listen to a new Jay-Z and Kanye West album to just ‘lose myself’ in their art. I’m just prepping myself for a series of conversations and Facebook threads in which I look to deconstruct their product or justify its artistic merits and social relevance.
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This makes so much sense it’s ridiculous a student came up with it and a beer company hadn’t already done it. Idea: when you say, “I owe you a beer” to a friend, a simple FourSquare partnership makes it easy for him to collect next time he’s at a bar.
Modes of listening seem to be moving toward the (apparent) opposite of micro-differentiation: a total pluralism of taste. This has become the most celebrated feature of the iPod era. “I have seen the future,” Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, wrote in 2004, “and it is called the Shuffle—the setting on the iPod that skips randomly from one track to another.” Here the iPod, or the digitization of musical life it represents, promises emancipation from questions of taste. Differences in what people listen to, in a Shuffled world, may have less and less to do with social class and purchasing power. Or, better yet, taste won’t correlate to class distinction: The absence of taste will. As certain foodies score points by having eaten everything—blowfish, yak milk tea, haggis, hot dogs—so the person who knows and likes all music achieves a curious sophistication-through-indiscriminateness.
From “Wall of Sound” (on how “The iPod has changed the way we listen to music. And the way we respond to it.”), excerpted from n+1 via Slate.
A long, fascinating read, but this point felt particularly timely. When we have a taste for everything, do we really have any taste at all?
Gap between what companies think people want from them online & on social sites vs what they actually want. Very amusing the kool-aid that marketers drink, but I am curious: on NEITHER side of the page is anything related to being entertained or having fun. (via Influx Insights)
Lady Gaga makes her debut as creative director of Polaroid with… Gaga Glasses? (via LAT)
Stats from Pew on internet video usage, made more eye-pleasing for easy digestion. (full size here)
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