Author: Jeff Albert

What is a podcast?

I have been trying hard lately to get the word out about the Scratch My Brain podcasts, and the other day someone asked me, “what is a podcast? I don’t have an iPod, can I still listen?”

Yes, you can listen on anything that will play an mp3 file. Just click the link to download the mp3 to your computer, then listen however you like. I have linked to the Wikipedia podcast definition page below, to offer greater detail.

Podcasting – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Podcasting’s essence is about creating content (audio or video) for an audience that wants to listen when they want, where they want, and how they want.

Digital music spins new sales approach | CNET News.com

Digital music spins new sales approach | CNET News.com

This article offers another look at legal music service styles, and the idea of playlists, or listener recommendations.

I like the concept of finding new music through another individual whose tastes you trust. Nearly every really interesting work of art that I have been turned on to has been through a friend’s suggestion. That was one of the founding principles of this website.

Napster on the ropes?

This article, Napster on the ropes? | CNET News.com, deals with the business health of a couple of legal online music services.

It points out the two basic philosophies: A la carte (like iTunes) where you buy individual tracks or albums, and subscription (like Napster) where you can access lots of content for a monthly fee, and pay extra to burn things or for other added “rights.”

I think ultimately the subscription model, or a similar “utility” model (see this book for more on that) may win out, but the technology has not quite reached the point to make that work on a grand scale. I think it will, it just hasn’t yet.

What do you think? (Use the comments section)

King’s Fiery Speech Rarely Heard

King’s Fiery Speech Rarely Heard

All of King’s speeches and papers are owned by his family, which has gone to court several times since the 1990s to protect its copyright; King obtained rights to his most famous speech a month after he gave it. Now, those who want to hear or use the speech in its entirety must buy a copy sanctioned by the King family, which receives the proceeds.

Doesn’t something about this just feel wrong? I know there is a long history in the world of living off of the fruits of the accomplishments of our family forebears, but is this what MLK would have wanted?

The more I learn about how copyright is used, the more I think the system needs a radical overhaul. Of course that could just be because the copyrights I own aren’t worth that much.

Via Boing Boing.

Will music kiosks change the retail landscape? – Yahoo! News

Will music kiosks change the retail landscape? – Yahoo! News

Still, Kiosk business is at an all-time high, with some providers readying U.S. deployments numbering in the thousands, an executive at startup kiosk provider MediaPort says. Such major chains as Starbucks and McDonald’s have experimented with them

I have never found my self in McDonald’s wondering where I could get Britney/Jessica/Christina mix tape RIGHT NOW.

But seriously, I like the idea that people are trying to take advantage of digital technologies.

Music retailers also like kiosks because they make it possible to offer more titles than what is available on shelves, as well as offer custom CDs to digital-savvy consumers accustomed to burning their own music at home.

That’s cool, but that already exists on my computer at home. I don’t quite get why a machine in McDonald’s or Starbucks or the airport is going to get me to buy music when I can do it at home.

Maybe an impulse buy at the airport if I am bored, but I no longer carry a CD player when I travel, and the machines won’t load to my iPod. I guess I could rip it to my laptop, then put it on the iPod, but it might be easier to just buy a newspaper or Sports Illustrated to kill that 30 minutes at the airport.

Sometimes the big music labels remind me of the government. They have this great knack for taking what could be the seeds of a good idea and finding a way to mess it up.

Dave Holland article

This article (found via Tim Niland’s blog) is a nice look at one of today’s busier and more influential musicians.

Bassist Dave Holland has found his bliss in his bands

The band exemplifies Holland’s artistic raison d’être: to play vital music with musicians with whom he feels an aesthetic and social bond.

“For me, music is a group effort, a thing you do with people,” said Holland — who in his 40-year career has played with such artists as Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Stan Getz, Jack DeJohnette, Pat Metheny and Roy Haynes.

“It requires a certain cooperation, a respect for each other,” he said. “There are a lot of good things you can learn from it. It’s a lot of what life’s about, being nice to the person who’s sitting next to you, being effective in small ways. I think that’s all we can do.”

I love the concept of music as a social interaction amongst the musicians. The best music is often made by people with a social as well as musical connection.

WNYC – Soundcheck: You Can’t Learn A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing (January 12, 2006)

Check out the cool interview with Dana Gioia, the chairman of the NEA, that appeared on last Thursday’s Soundcheck on WNYC.

WNYC – Soundcheck: You Can’t Learn A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing (January 12, 2006)

I like where he talks about well rounded artists: poets that support music, musicians that go to galleries, etc. How can we as artists expect people to support our art, if we don’t support the art of others?

Criticism based on taste

From Gerard McBurney’s article Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | In from the cold:

Any western European like myself, brought up within the highbrow aesthetic consensus of the cold war period, will remember their teachers and mentors dismissing Shostakovich as more or less worthless. His music was “undercomposed”, we were told, and he was as at best second rate, a kapellmeister in the wake of, but not as good as, the likes of Hindemith and Prokofiev. He was not to be considered in the same breath as the great and glorious gods of modernism like Schoenberg, Bartók and Stravinsky. Many thought him far worse than mediocre, angrily deriding him as a dreary and bombastic court-bard to Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, a time-server, a purveyor of cheap and diluted film-music masquerading as art.

This article made me think about the concept that much of musical criticism is driven by extra-musical factors. In the case of Shostakovich it may have been his politics. The knock on him that his music was really just film music posing as a symphony reminds me of the way some jazz snobs put down certain electric or rock influenced music.

Recently on The Bob Edwards Show, the guest was a writer whose name I am spacing at the moment. They were discussing literary criticism, and the point was made that critics end up having to write lots of words, when all they really want to say is, “I liked this. Read it.”

The day arts criticism is based on taste instead of agenda, the world will be a better place. I like Shostakovich. His music moves me. That doesn’t make me lowbrow, any more than the fact that you like the LCJO version of “A Love Supreme” makes you hip.