« November 2007 | Main | February 2008 »
January 30, 2008
Omodaka
Posted by shane at 03:45 PM
January 29, 2008
My iGoogle
Theme by John Maeda.
Posted by shane at 03:17 PM
The Robots Control The Music
The other day Last.FM, who was just bought by CBS, announced a revenue system for artists and labels using its service. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out. Could this be the start of a new and sustainable revenue system for the music industry 2.0? It is hard to fathom in concrete terms, but Google, an unknown just a decade ago and now one of the most powerful global brands, draws a vast revenue simply from the placement of contextual ads throughout its network. From what I understand, this is the same kind of thinking that will fund artist revenue in Last.FM.
Starting later this year, four times annually, a portion of Last.FM’s ad revenue will be paid to artists, labels, or whoever owns the rights to the songs uploaded into their site, in a proportional rate to the number of times that said music was streamed through the Last.FM service. Of course the labels, artists, etc. have to opt into the service first, but all four majors are already on board. This is just off the top of my head–so don’t quote me–but I think I read somewhere in the past that the four majors account for publishing of more than 90 percent of the world’s music. Beyond that, this revenue system is open to anyone at all. That means ANY indie band can upload their tracks, videos, etc. and get paid for it proportionally to the plays it gets.
So what we have shaping up here is a system in which almost all of the available recorded music in the world is completely on demand, and at the same time, that system is completely open to any artist to freely add to that system music that is not already included–and make money from it. Thinking ahead, one can dazzle themselves in imagining a plausible future in which a totally unknown artist explodes from inside Last.FM, launching a career and earning a living sans interaction with any traditional label or PR and marketing muscle. Or maybe that’s just a fantasy.
This could be a HUGE deal for the future of music. Or perhaps it will just remain a niche. Either way, interesting times are ahead. I have been a Last.FM member for a couple years, and Tokyo Lab has a presence there as well. I’ll be eagerly watching as this thing unfolds.
Posted by shane at 12:55 PM
January 28, 2008
After Effects Users Fucked by QuickTime 7.4
If you use After Effects on a Mac, and in the last week you began to wonder why you can’t finish any render that lasts more than 10 minutes or so because you get this message:
you are probably very frustrated by now. An answer seems to have emerged in this Creative Cow thread. The only real option you have to fix this is: (1 Download this software called Pacifist and install it. Now go to Apple, and download the previous version of QuickTime, 7.3.1. from here. Once you have that, mount it so that the .pkg file comes up. Now Open Pacifist, and instruct it to open that .pkg file, and follow the instructions to install. When it finds previously existing files as it installs, always tell it to “Replace”.
After that you should be back to 7.3.1. What apparently happened is some kind of DRM shit introduced into the new QuickTime, presumably for some iTunes Store function, is refusing you access (permissions) to your .mov file AS IT IS IN THE MIDDLE OF BEING RENDERED OUT OF AE. Hahahaha. Ridiculous. Equally ridiculous is that apart from the method described above, there is no way to downgrade QuickTime to a previous version. The only other alternative is to reinstall Mac OS from zero and refuse to update QuickTime.
There is one other workaround solution which is to do all your AE renders as Targa sequence (no DRM on Targa for now, so it shouldn’t quit out). But then you will have to re-import the sequence and render as a .mov. (If it goes quickly then you will avoid the permissions error as it usually comes up after a render has been running for about 10 minutes.)
This is a small problem, but it makes you think about what could happen if something worse were to go down. You realize that through some stupid bug, Apple could take down some whole industry. Hopefully they are getting enough flack from the motion graphics and effects community to be motivated to fix this shit with a new update fast.
Posted by shane at 12:29 PM
January 15, 2008
Presidents/Precedence!
While away from work for the holidays, I found myself with a rare and delightful chance to pay attention to things going on outside of my typically minuscule and incestuous world. These were mediated by friends, as well as some lovely individuals whose voices I pay attention to through a lovely thing called the internet.
There are perhaps three distinct issues that I had been totally neglecting, but caught up on a little bit in my spare time hanging around in California. Here I will try to elaborate on the first of those three. Later entries hopefully coming soon.
Item One: The presidential election.
Its shaping up to be a very interesting one, and I can’t say that I’ve done the reading or research to make a good judgment about the candidates, but that is not my focus here. One interesting thing I found is that it looks like there are a number of actually viable candidates for the presidency. Perhaps for the first time in my life there is an actually plausible variety of choices, beyond the one prototypical Democrat and Republican. If the previous election saw the nation divided 50/50 into a polarizing liberal/conservative, red state/blue state dynamic, perhaps the upcoming election will see the same giant pie cut up into more bite-sized slices of 8% here, 20% here, 12% over there, and so on. If you want to stick to the Dems you have Hillary, Obama, Edwards, and more. If you go Republican you’ve got Giuliani, Ron Paul, Huckabee, et. al.
I am fascinated by this idea of there being a bounty of choices (although I suppose some would still argue compellingly that there is no real choice, and that every puppet is just pulled by the same strings). And this is a further stretch, but I see this electoral situation pointing toward something that looks a little bit like Japanese pop culture: Everyone has got their little clique. Even small artists can draw a loyal following from their tiny group of fifty otaku fans. Others belong to big jimushos, have a mass following, glossier ads, bigger billboards, and media money. But this doesn’t necessarily deter the fans of the tiny indies. They can be indifferent to the big guys and keep doing their thing regardless. They’ve still got their little corner with a listening station in a record store somewhere, magazines they pop up in, and a regular night at a live house, somewhere, maybe Nakano?
Japan’s pop culture seems happy to cater to any taste, because fans are compelled to be fans. No one has any real excuse not to rally around some little morsel of pop culture because its a certainty that something out there has been designed just for them. And its typically not hard to find that one thing here, as it is in the meatspace of the USA. Now–and perhaps this is thanks to emerging internet culture–the people of America can more visibly and more powerfully rally around any variety of candidate, with any kind of varying viewpoint.
Something I always found curious is that, to me, the structure of the data-space of the internet somehow seemed to mirror the structure of physical space of major cities of Japan. Geeks worldwide took to the internet quickly for its ability to uncover all manner of interesting information and cultural dispatch coming from many disparate places. You could readily find things there–cultural morsels molded to your personal interest–that you would not typically run across in the real world. In the physical space of somewhere like like Shibuya however, you are likely to run across that morsel–that one thing designed just for you–simply by taking a short walk around.
Perhaps its the internet age, the courting of voters through MySpace, and the YouTube-ization of debate that has enabled this strangely empowering fracture of audiences, and the rise of a more specific appeal to discerning cultural cliques with regard to the presidency. Or maybe this is just a strange fluke due to any number of other factors. I am completely open to either possibility, but I would be excited if things continue to move in this direction of a specifically-targeted diversity.
In other words, it would be a marked improvement to me if the presidential race started to bear more resemblance to Tower Records Shibuya. We might have to endure some Death Metal president for a term, but it might be substantially fucking interesting.
Posted by shane at 09:18 PM
January 09, 2008
A Coke Ad
Posted by shane at 11:15 AM