OK, so I recently broke down and got a Twitter account (see: The Twitter Thing).

What’s next? Spreading out! Facebook. MySpace. iLike. etc. etc. etc. Yes, I am currently working on pushing my manifold activities onto all these platforms. (OK, some of you already know I technically do have accounts on all these places, but they are all about as lively as a <insert Dan Rather style metaphor here>.  In short, they don’t do anything for me.) I talk about my objections to all this sort of thing over at the main site under FAQs.

But I’ve decided that hitting all these sites is the only way to reach the masses who need what I’ve got but don’t know they need it.The market has become so fragmented that there is no universal way to get one’s message out. In short, you have to shotgun spray all the big media sites with your message. The trick is going to be how to bloody do it?

I sure don’t have the […]

I’m in the process of adding ads to this thing, strictly as a means of survival. I’m sort of opposed to it, but obviously not enough to shut ‘er down. Nevertheless I am a bit sad about it in some ways and thought that some clarification was in order.

Everyone that blogs is to some degree narcissistic. I have to be, because I’m an entertainer. And because I’m an entertainer I have no problem asking people to pay for my “deep thoughts.”

But ads are a bit insidious, first of all because they seem so innocuous. Just having the things sitting there subtly changes the experience. Even if I tell you (and you believe) that I have no investment in any of the specific companies (and in fact, may have no idea which ads are being “served” at any given moment.) Their presence changes the game, just like billboards in the outfield of a baseball field change the game a bit.

The second point is that they will help make up for a […]

A while back I ranted on the enormous number of ‘free’ downloads of my stuff.

Now here is a very interesting article about how at least one company is making serious money helping record companies convert some of this activity into sales.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.10/fileshare.html

In short, Big Champagne gathers stats on P2P file sharing data as demographic marketing information; the frequency by which songs and artists are being downloaded in various cities, states and countries. They then sell this in digestible chart and spreadsheet form to record companies so they can determine which artists to push in which markets.

So while the record companies are trying like crazy to shut down P2P sites, they are also not above getting whatever benefit they can out of their predicament.

I’m sure you’re at least vaguely aware of all the valuable medical information that came out of those Nazi experiments during the war. Same deal. People have to hold their nose to use such data, but it’s just  too valuable to ignore simply because the source was so reprehensible. […]

This is Joe Clark, a writer in Toronto, working on a very interesting book on copyright reform. It refutes a lot of the extreme points of view on both sides of the ‘great divide’.

Last time I talked about why records made in the seventies sounded so goooooood. Punchy. Danceable. And also, why the music started to suck. One factor… the widespread use of ‘compression’.

But there has been a second compression scandal which began in the early 90’s and continues to this day. This is commonly known as The Loudness Wars.

Now when CDs first came out, they were mastered a lot like vinyl. Sure the dynamic range is much greater, but the actual perceived volume of the CDs was quite similar to good ol’ records.

A funny thing started happening though. Like most drug habits, it was subtle at first, but over time, it turned into a monster that ruins lives. Little by little, CDs (the new ‘records’) became louder and louder.

Now technically, they didn’t get ‘louder’. They can’t really get louder. The strongest signal a CD can handle is exactly the same loudness as the strongest signal a record player can. But what can and does happen with digital tools is that the dynamic […]