Word. Ezra sez:

When my friends and I compare notes at week's end, more plaudits are given when the girls are impressive than when they're hot. I became extra-infatuated with my first girlfriend when she used a word I didn't know (phylogeny, as I recall), and I still weed folks out by way of a quasi-intellectually elitist checklist, though what's on it remains proprietary information.

I'll take it a step further and say I've taken home and slept with women, mainly because they were working on their PhDs. It's like big knockers, but different.

There are some generation gaps that are emerging among White Male Americans...

Dudes who are over 35 are roundly terrified of homosexuality and will make a point of saying they didn't see Brokeback Mountain. People in my generation don't give a fuck. Result? The Gays™ will be able to marry when I'm 50.

Dudes from the other generation are more likely to see relationships with women in a compartmentalized fashion, more likely to see their mate as filling a pretty specific niche in life and ergo more likely to value beauty over brains. Not so with my peers, though conversely we're probably better at one-night-stands than older folks.

Word. Ezra sez:

When my friends and I compare notes at week's end, more plaudits are given when the girls are impressive than when they're hot. I became extra-infatuated with my first girlfriend when she used a word I didn't know (phylogeny, as I recall), and I still weed folks out by way of a quasi-intellectually elitist checklist, though what's on it remains proprietary information.

I'll take it a step further and say I've taken home and slept with women, mainly because they were working on their PhDs. It's like big knockers, but different.

There are some generation gaps that are emerging among White Male Americans...

Dudes who are over 35 are roundly terrified of homosexuality and will make a point of saying they didn't see Brokeback Mountain. People in my generation don't give a fuck. Result? The Gays™ will be able to marry when I'm 50.

Dudes from the other generation are more likely to see relationships with women in a compartmentalized fashion, more likely to see their mate as filling a pretty specific niche in life and ergo more likely to value beauty over brains. Not so with my peers, though conversely we're probably better at one-night-stands than older folks.

Fantastic bit of Fair-Use Parody. Taseful too.

"Let us join together before we are annihilated."

Strong words from Mr. Wonder. I wonder what Ms. Franklin and Messrs Jagger, Richards, et all will add to the debate?

"Let us join together before we are annihilated."

Strong words from Mr. Wonder. I wonder what Ms. Franklin and Messrs Jagger, Richards, et all will add to the debate?

Pretty Cool -- My old org, Music for America, is voting a regular member/volunteer onto their Board of Directors:

The winner will receive an all-expense-paid trip to San Francisco for the MFA Icon Awards and will serve for one year on the MFA Board of Directors, effectively becoming (gulp!) our boss. So please, choose wisely! We beg you!

Oh, and remember, first 50 voters receive a free cd with music from Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, Elliot Smith, R.E.M., Tom Waits, Nada Surf, David Byrne, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and more. Incentive!

If you've ever done any MFA stuff, you should vote! I'm still thinking it over.

Pretty Cool -- My old org, Music for America, is voting a regular member/volunteer onto their Board of Directors:

The winner will receive an all-expense-paid trip to San Francisco for the MFA Icon Awards and will serve for one year on the MFA Board of Directors, effectively becoming (gulp!) our boss. So please, choose wisely! We beg you!

Oh, and remember, first 50 voters receive a free cd with music from Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, Elliot Smith, R.E.M., Tom Waits, Nada Surf, David Byrne, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and more. Incentive!

If you've ever done any MFA stuff, you should vote! I'm still thinking it over.

Pretty Cool -- My old org, Music for America, is voting a regular member/volunteer onto their Board of Directors:

The winner will receive an all-expense-paid trip to San Francisco for the MFA Icon Awards and will serve for one year on the MFA Board of Directors, effectively becoming (gulp!) our boss. So please, choose wisely! We beg you!

Oh, and remember, first 50 voters receive a free cd with music from Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, Elliot Smith, R.E.M., Tom Waits, Nada Surf, David Byrne, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and more. Incentive!

If you've ever done any MFA stuff, you should vote! I'm still thinking it over.

Tell Me What You See Here:

This is about 50,000 people downloading episodes 10 and 12 of Lost off a popular bittorrent tracking site. If you're in the entertainment industry, your answer is going to be something along the lines of "$100,000 in lost revenue!" At $2 a download from the itunes store, that is the direct equivalency, so there's a certain kind of logic here.

However, this sort of grade-school economic arithmatic isn't how the world really works. I fileshare a good portion of my media intake, including shows like Lost, but that doesn't mean ABC and Apple are missing out on my $2, because I wouldn't pay $2 an episode to watch the show, especially not at the quality level (well below broadcast) that's provided via iTunes.

As a media consumer, the DVD set, which will include 25 or so episodes for $60 retail, offers a better value. Savvy mathamaticians will point out that this is slightly more than $2 and episode, but there are important differences:

• A DVD set will have HD-quality visual resolution and sound. The iTunes version will have about a quarter the visual resolution.
• With iTunes I need to provide my own valuable hard-drive space (close to 10GB a season) to store my media. The DVD set is its own archive.
• The DVD set can be easily loaned to friends. Apple's DRM prevents me from introducing my friends to one of my favorite media experiences on their own time, unless I want to give them my iPod.

I could go on, but the point is that the $2-a-show download from Apple's iTunes is a poor bargan for media consumers v.s purchasing a DVD set. The only benefit is that you get to watch it today rather than in several months, but this option is open to anyone with a television, a pair of rabbit ears and a clock, let alone one of these newfangled "VCR"s or futuristic "TiVo"s. So there's that.

The other point about Lost's "lost revenue" is that a lot of these people were never going to buy the DVD either. Read this next part slowly if you're an industry person: If the filesharing option didn't exist, a lot of these downloaders simply wouldn't watch the show. I'm in that camp. If I didn't have filesharing, I might be more likely to join NetFlix or some similar group, and I might rent more movies from the video store, but I'm not a high-rolling media consumer. Never have been. The same dynamic holds true of music vis-a-vis Naptser and the subsequent p2p networks.

Will the entertainment industry get smart?

The interesting thing is that I think the industry benefits from this, whether it realizes it or not. It's widely understood that Microsoft has made piracy a part of their strategy in rolling out new software: they would ignore it and let it help spread the word about a new product, even through several versions (1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc) until finally when they'd gotten enough user feedback and a broad enough userbase -- when people were actually semi-dependent on this piece of code -- they release the next version (4.0), lock out previous versions, generally drop the hammer in a number of ways, and thus maximize their profits.

Making use of illicit filesharing to boost popularity and grow an audience, followed by a strong move to capitalize on that market, should produce good financial results, though methods for this need development. The mid-season release of the first half of Battlestar Galactica Season 2 on DVD is an interesting experiment, one I predicted we'd see about a month ago. This obviously has stronger applications now for youth and techie oriented products, and at almost $5 an episode I think Battlestar is pricing itself out of the market, but give it five years and something like this will be the norm for any hot media product.

The business of entertainment has a populist character. You're trying to make money by pleasing people through your hard creative work. The current model for television is financed by advertising, which sort of turns the nature of entertainment on its head: the consumer of media is the real product, their assumed eyeball-time sold to advertisers to reap profits for the studio and finance further production(s). This revenue model (along with the idea of financing many failed projects with a few hit properties) is falling apart in the information age as eyeball-time fragments, independent production continues to grow, and broadcast advertising looses its punch.

I would like to see an open source entertainment endeavor: one which makes its finances largely public, its products available (at Sub-DVD quality) for free, and which is clear that it's relying on viewers to support it (though DVD purchases, other merchandise, or simply direct donations) to keep up production. It's sort of an OpenPBS model -- "this show is supported by viewers like you" -- but I think it would work if you could get the initial nut together and you had a good idea, good talent, and a sound community-marketing effort on board.

Tell Me What You See Here:

This is about 50,000 people downloading episodes 10 and 12 of Lost off a popular bittorrent tracking site. If you're in the entertainment industry, your answer is going to be something along the lines of "$100,000 in lost revenue!" At $2 a download from the itunes store, that is the direct equivalency, so there's a certain kind of logic here.

However, this sort of grade-school economic arithmatic isn't how the world really works. I fileshare a good portion of my media intake, including shows like Lost, but that doesn't mean ABC and Apple are missing out on my $2, because I wouldn't pay $2 an episode to watch the show, especially not at the quality level (well below broadcast) that's provided via iTunes.

As a media consumer, the DVD set, which will include 25 or so episodes for $60 retail, offers a better value. Savvy mathamaticians will point out that this is slightly more than $2 and episode, but there are important differences:

• A DVD set will have HD-quality visual resolution and sound. The iTunes version will have about a quarter the visual resolution.
• With iTunes I need to provide my own valuable hard-drive space (close to 10GB a season) to store my media. The DVD set is its own archive.
• The DVD set can be easily loaned to friends. Apple's DRM prevents me from introducing my friends to one of my favorite media experiences on their own time, unless I want to give them my iPod.

I could go on, but the point is that the $2-a-show download from Apple's iTunes is a poor bargan for media consumers v.s purchasing a DVD set. The only benefit is that you get to watch it today rather than in several months, but this option is open to anyone with a television, a pair of rabbit ears and a clock, let alone one of these newfangled "VCR"s or futuristic "TiVo"s. So there's that.

The other point about Lost's "lost revenue" is that a lot of these people were never going to buy the DVD either. Read this next part slowly if you're an industry person: If the filesharing option didn't exist, a lot of these downloaders simply wouldn't watch the show. I'm in that camp. If I didn't have filesharing, I might be more likely to join NetFlix or some similar group, and I might rent more movies from the video store, but I'm not a high-rolling media consumer. Never have been. The same dynamic holds true of music vis-a-vis Naptser and the subsequent p2p networks.

Will the entertainment industry get smart?

The interesting thing is that I think the industry benefits from this, whether it realizes it or not. It's widely understood that Microsoft has made piracy a part of their strategy in rolling out new software: they would ignore it and let it help spread the word about a new product, even through several versions (1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc) until finally when they'd gotten enough user feedback and a broad enough userbase -- when people were actually semi-dependent on this piece of code -- they release the next version (4.0), lock out previous versions, generally drop the hammer in a number of ways, and thus maximize their profits.

Making use of illicit filesharing to boost popularity and grow an audience, followed by a strong move to capitalize on that market, should produce good financial results, though methods for this need development. The mid-season release of the first half of Battlestar Galactica Season 2 on DVD is an interesting experiment, one I predicted we'd see about a month ago. This obviously has stronger applications now for youth and techie oriented products, and at almost $5 an episode I think Battlestar is pricing itself out of the market, but give it five years and something like this will be the norm for any hot media product.

The business of entertainment has a populist character. You're trying to make money by pleasing people through your hard creative work. The current model for television is financed by advertising, which sort of turns the nature of entertainment on its head: the consumer of media is the real product, their assumed eyeball-time sold to advertisers to reap profits for the studio and finance further production(s). This revenue model (along with the idea of financing many failed projects with a few hit properties) is falling apart in the information age as eyeball-time fragments, independent production continues to grow, and broadcast advertising looses its punch.

I would like to see an open source entertainment endeavor: one which makes its finances largely public, its products available (at Sub-DVD quality) for free, and which is clear that it's relying on viewers to support it (though DVD purchases, other merchandise, or simply direct donations) to keep up production. It's sort of an OpenPBS model -- "this show is supported by viewers like you" -- but I think it would work if you could get the initial nut together and you had a good idea, good talent, and a sound community-marketing effort on board.