There’s a revolution going on in the music industry, and the industry hasn’t noticed. With all the brouhaha about p2p, DRM, piracy and copyright, the RIAA and its members, the big record companies, have clearly taken their eyes off the ball.

I was at a gig for The Bronx last week (whose web site unfortunately doesn’t support Safari), a hardcore band from Los Angeles, and on the way out, amongst their t-shirts and CDs for sale, was a DVD of one of their live gigs.

But this wasn’t your regular live DVD, it was a recording of their first Sydney gig earlier in the year, which also happened to be their first ever sold out headline gig. The recording was made by a fan on a handheld DV, and the quality was good enough to publish. The day after that gig, the fan contacted the band and they arranged for the footage to be released as a DVD. Coincidentally, at the same gig, a local company has been recording and broadcasting shows over the Internet, and they just happened to have a mixing desk recording of the gig, which was then dubbed over the footage. No edits, just video from the handheld, and audio from the Internet broadcast. Now this isn’t a big production venue. The Annandale Hotel is a fairly small few hundred people at most venue. And The Bronx aren’t particularly well known, except that they did get album of the week at some point last year on 2JJJ.

I was at that same venue on the weekend, to see a one off (well, twice off, they did the once off thing last year) reunion of another punk band, this time a local Sydney band from the early 1980s, The Kelpies. At the gig, they were selling a copy of the one off gig they did last year, on CD, and this night they were recording a DVD of their last ever gig. It didn’t help that their bass played died last week just before the show, but the added risk of getting in another bass player from the same punk period to learn all their songs, makes it an even more unique DVD. They were collecting email addresses on the night, so they could let people know in a few weeks when the DVD would be available.

About a month ago, I went and saw DKT/MC5, a reunion of the three still alive members of the MC5, a detroit band from the early 1970s, who were the primary influence on pretty much most punk and alternative bands in some way. They played the Gaelic Club and the Coogee Bay Hotel, which is the old Selinas venue. Pretty big, but that doesn’t count. Ten minutes after the show finished, they’d pressed copies of it on to CD to buy on the way out. At Selinas, after ten minutes you’d be lucky if 20% of the 1300 person audience had gotten out. To then see a $10 CD of the gig as you went out the door, is pure marketing genius. We’ve read about this happening in the U.S., but this is apparently only the second time it has been done in Australia, the first being when The Who played in Sydney the week before.

On top of this, in the U.S. there’s a company called eMusicLive, which sells keychain USB drives of gigs on the way out. They also then sell the recordings over the internet, but you get the point. Same trick, newer technology.

And at yet another gig over the weekend, a local support band was selling their own independently recorded and produced CD at their gig for $15. I wouldn’t pay the usual $28 at a store, but for $15, while my body was still warm, sure, I’ll buy that. This has been happening for years of course, bands selling their independent CDs at gigs, and even that hasn’t begun to click with the record industry.

Artists are finding ways to change the business model, look after their own interests, and look after their fans. But then artists have always tried to do that, it is just the record companies that treat the fans with contempt, or as is common these days, just sue them.

As predicted several years ago, the space is changing, artists are finding ways to look after themselves, and make money off merchandising, without being tied to a major record label. And when USB drives and RAM devices become more prevalent, we’ll finally see the end of the CD as well, which artists are still paying royalties to Sony and Philips on, for every CD they manufacture.

There’s a revolution happening, and the industry, bless their little capitalist monopolistic hearts, have been caught well and truly napping. Good riddance I say. After a 50 year break, it is time to return art to the artists.

I hate email. I’ve been (ab)using it since 1984, and it still doesn’t communicate the way I do. In fact, the last few days, I’ve had two communication breakdowns involving email.

The first was an email from an acquaintance asking for feedback on a project proposal. So I sent them my feedback. The problem was that I sent way too much detail, because unknown to them, it was an area in which I tend to specialise, user interaction/interface design. This then made me look like a bit of a smart arse and a trouble maker. Imagine asking an NRMA safety officer which bull bar to buy for your 4WD, or asking the tax office which loop hole you should be using this year.

There’s a decision to be made here about whether to give them the full detail, which is ultimately the best way to help them out, or on the other hand to give them just a smattering of feedback, enough to make me look helpful, yet not enough to show that I know very much about the subject.

I could of course ask them how much feedback they want, but then I’ve already started down the slippery slope of being a smart arse.

Which bull bar should I buy for my 4WD?

How much detail would you like?

The second breakdown was one of those split email threads, where an initial email splits into two completely different arguments, multiplexed over a single thread. In most cases, the thread becomes two people trying to explain that what they said, wasn’t actually what they said, and it escalates from there, with each person concentrating more and more on the actual words, not the meaning of each email, and the two perceived arguments getting further and further apart.

But you had a comma between them, which means you don’t agree, else you should have used a semicolon, especially when followed by a verb. No wonder you misunderstood me! And anyway, who said I was being pedantic, I was just pointing out the inconsistency of your logic when used to arbitrarily compare two different technically correct yet contextually incorrect statements.

There’s a decision to be made here as well, at which point to pick up the phone, or if you can’t, at which point to resign from the thread, knowing full well that the other person will think that they’ve won an argument, even though it never existed. Ahh, the human condition, never wanting to lose, especially when there’s nothing to lose, but the winner perceives that there is. 🙂

Both of these communication breakdowns probably wouldn’t have occurred if we were talking to each other in person, or even on the phone. The risk of argument is higher, because you’re in a live conversation, with limited opportunity to think about what to say, yet communication tends
to be more successful. With email, you have a lot of time to sculpt the perfect reply, which in most cases is then completely misunderstood.

This is why I believe anyone can play improv. We do it everyday when we communicate with people, reading visual and audible cues, planning our responses, navigating our way through the miscommunication minefield.

Improv isn’t about learning to improvise, it is about removing the boundaries which growing up has placed around our natural ingrained ability to improvise. The world gives us our inputs, and we adapt or improvise accordingly. That’s life. Breaking these boundaries can be difficult for some, but is always possible.

Sensis is an Australian search engine company. They’ve only recently come on the scene, with what seems like pretty big advertising budgets. They’re actually owned by Telstra, our half government owned telecom company, who have been trying to work out how to make money out of their stock pile of underground copper wires, and who have spent much of the last decade trying (and failing) to understand what leading edge technologies they should be investing in. Not unsurprisingly, in 2004 they’ve decided in a moment of dumb arse brilliance, that a search engine might be a good new technology to spend our tax dollars on.

Anyway, I had a referer this evening from a Sensis search come into my RSS feed as if it were a web page. Dumb. Just plain dumb.

Want some more dumb? Here’s a quick 5 minute review of their results page:

• there’s no hyperlink on result URLs
• there’s a text input field labelled “In this location:”, which makes no sense until you click on “Australia only” and find out is some free form text location field
• the aligned “Australian sites only” radio control gives the impression that it affects the location box. check the radio and enter “london” into the location field. who knows what happens, as the controls don’t reinforce or support each other
• “worldwide sites” radio control isn’t aligned to indicate it’s affiliation with “Australian sites only”, or anything really
• the sensis logo takes you to the main entry page, which apparently has this URL: http://www.sensis.com.au/siteEntry.do;jsessionid=3gbwt2ri5pmbf.server2-1. why not www.sensis.com.au? they can’t use www.sensis.com, because there’s already a U.S. based defence company called that, which makes you wonder how they decided upon the name
• there’s a strange blue curved arrow in front of search result text. i’m guessing it means “abstract”, but there’s no alt/title text, and it is bright enough to indicate that it serves some more significant purpose. oh there we go, a legend which means it is “web only”. huh?
• the “Search within your results [SEARCH]” is confusing all on one line, and doesn’t clearly indicate that this is a search refinement
• the site uses greys and other pastel colours, making it harder for people to do what they’re ultimately at the site to do: find information quickly

Jason Scott is putting the finishing touches on his BBS Documentary, covering the history of the BBS scene from 1978 to the present day, or at least when the web sort of took over from the BBS.

Released on 3 DVDs, with 200 interviews and taking 3 three years to produce, looks like Jason’s done an amazing job, especially getting hold of a lot of the original innovators like Ward Christensen.

Although I haven’t actually seen it myself, I’m sensing a big hole in the research with respect to the AppleII, and more specifically Australia, which had a huge BBS scene. However this is our problem, not Jason’s, as we never really found the time to answer his questions or document the local history for him. Seems a shame to do it after the documentary’s come out, but he’s pestered us enough over the past few years, or least I’m guessing that Andrew was as well.

The only mention I did get is for Eclipse (yes, we had the name first), a pretty cool project, but not much of a landmark release for Australia. In fact I don’t think anyone ever ran it locally, as by then the whole scene had pretty much collapsed. And to rub it in, Andrew gets top billing, which I guess is probably fair considering he basically took over the project once I’d gotten over it. Eclipse was a development platform, including plug in drivers and a Pascal/REXX hybrid language designed specifically for BBS use.

Anyway, if you have an interest in the 1980s BBS scene, take a look at Jason’s site, or even grab a copy of the documentary. And if you’re interested in hearing about the Australian history, then perhaps keep pestering me to find the time to write it all up. Although some of it is covered in my personal history of the Australian Apple II scene.

It’s been a week since I wrote about how podcasting will have its biggest effect on community radio, and about 3-4 weeks since podcasting began, at least in its current form. What we in Australia call community radio by the way, in the U.S. they call public radio.

Public/community radio is mainly funded by sponsors and government grants, this is true in Australia and the U.S., so to embrace podcasting, where is the money going to come from for the bandwidth and storage of program content?

Let’s actually drop the facade and instead of calling it podcasting, call it what it is, on-demand radio, which has been around for at least decade. The podcasting part is just the technology to get it out of a feed and onto an iPod or similar device.

Interestingly enough, the blogosphere seems divided at the moment between whether it’s a fad, or a revolution, although with a majority tending to side with revolution. Here’s one against, which pretty much sums up my opinion as well. Online Journalism Review has some good coverage of some of the issues, but at the end again descends into hypeland by quoting Russell Beattie slightly out of context. The ghist of it being:

[..] there are going to be 650 million phones shipped this year alone. How big will podcasting be when all those phones can be “podcast players?” Think you’re at the beginning of a trend now? Just wait.

Well like I said in my previous post, radio does this already. Everyone has a radio receiver, heck even my mobile phone does. How often do I or you listen to it?

The big problem is going to be content, and this is where the current community radio broadcasters will hopefully jump in, as that’s their biggest asset, varied programming. Unless of course they’re one of the stations who have already shifted from specialist to block programming. Wise move guys. 😉

Maybe Dave Pollard’s ideas will help, maybe more content sources will help, but in a world of information overload, when we’re bombarded left right and centre with information, including hundreds or thousands of RSS feeds, how many of us will bother listening to the radio for this type of content? I’m guessing roughly the same as do now. Except of course the podcasters, who don’t seem to have heard of or listened to community or public radio.

As an aside, in the next few months we’ll be trialling limited podcasting from our radio station. This in conjunction with our company’s work on Sauce Reader, should give us some valuable insight into where we’ll be in a few years’ time.

Saw a mildly amusing tshirt this morning on the way to work in Sunny ol’ Canberra, which I’ve since found after googling it, did the rounds a few years back. No matter:

There are 10 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and those that don’t.

Like I said, mildly amusing, perhaps because I fall into the former camp, and am still able to quote ASCII and 6502 instruction codes at will.

I was listening to 2JJJ last night, our government run national youth network (yes, I still refuse to call it Triple J, due to Barry Chapman‘s sellout), and heard yet another example of how we’re breeding a generation of youth ignoramuses who believe all the record company and branding/youth of today hype.

Anyway, I was listening ever so briefly (I promise) to Super Request with Rosie Beaton, who surprisingly knows a little bit about music pre-1991 (my era), and she was speaking with her producer on air, about tracks that various callers had asked for, particularly on the theme of treadmills.

Now the producer is the one who supposedly looks for each track and makes sure its the correct one, and I’m assuming knowledge of music to some degree would be one of the prerequisites. It was at this point she said:

And several listeners mentioned “Troo-ga-nine-knee” (laughs) or something (laughs) by Midnight Oil.

She’d certainly know Midnight Oil, all Australians do, and you may not expect her to know that Truganini is a song by Midnight Oil, but you would assume, being the lefty and informed station that it is supposed to be, that she would actually know who Truganini was.

Or do you think I’m being over judgemental because I still have a gaping wound about 2JJJ from 14 years ago?

A week or so ago, I wrote about Podcasting: The little brother of RSS, or the future of community radio? on my personal weblog, namely due to my background in community radio. Enjoy.

Well, after the local Liberal party put up signs about funding tunnel filtration, pretending to be local community group protest notices, the following morning they magically disappeared again. Perhaps the Lane Cove Sticker Syndicate Inc. Pty Ltd. didn’t like someone vandalising their property…

Podcasting in its simplest form, is the posting of blog posts in audio format, and having them automatically end up on subscribers’ iPods, ready for playback. It’s not so much the audio blogging that’s the innovative part, as on-demand audio has been around almost as long as the web. We used to broadcast our radio show on the Internet, back in 1998, and I’ve still got copies of shows sitting in my iTunes. Big deal.

The real innovation is making on-demand audio easier to use, namely through two technological breakthroughs: 1) automatically removing the audio from an RSS feed (via enclosures), and 2) automagically downloading the audio from iTunes specifically to an iPod, ready to play. Podcasting offers nothing new content wise that community radio hasn’t been providing for the last 40 years, but hey, everything goes in cycles.

The beauty of RSS/Atom, is that it delivers only the bare content, the raw information you’re interested in. You don’t have to visit a web site, you don’t have to scan through pages of navigation and HTML embelishments to get to the actual content.

Podcasting is supposedly the audio version of this, but it fails. All the podcasts I’ve listened to, including Adam Curry’s genre defining Daily Source Code, are about 20-30% useful information, and the rest is umms, ahhs, repetitions, or information that’s easier and faster to get in textual format through other feeds. In fact, all the podcasts I’ve heard, sound like they were simply recorded from community radio, and if you had to read that amount of text to get to the useful bits in a standard RSS feed, you’d end up unsubscribing.

Dave Pollard has talked about useful ways to reduce the effluvium in audio through the use of pitch shifting/time compression, which is infinitely more useful in reproducing audio with the useful characteristics of RSS content, than podcasting. But of course, useless content (umms, ahhs, repetitions etc.), at any speed, is still useless content.

There are however notable reasons why podcating will make a big impact, and it isn’t because people can get on-demand audio.

Lets talk about traditional radio for a bit. Webcasting was supposed to be the traditional radio network killer, and was going to eat into the major radio market over the years during and following the bubble. Like most ideas from that time however, the technologists failed to recognise what was so good about radio. Radio is audio only, there’s no visuals, plus most radio broadcasting is programmed for the masses, so it tends to be the conservative middle of what we as individuals would like to hear. We don’t get to pick the music that’s played, we can’t rewind at all, we have to listen at the exact time the show is on, we can only pick up certain shows in our local area (unless networked) and in many cases we don’t agree with the announcers’ opinions.

With all these flaws, how come radio still succeeds? For three reasons: 1. Because you can pick it up anywhere. 2. Because it is free of charge (no collection/bandwidth/CPU costs). 3. Because you don’t have to concentrate to listen to it, it runs in the background while you multitask.

At home, in the kitchen, while vacuuming, in the car, on the street, think of the radio walkman, or your clock radio which not only turns the radio on at a set time, but can also turn it off after an hour of you being asleep. On a plane, a train, in class, at work, radio is available everywhere, that’s why we tolerate all it’s inherent faults.

So what do the technologists do? They broadcast it over the web, thus solving the problem of reach, but breaking radio’s only real redeeming feature, the ability to take it anywhere. No wonder it failed.

But who says that reach was a problem anyway? Most local programming is local for a reason, meaning the only radio programming that really benefits from streaming is niche special interest programming. But the cache 22, is that with so few listeners, the chances are that most won’t be able to listen in at the right time anyway. Of course there’s always going to be a minority of people who want to sit at their computer all day and listen to low quality audio streams from Internet radio stations, but in general, webcasting is flawed for use in radio broadcasting.

So, the only real Internet based alternative to traditional radio broadcasting, is specialist programming. There are still problems of course, people can only pick it up while they have an Internet connection and a capable computer, tuning in is harder than using a radio, and not everyone wants to sit in front of their computer just to hear the radio. By providing the content on-demand however, people can listen to what they’re interested in, in their own time, and this is the principle behind podcasting.

The bottom line is, the only type of radio broadcast that will be better served with podcasting, is actually community radio. This is why podcasting is so important, because it will change the community and special interest radio stations forever, and will probably shut a lot of them down. Podcasting is community radio.

There’s an argument doing the rounds of the blogosphere at the moment that podcasting will threaten the big radio broadcasting networks, but for the reasons above, that’s not going to happen.

First, mainstream radio only works when everyone can pick it up anywhere, and the only real solution to that is a big mast, real estate to house it, an expensive and power hungry transmitter, and an expensive license from the government regulator. This won’t change, because the radio wave spectrum is becoming more and more expensive as technology advances.

Second, community radio has been around for almost 40 years now, and hasn’t affected the big networks one iota, even though, like podcasting, like webcasting, it was supposed to. What’s more, at the moment community radio is easier to pick up and listen to than the Internet, for the reasons mentioned earlier. Even my phone picks up radio and has earphones, that’s the sort of simplicity that you’d need to equal or beat.

So, podcasting won’t affect mainstream radio, but it just may replace community radio, and that’s a big shame. However, unlike the record companies and the RIAA, we’ll be working our butts off over the next few years to make sure our community radio business models change as the technology changes. Instead of fighting the podcast revolution, we’ll actively integrate it into whatever form community radio will take over the next 5-10 years. Watch this space, the world is about to change again, and not in the way most podcasters are expecting.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the Daily Source Code, and would love to have it on our radio station, but really, it’s still just community radio.