1000 true fans? Bullshit

This blog is bullshit. Having 1000 true fans or around that many for a musician like Robert Rich(link), lets him earn about as much as a local garbage man. The writer of the case against 1000 true fans writes about specific situations where artists earn a certain amount from their true fans. The numbers are dauntingly small and prove that the case against 1000 fans and the problems with theories on surviving with 1000 fans are all true. There is not a way to survive on just having 1000 fans. Even major label pop artists end up in deals where they have no money and don’t break even. Are you that much better than the best? Your probably full of shit.

Robert Rich writes an article that pretty much goes exactly along the lines that I would expect. I feel very badly a person as smart as this man seems makes what he does and I believe he probably deserves more and would get more if people weren't thieves, but as he says that is almost a completely different argument since there is nothing to be done about that. What can be done in the case of 1000 is either getting more fans to support your art full time or not do your art full time. Everyone would define true fan as something different. The artist pulling 150000 a year defines a true fan as someone who give 150 a year, but the author in the table from, “the case against,” considers a true fan someone who gives 10$. Why is that. Does the author have a lower cost within his craft? Im pretty sure expenses would be similar for both arts if i were to argue them. If a painter has at least 1000 people paying at least 150 a year for their work, they probably are a very well known artist. This is an unfair comparison on the same chart as other types of art.

Musicians who are within some part of the old system, whether it be loans from investors, record label contracts or any of the other million contracts there are, are always having a hard time making money. You have to be so lucky, you have to make really good music, and you have to have people like you, alot of people. No record label exec. knows what the fuck is going on anymore, they want you to prove that you will sell your music and make them money on their record label first.

John Scalzi is also write. He writes for a blog and talks about how he has an audience on his website of about 30-40 thousand a day. He has spent many years doing many different things to become such a self made man.(ie:over ten years), as well as writing and selling of course many many books, over 100000 books in 2007 alone. One of his points that sticks out the most to me is when he talks about not getting the money that fans actually shell out. Especially in music if 100 dollars was given to an artist in the old system which is still much of the new system, because of debts, commissions, and costs, the actually cash ever seen may be as much as $20 or as little as less than nothing. Most musicians lose money every time.

I think most people agree with me. 1000 true fans is not enough. You need 1000 true fans to get you more than 1000 more good fans and more than 2000 good fans to get you another 10000 people to be well interested and that 10000 people to mention you to 200000 more of their friends, and so on. Good luck. If youre an artist like me, were all fucked.

The Long Tail-Criticism

The Long Tail,is a blog that refers to extremely large market on the internet for things that can not be found in stores. Specifically music and books that aren’t carried in music stores or book stores. This market is reportedly even bigger than the market of products available in stores. The long tail talks about how this is good for the industry but does completely change how it works. Because of the way selling internet music works, our market has turned to a much more singles based market. Many people have different views on how we go about selling the singles and the prices of them, but to me as things are, they seem fair. 1 song on a ten song album should be one tenth the price of the album. Many people, who dont really know the costs of working in the music industry think the current prices are bad, but in this long tail/ trail off in the market, one must remember that the little pays the price for their music. I am a perfect example.

The long tail specifically says that in order to intice more customers in a hard economy, they should lower their record prices. The author give an example of an artist who sells 300000 records. This is not the long tail. If you sell 300000 records you are recognized with a gold disc in the industry. The author states creative costs to be around 7.50 a disc for this CD. What they dont realized is that the artist only recieves around 7$ for every cd on itunes anyway. Forget the fact that that band wont break even on selling cds, the left over money after creative costs in make a cd that sells that much has already gone into promotion. The views expressed by the writer of this article in this paragraph clearly demonstrates that the author has no business in the record business. He is completely contradicting the idea of the long trail with this idea.

Lisa Dicarlucci also raises some points in an editorial that she wrote.

She talks about how people will just steal music illegally just as conveniently as buying it if itunes continues to anger people with raised prices. The people this affects most are the artists within the long tail. She asks why would apple want to punish the people who support them. It was Apple who was forced by the music industry to raise prices and she even quoted Steve Jobs talking about how it was the record industry pushing him to raise prices. The prices were raised however, due to the fact that apple would not change how much they wanted to take for each song sold. What I think is most interesting about her article is that she calls the price increases selfish. They arent selfish to the people who are still not making money off of records. Which is most people, including the 90% of artists signed to major record labels who dont break even off of their records. I think consumers are selfish. Has anyone ever not bought a candy bar because it was 99 cents instead of 70 cents?

I am a member of a band that has $20000 on a recent record. This is small change in the record industry. We also spend thousands and thousands of dollars on equiptment, rent, cds, merch, transportation, and many other things. The long sucks and we are definatly in it. Artists appreciate the long tail but after years of most would tell you that 1 stream a month on rhapsody from a cd you came out with years ago, is a good as none. The hit economy is decided by the big guys in suits, and it will continue to be that way, because they have the money, and they decide how to spend it. Records dont just get big becuase they say so though. They put far, far more money into records that flop.

I dislike people who steal so much music because they cant put up with the prices. CD sales are down, prices are down, recording costs are higher, and the ability to make money is harder. What educated person would say that a $10 cd that an artist sees so little of, is too much. People get rich off of music because people are willing to buy it. Not because its priced so high. My cd is same price a million other cds. And the cds that go platinum? They have had way more money into getting the disc to sell that much. I think its the consumers who are selfish and cheap.

IRAN ON TWITTER

Micro-blogging a Revolution

For those of you who don’t regularly tweet their everyday lives. It may surprise you that the network, Twitter, where your friends frequently tell you of their trips to the grocery store, is now one of the greatest sources of communication in Iran to send messages quickly to many people. The conflict involving the election has spun out of hand to the point of violent clashes between riot police and protesters are resulting in many people being injured or killed. Iran, a country that is infamous for it’s censorship of the internet has been cutting phone lines as well as filtering the internet of the whole country, They have attempted to continue their censorship throughout the current Iranian conflict, but people continue to find ways onto the internet and access twitter to communicate.

LaraABCnews tweets, “source: they are beating people severely. helicopters all over the city finding protesters & telling guards so they go attack #iranelection.” #iranelection is an identifying tag that lets anyone looking for any information on the conflict search for it. The technique of using the number symbol in from of an important word is common among twitter users in order to group together tweets on the same subject.

Via @dougjohnston006 ”RT from Iran:Secret Service destroying archives, accounting papers showing money sent to outside of Iran (4 hrs ago) #iranelection TRU?” This is a tweet from a twitter.com user who frequently writes specific tweets of information about how to not get caught using the internet in Iran, and on other issues deep within the conflict. I was able to find this, not hugely followed twitter account specifically from the search engines used to help link people up with information that they want on twitter. This is a prime example of how important this site can be to people in many different ways.

Twitter is used for more than just communication in Iran. People can use twitter to direct people to other information and movements throughout the internet. Via @Twitteriran”Washington Times claims Obama sent letter to Khamenei before the election http://bit.ly/S6iGN #Iranelection.” This tweet by user “twitteriran” shows a common method of tweeting links to other information on the net.

There are webiste completly devoted to following this conflict within twitter. One such site is cnnfail.com This site was created after many people felt that CNN had failed to do its job on covering the conflict. This resulted in Twitterers creating another grouping of tweets under #cnnfail. Fail is often used as word to signify complaints on a company.

With this conflict, twitter has found a niche in online communication that other, “social networking” websites have failed to do. Twitter has become a tool for a movement. The internet has become enough of a network of ordinary people for the whole world to easily watch a revolution going on through the eyes of other ordinary people. Many new inventions like this often find uses other than their original intentions.

BLOG 2Tim O’Reilly: “Obscurity is a far greater threat...than Piracy"

According to Tim O’Reilly, in 2002, there are many things that publishers have to fear, but piracy is not one of them. Piracy, he says, is more like promotion and often leads to readers purchasing more material, as well turning consumers on to more obscure interests in music, film, and literature. Even Tim O’Reilly himself, an author and publisher, has found this true when purchasing music that he otherwise would not have known. He found he new interests when his daughter had stumbled across music he liked when she was downloading illegally. I agree with this view as well as others of his, which state that piracy is a “progressive taxation.” This means that as artists become more well known and wealthy, their piracy rates may go up, but the piracy itself is almost a form of free marketing leading to more consumer interest in whatever art form it may be.

On TorrentFreak.com, blogger “Smaran”,writes about Paulo Coelho, Author of “The Alchemist.” “Smaran” talks about how Coelho created his own site leading to a boost in the sales of his own novels. By letting people download, and preview the books, he has become wore well known by having more readers leading to more direct word of mouth buzz. This directly proves O’Reilly’s belief in than piracy can be a way to invite more people to view whatever is being pirated.

Mr O’Reilly also finds that in many situations consumers in his industry are some of the main enforcers of anti-piracy. He receives multiple emails a day reporting people pirating on file sharing networks but truly believes that a single stolen copy in a retail environment can cause more issues. What might happen from single stolen copy may be a retailer not ordering more copies of a book due to their systems still showing stock. This could be a single ghost book in their store that was actually stolen at one point.

I personally have seen this happen in the retail environment. Stealing is a far larger problem in most retail environments than most people realize and can lead to many inventory issues including being under-stocked, or not stocked at all with certain products.

The last points made by O’Reilly state that eventually most “free” services are replaced by better, pay services, and that there are many new ways to display the products and information we have on the internet. The more ways that we give out information and products at a fair price, the more choices people can make about what is best for them. His examples or better non pay services include: paying for cable television services when there are free channels over the air, or how peer-to-peer UUCP internet can be obtained for free instead of over ISP networks.

Most people would have a hard time disagreeing with these last two points in the fact that there are very few people who even know how to get free peer-to-peer networks over the phone lines, and almost as few people who still use antennas for their televisions.

Seth Weintraub, who writes for computerworld.com, agrees that if companies are using fair prices,then people will pay for the music they have available on the web. He makes a point that the largest retailer for music right now, iTunes, is actually charging more than other online retailers like Amazon for the same music. He believes that if people dont like the pricing then they will either walk away and not buy it, or steal the music they want.

I agree with Tim O’Reilly when he says that obscurity is worse than the piracy that is happening right now. There are so many ways to effectively reach people and piracy itself has proved to be one of them. However, if a retailer wants to sell things electronically, it can also be agreed that people are far more likely to spend money when they think the prices are reasonable.

Works Cited

O’Reilly, Tim. “Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution.” openp2p.com. 12/11/2002, 6/17/2009. <http://www.openp2p.com/lpt/a/3015

Smaran, “Alchemist Austhor Pirates HIs Own Books.” torentfreak.com. 1/24/2008, 6/17/2009. http://torrentfreak.com/alchemist-author-pirates-own-books-080124)_

Weintraub, Seth. “Is all fair in Apple’s iTunes $1.29 variable pricing?” blogs.computerworld.com. 4/7/2009. 6/17/2009. <(http://blogs.computerworld.com/itunes_amazon_apple_variable_pricing_store_99_cents)

Facebook is bad for you

James Clarke

Sean Fitzroy

CSI 110

June 10, 2009

Facebook

Facebook, as far as everyone is concerned is currently the ultimate online personal networking application. I use it, everyone I know uses it, and it is considered odd if you don't. My mother's friends talk about it at dinner parties, and joke how they have contacted their good old, long lost friends. I know many people, including myself who use it for personal use as well as promotions use for either a business, or a band or something else. I don't know how many people will admit this, but every-time I get on Facebook, I cringe with hatred. There is something about impersonal communication that is so useful yet so impersonal that having enough free time to sit in front of a computer, looking up your friend's pictures from their beach trip seems unhealthy. There are multiple interesting issues and all around problems with using this extremely popular service, which can result in a total addiction to the service, or for me, force you to despise it.

If you are to type ,”Facebook disorders,” into google, you can find multiple articles written about FAD, or, Facebook Addiction disorder. Last year, Idris Mootee wrote about Facebook in a blog about internet addiction. Her article, while mostly satirical, had some very interesting comments written at the bottom. A girl who commented on this specific blog, posted about her addiction to Facebook openly. She even wrote about creating a Facebook group about being addicted to Facebook. The purpose of the group she says is to try to focus on other things in their life other than Facebook. This to me seems crazy to me on many levels.

Addiction to the internet is not something that is undocumented. Dr. Dannon, a doctor well known worldwide for his work in gambling and addiction has studied addictions to the internet believes that we need to look at it differently. Many proffesionals look at the issue as a type of obsesive compulsive disorder.

According to Dr. Dannon these addictions are just like anyones addiction, “to coffee, exercise, or talking on their cell phone. As times change, so do our addictions.”

Something crazy to me is that I have found myself excited when someone who I haven't spoken to in a while, comments on a photo or posts something on my Facebook “wall.” It would seem that the excitement comes from the thought of a friend thinking about me. It would also seem that they were by themselves at one point on their computer looking at pictures of me. This creeps me out a little bit and may be where the term “Facebook-creeper” came from. I have encountered this term in multiple situations. One situation was when a girl who I was interested in at the time commented on a picture of mine on Facebook. She said that she hoped I didn't think she was a Facebook-creeper. Well, obviously she seemed like one to me, but what other point does Facebook exist for. Creeping on some band, some fans, some friend, an ex-friend, a future girlfriend, an ex-girlfriend, a cheating girlfriend, these are the ultimate purpose of this application. It would seem to me that an addiction to Facebook is different from any other addiction on the internet. FAD, in my eyes, an addiction to creeping or stalking.

If I must use it there are a few things that I wish could be changed. I feel that there are a few features that I ultimately have to go to another web application to find. I greatly dislike how there is no music streaming on Facebook. They promote band pages and groups but to network and find music and then listen to it, you must leave Facebook and either go to Purevolume.com or venture over to the good old myspace.com. I feel that that is the only reason I still, as well others, use myspace. Myspace.com is full of fake accounts and spam that seems to only want to steal my information. Facebook, I am sure has its fair share of malware but seems to be less malicious. I also wish facebook looked better. Its hard to figure out what is going on on all the different pages and is often way to cluttered. The simpler everything looks, in my opinion, the better.

While it may seem that Facebook is the end-all and best social networking application on the internet, I still feel there is room for competition and growth. There are problems with the usability, along with the addictions to Facebook as well. I predict that while the user experience will get “better,” more and more people will find themselves attached to the site along with others on the internet and our society will find addiction to the web more and more of a problem.

Work Cited

Futurelab Blog. May 31, 2008. “Are you suffering from Facebook addiction disorder?” By Idris Mootee. Accessed June 10, 2008

Blog.futurelab.net/2008/05/are_you_suffering_from_faceboo.html

Psych Central. August 20,2007. “Internet Obsession or Addiction.” By Rick Nauert

Accessed June 10, 2008

http://psychcentral.com/news/2007/08/18/internet-obsession-or-addiction/1152.html

Blogs

This is a blog that will be used when I see fit.....most likely only when I have to write something for class and never else. I think and talk to fast to take the time to write/type it for others to read.

-chillin