Digital – Page 6 – Leaps And Bounds

Category: Digital

05
May
2009

Trent Reznor: A primer

We haven’t really listened to his music since the Downward Spiral. But we still follow Trent Reznor’s career as a pioneer in the digital playground. The man is in the press a lot. So, follow us as we take a stroll through some of Trent Reznor’s other greatest hits.

1. NIN Access – the Nine Inch Nails iPhone App. It’s pretty great actually. Solid, well made, with plenty of news, videos, forums, messages and more. Pioneering but not groundbreaking, this app is so fantastically functional it should be standard for bands.

2. Even after the success of the app, he’s not resting quiet. Just this week, he’s been a vocal critic of Apple’s app store rejection policies.

3. Attacking Chris Cornell on Twitter. The man even uses the latest tech to insult his contemporaries. The full tweet -“You know that feeling you get when somebody embarrasses themselves so badly YOU feel uncomfortable? Heard Chris Cornell’s record? Jesus,”.

4. Forget a t-shirt or a sticker. The tie-in for the album Year Zero was a video game.

5. He’s going to go down as a pioneer of direct-to-fan packages. His last album, the Slip, was announced on his website and sold 250K limited edition versions.

6. Beyond the deluxe versions, he offers his albums five different audio formats. The lowest quality is VBR V0 MP3, followed by two lossless formats, FLAC and Apple Lossless. Also released were 24-bit, 96 kHz FLAC and WAV files. And why the hell not.

7. He produced Saul William’s 2007 album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! He also distributed by his standard new age method. It was offered both for free in a low quality version and a paid version for high quality. And complained loudly when no one paid for the better one.

8. When he saw the prices of the CDs in Australia, he openly attacked his record company from the stage. He actively encouraged his fans to steal his music. The man is a rebel.

9. Alongside the regular studio albums, there’s more experimental pieces like Ghosts I-IV and remix albums like Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D

10. Hey, and somehow the man found time to get engaged to his sweetheart Mariqueen Maandig of West Indian Girl (and looks like he saw the Star Trek movie too).

Bonus 11th point! His new collaboration with Jane’s Addiction is called…NINJA. So great.

So, Trent Reznor, we salute you for being such a crazy new age old coot. Congratulations for the wedding. Give us more madness soon.

04
May
2009

Who are the stars of Twitter?

categories: Digital, music

Ashton Kutcher made headlines by beating CNN to a million followers on Twitter. But who are the music stars on Twitter?

Britney Spears has blitzed the 1 million mark right behind Kutcher and CNN. Today she is on 1.307,497 followers. Other stars?

As of May 4th, 2009 – John Mayer comes close with 948,413, P Diddy has 804,531 Coldplay sits on 722,533. We couldn’t find any other musicians over the half a million mark other than Dave Matthews who has 558,618. Trent Reznor bubbles just under at 438,868.

(Can you find anymore? Please let us know in comments).

It doesn’t bode well for Twitter being a place to discover music, especially new music. Even artists considered to cutting edge, like Lily Allen, hasn’t broken the 100K mark. The stars on Twitter seem to be existing megastars – not the next breaking wave, like in Myspace.

And of course, many of those megastar acts don’t have Myspace. U2, Kings Of Leon, Metallica and Radiohead are represented by fan twitters. The Killer’s ‘official’ page has but one post, four months old. There’s a big gap, and music fans on Twitter are bound to have a unsatisfactory experience.

This comes hot on the heels of the news that Twitter is not shaping up to be the future. News this week shows that 60% of Twitter’s audience do not return to the site in the following month. In short, not much is happening on there.

What will come of it now? It seems that almost everyone has heard of Twitter by now, but how does it explain it’s low numbers, and lack of activity?

Maybe Facebook and Google both made the right call to NOT buy Twitter…

Britney Spears –http://twitter.com/britneyspears
John Mayer –http://twitter.com/johncmayer
P Diddy – http://twitter.com/iamdiddy
Coldplay – http://twitter.com/coldplay
Dave Matthews – http://twitter.com/DaveJMatthews
Trent Reznor –http://twitter.com/trent_reznor

(An aside – my twitter – http://twitter.com/yauami – seems to have more and more spam followers. Something’s got to give)

17
Apr
2009

…And the Law Won…?

categories: Digital, technology

In a landmark verdict in Sweden today, four men behind the number one P2P/Torrent website Pirate Bay, have been sentenced to one year in prison and £2.4 million in damages.

However, the four men, Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde, plan to appeal the verdict and remain in high spirits – even joking on Twitter. The case, being trailed in Sweden, has been a small circus. The men behind Pirate Bay (or, as I will now call them, the Pirates) have had the support of some of the public. They are playing the rebel card against big bad corporations.

Today’s verdict, which many people saw as a lot harsher than expected, seems to shatter that image. Fact of the matter is Pirate Bay made these pirates very, very rich men. On the back of content, and the eyeballs of their users, for which they clearly care nothing about.

It’s a turning point in the history of digital music. And once again, it is Sweden who is leading the charge. As the Pirates fight on technicalities such as not having anything illegal on their servers, it’s clear that everyone knows what they are doing and their intentions.

(As an aisde – cloud computing will be the big event of the next 24 months. Having anything on your servers at all could soon be irrelevant)

Some of the world’s media, and the people questioned by the media, remain pessimistic. Kill one, and another takes it’s place. The fall of Napster did nothing to turn the tide. But the people behind Napster did not go to prison.

This is a good thing. Our music, our games, our movies, have been devalued too much now. But with services like the BBC iPlayer and Spotify (also Swedish) making free access to great content a legal viability, there’s no reason free can’t be associated again with ‘high quality’, ‘official’ and ‘artist’. Enjoying music should not be a irty, potentially illegal thing. It doesn’t have to be.

The fight is to push priacy to the margins. The Pirate Bay servers are not in Sweden and it’s a loophole that will allow the site to continue operations. But the verdict sets a precedent for the EU, and perhaps the world. Pirate Bay offers a $6US service that hides your IP address. But once it becaomes not free – it loses all it’s glamour.

In the end though, another one will pop up. Just as there were always bootleg labels in the vinyl era, and the CD era. So much – music, movies, TV and more – is simply not available anywhere else. This whole thing got started because someone really wanted to experience something – be it a song or a film. and that person is still going to be unhappy after today.

Today, the first Pirate Bay server box resides in a museum in Stockholm. Today, it’s begins it’s journey as a relic of the past.