u l t r a m o o k i e

Update: Disregard this post. Sony BMG has come to their senses and are going to be offering their non-DRM music through Amazon’s MP3 Store.
In what maybe the biggest backasswards way of selling digital music, Sony BMG detailed their plans on how they will sell DRM-free music: In retail stores only. What [...]

Update: Disregard this post. Sony BMG has come to their senses and are going to be offering their non-DRM music through Amazon’s MP3 Store.

In what maybe the biggest backasswards way of selling digital music, Sony BMG detailed their plans on how they will sell DRM-free music: In retail stores only. What the hell?

So, it is really possible that Sony BMG will be able to “sell out” of MP3s! Wow! That is just brilliant. Here’s how Sony BMG wants to sell digital music:

1. You decide you want to buy a Sony BMG album
2. You get in your car
3. Drive to Best Buy
4. Buy a $12.99 “Platinum Music Pass”
5. Drive Home
6. Log into the Sony website
7. Punch in the code from your card
8. Download music

That has got to be the most idiotic way of selling digital music ever. People buy digital music because it is convenient and easy to get (not to mention makes for an excellent impulse buy). By inserting steps 2-7, Sony has just eliminated the convenience and easy of digital music. And on top of that, they are charging a lot more per digital album than either Amazon or iTunes. Someone’s ass needs to get kicked for putting together such a “brilliant” plan.

Sony BMG feels “strongly that there’s a group that will enjoy carrying the imagery of an artist they love around with them, or sharing it with their friends.” Yea, you know what Sony BMG? With gas prices so high, I’d rather not buy your music than to pay $12.99 and gas to get a digital download. I could care less about “carrying the imagery of an artist I love around with me. Thanks, but no thanks.

Lets not forget about the unnecessary damage that is caused to the environment because of this scheme:

• The trees cut down to print the card backings
• The plastic cards that contain codes which are going to be tossed in the trash
• The fuel needed for the trucks to bring all this stuff to the stores
• The fuel needed for a consumer to drive to and from a store to buy a card

If only the management at Sony BMG “got it”…

I never really bought much music from the iTunes Store. Yes, I have bought singles when I really wanted the song, but usually, I don’t buy music from the iTunes Store — mostly because I like listening to movie scores and the quality of the music sold at the iTunes Store exhibit artifacts (yes, [...]

I never really bought much music from the iTunes Store. Yes, I have bought singles when I really wanted the song, but usually, I don’t buy music from the iTunes Store — mostly because I like listening to movie scores and the quality of the music sold at the iTunes Store exhibit artifacts (yes, I can hear the difference between a 128kbps AAC and a 256kbps MP3). The iTunes Store’s non-DRM AAC files do sound excellent though at 256kbps. Instead of buying music from the iTunes Store, I have been buying CDs from Amazon and then ripping them to get the best quality.

Now that Amazon’s MP3 store has gone live and I have gotten a chance to buy some music from it, I realize that this is how things are supposed to be for digital music. Even though I love my iPhone and my iPods, I still have other equipment — like the CD changer in my Lexus — that play only MP3s (oh, ok and those rascally WMA files too). My Lexus doesn’t play AAC and it sure as hell don’t play FairPlay “protected” AAC files. So, if I bought non-DRM music from the iTunes Store, I would still have to burn it to a disc and rip it as a MP3.

So, if I have a craving for music and I just want to get one song — or now even an album — I will look at Amazon first. Not only will Amazon give me the option of being able to buy the music as a non-DRM MP3, but if I can’t find it, I can always get it on a CD and rip it when the CD arrives. The catalog at Amazon is not as deep as the one in the iTunes Store. The depth of the iTunes Store is mostly made up of DRM’d music, which I’d have to burn to a disc then rip in order to listen to in the car (more hassle than if I bought a CD from Amazon and ripped it, plus the audio quality still suffers with burning a 128kbps AAC file to a disc then ripping in a different lossy format). Hopefully as labels start to sell music without DRM, they will start to seed Amazon and other online digital music stores with high quality and better priced music in MP3 format — the format that they should have been selling music in from the beginning.

I haven’t done a geeky “vs” photo shoot in a while — so, without further ado, here’s the iPhone vs. iPod touch photo shoot.

I haven’t done a geeky “vs” photo shoot in a while — so, without further ado, here’s the iPhone vs. iPod touch photo shoot.

One little speaker makes such a huge difference.  The iPod touch is a great little media player, but the iPhone is a lot better.  Why?  One little speaker at the bottom of the iPhone.  That speaker is great because I don’t have to strap on my headphones.  And, if you’re a Zune kinda person, that [...]

One little speaker makes such a huge difference.  The iPod touch is a great little media player, but the iPhone is a lot better.  Why?  One little speaker at the bottom of the iPhone.  That speaker is great because I don’t have to strap on my headphones.  And, if you’re a Zune kinda person, that little speaker gives new meaning to the word “Social”.  The little speaker lets me share my media with ease.  I wish all iPods had little speakers on them.

Yes, I have an iPhone. I have had one for a week now — my lovely wife gave the iPhone to me as an early Christmas present! Isn’t she the best?? The acceptance of the iPhone is a complete reversal from my anti-iPhone attitude of earlier months.
So, here were some of my [...]

Yes, I have an iPhone. I have had one for a week now — my lovely wife gave the iPhone to me as an early Christmas present! Isn’t she the best?? The acceptance of the iPhone is a complete reversal from my anti-iPhone attitude of earlier months.

So, here were some of my beefs from previous postings, and some corrections (ie. me eating my words) or “still beefs”:

• Customers need to escape from their contracts to get an iPhone since the iPhone requires AT&T service. Our family plan with T-Mobile had been on a month-to-month basis for almost a year now, so that was not a biggie.
• iPhone costs too much. This was a beef when the 8GB iPhone was $600 and the 4GB iPhone was $500. Now that Apple has dropped the price of the 8GB iPhone to $400, it is not as big of a price pill to swallow (still expensive though) — I bought the very first generation iPod (ah, five whole gigabytes and six years ago) for the same price, but, the iPhone provides a helluvalot more functionality.
• No 3G on the iPhone. This is still a beef, but thank goodness for WiFi — I have WiFi access in all the regular places I am at (home, work, parents, Eileen’s work, etc), so that helps. I also have free AT&T WiFi access because of our DSL package. But, still EDGE access is pretty darned slow and that can’t be overlooked.
• “How can I buy music through the iPhone?” You can’t. You can now.
• Non-user replaceable battery. This is still a beef.
• Screen will scratch up easily. After owning an iPod touch (which is going up on Ebay soon), I have been corrected on this one. The glass screen on the iPod touch and iPhone are really resistant to scratching (unless you carry diamonds in your pocket).
• The iPhone is gonna weight more than a Windows Mobile device and pull down my pants like a Treo. Wrong again on my part. The iPhone is very light — not plastic toy-like light, but it has enough weight to make it feel solid, yet not “heavy”.

What got my wife and I really interested in the iPhone was the iPod touch — jailbroken and running iPhone applications, that is. Steve Jobs really did a number by removing the iPhone applications — especially Mail.app — from the iPod touch. Sure, the iPod touch has Safari and that can be used to check webmail, but the total convenience of Mail.app is indescribable. It really does make a difference. The other apps are also pretty cool; Weather and Stocks by Yahoo!; Google Maps by Google. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying, “The iPod touch is training wheels for the iPhone.” After using both the iPod touch and iPhone, I agree with him. Did the iPod touch have to be training wheels for the iPhone? No. Steve Jobs orchestrated it so that people who used the iPod touch only got a small taste of what the iPhone could do (I don’t believe him when he says the applications were not included just because the iPod touch is a “music” device) — and if they were interested, they would “trade up”. Good business strategy on Jobs’ part.

Let me get this out though: The iPhone is not the perfect mobile device. It has a bunch of flaws: No cut & paste, no Flash support in Safari, it crashes, and other minor things. But, what it does, it does really well — and it is a mobile device that will change the way other mobile device makers think when they start designing iPhone-killers. My SonyEricsson w810i was a great phone and it did everything the iPhone did: Mail client, Web client, music, video, camera, and other things. But, the iPhone just does it much better. The virtual keyboard works great, a lot better than the chiclet keyboard on the Treo, and on-par with the spacious keyboard on the Sidekick II. iTunes syncing makes a big difference when it comes to music management (since I am an iTunes using guy). The camera on the iPhone is not as good as the auto-focus on the SonyEricsson though.

After a week with the iPhone, am I happy? Damn straight, it is the best mobile device I have ever used — and I have gone through a bunch of mobile devices, some of them smartphones too (Nokia 6682, Treo 600, Sidekick II), none of them match the iPhone. I eat my words from my previous posting doubting the iPhone. I have been converted.

Update: I forgot to mention stuff about how I carry the iPhone around. I know people that carry the thing “naked” in their jean pockets with their keys and wallet and stuff. I’m a little paranoid about that (even though I know the screen is pretty scratch resistant). So, for the last week, I have been carrying it around in my old orange Timbuk2 Accessory Case (no longer available). I was looking for a really good case for my iPhone all week long and had been thinking about two: Agent 18 Eco iPhone Shield and the Contour Showcase for iPhone. The Agent 18 got shot down after I found reports that the case scratches the chrome on the iPhone face. The Showcase is really, really nice, but I like being able to hold my iPhone without a case around it. Finally, I found the Sena Ultraslim iPhone Pouch. Perfect case for my iPhone. Eileen picked one up for me today, the case fits the iPhone like a glove and works great.

I’ve always held that music label executives are idiots. There’s an interesting article in this month’s Wired which features Universal Music Group’s CEO Doug Morris (who famously complained that MP3 players are “repositories for stolen music”). While I have no doubt that Morris was (notice past tense) a genius when it comes to [...]

I’ve always held that music label executives are idiots. There’s an interesting article in this month’s Wired which features Universal Music Group’s CEO Doug Morris (who famously complained that MP3 players are “repositories for stolen music”). While I have no doubt that Morris was (notice past tense) a genius when it comes to cultivating musical talent, he really is a dim-wit when it comes to the digital age — and I think it goes to show why in 2006, music sales have dropped off 10%.

Here’s one of the best quotes from Morris out of the article:

“If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go, that’s what happened to the record business.” (Wired, December 2007, page 206).

Instead of the fanciful example as Morris gives, lets get back the reality (where apparently, most of us live). Water flows through the faucet in kitchens. Yet, the bottled water industry is an $11 billion industry. Are you reading that Morris? $11 billion (as in “b” not “m”). So, given this clear example that is grounded in reality, why is music sales dropping?

Greed? “Our strategy is to have the people who create great music be paid properly,” Morris says. “We need to protect the music. I know that.”

Stupidity? “There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist,” Morris explains. “That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?” (Uh, take the dog to the vet?)

Inability to see that consumers go for what is convenient? People walking down the street on a hot day will stop at a 7-Eleven to buy a cold bottled water because it is convenient. People use MP3 players because it is convenient. When you lock up content with DRM and make that DRM compatible with only certain devices (iPods, Zunes, Plays-for-Almost-Sure, etc), that makes it inconvenient to the consumer — and they don’t buy.

So, whatever the reason, it really does come down to the fact that music label executives are idiots living in the past.

I’m still around! Yay!
I’m reading World War Z. I’m listening to Doctor Who’s soundtrack.
World War Z is a pretty cool book about zombies. Cool yet scary.

I’m still around! Yay!

I’m reading World War Z. I’m listening to Doctor Who’s soundtrack.

World War Z is a pretty cool book about zombies. Cool yet scary.