July 2005 Archives

I just noticed that this past week marks two years since I started this weblog.

I've posted 463 entries, which averages out to more than four posts a week, and the site is getting somewhere around 500 visits a day.

While that certainly doesn't rank up with the most popular blogs, it's nice to have a place to share thoughts, and it's really great that people are interested enough to take the time to read them (and occasionally share comments).

I only wish I had the time to write more - there's certainly no shortage of interesting topics to ponder!

The UW Daily obtained the details of the University's deal with Dell and Napster to offer Napster services for the students in the residence halls this fall.

The article by Kayla Webley is here.

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus Blog has this to say:

How much does a college have to pay to give its students an academic year's worth of legal music downloads? Not quite as much as you might think.

As part of a deal announced earlier this month, the University of Washington at Seattle will fork over $24,000 to Napster, the online music service, to provide students living on campus with eight-month subscriptions. The money will come from royalties generated by the university's own technology licenses. The price tag isn't cheap, but it's not terrible for a university with almost 6,000 residential students: According to most estimates, colleges can expect to pay $2 or $3 a month for each student who signs up.

Ashlee Vance in The Register, on the other hand, is outraged, in a story headlined "University bans iPod adverts":

But here's the real rub.

So students have been put on a music meat market where they're being force fed a service that doesn't work with Mac OS X, Linux or even older versions of Windows and that doesn't work with the leading MP3 player. Instead, the kids will have to listen to a sales pitch for Dell's embarrassing device and nothing else.

Not that Ashlee ever actually checked with the University to see what really is going on here - he prefers to get all his information second hand.

And not that he's got an opinion to grind here - but you might want to check his other stories:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/21/dell_land_nc/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/12/dell_nc_photos/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/06/dell_napster_college/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/02/cornell_apple_shame/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/12/ou_napster_tax/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/08/apple_napster_letters/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/09/napster_rochester_survey/

Just for the record, Ashlee - the exclusive promotion on the Dell DJ is within the Napster / Dell deal.

As we've told every one of the dozens of reporters who've called us about this story (As far as I know Ashlee has not called), we have been talking to Apple about possible ways we might leverage the iTunes Music Store for our campus population. If Apple comes up with a program that makes it possible for us to offer iTunes music to our students at any affordable pricing, we'll be very happy to participate. So far Apple don't seem to be very interested in the university market (perhaps the advantage of being the market leader by a long shot).

As everyone probably knows, I'm certainly not a fan of copy-protected music that only runs on one operating system or one type of portable player. I know from talking to them that the folks at Napster would be very happy to make their content available on iPods, if Apple was willing to offer them the copy-protection that they use (and that the record labels require). I also assume that Dell would likewise be happy to put iTunes Music Store content on their DJ players, if Apple would make that possible.

I'm just as sick and tired as the next guy of online music being locked up in such a way that makes the only good choice to go buy CDs and rip them myself (though even CD's are being copy protected now). But I think Apple's just as guilty as Napster and the others.

And at least Napster is interested in our business.

What is NINJAM?

NINJAM uses compressed audio which allows it to work with any instrument or combination of instruments. You can sing, play a real piano, play a real saxophone, play a real guitar with whatever effects and guitar amplifier you want, anything. If your computer can record it, then you can jam with it (as opposed to MIDI-only systems that automatically preclude any kind of natural audio collaboration).

I can't wait to try it out!

Despite the presence of some of my favorite folks in higher-ed IT leadership (Vijay Kumar, MIT's Phil Long, Ruth Sabean, Kathy Christoph, etc) the day-long Syllabus Executive Forum didn't seem terribly enlightening to me.

If I hear one more IT person say that faculty rewards and promotion systems should change to recognize use of technology in teaching I think I'll scream.

Phil did make one point that resonated with me about how our in trying to perfect the services that organizations offer we can do all the right things in listening to clients, managing processes, and measuring quality, and totally miss the next big development that will cause disruptive change.

He pointed out "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Harvard prof Clayton M. Christensen which I picked up yesterday.

I'm in LA (Hollywood, to be precise) for the Syllabus 2005 Excecutive Summit tomorrow (Sunday), at the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel.

The last time I was in Hollywood was when we lived close to here in the early '80s. In true LA fashion, despite being in the middle of the city, this conference is in a huge hotel which is attached to a theme mall (HOLLYWOOD AND VINE) so you never actually have to go out on the street.

I'm sad to say that given how burned out I am at the moment, that suits me just fine - having a drink and watching baseball highlights in the hotel room is just my speed this evening.

Syllabus is a big higher education computing trade show that I've never been to before. Topics for the Executive summit include serving student populations, aligning IT with institutional goals, and information security as a strategic issue.

Unfortunately, I won't see any of the rest of the conference as I fly back to Seattle tomorrow night.

I'll try to blog as possible during the day tomorrow.

KEXP, Seattle's wonderful independent non-commercial popular music station has begun KEXP.

The first two podcasts are a roundup of some local Northwest US music from KEXP DJ John Richards and a live, in-studio appearance by Seattle hip-hop group Boom Bap Project.

They're both available by searching "kexp" in the podcasting section of iTunes or from the KEXP podcasting page.

Congrats to Tom Mara, Kevin Cole, and the whole KEXP crew. While the technology behind podcasting is simple, securing the rights to share music with audiences this way is anything but.

A bunch of family and friends went out last night to St. Edwards State Park in Kenmore to hear Issa Bagayogo play at the Kenmore Summer Concert Series. Issa, a Malian kora player who uses techno elements in his music, and his band were great, and it was a lovely summer evening to be outside in beautiful surroundings with folks.

Issa will be playing live in the KEXP radio studio today at noon Pacific (90.3 FM in Seattle).

There are still two more concerts in this free series, Thursdays from 6:30 - 8:00 pm. Next week (28 July) is Fiamma Fumana, a group from the Emillian region of Northern Italy that mixes regional folk music with pop and techno elements. We heard them at the Vancouver Folk Fest last year and liked them a lot.

The following week is Janiva Magness (4 August), a young blues artist I don't know anything about, but hey - it's free, it's outside, and it's close by - what more could you ask for?

Finally getting around to reporting on last weekend's Vancouver Folk Festival. Despite having to deal with years of accumulated budget problems Dugg Simpson and his crew put together another stellar lineup.

The surprise hit of the weekend for me was the Jaipur Kawa Brass Band from Rajahstan, India - imagine a 10 piece brass band with snare and bass drummers playing wild Indian music - to my admittedly Western ears it sounded like Ornette Coleman meeting Zakir Hussein. Great extroverted party music! There's a music sample online here.

The Grande Mothers, featuring former Frank Zappa cohorts Roy Estrada, Don Preston, and Napoleon Murphy Brock turned in a sparkling and rocking set of Zappa tunes on Saturday afternoon, including Montana, Trouble Every Day, and a good part of One Size Fits All. I was completely blown away by the way they negotiated the twists and turns of Zappa's compositions while remaining relaxed and rocking. Drummer Chris Garcia was particularly impressive. I was sorry we had to leave before their Sunday afternoon show.

Le Vent du Nord, a fine rollicking group of young Quebecois traditionalists were all over the festival winning people over with great playing (including a hurdy-gurdy!). They hosted a wonderful Sunday afternoon workshop with Michael Jerome Brown and the Twin Rivers String Band and Irish singer Karan Casey.

Other highlights included the Danish fiddle/guitar duo Haugaard & Hoirup (traditional Danish music filtered through a Django Reinhardt influence); good performances by Vancouver chanteuse Veda Hille, including her group Duplex where she gets young kids to write songs about things that matter to them (like how they hate salad); spirited young Australian women in FRUiT (who I thought played and sang great, but could have better songwriting); the return for the second year of the Wailin Jennys (my son Mo's favorite); and Texas songwriter Eliza Gilkyson. Whew!

There was lots more there that I didn't get to see enough of, and I look forward as always to next year.

When we got home I got out all of the CDs I've bought over the last twelve years of artists I've discovered at the Festival and loaded them all into iTunes - 27 hours of wonderful music that I wouldn't have heard otherwise. I'll publish the list somewhere soon.

Monday morning - back from the Vancouver Folk Fest (I'll blog about that tonight).

I'm catching up on some reading while listening to last Friday night's archived KEXP radio show from DJ Michele Myers.

I'm spending some time reading the latests posts Chris Anderson's Long Tail blog - Chris really hits the nail on the head in his post titled Brands - Think People, Not Products.

Chris says:

So, in a Long Tail market, the brands that matter most are the tastemakers. These are the filters you trust, who point you to the niche (or mainstream) stuff you wouldn't have found on your own. And because you trust them, you're willing to follow their recommendations, voyaging down the tail with confidence. In the Long Tail, great filters become brands.

Rings true to me - why am I listening to Michele's show? Because I trust her as a filter to point me to music I will like - and that's the value of having an outlet like KEXP, where her high-quality personal taste can come through so clearly. That's very different from most radio or other mainstream media, where the choice of what goods are exposed is very tightly controlled - what Chris would call a classic Short Tail model.

I call the people who act as these kinds of filters "curators" - they can pick through a huge amount of stuff and decide which items are the most relevant to show to illustrate various points about the art - just like those folks who build up museum shows. And the web allows these curators to add additional value by adding additional comment, and it allows us audience members to further enrich the content and turn it into a conversation. Now that's cool!

I find myself increasingly drawn to people who can peer through the hype surrounding the evolution of technology with a good dose of common sense. Tim Bray is one of those people. So is Mark Cuban (cofounder of broadcast.com and current owner of Landmark Theatres and the Dallas Mavericks basketball team).

Mark has a nice post in his blog about the future of podcasting - worth a quick read:

Finally, when those formally known as podcasters do an accounting of the net dollars they earned and compare it to the time they invested, they will realize they made about 17 cents per hour all in.

So in about 3 years, the Podcast phenomena will have run its course and will just be a normal part of the digital media landscape.

Jennifer brought a Dell Pocket DJ by for us to try out yesterday - it's a 5 GB portable music player, basically Dell's equivalent to the iPod Mini.

I've never had a hard-disk portable player (I do own a couple-year-old Rio flash memory player), so I can't compare directly with an iPod, but thought I'd comment on my experience with the DJ so far.

I charged up the battery (there's a cord that connects the USB port to a wall outlet) and installed the Dell software on my Windows box. The Dell software included both the Dell DJ Explorer and Music Match Jukebox 9.

I then connected the DJ to my box with the included USB cable. The first thing I got was a note saying that data transfers would be faster if I connected to a USB 2.0 port - but unfortunately, my box (which is a couple of years old) only has USB 1.0 ports on it.

I then fired up Napster, to see how it would go transferring music to the DJ from Napster To Go. The first thing I got was a message saying that I had to upgrade the firmware on the DJ so it could support the copy protection scheme used by Napster To Go (Microsoft's amusingly named PlaysForSure). The firmware upgrade went ok after some futzing about (I suspect it would have been smoother if IE was my default browser instead of Firefox).

I was then able to transfer songs easily (if slowly, due the USB 1.0 connection) from Napster to the DJ. I continue to be impressed with the breadth of material available on Napster, and having a subscription-based service (as opposed to paying for each song individually) definitely encourages me to explore artists and whole genres I wouldn't otherwise be exposed to (Zephyr turned me on to Cassia Eller and Maria Rita yesteday).

When I went to transfer some of my mp3 files to the DJ things got a little more complicated. The DJ Explorer software could no longer see the DJ at all. Musicmatch 9 seemed to work, but then crashed so hard it locked up Windows, and the songs it said had been transferred did not show up on the DJ.

I figured these problems were a result of the firmware upgrade, so I went looking for corresponding software upgrades. I couldn't find an upgrade for the Explorer software, but there is an upgrade to Musicmatch Jukebox version 10. Of course it's not easy to find the free version (as opposed to the paid versions that have way more features than I needed) - the free one is here.

Once I had installed Musicmatch 10 and had it index my mp3 collection I could move files onto the DJ easily enough - ahh, sweet success!

The DJ seems pretty easy to use, and it's a great size and weight. The sound on the included earbuds is not great (us bass players tend to like a lot more bottom end), but seems good when played through my Koss The Plug in-the-ear buds.

I did try connecting the DJ to my iMac, where I do have USB 2.0, but the Mac and the DJ refused to even acknowledge each other's existence. That seems unfortunate to me - my Rio works fine on the Mac, and the iPods can work on both platforms (with iTunes software).

I'm assuming that Dell will update the firmware and the included software bundle by the time they start shipping product for school to start in the fall. As long as that's done the attractively priced DJ line will be of interest to those who live in a Windows-only environment.

As I threatened to do in last week, I've taken the list of songs from Nick Hornby's book Songbook (known as 31 Songs outside the US) and compared the availability of the 31 songs he wrote about on Napster and iTunes.

The complete results, and appropriate caveats, are listed here.

The bottom line?

The services are pretty close in coverage, at least for this somewhat random sample of songs at this particular point in time. There was one case of an artist carried on one service but not at all on the other (Ani DiFranco shows up on iTunes but not Napster).

There were two cases where Napster had the specific song but iTunes didn't, but had other songs by the same artists (Van Morrison's Caravan, Pissing in a River by Patti Smith) and two cases the other way around (A Minor Incident by Badly Drawn Boy and The Calvary Cross by Richard and Linda Thompson).

Conclusions?

At least at present I wouldn't pick one of these services over the other based on at least this look at coverage.

I took it - spread the word!

Ok - so it's been so long since I posted that all of the posts have rolled right off the front page of the blog web page! Yikes! It's not just laziness - really!

I was on vacation last week, with my family in and around Monterey. We had a great time - spent an entire afternoon at the Aquarium, a day hiking and peering into tidepools at Point Lobos. We spent a day in the fog on the beach in Pacific Grove (seven year old Mo was the only one willing to brave the 54 degree water), and a day in 100 degree heat hiking at Pinnacles National Monument.

On the way back we stopped off to see the Oregon Caves, which was very impressive indeed.

This week I've been finalizing our campus deal with Napster and Dell - I'm writing a longish post about it, but in the meantime, you can read the Seattle Times story on the deal or listen to me being interviewed about it on KPLU public radio.

It was announced on Wednesday that we've made a deal with Napster and Dell to provide online music for students in the dorms this coming academic year.

This deal came as a result of the UW Daily (our student newspaper) having published a story in May about how we had been having discussions about whether to provide access to a commercial music download service for students. When I spoke with the Daily I had been hoping to get some gauge of student interest in having a commercial music downloading service available.

We didn't get much student response, but Jennifer Clark, our local Dell representative, did read the article and approached us a few days later about our interest in being the first campus to offer this new joint Dell/Napster service. After a frantic couple of months of discussions, we arrived at final agreements last Friday.

So what's in the deal?

Starting this coming fall, students who live in the dorms will be able to sign up for the Napster Premium service for free. This will allow them to use the Napster application to download music to their PC (Windows XP and 2k only) and play it on that computer. The student can authorize up to three computers to play the files. The files are protected with Microsoft's copy protection scheme so that these files cannot be transferred to portable devices or burned to CDs.

For an extra fee, students will be able to register for the Napster-To-Go service, which allows them to transfer tunes to a Napster-certified portable device. Certified devices include the DJs from Dell as well as others from Creative, iRiver, Samsung, etc - but not Apple (one interesting thing to me is that all the companies call these portable devices "mp3 players" even when the music files they're talking about are definitely *not* in mp3 format).

The subscription will be good for the academic year. Over the summer students will be able to play music they downloaded previously, but will only be able to download new music if they pay for an additional summer service.

When the free subscriptions are over, the student will have the option to convert to a paid subscription. Once the student is no longer a subscriber, the songs will not play anymore.

So how do I feel about the deal?

I'll be very curious to see what the reaction is to this service among the student body in the dorms - how many of them sign up, and what the usage is over time once they do sign up.

I've been playing a little bit with the service, and I think the Napster folks are doing a nice job of trying to build a compelling piece of software - the community elements such as messaging and sharing playlists look intriguing, and the library seems pretty full so far. I'm starting to think that the subscription model is actually a pretty interesting one for music junkies like me, who are always looking for new music to play. For me, the success or failure of such a service will depend on how the library matches up with the particular niches of the long tail that I'm interested in.

Just before we left on vacation my friend Ed gave me Nick Hornby's Songbook (known outside the US as 31 songs), where he writes about, logically enoough, 31 songs that he finds compelling. It's a great read, and, I think, typical of lots and lots of listeners who are listening to some new songs, some old songs, some popular songs, and some way-outish acts that won't be on any Billboard list. The thirty-one songs, by the way, are listed on this Dutch web site). After reading the book I of course want to go listen to the songs mentioned that I'm not familiar with, and I think that will be one interesting test of the extensiveness of the Napster library.

The one big drawback of Napster and all the other commercial music downloading services continues to be the reliance on various copy protection schemes (I refuse to buy into using "Digital Rights Management" (or DRM), the industry's favorite term for this protection - the only rights being managed are those of the distributor - the rights of the listener are mostly trampled in these schemes see Cory's brilliant talk to Microsoft last summer.). It seems obvious that by making it difficult for people who love music to do what they want with the music that they will continue to drive people to use the non-commercial peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and/or buy CDs to do their own ripping. The first thing most people ask me about Napster is if they can put tunes onto their iPods. When they hear they can't, they lose interest fast.

My experience with the major online p2p services is that finding and retrieving the music you want from them is unreliable, slow, and the files you get are completely inconsistent in quality. Who wouldn't want to get files from fast and reliable servers with consistent quality and good searching and cataloging? The main questions are price and flexibility. I firmly believe that if the majority of songs were available with no copy restrictions at a reasonable price (I think at a buck a song they're still too expensive by a factor of four) that the music industry would see a phenomenal growth in the market for their products that would dwarf anything they've ever experienced. I also believe that the right price for fast, reliable, flexible service would offer a value proposition that would be hard to resist, and would discourage the spread of piracy.

But we don't seem to be getting there anytime soon, at least not from the major labels and online distribution services. Instead they seem to be descending daily further into a complex set of conflicting schemes about under which restrictive scenarios their licensing schemes will allow. You can download, but only play on your computer. You can put it on some portable devices but not others. You can only burn to CD for another fee. True ease of use and value for the consumer seems to play a small part in these schemes, and that's unfortunate, because it limits the success of the entire online music world.