Moving it over to New Orleans...
For the next two weeks (until 2 May), I'll be live-blogging the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival at http://jazzfe.st
Check it out, leave a comment.
Fly down and join us!
« March 2005 | Main | May 2005 »
April 21, 2005
April 17, 2005
VampiSoul
OK, it's been a while since I had anything to say about music, and seeing as this is the week before I switch into full-time Jazzfest mode, I'll fill you in on a recent find.
Last week, I was in Madrid, and I had the opportunity to visit my favourite music store in the world: AMA Records at the Mercado de Fuencarral. To start, it's the only legitimate record store I'm aware of where you can listen patiently to just about every CD in the store and smoke a joint at the same time. When I lived in Madrid, I spent many an afternoon that way, and even though I largely left the weed behind a few years ago it's still nice to spend an afternoon listening to tunes and maybe get a bit of a contact high.
But also, the curators of this music shop seem to know my tastes very well. They're helpful, make excellent suggestions, and they love me because I'm probably the only customer they have who will buy 15 CDs at a time without blinking.
So I found a bunch of great stuff this time, naturally. And most of it is reissues of rare stuff courtesy of the (I'm assuming) friendly people at VampiSoul Records. Try and pigeonhole a style for VampiSoul and you cannot do it -- the releases I bought ran the gamut from East LA soul to Latin jazz to easy listening. But the style seems to be good, because just about everything me try, me likey.
For the East LA soul, try out "Pachuco Soul," a mix including about 30 tracks from various -- and not necessarily Latin -- East LA bands from the mid-60s to the 90s. It's class. They have a whole range of mambo-era Latin soul-jazz, from acts such as Pete Rodriguez and Jack "Mr. Bongo" Costanzo. And the silky voice of Claudine Longet (who has a compicated history too long for me to get into) provides the easy listening section -- you'd probably recognize her dreamy version of "Let's Spend The Night Together." The Johnny Adams disc is also definitely worth a look.
You can find VampiSoul's releases online, but I've only ever seen them in my shop in Madrid. I strongly recommend you have a look and give it a try.
April 16, 2005
Lifeguard Anthem
When I was little, I went away to summer camp near Albany, NY. Around 1980, a local band called Blotto released a song called "I Wanna Be A Lifeguard", and it was all the rage at camp.
Which was cool, except I hadn't heard the song again until today. It's still pretty funny, although probably not as funny as I thought it was when I was 8.
April 15, 2005
One Week To Jazzfest...
...and preparations are underway. I finally found a (free!) photo gallery server so I don't have to spend hours configuring my photos each night, and you can see the results of JetPhoto Server at the ElectricOrange gallery.
I'll take some time after fest to move all of my old galleries over to this server, but in the mean time it's back to tech land for me.
April 3, 2005
A very long treatise on the future of television
For some reason, the question of "the future of television" has come up very often lately. I've had countless conversations about it with friends and former colleagues, and I've been reading about it from people like Bob Cringely, whose opinions I typically hold in high esteem on forward technology topics.
Cringely used his most recent column to posit that in the future we will all have subscriptions to television "archives," for lack of a better word, and that we will use these to re-watch programming that we may have missed when initially broadcast. I thought he was so wrong that I wanted to write him a mail, but that got too long and so I decided to write my thoughts here.
I suspect the reason the topic keeps coming up has to do with my recent purchase of a Mac Mini, which I use exclusively as a tool to download television programmes from the internet and watch on my connected large-screen monitor. Nothing really opens up the mind to possibilities like actually using the technology first-hand, and I have to say that -- based on my experience -- the infrastructure for internet-delivered television is a lot closer to being "there" than I had previously realised.
Cringely, in his piece, stated that there need to be four things in place to make television a reality. To wit: content (the shows), technology (the device to watch the shows on), network access (how you get the shows to the devices), and money (that which maketh the world spin around). And he's partially right. You only need three to make it a reality: the fourth, money, isn't needed to make it real, just to make it legal.
What most people haven't noticed, though, is that in most areas where people care enough about television that they'd bother to read this far down, the content and network access are already there, and so is the device -- your home computer connected to your television or an oversized monitor.
If you don't believe me, I suggest you have a look at this page. Take a look at the list of programmes on offer there and you will see it is like a Tivo with unlimited storage capacity. It is neither hard to find, nor hard to use. And programmes are generally posted to this page within an hour or two of being broadcast.
To bring the example very close to home, I will freely admit that I, sitting in my living room in Paris, am generally watching the most recent episode of "American Idol" within 6 hours of it having been broadcast.
Which brings us to the fourth part, which is the money question.
Television is essentially a relationship between content producers and content consumers. Throughout its history, that relationship has involved an intermediary -- the content distributor, or television network.
The business model for this relationship has been generally the same thus far, with exceptions: the television network pays the content producer for the right to distribute the content to the consumer -- the viewer. Advertisers finance the transaction by paying the television network to broadcast commercials.
I don't mean to say this is the only business model -- there are variations, to be sure, mainly to how the television network's content purchases are funded. Yet, regardless of these variations, there has always been a finite number of channels for content, so the network has always played the role of intermediary, or distributor.
With the internet, however, the network is public and freely accessed. Content producers and consumers can interact directly with one another, so the role of the distributor is not as important. Surely there would need to be an editorial or promotional mechanism to "break out" new content, but for the most part the distributor could be cut out entirely.
The business model is the same -- except without the content distributor getting a cut. It could be advertiser-supported, subscription-supported, or pay-per-view supported, but that money is going straight into the hands of the producers. It's classic disintermediation, and it's very much in the producers' interest to do so.
Producers desperately want to control their own content, which is why many major studios, sports leagues and teams, and other content producers have either bought or launched television networks in recent years. NBC, as the only network unaffiliated with a major studio, and seeing the writing on the wall, wisely bought Universal when it became available.
In a sense, the move to delivery of content over the internet is just the next step in a natural evolution away from a three-network distribution oligopoly, through the cable/satellite era of tens or hundreds of niche channels, and toward an unlimited number of niche channels. It's been moving that way all along. In this new environment, the parties best suited to profit on the distribution side will be those who know their audience best and can deliver that audience to the producers.
So, if you ask me about the future of television, I think your basic model stays the same as it has been, with editorial websites (and webcasts and podcasts, etcetera) providing the capability to drive audience. And as for the payment model, the product advertising model could continue to apply, but the direct-to-consumer channel opens up other possibilities, such as show-based subscriptions for "first-run" content and live events, or pay-per-view, on-demand viewing of archived content.