Hippo, birdies, two ewes...
2006-06-16 06:37 am![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
Weird Al Yankovic Says Digital Is a Raw Deal For Some Artists - The Digital Music Weblog
King of comic rock, Weird Al Yankovic says digital is a raw deal for artists like himself. When asked by a fan whether purchasing a conventional CD or buying a digital file via iTunes would net Yankovic more pocket money the artist answered on his website.
"I am extremely grateful for your support, no matter which format you choose to legally obtain my music in, so you should do whatever makes the most sense for you personally. But since you ASKED... I actually do get significantly more money from CD sales, as opposed to downloads. This is the one thing about my renegotiated record contract that never made much sense to me. It costs the label NOTHING for somebody to download an album (no manufacturing costs, shipping, or really any overhead of any kind) and yet the artist (me) winds up making less from it. Go figure."
The article goes on to explain that Apple pays, not Weird Al, but his publisher; they in turn pass a pittance on to Al -- significantly less than the mechanical license fee that he gets for a CD, which isn't much to begin with. Some of the comments (after you filter out the flames) go into even more detail.
It's worth noting that the economics change considerably if you're not going through a record label. In that case, you own not only the copyright on the songs, but the copyright on the performance, which is where the label is taking its huge cut. <
The Truth: Recording Music is Basically Free (posted a few days ago by Shane Workman of Syrius Jones) goes perhaps a little too far towards doing it all yourself, but all their music is under a Creative Commons license and they don't seem to be losing money.
Overall, technology has changed the economics of the music industry. Music is now cheap to record and free to acquire. Ignoring this point is just insane. If the music is good, people will come to the shows and we’ll make enough money to keep doing this.
Spent some time this morning filling in the remaining holes in my Java
git
blob classes -- specifically the part that conses up a
header into a byte array. I didn't need it for the stream code, since it
was more efficient to write it into the stream piecewise.
Spent most of the afternoon hacking Emacs lisp to finally solve a problem
with gnus
automatic mail-foldering that's been bothering me
for a long time. You see, gnus
(the Emacs mail/news reader)
lets you match a series of regular expressions against your mail headers
in order to decide what folder it belongs in. A lot of mail from mailing
lists contains strings like "[mumble]
" -- a tag in square
brackets. Turns out our new spam-filtering appliance does that, too.
Trouble is, gnus
insists that the thing you match look like a
word, meaning it has to begin and end with an alphanumeric.
The flower_cat went out to the nearby Rosicrucian Museum with
Maya Bohnhoff and her daughter C, who have recently moved to San Jose and
hadn't seen it yet. Seems the Bohnhoffs thought our household party was
this weekend.
So we're having a housefilk, starting around 7pm. Feel free to drop in. Bring a voice or an instrument -- if things are too slow there's no telling what you may be subjected to.
This afternoon I finally hauled off and ordered a VIA CN1000 fanless Mini-ITX board for my recording rig, which even with a single 40mm CPU fan is annoyingly loud in a quiet room. And the case is fairly big and heavy; I'll fix that, too. With luck, it ought to arrive in time for me to take the new setup to Westercon, but too late for me to waste much potential recording time futzing with it. I'll try not to work on it next weekend even if it arrives on Friday.
It's difficult to appreciate a totally fanless computer until you've used one. The silence is addictive. I'm tempted to give the new machine a flash drive, with an external hard drive only for working off the network and away from the fileserver.
The old 800MHz machine, which is in a very cool-looking black Morex 2699B case, should do well on the stereo rack (as a CD ripper and/or streaming music player) or in some other application where it's far enough from users that the slight fan noise won't matter. I'm becoming more noise-sensitive in my old age.
I've been casting about for alternatives to a stack of CDs for listening
in the car on the road to Westercon (an 8-10 hour drive depending on the
route); realized that a 12-volt adapter for one of the little computers
would be cheaper than either a laptop power adapter or an MP3
player. But the flower_cat has expressed a preference for
CDs, so it's probably moot.
As a follow-up to this post (in the chain leading to this one of mine, I found taco isu, the all-too-real Japanese (of course) octopus ice cream.
( the horror! )