Music by subscription

Rick Rubin - Recording Industry - Rock Music - New York Times

Rubin [the new head of Columbia Records] has a bigger idea. To combat the devastating impact of file sharing, he, like others in the music business (Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine at Universal, for instance), says that the future of the industry is a subscription model, much like paid cable on a television set. "You would subscribe to music," Rubin explained, as he settled on the velvet couch in his library. "You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere. The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home. You'll say, 'Today I want to listen to ... Simon and Garfunkel,' and there they are. The service can have demos, bootlegs, concerts, whatever context the artist wants to put out. And once that model is put into place, the industry will grow 10 times the size it is now."

From Napster to the iPod, the music business has been wrong about how much it can dictate to its audience. "Steve Jobs understood Napster better than the record business did," David Geffen told me. "IPods made it easy for people to share music, and Apple took a big percentage of the business that once belonged to the record companies. The subscription model is the only way to save the music business. If music is easily available at a price of five or six dollars a month, then nobody will steal it."

For this model to be effective, all the record companies will have to agree. "It's like getting the heads of the five families together," said Mark DiDia, referencing "The Godfather." "It will be very difficult, but what else are we going to do?"

Rubin sees no other solution. "Either all the record companies will get together or the industry will fall apart and someone like Microsoft will come in and buy one of the companies at wholesale and do what needs to be done," he said. "The future technology companies will either wait for the record companies to smarten up, or they'll let them sink until they can buy them for 10 cents on the dollar and own the whole thing."

As usual, I'm pretty sure this is part of the answer, but not the whole answer. If you have to subscribe, how does that get enforced? How does anyone know whether you're a subscriber when they hand you a URL? How does anyone know that the URL points to music?

The only thing that makes sense is to bundle the price into everybody's ISP fees, exactly the kind of surcharge that many countries now add to recording media.

I've been down this road before.

Ball lightning explained?

EETimes.com - Ball lightning's frightening . . . but finally explained

Ball lightning has puzzled scientists for centuries. These orbs of electrical charge bounce like balls, squeeze under doors then reform into orbs, and sometimes even float in mid-air. Now, a Ukrainian scientist claims to have solved the mystery of ball lightning—it is, he said, an aerosol of nanoscale batteries short-circuited by surface discharge to spontaneously generate mega-amperes of current.

Oleg Meshcheryakov, general director of Wing Ltd. Company (Odessa, Ukraine), said that ball lightning can be explained as the "process of electrochemical oxidation and combustion of atmospheric aerosol particles. Aerosol nano-batteries exposed to a powerful magnetic dipole"dipole attraction [form into balls]."

According to Meshcheryakov, these nano-batteries consist of an aerosol form of a reductant, an oxidizer and an electrolyte. Normal lightning strikes stir up unoxidized substances commonly available in the environment, becoming the reductants of these aerosol nano-batteries. Meshcheryakov claimed that ball lightning consists of a cloud of thousands of such composite particles, ranging in from 5 to 100 nanometers in diameter. Each particle spontaneously forms a nano-battery, which is then short-circuited by surface discharge.

The theory -- and others -- is mentioned in the Wikipedia article

Almost gone...

Shipped my first two international pre-orders this morning, along with a box of 10 copies to CD Baby -- they're down to one copy. Somebody please take it off their hands? They'll have more by Saturday...

The rest of the shipping should go quickly now that I know what I'm doing on the customs form. Eight more labels, all but one international IIRC, plus a couple that hadn't been entered yet. I really need to set down and consolidate all the customer and sales data, ...

About bleeding time

Finally burned the last copy of About Bleeding Time, the pre-order bonus disk. I'm guessing there are about 60 of them. Assuming I don't sell out on the limited edition, it should be enough. I have about half a dozen pre-orders left to ship.

Another great one gone.

The sky has been overcast -- a uniform pearly-grey -- all day. Smoke from two nearby wildfires, presumably. And some more music has gone out of the world.

Here are Reuters and CNN on Luciano Pavarotti's passing, at the tragically young age of 71, of pancreatic cancer. Same thing that got my Dad. And here is Pam Jones of Groklaw, with one of the most heartfelt tributes I've seen, made a little more poignant by her realization that a high-profile blogger writing about copyright law probably shouldn't risk linking to pirated video clips on YouTube. Just search there and you'll find 'em -- I'm not a high-profile blogger writing about copyright law.

At the moment, I'm just an amateur musician lamenting the passing of one of the great ones.

I'm not making this up, you know...

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Goats sacrificed to fix Nepal jet

Nepal's state-run airline has confirmed that it sacrificed two goats to appease a Hindu god, following technical problems with one of its aircraft.

Nepal Airlines said the animals were slaughtered in front of the plane - a Boeing 757 - at Kathmandu airport.