If you do find a way to get data, other areas that interest me (that I was unable to deal with due to being an amateur at what you do and not getting raw data) are the time periods between releases and certifications.
I have a hunch (plainly mentioned in my words on the subject), largely brought on from having seen every cert date in the course of doing the analysis, that in recent years the ability of acts to continue to sell albums through back catalog has _really_ fallen off. I named Warrant- double platinum, then no further certs in ten years. I think there's a pattern there- I saw a lot of that. Some of it must surely be just due to the fact that you can't release _last_ year and get a cert for five years from now- but there's no compelling reason for the times to be so obviously compressed, the entire commercial lifespan of an album compressed into a matter of eight months and then fizzling out completely.
I think this would show in a listing of 'record lifespans' measured by certifications. In particular- I would love to see the same data sorted using this formula:
Each album is a sum of values derived from certifications- triple platinum, three values added together, and so on.
Values are simply the date of certification minus the release date- number of years since release. So as a record keeps on getting certifications, the 'points' for each keep getting higher and higher.
Result, no weighting in favor of older albums except those that continue selling and earn recent certifications.
I think this could potentially turn up some real surprises. It would certainly be a much more effective metric for revealing 'evergreen' albums. You could again add artists' albums together to return career numbers, this time more clearly indicating which artists tend to produce albums that keep selling many years after release.
Even with the limited data I ended up with, there's one trick I didn't get around to doing: instead of summing career totals, average them. I can tell you right off two results- soundtracks and Broadway shows would drop way down in 'score', and Elvis would drop way down in score, because he faded into obscurity on an endless string of lame albums and repackagings. I may just give that a try because now my curiosity is aroused... because I am no sort of professional analyst, I am essentially hacking with the data to see what happens, and trying to come up with interpretations of what I'm seeing. For instance, until I did this analysis I had no idea whatever that movie soundtracks were such astonishingly big business. The bulk of those are _recent_ and still scored shockingly high- and led to some insights on convergence and why this was happening.
Again, if anybody does manage to suck all the data off the RIAA website (remember, huge amounts of it is incomplete or flat-out wrong! That was more than half the work!), I would love to hear about it. I know there's a lot more to it than what I ended up with. I just couldn't do more than what I did, right at the moment.
Garth is just too recent to dominate any list of sales _over_ _decades_. I think it is actually quite likely that he will be viewed by history as hugely important, and will have his albums still bought in great numbers ten, twenty, thirty years from now.
But with the Beatles, with Elvis etc, we are not guessing. We _know_ they still sell, decades later. We don't know that Garth will sell a damn thing five years from now- what if the industry just overexposed him to the point where the world's sick of country? There are risks to superstardom on his level.
He may _be_ another Beatles. He may _be_ more important in the long run than Elvis. But it's too soon to tell. I think it's foolish to expect my methodology to anticipate such success. There were other suggestions of just leaving off recent artists- which I consider equally unreasonable. I'm sure there are many ways to measure a Britney or Garth against the Beatles and the Monkees and Elvis- not least by paying attention to the _content_ and speculating on why country music became popular, what mood was tapped. But all I wanted was to work out some arrangement where the _numbers_ put all those people into context. Given that the context is historical and commercial importance over the long haul, I have no problem with not giving Garth his due right at the moment. Wait and see- and frankly, the guy rates very well by any standards. It just seems goofy to insist that Garth _must_ _be_ more historically/commercially important than Michael Jackson- who broke the color line on MTV _singlehandedly_- or Bruce Springsteen- who had presidential candidates trying to co-opt his 'political platform'- or Pink Floyd, among the most commercially heavyweight bands _ever_ for _decades_ on end.
I stand by my methodology. If you'd prefer to measure straight-up total sales, that's a different perspective entirely, and you'll be misled into thinking the Britney Spearses of the world have a commercial future. I think that the fact Garth rates #21 and Britney rates #440 tells its own story- by _my_ methodology;)
No, just more 'commercially important' in a historical sense. Go to Hollywood and tell them you want to make a big movie, and you have Abba under contract. Now go to Hollywood and tell them you want to make a big movie, and you have _Eddie Murphy_ under contract;)
This is nothing to do with artistic merit, simply a matter of commercial clout and ability to drive sales over the long term. If Eddie Murphy came out with an album of just about _anything_ today, don't you think he'd have an easier time getting space in Wal-Mart than Abba would?
No problem at all. Nobody is making you. I _did_ sit and manually do it. You think that's worth nothing (or worse than nothing?). I charged you nothing, so we're even.
I'm sorry you're _not_ going to sit and manually do it properly. I would love to have better data to work from- I simply did not have the time to get everything I could.
Assuming the RIAA site remains up and continues to offer that search facility, I may at some point do the whole horrible task over, informed by the criticisms I've seen here- _especially_ if, as I suspected, not a single blessed one of these critics is themselves willing to sit and manually retrieve all the data from the RIAA's balky NT server. Some sort of bot or HTML-parser might be in order: I wrote software to add artist career totals rather than add all the individual albums up with a hand calculator.
However, if I am the only person in the world expected to do this absurd feat of singlehanded data entry and cross-correlation to fix faulty records... you're not going to see it done right away. If you are that determined to say "THIS is how the job must be done", well... you know what to do! It involves sitting. I can confirm that part... >:)
To some extent you are assuming that people cannot be exposed to music other than through a formal place-for-exposing-music.
The thing is, no such place is strictly necessary given a context where people can _access_ music or other content directly. As long as the Internet allows you to (as an extreme) type in an IP address, connect to the computer and download a file from a server somewhere else in the world, that channel exists. While that channel exists, it is easier and cheaper for musicians to expose their music than it has ever been. There _was_ no analogous situation before audio tapes, and even with audio tapes, the cost of getting a copy of the music to somebody was significant. With data copying and the Internet, the only real barrier is awareness- and in practice, awareness is not necessary. In a peer-to-peer situation, content that's really strong yet totally unpromoted can proliferate wildly. The very successful internet musician "Bassic" came by his popularity in just this way- promotion came _after_ grass-roots listeners had proliferated his music widely.
As the original author, I quite agree. There's further stuff that I wanted to do that I just plain ran out of time to deal with. I wanted to add all the Gold records weighted at half the weight of Single Platinum. No time for it.
I'll add that I have been kicking myself since halfway through for only noting down the product of those two fields and not keeping the fields themselves. The 'alphabetical' list is literally what I was typing in, record by record- at first because I wanted to get a quick look at the multiplatinum level, and then I was stuck either going back and starting again, or going on...
Please do show up my inadequacy as a data analyst by going to http://www.riaa.com/Gold-Intro-2.cfm and making nice downloadable text files suitable for data munging that contain ALL the information you can get from that source, i.e. artist, album, release date, cert date of each certification. I would love it if you did that! Would have saved me days of exhausting and nonprofessional work. I'll further warn you that loads of the information is either missing or flat wrong, and must be corrected through cross-referencing with other sources- _this_ I did, well I thought.
There is no original files- what you see is literally all I have. http://www.riaa.com/Gold-Intro-2.cfm is the source for mining. If you mean it and have the facilities to do a better job at this, may I please, earnestly and in _total_ _sincerity_, beg you to do it? I'm not a data analyst: I'm a sound engineer dabbling in many other fields. If I'm not mistaken my own limited analysis is _the_ _only_ compiled data source of this information out there and publically available. Now that I've taken a shot at it, maybe someone or some open-sourcey group can get some people together and do it right? Nobody would be more pleased than I. Eighteen-hour days of data entry sucked...
Insightful... to be specific, if the Beatles were launched in 2001, they'd promote Love Me Do until we puked- it'd sell as much as it did back then, only scaled to 2001 levels (say, 18 platinums)- they would continue to milk the formula (note that the song 'Help!' is documented as Lennon's cry to get out of the somewhat formulaic situation the Beatles were in)... and then around the time of Rubber Soul, the shift in content would lead to more difficulty getting the record on radio in the face of stiff promotional competition from The Monkees 2001, and due to the ambivalence the record would flop compared to the earlier ones.
As a result, Revolver would have even less promotional muscle and would flop even worse- "Love You To? Tomorrow Never Knows? What are you guys, trying to blow it here?", and there would be no budget for a symphony orchestra on Sgt. Pepper, which would be orchestrated much like Let It Be- kinda low-fi early-days sounding.
When that flopped, forget getting approval for a double album- forget getting tracks like "Revolution #9" on said album- forget even getting approval for the minimalist cover, and hence the very name 'White Album'- and goodbye to the (according to some!;) ) most commercially important Beatles album in history.
And as admitted- I made a serious blunder when I got half the data entered (the entire _multplatinum_ list) without retaining the details of last cert, year of release etc. I wanted to quickly check out what the basic formula did. Having done this, it was time to go on and add the single platinum records- and that's when I wanted to get the broader data- but the initial data entry session was an eighteen hour assault that wiped me out for days, and I just plain couldn't face doing it all over again... at least, not THIS month.
I _saw_ and was aware of every single certification date relative to year of release. You can too, if you are very patient: www.riaa.com is where I found the gold+platinum search engine, and CDNow and Google were respectively where I looked up the large amounts of missing or erroneous information. I'm not aware of anywhere else you can get this info. The current bands of 1990 (the 'Limp Bizkit' of their day- such as Warrant, whom I mentioned) are not getting ongoing promotion.
It would be terrific to see the actual sales (not rounded off to the nearest million) of bands divided by the total earnings of the record industry for that year and thus making a much more accurate analysis of the situation. I would _love_ to see that. Unfortunately, I didn't and don't have access to that information, and didn't take the time to exhaustively record all the information I _did_ have. What I did was something rather than nothing, and that because I could and because nobody else seemed to be interested in looking at album sales from this perspective in even the crudest way. Well... I've taken care of that 'crudest way' stuff;)
If anyone wants to do a better job than I've done, I will jump up and down and cheer and hope earnestly that you make your results available as freely redistributable text files as I have done;) I _know_ it's possible to do a better job. Please do! This was the best I could do for now, and you've _got_ it. An analysis in the hand is worth two that cost $100,000 and are locked in a filing cabinet in the records-keeping department of Bertlesmann or Sony;)
I would love to see that myself. Several _days_ into the data entry, I realised that I'd have been much happier if I'd at least made note of the last certification of each album, or individual record of both the release date and the number of platinums. But it was too late to go back. Contrary to the appearance of it, I have a life of sorts;) and there are some other things I _must_ do. I've got to hack more controls into my dithering software, and remix something like 5 CDs for release on ampcast.com, and this has been delayed for _months_ by other things, including a move, and further delayed by the Evergreens project. Starting over wasn't an option.
You have what I've done: the alphabetized list is ALL the data I have. It took at least two literally 18 hour, wrap-around nonstop sessions of data entry plus many less concentrated days to even get that. You've also got the only source of information I had: http://www.riaa.com/Gold-Intro-2.cfm. It does not _contain_ the information you specifically mention. It (when heavily corrected and cross-referenced with Google or some other web or music searcher) does contain more information than I ended up using. I'm aware of that, but not especially sorry or apologetic about it. Evergreens is as much as I could do, this month. Assuming the RIAA keeps its fairly sketchy database online, I may go in and do more someday. I was really _hot_ to add all the Gold records in, weighting them at (number of years out / 2), but time just did not allow that.
If anybody decides to organise an effort to copy out a snapshot of ALL the data in this database and put it up somewhere in a more hackable form, I would be wildly excited and pleased. Imagine one person getting every certified album starting with A, and compiling complete data for year, gold and platinum sales, possibly the individual cert dates for each award- there _is_ no more information publically available. I think it would be great if someone did this. I just know that I can't do it right now, single-handedly.
Absolutely. The labels are not rolling in cash. It mostly all goes back into the channel again in the form of payola. It's not about lambasting the record labels for greed- it's recognizing that, due to their very nasty situation, they're forced to take certain actions that aren't desirable- and asking how important it is that the labels survive under those conditions?
The 'channel' needs to back the heck off from the labels and stop squeezing them so damn hard. That's what keeps CD prices so high and keeps novel, original music largely off the radio. Unfortunately, with recent consolidation, it looks like the channel's going to squeeze the labels even harder. It's an absolute shakedown and everybody loses- except performers and listeners outside the mainstream, who are to some extent legitimized by a situation in which people are almost forced to explore other avenues of music awareness and distribution.
I have to sympathise with your friend but at the same time it's as if she is a nice person working in telemarketing- I'd still be happy to see her employer hosed even if it costs her her job. There are better places to work:)
It's always fun to wake up to a slashdotting. All of a sudden instead of just spam you have several damn good questions in your mailbox by smart people, and you're yawning and blinking and trying to answer them, knowing they represent about 1000 much rowdier people saying the same thing on Slashdot itself. So: Garth Brooks.
I got an email asking why Garth Brooks isn't on the top ten artists list. Garth Brooks is number 21 on the complete list of commercially important careers. The only country artist he's second to is Kenny Rogers at number 14, and this is hard to argue. More relevantly, the only artist remotely contemporary to him is Whitney Houston at number 33- every other act has been sustaining a career for _years_, in many cases starting from the 70s or earlier. Garth Brooks _does_ make a hugely strong showing- no other rock or pop artist registers so high given such a late start. The analysis is of _evergreens_, remember. The question you should ask yourself is this: thirty years from now, will Garth have _beaten_ the Beatles, or will his sales have flagged while the Beatles' sales have continued?
This is an interesting perspective: I'd like to expand on it a bit.
The trouble with search engines is that, as you say, they've got reason to have an agenda and punish non-revenue-generating content, being slow to list it or possibly ignoring it completely. When the Internet is seen strictly as a marketplace there's no way around this: the benefits of being 'featured' in a high-rated search engine are too significant for the search engines to not monetize this. It's a mirror of earlier forms of media where there WAS no access save through a narrow channel. The search engines you speak of replicate that narrow channel.
However, the notion of a narrow channel on the Internet is a _myth_. It's an assumption carried over from earlier forms of media, and in at least some forms of internet content (certain musicians, 'all your base' etc) the proliferation of awareness about content takes place without _any_ reliance on a narrow, tailored channel.
It becomes a problem of promotion in a context of wildly prolific choice. There is so much hype, so much promotion from so many directions, that it all cancels out... in a situation of such deep choice the only real 'magic bullet' is content itself. Publish or perish- work on your 'performance' rather than your publicity.
When this is done, and a basic minimum of initial publicity is given (like telling your friends, mentioning what you've done to your peers), the content gradually takes on an popularity roughly equivalent to its real significance- if you average it. Wild bursts of publicity and insignificance are also to be expected, it's not anything like a steady 'readership' or listenership. The pattern actually resembles the fractal distribution of noise in signal transmissions... very striking fluctuations. Again, this is without external publicity such as featuring in search engines.
Your last point is well taken- people who do not live long enough to see their ideas adopted are liable to lose out. Interestingly, this corresponds with the assumption that intellectual property must be defended- if only the creator is permitted to control the expressions of their ideas, then it is wrong to take them and post them willy-nilly elsewhere, and so when the person dies, their own little web page is no longer paid for and the content is erased. If there is no intellectual property, it only takes one person to copy the data to preserve it, and that person also winds up capable of redistributing the material, rather than being legally barred from doing so. In essence, part of intellectual property is to guarantee that a creator's works die with the creator unless proper arrangements are made.
I don't know _where_ my brother turned this up years ago, but one reading of this small book will make your jaw drop, and answer questions you never thought to ask, like-
In what ways are Disney comics destined for Latin America rewritten and altered by Disney to express American _political_ ideology by way of crude allegory?
Why are there no direct family relationships in Disney, just a thousand uncles and a complete lack of stronger family bonds- in what is purportedly family material?
What is Donald Duck's undying aim in life, and is it seen as admirable?
And to think I saw my first glimpse of 'Atlantis' and thought to myself, "Oh good, for once in their lives they are taking a _broader_ concept and writing their own damn story around that". Of course, this was before I saw the side-to-side story elements between that and Nadia. And the side-to-side _character_ designs between that and Nadia... *yeesh*
As for how to realistically change the situation? I don't know. I can only do little things. For instance, writing open source dithering software to try and get some of the proprietary tools of Big Media into the hands of individuals. I did that. I upgraded the cabling and provided technical advice for a Brattleboro micro-radio station while I lived in Brattleboro.
What I do is not much. I'm completely out of my depth regarding stuff like Clear Channel. All I _can_ do is what comes to hand- for instance, I have hopes that my work will lead to pro audio software for Linux. I'm not good enough of a programmer to write C programs for Linux, so the program I wrote is in REALbasic for MacOS. I GPLed it anyway, because what if someone can make use of the algorithms and translate them? It may end up benefitting nobody but me, but I _did_ have the option of going wholly proprietary with it- high-end dithers and wordlength reducers can fetch thousands of dollars just to use them, in proprietary-land- and I couldn't accept that.
I've put effort into understanding the music side of modern media as well- not 12 hours ago, I uploaded my Evergreens analysis, which starts with inspection of the entire history of platinum albums and goes on from there to extrapolate what recent trends mean for the future of this form of media. I think that counts as my thoughts on the matter. I'm of the opinion that 'Big Media' in the sense of the RIAA is heading for a nasty fall but I _don't_ know what will replace it, I only know that it will involve levels of differentiation vastly in excess of what is possible with the traditional radio/retail sales channel, which has been getting absurdly restricted in terms of total inventory. I don't know the form this will take, or whether the record labels will have a heavy stake in it. I do know that if the labels try to sell on the Internet they way they are selling through retail, they are fooling themselves and guaranteed to fail expensively.
Again, I'm sorry for misjudging you- reading Slashdot has caused me to be awfully sensitive to freemarket chauvinism, maybe too sensitive. Just because I see some attitudes as horribly damaging doesn't mean I need to see them in every little remark, and I apologize. I vented unjustifiably at you- my beef is with the numerous people out there who swear up and down that ideology-driven, totally heedless deregulation of everything is the wonder drug to make everything be marvellous and great, and obviously I think this is cult-like insanity with lots of evidence to harshly disprove these promised benefits, but THOSE PEOPLE are the ones running things now. Hence my occasional venom- and I'm sorry to have nailed you with it and disrespected you.
Re:Comparatively speaking...
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MP3Pro Released
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· Score: 3
Actually, _all_ of you guys are waaaaaay too gullible. 128K mp3 _and_ 80K.ogg and certainly 64K or indeed 128K MP3Pro are so obviously compromised that it's really not hard for even an untutored listener to identify them as sonically compromised. Any playback system that's not itself totally hosed (even really cheap headphones with elements enough to extend to around 18K) will reveal this. Apparently, MP3Pro is the _worst_ and most easily identifiable, possibly because it attempts to re-synthesise discarded content above 10K. I know mp3 tends to cut off at 18K if at all, and have never heard of.ogg cutting off at all, much less trying to resynthesize data that was completely discarded. That way lies madness:D
...and then tries to synthesise it back again, a truly dumb-ass move
and thus (and from early reports) sounds _awful_
...how can you be sure anyone will buy hardware using the new format?
My guess is that there's a very serious risk of consumers returning any prospective hardware that uses MP3Pro, believing the hardware to be broken. There's only so far you can go with audio garbage before you cause even totally untrained ears to categorize the sound as 'distorted' or 'something in this must be broken, it sounds wrong'. From what I'm seeing in early reports, MP3Pro crosses that line.
If I am not mistaken, Voltaire99's take on the meaning of 'caveat emptor' is that it means "Buyer, be aware". I can't think of a more sensible way to protect and serve the consumer than seeing to it that the consumer is able to be aware of the realities of the market and the veracity of the claims of marketers and salesmen.
As you know, UCITA contains language that can be used to stamp out buyer awareness, specifically prohibiting anything constituting a 'bad review'. As such, it's potentially a very serious violation of 'caveat emptor', or buyer awareness. Even overlooking this, it's transparently obvious that fly-by-night companies and con artists always wish to trick and fool buyers, which also interferes with buyer awareness.
If you think "caveat emptor" means "buyer, sucks to be you", remind me never, ever, EVER to buy anything from _you_;) and, I might add, I'm damned grateful that lawyers find it profitable and satisfying to defend consumers _against_ people like that.
Well, if there is no justice in rule of law, the lawyer's whole field is completely pointless. If you just have an auction for who gets to win, why even employ a lawyer? So it is in the _longterm_ best interests of lawyers that justice continue to be a vaguely sensible concept.
That, or they're afraid that if things get too ugly, we really _will_ kill all the lawyers;)
OK- analogous things have happened in radio where 'Big Radio' (Clear Channel) _can_ stop you from starting up a radio station, buying licenses and running a business in that area. It's not hypothetical, they have the capacity to freeze _anybody_ out at this point. The Clinton Administration completely deregulated radio (in terms of station ownership) and, well... we don't have to speculate on that anymore because we _have_ the result. Go read about Clear Channel.
Now, bearing this in mind, why do you behave as if 'stopping you from buying a domain name and writing good content' is a rhetorical, sarcastic aside? It's no immediate threat, but that is precisely where all this is heading. There is no reason to assume you, or I, or anyone will forever be allowed to buy a domain name for 20 bucks and write good content, even if we put up the money ourselves. This capability is not some sort of natural law, but the consequence of largely unstated rules that are being increasingly overturned, as in the radio deregulation.
I would respectfully suggest that if they CAN stop you from 'buying a domain name for 20 bucks and writing good content', it is WAY, WAY TOO LATE to worry. How can you seriously suggest such a Pollyannaish attitude? It is very akin to saying, "If you die, _then_ you can see a doctor".
Feel free to go make (for instance) a radio station, and 'compete' in the 'free market' with Clear Channel. They will murder you. They have jocks _kill_ _animals_ on-air for attention (Clear Channel aired the live killing of a boar and the station posted the bloody pictures on its website). They control live concert promotion of record companies and can and will pull a label's artists off the playlists of _hundreds_ of stations unless they cooperate and freeze you out completely.
Clear Channel is what happens when an industry is both mature and completely deregulated. Radio went totally laissez-faire during the Clinton administration through pressure from Republicans, and this is what happens. Clear Channel is working on taking over 'independent promotion', too. They are flat-out vicious. There is no 'market'. A lot of good people are now out of radio entirely because of Clear Channel taking over the whole damned industry.
IT CAN HAPPEN HERE.
When some future AOL or Microsoft or who-knows-what gets control of enough of the Internet, owning the hardware and the big web sites and the backbones, and decides it is time to announce to everybody else that they will not peer with you if you host content they don't provide, where will you be then? Where will your common market be then? The only thing stopping us from facing that is the fact that the Internet is NOT really mature, and that it is by no means unregulated. The regulation is hovering around waiting to happen- nobody's really clear on what the rules are.
If the rules turn out to be 'no rules', kiss your ability for grassroots media goodbye. Inevitably someone is going to want to MOW that grass. I ask you, if AOL/Time Warner really did have authority over enough of the internet that they could do what Clear Channel does, and if there was no regulation, what possible reason would they have for allowing ANY independent content on their internet, or allowing any unauthorised networks to peer with the Internet? It comes down to dollars and cents in the end.
I am sorry, but you are naive and painfully uninformed about analogous situations in radio and you need to grow up and learn how the big bad world really works. The only way a 'free market' _ever_ exists is within a context of rules. No rules, no market. Those rules are demonized as 'regulations', which they are, and having too many of them puts business in a straitjacket, which is unhelpful- but if you get rid of them, you kiss off any chance of a functioning market. Look at radio post-deregulation. This isn't theory. You're talking theory. I'm talking observation and analogy. I defy anyone to claim Clear Channel is a desirable outcome of a market. Christ, it is the UN-market. Clear Channel armtwists everyone they deal with and cannot be challenged or competed with. Try it and watch your revenue from record labels, advertisers, _anything_ be choked off. If you're in radio your whole environment is Clear Channel now and they will tell your advertisers whether they can advertise on your station, will tell record labels whether they can let YOU play the new releases- everything. Thank you, Clinton Administration and Republicans who got their way against the impotent wishes of the Clinton people. So much for an industry.
This is a very good point... normal Big Media is totally based on an assumption, that you have to use economies of scale in order to serve large numbers of people with media information. You can't have _ten_ New York Timeses, there aren't the subscribers. If you want to be the New York Times it costs huge sums in printing equipment, elaborate distribution channels, all based on the fact that you've got to be raking in lots of money just to have the _ability_ to reach a person in New York or Spain or Des Moines. In order to get your message to them you have to have the distribution system from hell, and sustain it with lots of money coming in.
The internet DOES NOT HAVE such a restriction.
To some extent there's a limit to how much you can scale- if 10 million people tried to read my 'Airwindows' site tomorrow, I wouldn't be charged extra, but the site could very possibly go down under the load, something I would just have to accept. My capacity to put information out globally does not equal anybody's _obligation_ to have it stand up to such loads. If I had anything especially important for everyone in the world to know about, I could put it out as open content, and have people mirror it and distribute it in a P2P way, and that _does_ scale.
But the real point here is that by the very nature of their approach to media, the AOLs of the world are put at a disadvantage, unavoidably. They must take a middle line (or whatever is safest and can be _spun_ as a middle line- you'll find them taking a quietly ultraconservative line on corporate power, obviously!). They cannot introduce content that's too 'niche'. Most of all, they must produce revenue. Not for them the capacity to cheaply fund a small web presence out of pocket change indefinitely! Everything they do has to _pay_ them, because their operations cost so damn much.
At the same time, you have media kingpins like Clear Channel Communications (real scumbags, btw- and it was Salon that had the story...) who take the corporate media suck-fest and escalate the hostilities- who put further revenue pressure on operations like AOL/Time Warner by outflanking them and out-NASTYing them in every way. Once you begin to play the 'driving revenue, appeasing mainstream' game you're at risk of being outcompeted on those grounds by total scumbags. You can't even be a _boring_ media monolith and be safe. Evidence suggests that under laissez-faire modern capitalism you _must_ be scum, or you get beaten up and your lunch money taken away, no matter how big you are. AOL/Time Warner is in no way safe just because they are big, unless deregulation is slowed or stopped.
And all the while, on the Internet, you still are one click (or one typed-in URL, remember- one Google search? etc) away from any person's niche content- hosted at that person's expense. Sure the sites can't stand a slashdotting, but so what? The information is out there. The thing to really watch out for is not that the Salons of the world get crushed- that's a pretty big niche and there will be others if there's a need to be filled. The thing to watch out for is any mechanism that might block the individual from putting their own information out there on the network- NOT in some wildly public way, that's not a given, but just OUT THERE at all. Nobody is guaranteed attention, but the nature of the Internet would be horribly compromised if anything reduced the ability of people to just buy some cheap hosting (say, under $50 a month- comparable to buying dial-up) and have their material linkable to, one click away from anyone who saw fit to refer to it.
Because to some extent this is a value-added proposition to the AOLs of the world, but it also potentially dulls the sales message, draws attention away from AOL/Time Warner properties, is content that's not owned by AOL/Time Warner etc., plus you have people who would really prefer individuals' abilities to reach a worldwide audience to be globally restricted on grounds of content. They might be making pr0n! Or advocating gay rights! Or suggesting parody is not against the law in Korea! Or that women shouldn't wear veils in Iran! So even the ability of niche people to connect to the worldwide electronic network is resented by some- and THAT is the area to watch out for. In particular, anything suggesting that Big Media should have control over individual Internet content should raise a red flag. (I see Microsoft's 'Smart Tags' as potentially a hell of a Trojan Horse in this regard, but there could be other issues ahead too.)
Re:You've just never heard a really good sound sys
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Insanely Audiophile
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· Score: 2
Um, it's a bit of a scandal among pro audio types just HOW BAD live sound has become in the last 20 years or so. It's gotten really bad. When people say they want 'live music' they _don't_ mean that, they are thinking chamber music or symphony. Insanely, some symphony halls have taken to installing horrible PA systems just to try and give people comparable loudnesses to the horrible rock concert PA systems!:o
Since you like rock, have you ever _played_ in a band? With nothing but drums and amps, no PA, just raw instrument volume? _That_ is what 'rock live sound' really is, but you won't get it at a concert- unless maybe you're catching some really small gig where the drums and amps aren't even miked. You might get it there....or, of course, off recordings that accurately convey what live rock instruments sound like- for instance, if you have a killer vinyl-based High End rig, you can put on Creedence's "Bayou Country" and get damn close to the 'live sound' I'm talking about. It's a lot rowdier than classical as you know, but there _is_ still a proper way to do it.
Yeah, but it sounds NASTY! Great great music but my God does it sound nasty! What was it, his first digital album or something? Insanely big sonic change between his early stuff and that.
That said, you're a sillyperson not to like some of the high points of 'Spike'. I mean, come on, "Chewing Gum"? "God's Comic"? "Any King's Shilling" for God's sake? Geez, it may be an inconsistent album but _damn_...
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I have a hunch (plainly mentioned in my words on the subject), largely brought on from having seen every cert date in the course of doing the analysis, that in recent years the ability of acts to continue to sell albums through back catalog has _really_ fallen off. I named Warrant- double platinum, then no further certs in ten years. I think there's a pattern there- I saw a lot of that. Some of it must surely be just due to the fact that you can't release _last_ year and get a cert for five years from now- but there's no compelling reason for the times to be so obviously compressed, the entire commercial lifespan of an album compressed into a matter of eight months and then fizzling out completely.
I think this would show in a listing of 'record lifespans' measured by certifications. In particular- I would love to see the same data sorted using this formula:
I think this could potentially turn up some real surprises. It would certainly be a much more effective metric for revealing 'evergreen' albums. You could again add artists' albums together to return career numbers, this time more clearly indicating which artists tend to produce albums that keep selling many years after release.
Even with the limited data I ended up with, there's one trick I didn't get around to doing: instead of summing career totals, average them. I can tell you right off two results- soundtracks and Broadway shows would drop way down in 'score', and Elvis would drop way down in score, because he faded into obscurity on an endless string of lame albums and repackagings. I may just give that a try because now my curiosity is aroused... because I am no sort of professional analyst, I am essentially hacking with the data to see what happens, and trying to come up with interpretations of what I'm seeing. For instance, until I did this analysis I had no idea whatever that movie soundtracks were such astonishingly big business. The bulk of those are _recent_ and still scored shockingly high- and led to some insights on convergence and why this was happening.
Again, if anybody does manage to suck all the data off the RIAA website (remember, huge amounts of it is incomplete or flat-out wrong! That was more than half the work!), I would love to hear about it. I know there's a lot more to it than what I ended up with. I just couldn't do more than what I did, right at the moment.
But with the Beatles, with Elvis etc, we are not guessing. We _know_ they still sell, decades later. We don't know that Garth will sell a damn thing five years from now- what if the industry just overexposed him to the point where the world's sick of country? There are risks to superstardom on his level.
He may _be_ another Beatles. He may _be_ more important in the long run than Elvis. But it's too soon to tell. I think it's foolish to expect my methodology to anticipate such success. There were other suggestions of just leaving off recent artists- which I consider equally unreasonable. I'm sure there are many ways to measure a Britney or Garth against the Beatles and the Monkees and Elvis- not least by paying attention to the _content_ and speculating on why country music became popular, what mood was tapped. But all I wanted was to work out some arrangement where the _numbers_ put all those people into context. Given that the context is historical and commercial importance over the long haul, I have no problem with not giving Garth his due right at the moment. Wait and see- and frankly, the guy rates very well by any standards. It just seems goofy to insist that Garth _must_ _be_ more historically/commercially important than Michael Jackson- who broke the color line on MTV _singlehandedly_- or Bruce Springsteen- who had presidential candidates trying to co-opt his 'political platform'- or Pink Floyd, among the most commercially heavyweight bands _ever_ for _decades_ on end.
I stand by my methodology. If you'd prefer to measure straight-up total sales, that's a different perspective entirely, and you'll be misled into thinking the Britney Spearses of the world have a commercial future. I think that the fact Garth rates #21 and Britney rates #440 tells its own story- by _my_ methodology ;)
This is nothing to do with artistic merit, simply a matter of commercial clout and ability to drive sales over the long term. If Eddie Murphy came out with an album of just about _anything_ today, don't you think he'd have an easier time getting space in Wal-Mart than Abba would?
No problem at all. Nobody is making you. I _did_ sit and manually do it. You think that's worth nothing (or worse than nothing?). I charged you nothing, so we're even.
I'm sorry you're _not_ going to sit and manually do it properly. I would love to have better data to work from- I simply did not have the time to get everything I could.
Assuming the RIAA site remains up and continues to offer that search facility, I may at some point do the whole horrible task over, informed by the criticisms I've seen here- _especially_ if, as I suspected, not a single blessed one of these critics is themselves willing to sit and manually retrieve all the data from the RIAA's balky NT server. Some sort of bot or HTML-parser might be in order: I wrote software to add artist career totals rather than add all the individual albums up with a hand calculator.
However, if I am the only person in the world expected to do this absurd feat of singlehanded data entry and cross-correlation to fix faulty records... you're not going to see it done right away. If you are that determined to say "THIS is how the job must be done", well... you know what to do! It involves sitting. I can confirm that part... >:)
The thing is, no such place is strictly necessary given a context where people can _access_ music or other content directly. As long as the Internet allows you to (as an extreme) type in an IP address, connect to the computer and download a file from a server somewhere else in the world, that channel exists. While that channel exists, it is easier and cheaper for musicians to expose their music than it has ever been. There _was_ no analogous situation before audio tapes, and even with audio tapes, the cost of getting a copy of the music to somebody was significant. With data copying and the Internet, the only real barrier is awareness- and in practice, awareness is not necessary. In a peer-to-peer situation, content that's really strong yet totally unpromoted can proliferate wildly. The very successful internet musician "Bassic" came by his popularity in just this way- promotion came _after_ grass-roots listeners had proliferated his music widely.
I'll add that I have been kicking myself since halfway through for only noting down the product of those two fields and not keeping the fields themselves. The 'alphabetical' list is literally what I was typing in, record by record- at first because I wanted to get a quick look at the multiplatinum level, and then I was stuck either going back and starting again, or going on... Please do show up my inadequacy as a data analyst by going to http://www.riaa.com/Gold-Intro-2.cfm and making nice downloadable text files suitable for data munging that contain ALL the information you can get from that source, i.e. artist, album, release date, cert date of each certification. I would love it if you did that! Would have saved me days of exhausting and nonprofessional work. I'll further warn you that loads of the information is either missing or flat wrong, and must be corrected through cross-referencing with other sources- _this_ I did, well I thought.
There is no original files- what you see is literally all I have. http://www.riaa.com/Gold-Intro-2.cfm is the source for mining. If you mean it and have the facilities to do a better job at this, may I please, earnestly and in _total_ _sincerity_, beg you to do it? I'm not a data analyst: I'm a sound engineer dabbling in many other fields. If I'm not mistaken my own limited analysis is _the_ _only_ compiled data source of this information out there and publically available. Now that I've taken a shot at it, maybe someone or some open-sourcey group can get some people together and do it right? Nobody would be more pleased than I. Eighteen-hour days of data entry sucked...
As a result, Revolver would have even less promotional muscle and would flop even worse- "Love You To? Tomorrow Never Knows? What are you guys, trying to blow it here?", and there would be no budget for a symphony orchestra on Sgt. Pepper, which would be orchestrated much like Let It Be- kinda low-fi early-days sounding.
When that flopped, forget getting approval for a double album- forget getting tracks like "Revolution #9" on said album- forget even getting approval for the minimalist cover, and hence the very name 'White Album'- and goodbye to the (according to some! ;) ) most commercially important Beatles album in history.
The rules _are_ different these days.
I _saw_ and was aware of every single certification date relative to year of release. You can too, if you are very patient: www.riaa.com is where I found the gold+platinum search engine, and CDNow and Google were respectively where I looked up the large amounts of missing or erroneous information. I'm not aware of anywhere else you can get this info. The current bands of 1990 (the 'Limp Bizkit' of their day- such as Warrant, whom I mentioned) are not getting ongoing promotion.
It would be terrific to see the actual sales (not rounded off to the nearest million) of bands divided by the total earnings of the record industry for that year and thus making a much more accurate analysis of the situation. I would _love_ to see that. Unfortunately, I didn't and don't have access to that information, and didn't take the time to exhaustively record all the information I _did_ have. What I did was something rather than nothing, and that because I could and because nobody else seemed to be interested in looking at album sales from this perspective in even the crudest way. Well... I've taken care of that 'crudest way' stuff ;)
If anyone wants to do a better job than I've done, I will jump up and down and cheer and hope earnestly that you make your results available as freely redistributable text files as I have done ;) I _know_ it's possible to do a better job. Please do! This was the best I could do for now, and you've _got_ it. An analysis in the hand is worth two that cost $100,000 and are locked in a filing cabinet in the records-keeping department of Bertlesmann or Sony ;)
You have what I've done: the alphabetized list is ALL the data I have. It took at least two literally 18 hour, wrap-around nonstop sessions of data entry plus many less concentrated days to even get that. You've also got the only source of information I had: http://www.riaa.com/Gold-Intro-2.cfm. It does not _contain_ the information you specifically mention. It (when heavily corrected and cross-referenced with Google or some other web or music searcher) does contain more information than I ended up using. I'm aware of that, but not especially sorry or apologetic about it. Evergreens is as much as I could do, this month. Assuming the RIAA keeps its fairly sketchy database online, I may go in and do more someday. I was really _hot_ to add all the Gold records in, weighting them at (number of years out / 2), but time just did not allow that.
If anybody decides to organise an effort to copy out a snapshot of ALL the data in this database and put it up somewhere in a more hackable form, I would be wildly excited and pleased. Imagine one person getting every certified album starting with A, and compiling complete data for year, gold and platinum sales, possibly the individual cert dates for each award- there _is_ no more information publically available. I think it would be great if someone did this. I just know that I can't do it right now, single-handedly.
The 'channel' needs to back the heck off from the labels and stop squeezing them so damn hard. That's what keeps CD prices so high and keeps novel, original music largely off the radio. Unfortunately, with recent consolidation, it looks like the channel's going to squeeze the labels even harder. It's an absolute shakedown and everybody loses- except performers and listeners outside the mainstream, who are to some extent legitimized by a situation in which people are almost forced to explore other avenues of music awareness and distribution. I have to sympathise with your friend but at the same time it's as if she is a nice person working in telemarketing- I'd still be happy to see her employer hosed even if it costs her her job. There are better places to work :)
I got an email asking why Garth Brooks isn't on the top ten artists list. Garth Brooks is number 21 on the complete list of commercially important careers. The only country artist he's second to is Kenny Rogers at number 14, and this is hard to argue. More relevantly, the only artist remotely contemporary to him is Whitney Houston at number 33- every other act has been sustaining a career for _years_, in many cases starting from the 70s or earlier. Garth Brooks _does_ make a hugely strong showing- no other rock or pop artist registers so high given such a late start. The analysis is of _evergreens_, remember. The question you should ask yourself is this: thirty years from now, will Garth have _beaten_ the Beatles, or will his sales have flagged while the Beatles' sales have continued?
The trouble with search engines is that, as you say, they've got reason to have an agenda and punish non-revenue-generating content, being slow to list it or possibly ignoring it completely. When the Internet is seen strictly as a marketplace there's no way around this: the benefits of being 'featured' in a high-rated search engine are too significant for the search engines to not monetize this. It's a mirror of earlier forms of media where there WAS no access save through a narrow channel. The search engines you speak of replicate that narrow channel.
However, the notion of a narrow channel on the Internet is a _myth_. It's an assumption carried over from earlier forms of media, and in at least some forms of internet content (certain musicians, 'all your base' etc) the proliferation of awareness about content takes place without _any_ reliance on a narrow, tailored channel.
It becomes a problem of promotion in a context of wildly prolific choice. There is so much hype, so much promotion from so many directions, that it all cancels out... in a situation of such deep choice the only real 'magic bullet' is content itself. Publish or perish- work on your 'performance' rather than your publicity.
When this is done, and a basic minimum of initial publicity is given (like telling your friends, mentioning what you've done to your peers), the content gradually takes on an popularity roughly equivalent to its real significance- if you average it. Wild bursts of publicity and insignificance are also to be expected, it's not anything like a steady 'readership' or listenership. The pattern actually resembles the fractal distribution of noise in signal transmissions... very striking fluctuations. Again, this is without external publicity such as featuring in search engines.
Your last point is well taken- people who do not live long enough to see their ideas adopted are liable to lose out. Interestingly, this corresponds with the assumption that intellectual property must be defended- if only the creator is permitted to control the expressions of their ideas, then it is wrong to take them and post them willy-nilly elsewhere, and so when the person dies, their own little web page is no longer paid for and the content is erased. If there is no intellectual property, it only takes one person to copy the data to preserve it, and that person also winds up capable of redistributing the material, rather than being legally barred from doing so. In essence, part of intellectual property is to guarantee that a creator's works die with the creator unless proper arrangements are made.
This is somewhat non-intuitive :)
I don't know _where_ my brother turned this up years ago, but one reading of this small book will make your jaw drop, and answer questions you never thought to ask, like-
_Highly_ recommended...
And to think I saw my first glimpse of 'Atlantis' and thought to myself, "Oh good, for once in their lives they are taking a _broader_ concept and writing their own damn story around that". Of course, this was before I saw the side-to-side story elements between that and Nadia. And the side-to-side _character_ designs between that and Nadia... *yeesh*
Better still, Disney's version of Otaku No Video :D
As for how to realistically change the situation? I don't know. I can only do little things. For instance, writing open source dithering software to try and get some of the proprietary tools of Big Media into the hands of individuals. I did that. I upgraded the cabling and provided technical advice for a Brattleboro micro-radio station while I lived in Brattleboro.
What I do is not much. I'm completely out of my depth regarding stuff like Clear Channel. All I _can_ do is what comes to hand- for instance, I have hopes that my work will lead to pro audio software for Linux. I'm not good enough of a programmer to write C programs for Linux, so the program I wrote is in REALbasic for MacOS. I GPLed it anyway, because what if someone can make use of the algorithms and translate them? It may end up benefitting nobody but me, but I _did_ have the option of going wholly proprietary with it- high-end dithers and wordlength reducers can fetch thousands of dollars just to use them, in proprietary-land- and I couldn't accept that.
I've put effort into understanding the music side of modern media as well- not 12 hours ago, I uploaded my Evergreens analysis, which starts with inspection of the entire history of platinum albums and goes on from there to extrapolate what recent trends mean for the future of this form of media. I think that counts as my thoughts on the matter. I'm of the opinion that 'Big Media' in the sense of the RIAA is heading for a nasty fall but I _don't_ know what will replace it, I only know that it will involve levels of differentiation vastly in excess of what is possible with the traditional radio/retail sales channel, which has been getting absurdly restricted in terms of total inventory. I don't know the form this will take, or whether the record labels will have a heavy stake in it. I do know that if the labels try to sell on the Internet they way they are selling through retail, they are fooling themselves and guaranteed to fail expensively.
Again, I'm sorry for misjudging you- reading Slashdot has caused me to be awfully sensitive to freemarket chauvinism, maybe too sensitive. Just because I see some attitudes as horribly damaging doesn't mean I need to see them in every little remark, and I apologize. I vented unjustifiably at you- my beef is with the numerous people out there who swear up and down that ideology-driven, totally heedless deregulation of everything is the wonder drug to make everything be marvellous and great, and obviously I think this is cult-like insanity with lots of evidence to harshly disprove these promised benefits, but THOSE PEOPLE are the ones running things now. Hence my occasional venom- and I'm sorry to have nailed you with it and disrespected you.
Actually, _all_ of you guys are waaaaaay too gullible. 128K mp3 _and_ 80K .ogg and certainly 64K or indeed 128K MP3Pro are so obviously compromised that it's really not hard for even an untutored listener to identify them as sonically compromised. Any playback system that's not itself totally hosed (even really cheap headphones with elements enough to extend to around 18K) will reveal this. Apparently, MP3Pro is the _worst_ and most easily identifiable, possibly because it attempts to re-synthesise discarded content above 10K. I know mp3 tends to cut off at 18K if at all, and have never heard of .ogg cutting off at all, much less trying to resynthesize data that was completely discarded. That way lies madness :D
My guess is that there's a very serious risk of consumers returning any prospective hardware that uses MP3Pro, believing the hardware to be broken. There's only so far you can go with audio garbage before you cause even totally untrained ears to categorize the sound as 'distorted' or 'something in this must be broken, it sounds wrong'. From what I'm seeing in early reports, MP3Pro crosses that line.
As you know, UCITA contains language that can be used to stamp out buyer awareness, specifically prohibiting anything constituting a 'bad review'. As such, it's potentially a very serious violation of 'caveat emptor', or buyer awareness. Even overlooking this, it's transparently obvious that fly-by-night companies and con artists always wish to trick and fool buyers, which also interferes with buyer awareness.
If you think "caveat emptor" means "buyer, sucks to be you", remind me never, ever, EVER to buy anything from _you_ ;) and, I might add, I'm damned grateful that lawyers find it profitable and satisfying to defend consumers _against_ people like that.
Understand?
That, or they're afraid that if things get too ugly, we really _will_ kill all the lawyers ;)
Now, bearing this in mind, why do you behave as if 'stopping you from buying a domain name and writing good content' is a rhetorical, sarcastic aside? It's no immediate threat, but that is precisely where all this is heading. There is no reason to assume you, or I, or anyone will forever be allowed to buy a domain name for 20 bucks and write good content, even if we put up the money ourselves. This capability is not some sort of natural law, but the consequence of largely unstated rules that are being increasingly overturned, as in the radio deregulation.
I would respectfully suggest that if they CAN stop you from 'buying a domain name for 20 bucks and writing good content', it is WAY, WAY TOO LATE to worry. How can you seriously suggest such a Pollyannaish attitude? It is very akin to saying, "If you die, _then_ you can see a doctor".
Feel free to go make (for instance) a radio station, and 'compete' in the 'free market' with Clear Channel. They will murder you. They have jocks _kill_ _animals_ on-air for attention (Clear Channel aired the live killing of a boar and the station posted the bloody pictures on its website). They control live concert promotion of record companies and can and will pull a label's artists off the playlists of _hundreds_ of stations unless they cooperate and freeze you out completely.
Clear Channel is what happens when an industry is both mature and completely deregulated. Radio went totally laissez-faire during the Clinton administration through pressure from Republicans, and this is what happens. Clear Channel is working on taking over 'independent promotion', too. They are flat-out vicious. There is no 'market'. A lot of good people are now out of radio entirely because of Clear Channel taking over the whole damned industry.
IT CAN HAPPEN HERE.
When some future AOL or Microsoft or who-knows-what gets control of enough of the Internet, owning the hardware and the big web sites and the backbones, and decides it is time to announce to everybody else that they will not peer with you if you host content they don't provide, where will you be then? Where will your common market be then? The only thing stopping us from facing that is the fact that the Internet is NOT really mature, and that it is by no means unregulated. The regulation is hovering around waiting to happen- nobody's really clear on what the rules are.
If the rules turn out to be 'no rules', kiss your ability for grassroots media goodbye. Inevitably someone is going to want to MOW that grass. I ask you, if AOL/Time Warner really did have authority over enough of the internet that they could do what Clear Channel does, and if there was no regulation, what possible reason would they have for allowing ANY independent content on their internet, or allowing any unauthorised networks to peer with the Internet? It comes down to dollars and cents in the end.
I am sorry, but you are naive and painfully uninformed about analogous situations in radio and you need to grow up and learn how the big bad world really works. The only way a 'free market' _ever_ exists is within a context of rules. No rules, no market. Those rules are demonized as 'regulations', which they are, and having too many of them puts business in a straitjacket, which is unhelpful- but if you get rid of them, you kiss off any chance of a functioning market. Look at radio post-deregulation. This isn't theory. You're talking theory. I'm talking observation and analogy. I defy anyone to claim Clear Channel is a desirable outcome of a market. Christ, it is the UN-market. Clear Channel armtwists everyone they deal with and cannot be challenged or competed with. Try it and watch your revenue from record labels, advertisers, _anything_ be choked off. If you're in radio your whole environment is Clear Channel now and they will tell your advertisers whether they can advertise on your station, will tell record labels whether they can let YOU play the new releases- everything. Thank you, Clinton Administration and Republicans who got their way against the impotent wishes of the Clinton people. So much for an industry.
It CAN happen here, too.
The internet DOES NOT HAVE such a restriction.
To some extent there's a limit to how much you can scale- if 10 million people tried to read my 'Airwindows' site tomorrow, I wouldn't be charged extra, but the site could very possibly go down under the load, something I would just have to accept. My capacity to put information out globally does not equal anybody's _obligation_ to have it stand up to such loads. If I had anything especially important for everyone in the world to know about, I could put it out as open content, and have people mirror it and distribute it in a P2P way, and that _does_ scale.
But the real point here is that by the very nature of their approach to media, the AOLs of the world are put at a disadvantage, unavoidably. They must take a middle line (or whatever is safest and can be _spun_ as a middle line- you'll find them taking a quietly ultraconservative line on corporate power, obviously!). They cannot introduce content that's too 'niche'. Most of all, they must produce revenue. Not for them the capacity to cheaply fund a small web presence out of pocket change indefinitely! Everything they do has to _pay_ them, because their operations cost so damn much.
At the same time, you have media kingpins like Clear Channel Communications (real scumbags, btw- and it was Salon that had the story...) who take the corporate media suck-fest and escalate the hostilities- who put further revenue pressure on operations like AOL/Time Warner by outflanking them and out-NASTYing them in every way. Once you begin to play the 'driving revenue, appeasing mainstream' game you're at risk of being outcompeted on those grounds by total scumbags. You can't even be a _boring_ media monolith and be safe. Evidence suggests that under laissez-faire modern capitalism you _must_ be scum, or you get beaten up and your lunch money taken away, no matter how big you are. AOL/Time Warner is in no way safe just because they are big, unless deregulation is slowed or stopped.
And all the while, on the Internet, you still are one click (or one typed-in URL, remember- one Google search? etc) away from any person's niche content- hosted at that person's expense. Sure the sites can't stand a slashdotting, but so what? The information is out there. The thing to really watch out for is not that the Salons of the world get crushed- that's a pretty big niche and there will be others if there's a need to be filled. The thing to watch out for is any mechanism that might block the individual from putting their own information out there on the network- NOT in some wildly public way, that's not a given, but just OUT THERE at all. Nobody is guaranteed attention, but the nature of the Internet would be horribly compromised if anything reduced the ability of people to just buy some cheap hosting (say, under $50 a month- comparable to buying dial-up) and have their material linkable to, one click away from anyone who saw fit to refer to it.
Because to some extent this is a value-added proposition to the AOLs of the world, but it also potentially dulls the sales message, draws attention away from AOL/Time Warner properties, is content that's not owned by AOL/Time Warner etc., plus you have people who would really prefer individuals' abilities to reach a worldwide audience to be globally restricted on grounds of content. They might be making pr0n! Or advocating gay rights! Or suggesting parody is not against the law in Korea! Or that women shouldn't wear veils in Iran! So even the ability of niche people to connect to the worldwide electronic network is resented by some- and THAT is the area to watch out for. In particular, anything suggesting that Big Media should have control over individual Internet content should raise a red flag. (I see Microsoft's 'Smart Tags' as potentially a hell of a Trojan Horse in this regard, but there could be other issues ahead too.)
Since you like rock, have you ever _played_ in a band? With nothing but drums and amps, no PA, just raw instrument volume? _That_ is what 'rock live sound' really is, but you won't get it at a concert- unless maybe you're catching some really small gig where the drums and amps aren't even miked. You might get it there. ...or, of course, off recordings that accurately convey what live rock instruments sound like- for instance, if you have a killer vinyl-based High End rig, you can put on Creedence's "Bayou Country" and get damn close to the 'live sound' I'm talking about. It's a lot rowdier than classical as you know, but there _is_ still a proper way to do it.
That said, you're a sillyperson not to like some of the high points of 'Spike'. I mean, come on, "Chewing Gum"? "God's Comic"? "Any King's Shilling" for God's sake? Geez, it may be an inconsistent album but _damn_...
YOW! Are we OFFTOPIC yet? ;)