Most people don't care much about or very much like music qua music, so they don't seek it out, they let it come to them.
And almost all that comes to them is what the companies who control the channels of delivery--basically, AOL and Viacom--decide to send down.
From those pre-chosen choices, they narrow it down a little based on their actual and desired demographic niches, the kind of people they think they are or wish they could be.
They "identify with" some performers and not others, based on the manner of their marketing, and buy accordingly.
The rich, pretty Harvard girl whose favorite artists are Bartok, Rakim, and Slayer, and the young, urban black teenager who loves Devo, Fennesz, and the Deftones--those kinds of "off-demo" individuals are not viable marketing targets, so, they have been mostly engineered and/or ignored out of existence.
One can guess with about 80% accuracy what records people own by what brand of pants they wear, the remaking of music as "lifestyle badge" (and concurrent brainwashing) having been so successful. Even--or, especially--among "independent" splinter groups.
Tossing in a couple stiffly grafted-on profanities and saying "marketing bull" doesn't make you sound like you're not a shill--it makes you sound like you're a shill thinking you're sounding like you're not a shill.
As does your repeating the same "marketing bull" over and over again. And your saying "marketing bull." Only marketing dinks call it that, when denigrating us non-dinks, in mockery of our outré redneck incomprehension of your wizardry.
And oh--
"Real-time" is only capitalized mid-sentence if it's appearing in "marketing bull."
"Intellectual Property" means "products primarily of the labor of mind," not "owned intellect." It is not a mystical incantation. It's a modified noun. Irreplaceable pieces of the communal cosmic meta-mind which your question presumes are not being stolen and hoarded away from you--as your Jefferson quote would tell you, should you choose to understand it. Those of us who live primarily on the labors of our minds already know that you, who would ask such a question, envy our baby-soft skin and want us to be the chained Princess Leia dancing for your favor in your Jabba-on-the-skiff fantasy, or, at best, to create valueless "content" to help you sell the invaluable packaging which your nobler labors produce. The language need not be further debased for the purpose of making that known. We invent the words for things, and you repeat them--that is the division of labor. "Intellectual property" it is. Thanks for asking.
It's written in a style that's indistinguishable from that of Dawson's Creek or Gilmore Girls, but of course it's nothing like Dawson's Creek or Gilmore Girls, because, lacking the Dawson/Gilmore homo/soap stigma, it appeals to repressed would-be Dawson/Gilmore fans who need the reassuring bully might of majority consensus, which responds to any criticism with award litanies, various forms of "You're too stupid/ADD-ridden/West Virginian to understand the height of civilization marked by this major-network television show for teenage girls," and mass down-moderation of posts such as this.
That's some quality sick rationalization, right there.
That's obviously the best--and only unquestionably lawful--idea, but the company's equally obviously a cheap-ass, scrimping, barely functioning, "waves of layoffs" sort of outfit. Functional businesses don't need this kind of "morale-booster," or mp3s ripped from their employees' discs to, uh, fund it--or free bad advice from us misinformed jerks.
They could also just call up the g.d. RIAA and/or ASCAP and/or BMI and/or a lawyer and ask them what the proper licensing is for this kind of quasi-broadcasting situation--probably about the same as for a store where they play popular background music--but that, too, would be a reasonable, responsible, potentially non-cheap course of action.
If you think you might work with the anonymous questioner, quit now, before your paychecks start bouncing and they've stolen your DNA to make unpaid clone workers. That's Fair Use, isn't it?
Strange. I wouldn't expect Photoshop to quit just because I closed a picture file any more than I'd expect my finishing developing a photo to cause my darkroom to vanish. Nor would I expect my developing two pictures simultaneously to cause my darkroom to multiply and become two darkrooms. Nor would I expect my entire house to become a darkroom merely because I've begun developing a picture. My intuition must be broken.
The only technology-inspired poetic literature I can think of that isn't primarily totalitarian propaganda is a "novel"--which it's not; it's a book of poetry--by Mark Leyner called My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.
But, like hatless said, since it's Serious Literature, it's about people, not technology (one theme is tech-overkill's potential personality-disintegrating effects).
Also, it's maybe the oddest, and probably the funniest, book ever.
The guitar interface for the Synclavier did the same thing, back in 1985 or so. Good idea, until you tried to use it. They seriously underestimated the subtlety of "natural"-sounding playing. If Gibson's done it better, well, good, but it's far from revolutionary. If you're willing to waste a lot of time setting it up, you can already get the same result with Roland's interface, too.
And, you can already record direct pickup (and/or MIDI) signal alongside any number of differently amplified signals, then reamplify and process and combine them to your heart's content.
I don't see why anyone's excited about this. Severe tech-overkill to do a few simple things you can already do anyway, on the cheap(er).
2) Any association of social misfitisms with psychological diagnoses is problematic, scientifically. The diagnoses, being based on expert judgments rather than confirmable measurements, are already the products of social exclusions (cf. Foucault, Szasz, etc. re: expertise as mask of power), not of scientific measurement. In other words, social malcontents aren't allowed to become experts in the field of mind-disease-diagnosis, so, unsurprisingly, these malcontents are diagnosed by mind-disease experts as "diseased." QED (almost).
The university is not a flattener of hierarchy, it's a decisive, irrevocable split, the beginning of a lifelong segregation. A "top" and a "bottom" are sheared off, left aside forever.
The bottom--I use the hierarchical terms loosely here, just for illustration--is an "underclass" of people who can't continue their educations for reasons of economic or other deprivation, or infirmity, or youthful error, or simple misfortune. They just aren't there to be disdained anymore. If they were around, they would be.
The top is the rough equivalent of the "nerds" and "stoners" of the linked article, people whose lives simply take a different course because their skills and talents lie outside the set "professional"--like certain kinds of artists or technicians, who have their own, separate schools, or simply mavericks who strike their own paths outside the hierarchy--and/or who view college as merely a continuation of secondary school's horrors, but populated wholly by the priveleged (the "popular" and "nerds" of the article).
The members of your group no longer interact personally with the members of either of these groups, so, in your minds, they don't exist. Sometimes, they deliver you a pizza or make a movie or record you like, but they're essentially non-persons to you...
...judging by the blithe sanctimony your comment, that is.
Where there is a state-defined "political" which is the only brand of legally free speech, "tyranny" cannot be "risked," because it already exists. Hence the lack of a set of "political"/"commercial"/other distinctions in the 1st Amendment. Jefferson & Co. knew what they were doing, and it has no correspondence with what you're saying.
%.|?T disgruntled former players posting here come off sounding like abused wives or escaped kidnapping victims, and the current "addicts" and Sony astroturfers sound like Scientologists and Amway reps.
Obviously, something about the game is seriously fucked up, and exposure to it makes you fucked up, too.
Not knowing anything about this game is evidence that your life is, in this one respect at least, a better life than those who speak here from experience.
Webwasher tracks that info for you while you use it. I don't, but if you're interested...
I've used hosts to block ads and other annoying crap for about four years, and whenever some new annoyance has come up, I've added it--like anti-leech.com, about two weeks ago. My hosts file is over 10,000 lines long now.
A couple months ago, I had to use a friend's computer to look something up, and I was stunned--amazed--at the plague-of-frogs level of pop-ups and -unders, zinging Flash banners, uncloseable content-blocking Shockwave blobs, relentless MIDI background noise--etc, etc. And I wasn't even looking at porn. I don't know how people can stand it. I just gave up--forgot what I was doing, hit "Shut Down," couldn't take it. I can't even imagine how bad it is on Windows, with ActiveX, auto-run executables, self-installing spy- and ad-ware.... Jesus.
So, what I'm saying is: You don't want to know. Just go about your business, havin' a good time on the web. Almost no one else is.
...not its dopey pro-rich-liberal bias or its coastline cliquishnes or its porn-driven, moronically desperate marketing schemes.
And they've gotten more average as they've asked for more money. You can turn on any cable news channel and see Andrew Sullivan and Arianna Huffington saying the same stupid things they say in their Salon columns. Greil Marcus writes for every magazine on earth. Tom Tomorrow and Lynda Barry are more widely syndicated than Seinfeld. Damien Cave's tech columns are no better than your average +4 Interesting/. post or TechTV news update. Garrison Keillor is the most boring, played-out MF on the planet. (Etc.)
They've fired their best writers (Paglia, for example) to cut costs, and hired utterly average dead-tree columnists (why King Kaufman and Allen Barra instead of, say, Ralph Wiley?--what is this, 1982?), and just flat-out failed to bring in interesting new people who could liven things up (Jim Goad, Nick Gillespie and Justin Raimondo could probably use a few extra bucks from side jobs, for example).
Browse their archives from three to five years ago. The articles were mostly good. They were almost all interesting. Some were even surprising. But they waited until the site degenerated into PBS blandness (plus occasional class-baiting "I Was a Stripper for a Day" and "Trailer-Park Republicans: Whitey in the Wild" bilge and "classy" porn for prissy feminists and self-hating men) to start asking for money.
That--and simple mismanagement--is why they're broke. And they deserve it. "Lilies that fester..."
1) You buy Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns--it's a thick, scary book--and use some of those.
or
2) You think up something different.
Hence the non-resemblance of most good music to other good music.
Only Michael Nyman and Shellac get away with making music out of four notes, and that calculation is supremely retarded anyway, since it ignores rhythm and harmony (but "50,000" sounds better than "infinity" to techie types who're obsessed with denigrating the skill and intellect of all non-dorks).
1) If you think artists are "better compensated" for their work than programmers are, you must not know any artists or programmers. The statement is so wrong it's irrefutable--you should start a religion. But, an example: I'm an "artist." I write books, and make music for films. That's my job. And I make more money than anyone I know--except my friends who are programmers. My hourly wage for writing a book, I've calculated, runs about $2.20 US. Dollars. Two of them, and twenty cents. Years of work for a few thousand dollars--the high life indeed. (In case you don't like the analogy: I'm also in a band that's "critically acclaimed" but not famous; we lose money every time we even think about music.) My most successful programmer friend guesses he makes about $200 US per hour. He "guesses" that because he works so little and makes so much, he can't stop laughing long enough to bust out his calculator. Neither of us are typical, I'm sure, but there's more of him and me than there are of Britney Spears and RMS. Still, explain to me in detail how sickeningly overpaid and lazy I am, please.
2) Royalties exist so that artists can make whatever they want, and if people buy it, they can get paid for having worked--just like telemarketers and strippers. Ideally, this takes artistic decisions out of the hands of patrons and media corps--for artists willing to risk being utterly destitute should their work not sell--and puts them the hands of...whoever. Isn't that neat? It's, like, an almost-ideal version of capitalism or something.
(As for the whole "playing live" argument: Movies, paintings, books, and irreproducible studio-created music all exist; should they not? Because that's all "doing nothing," right? DVDs, reproductions of paintings, books, and records are already cheap, because they're easy to make once all the work is done. Like any other manufactured good is. I mean, should Ferraris cost $1000 each? Because all the "real work" was done before the first one went off the assembly line, and those greedy car-designing bastards expect you to spend a hundred grand on a pile of scrap-metal while they're off on vacation--right? The nerve.)
3) Everything you said above is a justification for your being a cheap and envious person. I admit I probably have much better luck with the art-hotties than you do, but you're rather too rabid about all this, don't you think? You're spitting bold tags all over the screen. Sigmund Freud wrote some books you should probably read. And you can steal them without guilt--dead men collect no royalties.
Seeing the worker bees uniformed like prisoners gives management a greater feeling of dominance over the workers--and this feeling is their subconscious barometer of "productivity."
You know, I really need to broaden my horizons and stop listening to off beat music and pick up some top-40
This is true. You failed to mention a single non-Top-40 release--on either side of this statement. Your "off beat" tastes are an inspiring (and, of course, self-image-shattering) example to us all.
By "freedom of the press," Reporters Without Borders seems to be referring to how easy life is for big-media / international reporters. None of this silly American "free speech for the plebes" stuff counts. Apparently. Can't get to the site to see what their metrics are, but that might explain some of the oddities in the rankings.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people don't care much about or very much like music qua music, so they don't seek it out, they let it come to them.
And almost all that comes to them is what the companies who control the channels of delivery--basically, AOL and Viacom--decide to send down.
From those pre-chosen choices, they narrow it down a little based on their actual and desired demographic niches, the kind of people they think they are or wish they could be.
They "identify with" some performers and not others, based on the manner of their marketing, and buy accordingly.
The rich, pretty Harvard girl whose favorite artists are Bartok, Rakim, and Slayer, and the young, urban black teenager who loves Devo, Fennesz, and the Deftones--those kinds of "off-demo" individuals are not viable marketing targets, so, they have been mostly engineered and/or ignored out of existence.
One can guess with about 80% accuracy what records people own by what brand of pants they wear, the remaking of music as "lifestyle badge" (and concurrent brainwashing) having been so successful. Even--or, especially--among "independent" splinter groups.
It's fucking sad.
Tossing in a couple stiffly grafted-on profanities and saying "marketing bull" doesn't make you sound like you're not a shill--it makes you sound like you're a shill thinking you're sounding like you're not a shill.
As does your repeating the same "marketing bull" over and over again. And your saying "marketing bull." Only marketing dinks call it that, when denigrating us non-dinks, in mockery of our outré redneck incomprehension of your wizardry.
And oh--
"Real-time" is only capitalized mid-sentence if it's appearing in "marketing bull."
"Intellectual Property" means "products primarily of the labor of mind," not "owned intellect." It is not a mystical incantation. It's a modified noun. Irreplaceable pieces of the communal cosmic meta-mind which your question presumes are not being stolen and hoarded away from you--as your Jefferson quote would tell you, should you choose to understand it. Those of us who live primarily on the labors of our minds already know that you, who would ask such a question, envy our baby-soft skin and want us to be the chained Princess Leia dancing for your favor in your Jabba-on-the-skiff fantasy, or, at best, to create valueless "content" to help you sell the invaluable packaging which your nobler labors produce. The language need not be further debased for the purpose of making that known. We invent the words for things, and you repeat them--that is the division of labor. "Intellectual property" it is. Thanks for asking.
It's written in a style that's indistinguishable from that of Dawson's Creek or Gilmore Girls, but of course it's nothing like Dawson's Creek or Gilmore Girls, because, lacking the Dawson/Gilmore homo/soap stigma, it appeals to repressed would-be Dawson/Gilmore fans who need the reassuring bully might of majority consensus, which responds to any criticism with award litanies, various forms of "You're too stupid/ADD-ridden/West Virginian to understand the height of civilization marked by this major-network television show for teenage girls," and mass down-moderation of posts such as this.
That's some quality sick rationalization, right there.
You're not being superficial enough to get this, to see what's most obvious.
What "they" want is simply to be the acknowledged--and, "they" hope, one day, legal--arbiters of righteousness.
There's no position to decipher. They're Puritans, prohibitionists, frustrated Stalins.
What most people most want is to dominate other people. When you don't understand what people are doing, that's probably what they're doing.
That's obviously the best--and only unquestionably lawful--idea, but the company's equally obviously a cheap-ass, scrimping, barely functioning, "waves of layoffs" sort of outfit. Functional businesses don't need this kind of "morale-booster," or mp3s ripped from their employees' discs to, uh, fund it--or free bad advice from us misinformed jerks.
They could also just call up the g.d. RIAA and/or ASCAP and/or BMI and/or a lawyer and ask them what the proper licensing is for this kind of quasi-broadcasting situation--probably about the same as for a store where they play popular background music--but that, too, would be a reasonable, responsible, potentially non-cheap course of action.
If you think you might work with the anonymous questioner, quit now, before your paychecks start bouncing and they've stolen your DNA to make unpaid clone workers. That's Fair Use, isn't it?
Strange. I wouldn't expect Photoshop to quit just because I closed a picture file any more than I'd expect my finishing developing a photo to cause my darkroom to vanish. Nor would I expect my developing two pictures simultaneously to cause my darkroom to multiply and become two darkrooms. Nor would I expect my entire house to become a darkroom merely because I've begun developing a picture. My intuition must be broken.
The only technology-inspired poetic literature I can think of that isn't primarily totalitarian propaganda is a "novel"--which it's not; it's a book of poetry--by Mark Leyner called My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.
But, like hatless said, since it's Serious Literature, it's about people, not technology (one theme is tech-overkill's potential personality-disintegrating effects).
Also, it's maybe the oddest, and probably the funniest, book ever.
The guitar interface for the Synclavier did the same thing, back in 1985 or so. Good idea, until you tried to use it. They seriously underestimated the subtlety of "natural"-sounding playing. If Gibson's done it better, well, good, but it's far from revolutionary. If you're willing to waste a lot of time setting it up, you can already get the same result with Roland's interface, too.
And, you can already record direct pickup (and/or MIDI) signal alongside any number of differently amplified signals, then reamplify and process and combine them to your heart's content.
I don't see why anyone's excited about this. Severe tech-overkill to do a few simple things you can already do anyway, on the cheap(er).
1) NERRRRRRRRRRD!
2) Any association of social misfitisms with psychological diagnoses is problematic, scientifically. The diagnoses, being based on expert judgments rather than confirmable measurements, are already the products of social exclusions (cf. Foucault, Szasz, etc. re: expertise as mask of power), not of scientific measurement. In other words, social malcontents aren't allowed to become experts in the field of mind-disease-diagnosis, so, unsurprisingly, these malcontents are diagnosed by mind-disease experts as "diseased." QED (almost).
Each instance of "'nerds'" in the third paragraph should have read "some 'nerds.'" Typed it rather quickly.
The university is not a flattener of hierarchy, it's a decisive, irrevocable split, the beginning of a lifelong segregation. A "top" and a "bottom" are sheared off, left aside forever.
The bottom--I use the hierarchical terms loosely here, just for illustration--is an "underclass" of people who can't continue their educations for reasons of economic or other deprivation, or infirmity, or youthful error, or simple misfortune. They just aren't there to be disdained anymore. If they were around, they would be.
The top is the rough equivalent of the "nerds" and "stoners" of the linked article, people whose lives simply take a different course because their skills and talents lie outside the set "professional"--like certain kinds of artists or technicians, who have their own, separate schools, or simply mavericks who strike their own paths outside the hierarchy--and/or who view college as merely a continuation of secondary school's horrors, but populated wholly by the priveleged (the "popular" and "nerds" of the article).
The members of your group no longer interact personally with the members of either of these groups, so, in your minds, they don't exist. Sometimes, they deliver you a pizza or make a movie or record you like, but they're essentially non-persons to you...
...judging by the blithe sanctimony your comment, that is.
Amp Ache. Gotta get me some.
Where there is a state-defined "political" which is the only brand of legally free speech, "tyranny" cannot be "risked," because it already exists. Hence the lack of a set of "political"/"commercial"/other distinctions in the 1st Amendment. Jefferson & Co. knew what they were doing, and it has no correspondence with what you're saying.
%.|?T disgruntled former players posting here come off sounding like abused wives or escaped kidnapping victims, and the current "addicts" and Sony astroturfers sound like Scientologists and Amway reps.
Obviously, something about the game is seriously fucked up, and exposure to it makes you fucked up, too.
Not knowing anything about this game is evidence that your life is, in this one respect at least, a better life than those who speak here from experience.
Smile.
Tennis ball, soaked in gasoline, lit on fire--midnight street hockey.
I still remember the demonic banshee sound the flaming ball made as it whizzed past our faces....
{Phil Hartman} Good times, good times. {/Phil Hartman}
{OJ makes OJ-can't-do-it-face}
Webwasher tracks that info for you while you use it. I don't, but if you're interested...
I've used hosts to block ads and other annoying crap for about four years, and whenever some new annoyance has come up, I've added it--like anti-leech.com, about two weeks ago. My hosts file is over 10,000 lines long now.
A couple months ago, I had to use a friend's computer to look something up, and I was stunned--amazed--at the plague-of-frogs level of pop-ups and -unders, zinging Flash banners, uncloseable content-blocking Shockwave blobs, relentless MIDI background noise--etc, etc. And I wasn't even looking at porn. I don't know how people can stand it. I just gave up--forgot what I was doing, hit "Shut Down," couldn't take it. I can't even imagine how bad it is on Windows, with ActiveX, auto-run executables, self-installing spy- and ad-ware.... Jesus.
So, what I'm saying is: You don't want to know. Just go about your business, havin' a good time on the web. Almost no one else is.
...not its dopey pro-rich-liberal bias or its coastline cliquishnes or its porn-driven, moronically desperate marketing schemes.
And they've gotten more average as they've asked for more money. You can turn on any cable news channel and see Andrew Sullivan and Arianna Huffington saying the same stupid things they say in their Salon columns. Greil Marcus writes for every magazine on earth. Tom Tomorrow and Lynda Barry are more widely syndicated than Seinfeld. Damien Cave's tech columns are no better than your average +4 Interesting
They've fired their best writers (Paglia, for example) to cut costs, and hired utterly average dead-tree columnists (why King Kaufman and Allen Barra instead of, say, Ralph Wiley?--what is this, 1982?), and just flat-out failed to bring in interesting new people who could liven things up (Jim Goad, Nick Gillespie and Justin Raimondo could probably use a few extra bucks from side jobs, for example).
Browse their archives from three to five years ago. The articles were mostly good. They were almost all interesting. Some were even surprising. But they waited until the site degenerated into PBS blandness (plus occasional class-baiting "I Was a Stripper for a Day" and "Trailer-Park Republicans: Whitey in the Wild" bilge and "classy" porn for prissy feminists and self-hating men) to start asking for money.
That--and simple mismanagement--is why they're broke. And they deserve it. "Lilies that fester..."
Save man-years by not saying things like "mature software process concepts" when you mean things like "good plan."
1) You buy Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns--it's a thick, scary book--and use some of those.
or
2) You think up something different.
Hence the non-resemblance of most good music to other good music.
Only Michael Nyman and Shellac get away with making music out of four notes, and that calculation is supremely retarded anyway, since it ignores rhythm and harmony (but "50,000" sounds better than "infinity" to techie types who're obsessed with denigrating the skill and intellect of all non-dorks).
1) If you think artists are "better compensated" for their work than programmers are, you must not know any artists or programmers. The statement is so wrong it's irrefutable--you should start a religion. But, an example: I'm an "artist." I write books, and make music for films. That's my job. And I make more money than anyone I know--except my friends who are programmers. My hourly wage for writing a book, I've calculated, runs about $2.20 US. Dollars. Two of them, and twenty cents. Years of work for a few thousand dollars--the high life indeed. (In case you don't like the analogy: I'm also in a band that's "critically acclaimed" but not famous; we lose money every time we even think about music.) My most successful programmer friend guesses he makes about $200 US per hour. He "guesses" that because he works so little and makes so much, he can't stop laughing long enough to bust out his calculator. Neither of us are typical, I'm sure, but there's more of him and me than there are of Britney Spears and RMS. Still, explain to me in detail how sickeningly overpaid and lazy I am, please.
2) Royalties exist so that artists can make whatever they want, and if people buy it, they can get paid for having worked--just like telemarketers and strippers. Ideally, this takes artistic decisions out of the hands of patrons and media corps--for artists willing to risk being utterly destitute should their work not sell--and puts them the hands of...whoever. Isn't that neat? It's, like, an almost-ideal version of capitalism or something.
(As for the whole "playing live" argument: Movies, paintings, books, and irreproducible studio-created music all exist; should they not? Because that's all "doing nothing," right? DVDs, reproductions of paintings, books, and records are already cheap, because they're easy to make once all the work is done. Like any other manufactured good is. I mean, should Ferraris cost $1000 each? Because all the "real work" was done before the first one went off the assembly line, and those greedy car-designing bastards expect you to spend a hundred grand on a pile of scrap-metal while they're off on vacation--right? The nerve.)
3) Everything you said above is a justification for your being a cheap and envious person. I admit I probably have much better luck with the art-hotties than you do, but you're rather too rabid about all this, don't you think? You're spitting bold tags all over the screen. Sigmund Freud wrote some books you should probably read. And you can steal them without guilt--dead men collect no royalties.
Seeing the worker bees uniformed like prisoners gives management a greater feeling of dominance over the workers--and this feeling is their subconscious barometer of "productivity."
Possibly.
You know, I really need to broaden my horizons and stop listening to off beat music and pick up some top-40
This is true. You failed to mention a single non-Top-40 release--on either side of this statement. Your "off beat" tastes are an inspiring (and, of course, self-image-shattering) example to us all.
By "freedom of the press," Reporters Without Borders seems to be referring to how easy life is for big-media / international reporters. None of this silly American "free speech for the plebes" stuff counts. Apparently. Can't get to the site to see what their metrics are, but that might explain some of the oddities in the rankings.