Alec Saunders SquawkBox

This morning a couple of posts related to the music industry caught my attention.  First, there was the Nine Inch Nails story in the Register.  NIN have just put out their first new recording in ages, called Ghost, and have borrowed a page from RadioHead.  It's a 4 CD compilation.  CD 1 is available in 320 kbps MP3 for FREE as a download.  If you want the whole set, you can buy it for $5 from their website, and have your choice of 320k MP3, or lossless audio (FLAC, or lossless iTunes), DRM free.  The Register notes that people have already made it available on bittorrent, and thousands of downloaders are downloading it via the Pirate Bay. The questions I posed to the panel were:

1. If you were Nine Inch Nails, how would you respond to this? 
2. And what about if you're the music industry? 
3. Can anyone make a living from recorded music anymore?

Related to that was a wonderful post from Kevin Kelly titled 1,000 True Fans.  Kelly's observation is that the long tail is good for content aggregators like Amazon, and good for the consumer, but delivers little benefit to the content creator. His thesis is that if you can find the 1,000 "True Fans" who will buy whatever you put out then you have a business model, and one which can grow. AND he applies this idea to music, blogs, novels… all kinds of art. So, large and small, content creators are learning to bypass distribution.  Will they need distribution in the future?  And what do distributors have to do to survive?

We finished up with one last, fascinating, free speech story.  The NY Times published a story yesterday about Steve Marshall, an English travel agent who lives in Spain and sells trip to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba.  Last October, 80 of his web sites suddenly stopped working.  They had been online since 1998, and despite the fact that he sells travel to Europeans, and the servers were located in the Bahamas, his registrar was located in Bellevue Washington — the USA.  According to a Treasury Dept spokesperson, Marshall's company "helped Americans evade restrictions on travel to Cuba and was a generator of resources that the Cuban Regime uses to oppress its people".  He had made it onto a blacklist and eNom, his registrar, was required to shut down his sites.  Moreover, eNom has refused to release the domain names to him, effectively shutting down the business.

To me this raised all kinds of questions: Who really owns a domain name?  What process should be followed to put a web site onto a blacklist?  What recourse does the owner have?  And what value are constitutional guarantees of free speech?

It was a good and very nuanced discussion, with surprising opinions offered from many quarters.  

 

 Squawk Box March 5 [34:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The micro-blogging site Jaanix just added a new feature last night.  Now when you add a post to Jaanix, it automatically cross posts to Twitter.  Very nice.  

Twitter seems to be becoming the flow publisher of choice for social sites.  In recent days, I've also been using Hictu!, which cross posts to Twitter as well.

We can all remain hopeful that they will expand their API to support this new audience.  A Hictu video stream, or Jaanix excerpt would be a fabulous payload addition to Twitter.

Yesterday Microsoft unveiled the public beta of Office Live Workspace.  Reaction has been mixed, with some positive pieces and some critical pieces comparing Microsoft’s offering to Google Docs and concluding that it’s wanting.

The naysayers are idiots. 

Google, by their own admission, will tell you that Google Docs is a pale shadow of Office’s functionality.  The attraction of Docs is that your documents are online and always accessible.  Oh, and the price is right… free or very inexpensive for small work groups.

Google’s problem is that the world is composed of Microsoft Office users.  These are by and large people who value the rich capabilities of a desktop productivity application.  Google is asking them to trade the value of that environment for another unrelated value — collaboration and online hosting.

Nobody will argue that collaboration and online hosting aren’t valuable.  I myself use all kinds of tools to share documents with colleagues today.  Google has to answer this question for me:  Why should I give up a familiar and powerful suite of tools just to be able to share documents?

Microsoft has answered it by adding collaboration and online hosting of documents to Office with Office Live Workspace.  They’ve said "have your cake and eat it too, Alec". With Office Live Workspace, you can easily create workspaces with project planning templates, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.  You can track changes and add comments.  You can even easily share your desktop with up to 15 more people for collaborative editing and presentation.  It’s as if you combined Google Docs, Basecamp and a screen sharing solution and made them all accessible from any Office application, all the way back to Office 2000.

And it’s free.

It’s a brilliant counterstroke to the Google Docs hype. As ValleyWag said "Office Live Workspaces makes Google Docs look like Google 20 Percent of Microsoft Office". The Silicon Valley community that thinks otherwise has been breathing their own rarified air for far too long.  The real world doesn’t work the way they think.

Today we’re going to talk about the music industry — specifically Nine Inch Nails ghost release, and how it’s already available on BitTorrent sites, despite the fact that portions of it are freely downloadable. And in a related story, we’ll talk about Kevin Kelly’s theory that if you can get 1,000 “True Fans” as an artist, you can make a living.

And we’ll also discuss a free speech issue — the closure of English travel agent Steve Marshall’s web sites, hosted in the Bahamas, but registered with a US registrar — because they offered europeans trips to Cuba.

And if there’s time… we might sneak in a little political discussion.