Category: .

The reason for war on porn in the app store may have been to support Apple’s ad network for the app store. Keeping things under tight control makes advertisers happy. For example, much of YouTube and Myspace will never get good CPMs, because advertisers don’t want to be next to sex, drugs or rock n roll.

This may not be a *good* idea, because Apple is losing sales of apps, losing compelling apps (given that iPhone buyers would be motivated by porn on the platform), and reducing in-app commerce in order to up their revenues on in-app advertising. But that’s the tradeoff from Apple’s perspective.

And of course, from the perspective of a free society it’s a rancid idea. Free societies thrive on truth about sexuality and wither from neo-Victorianism. But whatever.

New MacBook Pros support audio over Mini DisplayPort

Those hooking up the latest MacBook Pros to an HDTV using an HDMI adapter can now do so a little more easily: Apple has updated its implementation of Mini DisplayPort to pass audio signals through to any device that supports them. Until now, the miniDP port only transmitted video, even though the DisplayPort spec supports optional alternate signal channels such as audio or USB.

Apple confirmed to Ars that the just-updated MacBook Pros will pass both video and audio signals to an HDTV or receiver when using an miniDP to HDMI adapter

Moving troops into position for the upcoming Battle of the Living Room.

This is probably to help with using macs for audio and video production, not to sell laptops that you’ll hook up to your TV. But it doesn’t hurt either — I imagine that this change is happening across the board with recent macs.

gurdonark on playlists:

Last.fm is the one place in which I check out what people hear on their scrobble playlists, to learn about new artists.

i also find that last.fm is better than worlds of self-promotion when it comes to getting listeners for my own work. I find people here there and yon listen to me via that service.

Remember when one read Trouser Press or Creem to find music to try?
One read a review and then one bought the record, largely because the reviewer said “sounds like x” but sometimes because the reviewer “sounds like nothing you ever heard before’. I don’t remember a negative review being a deal-killer nor a positive reviewer being a religious conversion. It was all about the style and the sense of the moment.

As a young teen, we all went one better. Lisa Robinson’s “rock scene” magazine was out when i was 13 or 14 or 15 or so. This was an amazing magazine–black and white pictures of unsigned and barely-signed NY bands. One read there about bands one could not buy–early Television, early Ramones, Wayne/Jayne County, Talking Heads. One became a fan of bands from text. What an ephemeral, wonderful thing–to love a sound that one has heard only in print.

Now, you can play the track on last.fm, or hear it on pandora, or even just download it from a netlabel, all without violating anyone’s rights.

A puzzle: I listen to last.fm and never have trouble finding things to hear.
I subscribe to emusic and always delay and debate what to buy with my
35 or so credits. The only reviews I consistently read are in Gramophone, and yet I never buy those reviewed works at all. They just help me learn and think.

I have a friend with great musical taste who posts box.net playlists of her favorite tracks. She likes great stuff, but I never want to listen to tracks except through properly licensed ways of doing things. Besides, I’d rather she say to her friends ‘listen to this great song, it matters to me” rather than “here’s 15 tracks on this theme”. But with her tastes and other friends and strangers’ tastes, I’ll delightedly look at their last.fm scrobble, and pick and choose and enjoy.

I love discovering musicians through conversation. For example, I had a conversation about afrobeat acts this weekend, so now I’m planning to go spelunking in the stacks for afrobeat bands.

jPlayer is a jQuery plugin that allows you to:

• play and control audio files in your webpage
• create and style an audio player using just HTML and CSS
• add sound effects to your jQuery projects
• stream faster using HTML5 and alternative ogg format support

All of this with HTML5 <audio> support for compliant browsers that allow mp3 or ogg format, while supporting other browsers using mp3 format with no visible Flash.

gurdonark on playlists:

so much of music corporate culture depends on the water-cooler-sharing experience of mobs of buyers. what if music were shared one track at a time, among small groups, even in little parlor settings?

i personally never want to listen to anyone’s playlist, but i love to get a single song to hear.

I love browsing my friends’ collections, and I always associate my discoveries with the people who introduced me to them. It makes the music more flavorful.

It also reflects back on the friendship. “Do I like this person’s taste?” is a proxy for “Do I like this person?”

I haven’t really enjoyed people’s playlists since the Webjay days, though. Since then my interest has been more in Audioscrobbler-style voyeurism.

Piers sez:

When I was first involved in campus radio years ago, I was annoyed that the station supplied a playlist because this seemed “corporate” – but then I realized that the playlist was maintained by a community whose concern was to make sure that artists meeting the station’s mandate didn’t get overlooked.

Again, this was process, not product.

IMHO, publishing a “playlist” as an act of canonization is MUCH more important than as an act of “sharing” – I think there is something to be lost in conflating the two ideas.

In that sense the playlist is less about expression and more about data. It says “here are the items in the set.” The set is a tribal thing. Belonging to the set means that you are a member of the tribe.

In the music blog Aurgasm, the songs in the posts play one after another. Play one and when it’s over the next will start. It’s a blog but it’s also a playlist.

Also, it’s good. It’s just plainly obviously not lame.

And then there’s this Robert Radish playlist about rock songs inspired by Alice in Wonderland. It has an idea behind it. It has artwork. It has a ton of explanatory text. It has a recognizable human presence. It has a social existence in the form of comments.

It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s pretty cool in its own way. The page is full of color and life and it’s fun to think about all those songs being influenced by Alice in Wonderland.

Jeremy Schlossberg is a pretty decent writer. Here’s a piece he did ragging on shared playlists. It’s mainly self indulgent sport typing but towards the end he has some thought provoking words.

Check out
this snippet of a Techcrunch story on The Orchard going private:

The Orchard has yet to file an annual report for last year, but for the first nine months of 2009,it has lost $17.5 million on revenues of $45.5 million.

The Orchard specializes in digital distribution. The fact that it cannot make any money is yet another nail in the coffin of the music industry. Perhaps under private ownership, it can transition to a different business model.

I like this because it encapsulates the journalistic narrative on the music industry perfectly: yet another nail in the coffin of the music industry. Pretty much any story on music is shaped around that narrative, regardless of what the story is and regardless of the truth of the narrative.

In many ways (instruments, publishing, licensing) the music industry is doing better than ever. It is only the record industry that’s dying, just like the wax cylinder industry before it and the mass market for sheet music. _Recordings_ as a whole continue to drive a lot of transactions for third party products like jeans, cars and liquor, so there will continue to be money made. Managing recordings continues to be a hassle for consumers, and the business of making their problems go away isn’t becoming obsolete.

Journalists write whatever attracts readers. Readers love the narrative that the music industry is dying. That doesn’t mean it’s a true story, it just means that it’s dramatic and entertaining.

That also doesn’t mean The Orchard’s valuation isn’t really weak. Licensed distribution products don’t yet do a high volume of transactions — $45 million dollars is pretty lame considering how much music they represent. But I don’t know why their costs are so high.

Any thoughts on why The Orchard needed to spend $63 million to earn $46 million in the first nine months of 2009? Why is their business so expensive to run?

Venue.fm assembles a playlist of bands coming to clubs in your area, then correlates each play with concert info. The net effect is to let you use your ears to browse the concert listings.

Really tight product focus. It does one thing well. You get the concept right away and the software delivers on the premise.

And plainly a good thing for bands.

victor on Apple’s war on porn on the iPhone:

I’ve been thinking about how the iPhone is one of the few (only?) media technology deliver systems that did NOT use porn as a catalyst. Porn is tasteless, style-less, demeaning (basically the Church of Apple anti-christ) – but porn is a serious technology innovator. I know I’m missing a bunch of cases but virtual shopping carts/payment systems, video streaming, security, scaling all owe a debt to porn. I guess the Apple brand and the fact that we all, er, need a phone, allowed them to skip over the steep adoption curve that porn enabled in everything from photography, movies, VCRs, cable to the Internet itself but they could end up really, really sorry by voluntarily denying themselves the technology innovations porn could have brought to them.

By the way, those apps they removed from store – porn? really? calling that porn… now THAT’s motherfuckin offensive.

I am awed and inspired to say that Karen Agresti accepted my proposal of marriage, which involved the songs “Ring of Fire”, “Ring My Bell,” “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)”, a jar of herring, a can of Pringles, a spring, a key ring, an onion and an engagement ring on a plate.

The proposal idea was to do a series of subliminal “ring” hints until she finally couldn’t not get it. She could tell there was something staged going on but I had to go all the way to the “onion rings”, which had the ring itself, for the thing to become clear.

Life is good, I have to admit. Pretty damn good alright.

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This kind of post is more of a Facebook thing than a blog thing, given that this blog is about technology and business and not about my personal life. But since it is a personal blog I thought it would be awkward to not say something here.