Is this thing on? Oh it's on.

Ho ho ho! Pull my finger!

I don't know about you, but around our household, nothing says "Christmas" like farting.

This is apparently true elsewhere as well. On December 22, "iFart Mobile," the leading fart app in the iTunes store, pulled down nearly $10,000! That's right, in a single day. This is one of many, many fart apps in the store.

I got this from VentureBeat, a blog syndicated by the New York Times covering venture capital in Silicon Valley. Founder Matt Marshall used to cover technology for the San Jose Mercury News, the undisputed authority on tech news in the Valley.

So if you read on VentureBeat that on December 17 Apple approved FOURTEEN NEW FART APPS for the iTunes app store, on that single day, or that there are now 50 fart apps for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, you can take it to the bank. Or if you're not as lazy as I am, you could look it up yourself.

In the meantime, you might well be asking, why so many fart apps in the iTunes store, especially so many new ones being added for Christmas? (Seriously --14 new fart apps approved by Apple on a single day, the week before Christmas.) One of the developers puts his finger on it: "We asked ourselves over and over, why must I always carry a phone, iPod, AND electric fart machine?"

Now THAT's the holiday spirit! A gift that makes people's lives easier!

See here here and here. Plenty of other links in those stories, including one directly to iFart Mobile in the iTunes store.

A couple of random notes:

1) There's more than one iTunes store app with the words "Pull My Finger" in the name. Of course, how could there NOT be?

2) A reminder that this really IS a Christmas story. Every event described in it takes place after December 12.

3) My mother asked me once why men laugh at farts. "Because they're freaking hilarious," I said. At least she laughed at THAT.

4) This all kind of begs the question. Not why there are 50 fart apps in the iTunes store, but why aren't there more?

Tidings of comfart and joy, my friends! Ho ho ho!

Digital music sales surpass CDs for the first time

Can you tell me what the following 5 artists have in common?

• Bayje
• Justice
• Young Steff
• The Zac Brown Band
• Estelle
  

Besides the obvious, which is that I've never heard of them, and doubt you have either.

They're all featured on the front page of AtlanticRecords.com, in that order. It matters because Atlantic has the largest market share of any label, and is also the first to report that more than half of their sales are coming from digital sources.

(The link above is to one of those NYT stories you have to register for. VERY much worthwhile -- a fascinating read about all kinds of digital revenue, such as TV, and the tidbit that NYT's own online revenue is 12.9% of the paper's entire income.)

A couple of things to note:

1) I used to think of Atlantic Records and their subsidiaries as Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Aretha, Stax, the Allman Brothers, Genesis, and Led Zepplin -- all true, and all entirely irrelevant for digital sales. Led Zep isn't even available in any digital venue yet: no online music stores, no video games, no ring tones. Nada.

I mention ring tones and games because for many artists, these are more important than iTunes and the like. I'm going to cover this in another blog entry, but some artists are selling as much as 6 times more music through Rockband and Guitar Hero than they are through iTunes.

The point for now is that Atlantic had to put all of these together in order to tip the balance toward digital sales.

“I think we’ve figured it out,” said Julie Greenwald, president of Atlantic Records. “It used to be that you could connect five dots and sell a million records. Now there are 20 dots you can connect to sell a million records.”

And the fact is that, right now, nobody else is even close. Atlantic's parent company Warner Brothers has only been able to put together 27% of its sales digitally, even with Atlantic's 51% factored in.

(And before I get too far away from Genesis, I should note that they're talking very seriously about reuniting with Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett in 2009. As Hackett puts it, they've been kicking the idea around for years, but they need to get on with it before one of them dies. Gabriel had first proposed a "Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" tour in 2004, but other things occupied everybody's attention first. Banks says now that he'd rather do an early-years best of, mentioning Supper's Ready and The Musical Box by name.)

2) While digital sales are climbing, overall music sales are declining faster. And no, you industry doofuses, it's not because of piracy. (If you're a music industry reader who's NOT a doofus, then I'm not talking about you, am I?)

It's because sales of single downloads started rocketing past full album downloads from pretty much day one: singles vs. albums = less money.

Heck, ringtones mean that PARTS of songs might well surpass the sales of ENTIRE songs in the very near future. Of course, my guess is that record companies are putting the pedal to the metal on this, because the price of a ringtone is much higher than a digital single.

For example, as I write this on November 27 08, the top-selling ringtone at the biggest cell phone provider (Verizon Wireless) is by T.I. (Any guesses which label T.I. records for? That's right, Atlantic Records.) And the price of that top-selling ringtone is $2.99. Check out the rest of the list and prepare to feel really, really old.

Two more things to note about ringtones:

1) Not only is another T.I. ringtone at #3, but FOUR of the TOP FIVE best-selling ringtones are from Atlantic Records artists!

The exception is Taylor Swift, a 20-year old country singer. I've only heard a note or two from her here and there, but a great story: she was signed as a songwriter before she was signed as a performer, and is the youngest person to ever win the CMA Songwriter of the Year award, which she won at 19. We'll all be working for her some day.

2) While new ringtones are priced at $2.99, tones from older songs are only $1.99. This is a model that the labels have been begging for at iTunes, but Steve has held them off. On one hand, 99 cents for every DRM track, $1.29 for every DRM-free, higher bitrate track, makes a nicw, neat story.

(Until now, EMI has been the only label to sign up for the iTunes Plus format -- this higher bitrate, DRM-free thing. But just this week, "up to three" more labels are rumored to make the leap soon.)

On the other hand, asking people to pay more for the hottest titles and less for the catalog seems to me a pretty good model -- something that I almost never ever say about the major labels. I'm usually very much of the "make 'em beg, then tell 'em no" school.

In any case, the first major reporting that they've crossed the 50-50 threshhold for digital sales is a big deal....even it could be years before we see the second.

Blu-ray and the Big Bag of Hurt; or, why no Blu-ray for me...again

Steve knows how much a Blu-ray drive costs to license, so I'll take his word for it. I won't bust Phil too badly as an individual, because lordy knows he's not the only one to think that Blu-ray's launch will be impeded, if not altogether scrubbed, by digital downloads. I just think that downloads aren't the big story for HD delivery right now. I think the same thing that will prevent Blu-ray's speedy adoption is the same thing standing in the way of HD downloads catching on as quickly as they might.

Yes, I said “thing,” not “things.” There are plenty of market and technology forces standing in the way for the world at large worth talking about later, but for me, for now, there's only one obstacle standing in the way of me caring about Blu-ray or broadband delivery: my HD DVR.

Before the DVR, I was an early adopter of a whole lot of things. My first CD player cost $500 – a top loader! -- and that was one of the CHEAP ones. Like Blu-ray, the first sales were to “philes,” in this case audiophiles. You could mostly only buy them in the kind of stores that sold receivers and amplifiers as separate components. Mine came from a store in Harvard Square, across from Needle in a Haystack, an entire store devoted to nothing buy phonograph needles. It wasn't a huge store, but I'm not kidding – NOTHING but needles. It was kind of eerie.

And back in 1983, $500 was real money.

I was also an early adopter of Laser Disk, which introduced a number of critical technologies to wide-ish scale (only 1% of the VHS market, but still) home use: widescreen aspect ratios, random access chapters, frame-by-frame viewing, surround-sound encoding including Dolby and THX, digital audio tracks that allowed things like commentaries and separate language tracks, director's cuts, significant bonus features, significant picture remastering, and of course, Disney picture disks.

(Without getting all dewy eyed about how much better a laserdisk in a good player looks and sounds than most DVDs, I'll simply observe that no DVD will ever be as neato as a Disney picture disk.)

There were related things I adopted early, including hand-made custom subwoofer cables, front-projection TV (had one of them big 3 CRT gun jobbies), and yep, DVR. That deserves a couple of blog entries by itself, and I'll get to 'em....but the bottom line very quickly became that there wasn't much point to watching TV without a DVR, and there was no way on Dog's green earth that we were even going to THINK about adopting HD until there was an HD DVD.

Fortunately, DirecTV came to the rescue with DirecTiVo, a co-branded box that did exactly what it sounds like it did: for $1000, plus $10/month for HD programming. Eek. A little painful, but hey, it was HD, the way we wanted, so we took a deep breath, did without heat that winter, and got what we wanted.

(I say “we” - my wife is every step along the way with all this. We loves us some HD.)

This means two things. One is that the absolutely very, very last thing that would keep my from adopting Blu-ray. I have the rest of my HD rig loaded for bear. I'm not holding my breath for players to drop below the “magical” $200 barrier.

More important for Blu-ray in our lives is that we've been watching HD movies since 2004. I'm getting more every week for the exact same price as SD cable, and using the DVR to watch when I want.

(Not at all a big deal, but something that I notice when I watch DVDs – I prefer the features and responsiveness of my DVR. I don't need chapter marks as much as I do to hop back a few seconds to hear something I missed. One button on the DVR, a pain on the DVD.)

I know there's going to be a lot more Blu-ray disks very quickly, but right now on my DVR, waiting for me to watch a couple more times before I move along are two of my favorites: Office Space and Lawrence of Arabia, neither of which is on Blu-ray. (If I was a better person, I might have put Lawrence of Arabia BEFORE Office Space. So I probably shouldn't mention South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut – should I?) I have no doubt they'll come to Blu-ray, but not before I'll have watched them a dozen times or more in HD.

The big Blu-ray news this month is James Bond. Well, I've seen all the ones I like – including my favorite, Casino Royale with Daniel Craig -- in HD plenty of times. (Daniel Craig is the best Bond by a longer distance than we have yet found a way to measure.) It's the highest-selling Blu-ray disk to date, although The Dark Knight debuts Tuesday and could easily surpass Casino Royale in its first week. I'll see it plenty of times, on my time, when it comes to my HD DVR for free in a few more months.

I've got precisely zero use for the Lord of the Rings books. I haven't gotten past the first dozen pages – sorry, I've tried, but I just can't. I laughed – hard – at anyone in my high school who read them. This put me off seeing the movies longer than I should have waited. My bad. As much as I came to love the movies in the theater (barring the multiple endings of the third), I place the deluxe editions of the DVDs – once you've included 3 commentaries and the two disks of documentaries) among the great achievements in the history of human artistic endeavor. I'm glad to be alive at the time they were released. (Yeah, really.) Not coming to Blu-ray before 2010 says Mr. Jackson. I'll have been seeing them in HD for maybe 5 years at that point. Will the extras that make the deluxe editions such a wonder all be remade as HD? Highly unlikely I think, and I watch those as often as I watch the movies.

Of course Peter will probably find enough extra goodies laying around to make the Blu-ray edition worth my while...but I'm having a hard time coming up with any reason to buy a Blu-ray player before then. Not that I'll necessarily do it then. But I'm waiting something to push me over the edge. Any suggestions? Because until you persuade me otherwise, I'm keeping Blu-ray in my big bag of ho-hum.

The Hollywood OS

I watched a couple of movies over the weekend where Macs were prominently featured, "Independence Day," which holds up better than you might think, and "Office Space," which gets funnier with time, and with every viewing.

(BTW, I watched "Office Space" in HD on my DVR. Not on Blu-ray yet, suckas. More on that in another post, but the general rule of thumb is, no format has arrived until "Office Space" has arrived on it.)

Both of these were pre OS X of course, so the screens had our pal the Chicago font prominently on display. 

Neither movie featured the System 8 bomb, but if you remember the days of the Power PC transition from System 6 to 7, and 7 to 8, we all saw it plenty. Mac was wall-to-wall crashes for a couple years BS (Between Steve).

I bring this up because neither movie had the Macs acting much like Macs. They basically used some kind of animation playing on the computer screen, or composited into it, that allowed the designers to make the machine do what they wanted it to -- without being limited by what applications or behaviors were actually available.

You certainly see this with Windows machines too, on shows and movies everywhere you turn. Clearly identifiable machines, doing things clearly not happening in any real application. Or doing ridiculous things like "enhancing" parking lot security tapes to read license plates or something. Sorry bro, if the pixels ain't there, they ain't there. 

"House" is one of my favorite shows, and they're sponsored by both Apple and Dell. You see plenty of monitors from both companies, but rarely see applications do anything. And no matter how many Macs you see, there aren't any meaningful Mac apps in the medical world, so if you see software at all, it's going to be on Windows.

But think about something like a James Bond movie with all these crazy overlays and colors. It's like those computer virus movies in the 80s, before most of us had actually seen or used a computer, and before we learned that the worst that most viruses do is load your machine up with porn.

Although you remember the Love Bug? I may not have the name of it exactly right, but it basically sent a message that said "I love you" to everyone in your contact book. My wife was working with a lot of folks in the Army Corps of Engineers at the time, and it was pretty funny. "Hey, I don't love you. Ha ha ha. Wait -- it's not that I don't love working with you...or not that I don't LIKE you...just not that...ha ha ha...just not that way." I sympathize, but I'm still not buying that a virus on a floppy is going to start dropping satellites from the sky.

And for that matter, have you seen the ridiculous things that people supposedly find on the internet? There's a lot of Hollwyood OS going on there too. They're just making up the kind of things that are online, and the ease of finding them. It's just not so. 

You can place your product right here

Mike Cohen made a very interesting post on commercials and product placement. I commented on it there, so won't repeat it here. So when he began by mentioning "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" – which I like a lot – I was reminded of a recent episode where the actor Brian Austin Green stepped out before the show began in his character costume and makeup, and announced that Dodge was sponsoring that episode. I liked this a lot too. It took what can be a very cynical arrangement and put it front and center, where we could evaluate it ourselves. Of course it also helped underscore the Dodge presence in the show. Now I was looking for it!

Terminator's approach was pretty straightforward: just an extra truck in the show.

(Mike mentions exasperation with new models. My exasperation is that virtually EVERY vehicle on TV, new or old, is spotlessly clean. No way, man. On the other hand, the first use I saw of a car sponsoring an episode was on "Alias," a show with the distinction of blowing itself up and starting with a new story every season. (The went at least one too many.) There, the gleaming new surface was played as sinister. And in last season's premiere of "Heroes" (a show that has really, truly hit the rocks I'm afraid), a high-school cheerleader received a "sponsored by" car as a graduation gift.

But there have been examples that are far more extreme, and the Writer's Guild has been upset about it for years. In a June letter to the FCC, "the western division of the Writers Guild of America called for real-time notification whenever product placement occurs in a scene. It said a text message, or crawl, should appear at the bottom of the screen alerting viewers to the fact that a paid ad has appeared in the program.

"Since crawls are used with relative frequency, and viewers are accustomed to this practice, such a crawl would be no more intrusive than the warnings required for pharmaceutical ads or the network identifiers, or 'bugs,' that are now a mainstay of our TV visual field," said division President Patric Verrone."

Is he on crack? Because I have to tell you, that struck me as really, truly stupid, and genuinely offensive. Do they think that I don't know about product placement? More important, do they think I care about it one way or another because THEY do? Do they not know that we don't like crawls and animated bugs? Fooey on 'em.

The guild has been insisting on a code of conduct that governs how they can be pressed into service as advertising copy writers since at least 2005. Look, writers are paid to write. They have a long list of network instructions about what they can and can't write, frequently making changes on a scene-by-scene basis on the day of shooting. I don't see how being told what to write isn't part of the job. People on every job get told by bosses to do things they don't like, or think makes the boss look like an idiot. You suck it up and do it anyway. That's why they call it "work."

Actors may sometimes have a legitimate beef, noting that they typically get paid for product endorsements. Among the issues in the looming actor's strike is a demand for actors to have some say in the matter, especially when they're being paid for straight-up offscreen commercial endorsements for competing products. I also think their suggestion for exposing product placements can be the right one: announcing it up front, just the way Fox did, and others do.

I still think the "individual endorsements" argument is weak. There are very, very few character-specific placements – one notable exception being TNT's "The Closer," another show I like, but whose main character is frequently the only one eating Keebler cookies, or the one with the T-mobile phone, ringer always turned on. In general, though? Products are placed in the shows, and woven throughout. Actors are not typically the target of the placements, or the sole ones executing the plan.

I've enjoyed the main placement for Sci Fi's "Eureka," now on mid-season hiatus, Degree antiperspirant. The placement is very, very much front and center, in two directions. One is that there are Degree logos spread around in creative ways, such as on the jackets of scientists in the lab. This plays into Eureka-specific ads running during commercial breaks touting Degree as hyper-engineered by geniuses in Eureka.

The writers of Eureka host their own blog, which has some great stuff on it. One of the truly great entries in September 2008 came from Eric Wallace. It's a long entry, and worth quoting from at length.

It all began way back in October 2007 when the Sci Fi Channel announced to the Eureka staff that 1) we would have an official commercial sponsor this season, one that was kicking in a lot of dough and would therefore 2) require tons of product placement throughout Season Three. We were also told that 3) ONE EPISODE in Season Three would have to incorporate a storyline in which the actual product HAD to save Eureka somehow, or at the very least, be INDISPENSABLE to Carter's Act 5 solve.

Oooooookay…

That product turned out to be Degree Absolute Protection For Men (deodorant) and "Here Comes the Suns" (originally entitled "Little Miss Sunshine") would become that episode.

And how did the staff feel about writing an episode of Eureka under so many pre-existing conditions? Well, on the one hand… Degree money meant a higher budget, which would hopefully translate into a better-looking show. On the other hand, there was the danger that this much product integration could throw our story off balance. Needless to say, great care was taken along the way during this one. Never before has any episode of our show been so scrutinized on all levels.

I'd be lying if I didn't say it wasn't just a bit nerve racking. But, man… it was also fun as heck, too.

When Showrunner Charlie Craig asked for volunteers to write this episode, there wasn't exactly a huge show of hands. In fact, there was dead silence. Except for me.

Along the way we got tons of Network notes about the "Degree"-ness of things. The funniest one involved the ending. Originally Carter and Zane used a spray-on Degree deodorant to protect themselves from the heat in Act 5. However, it was then pointed out that Degree is a roll on. So the spray quickly got changed to a roll-on-esque fireproof goo.

Once we had come to terms with the "Degree-ness" of things, there was another challenge to tackle: what was the biggest, best story we could tell? If we had extra money, then let's spend it. Concepts involving blowing up the sun quickly appeared, but even we thought that was too big, so we ultimately settled on a little girl's class project that creates a second sun.

A couple of things to note. One is that Eric has his head screwed on right. The word comes down that this is the way it is, so he gets it done. The other is that he made sure that the extra money was used to raise production values, by telling a story that was going to make more money to produce. Eric goes on to tell about the last minute changes to the script to accommodate the notes – quite a tale, so be sure to check it out.

A funny quote about the whole thing: "It's less about stopping you from sweating, but more about saving the world," says Blake Callaway, Sci Fi's VP-brand marketing.

Which means that there's a vice president more or less responsible for product placement.

Eureka has spun off all of this marketing energy into a "Made in Eureka" mini-site, largely devoted to selling obviously fictional products, presented with tongue firmly in cheek. This is part of a pitch for a cell phone built into your hand: "Talk to the hand."

The little bubble there is what I got when I tried to find the product in my zip code. Pretty funny...although my IQ was measured at 170...although that was when I was much younger. I'm much less smart now, I'm certain of it.

Needless to say, as is the case with just about everything, some people don't find this funny. A coalition of 23 consumer groups is pressuring the FCC to come down even harder than the writers want, on the grounds that product placement is that "[t]he hijacking of content by marketers...threatens public health."

Now THAT's offensive. It trivializes the work of consumer advocates everywhere by overstating what doesn't actually threaten anyone at all as far as I can tell – certainly not public health. This foolishness make it easier to dismiss anyone who, say, protests fouled water or poorly designed air bags or alcohol addiction or [insert your favorite cause here] as a threat to public health. Those are. Nothing that happens with marketing in a TV show is.

Here's why product placement isn't going away: $2.9 billion in revenue in 2007, on track to be $3.1 billion in 2008. (Quoted from the same LA Times article cited above.) Over the past 2 years, revenues are up roughly 50%! There are now dozens of agencies specializing in product placement. Google has a short list in their business directory. (Did you know they even had a business directory? Much more helpful than a raw search return.)

With this much money at stake, these agencies are being called on to provide the same kind of audience measurement data that programmers and networks are. But because product placement is more varied, and can be more fleeting, the measurement is much more refined. ITVX, "Measuring the Evolution of Product Placement," doesn't do placements, they just measure 'em, with an amazing variety of metrics – including the ability to predict recognition and response to specific placements, and equivalent value of a product placement to a straight ad buy.

They recently featured the placement of the children's game toy Simon on The Family Guy. I'm not sure "Simon" is even being sold anymore, but their analysis tools offer a remarkable insight into where this is all going. Check it out.

(You'll also see "Top Design" and "Dancing with the Stars" featured. I could do a whole entry on product placement in non-scripted television, where it has been going on for decades, and far more pervasive than anything in narrative television..)

You'll click on the link for the Play Report, which will open a player window with frame-by-frame analysis of the "presence and clarity" of the placement, integration, the awareness it generates, its equivalent dollar value, and more. Seriously, one of the coolest things I've seen on the web in years.

Below is the right half of the player. You can see the clip, the player controls, and, notably, the cumulative value of the segment, updated in real time as the clip plays. You really have to see it.

Here's the left half of the player, which is a bit more technical. You can see what it's doing in general, but note the timeline at the top of the window. You get a graphic representation of exactly where in the clip the placement exists and doesn't, and how "big" the placement is.

Once again, seeing this in motion, in real time, or stepped through frame by frame, will make your jaw drop.

There are also now news outlets in addition to ITVX that cover product placement, including Product Placement News (catchy, no?) and Brandchannel.com, which tracks not only product placement but (surprise, surprise) brand placement as well. They recently posted the Brandcameo Product Placement Awards which sometimes even noted especially annoying placements in both TV and film. The Film Whore Award, for example, went to the Sex and The City movie. Gotta love that -- although only 900-ish people voted, so not exactly statistically significant. Of course, these are people who do product placement for a living. If THEY say it's annoying, it probably is.

Brandchannel.com is run by Interbrand, "Creating and Managing Brand Value" with offices in 40 countries.

Big, big business, friends.

I've also noted a trend for product placements within ads themselves. For example, our pals at Dodge Ram Tough who sponsor Sarah Connor? Their ads on NBC are sponsored BY NBC, who promotes their shows withing the Ram Tough ads, offering a chance to win a truck if you watch a given show.

Taco Bell has been promoting baseball's World Series on Fox, with the promise of a free taco for everyone in America after the first base was stolen in their "Steal a base. Steal a taco" award. No kidding either. There are rules of course, but they're no big deal, and they really do result in a free taco. Which means that every story about the World Series the next morning included a mention of Taco Bell.

Dr. Pepper has been in on the act for a while. They've promised a free can of Dr. Pepper for everyone in America in the year that the "new" album by Guns and Roses, "Chinese Democracy," promised since 1994. Needless to say, nearly every mention of the record includes a mention of Dr. Pepper. The stories also mention Best Buy, which is the only place you'll be able to buy "Chinese Democracy."

For a wonderful example of the whole machine in motion, check Billboard magazine's story on the album release. That's all the headline says it's about, but toward the end: "We're waiting to hear about 'Chinese Democracy' just like all the other GNR fans," Dr Pepper VP of marketing Tony Jacobs tells Billboard. "But if the rumors are true, we're putting the Dr Pepper on ice."

Our boy Axl Rose has apparently been having plastic surgery in his free time.

Before:

After:

Not that I have Axl's ear the way I used to, but I highly recommend getting back to the music business, my friend. Hey, and who ever knew that the music business would be the HEALTHY alternative?

By the way, the new AC/DC album, "Black Ice," is available exclusively through Wal-Mart and Sam's Club. It debuted at number one this week (October 28, '08 as I write this) with over 787,000 copies, the first time AC/DC has ever occupied the top spot in the US. Guess how many times Wal-mart has been mentioned in stories about the record, the band and the sales. Wal-mart's own press release on the subject notes that overall music sales in the store were up for the first time in a while, as were clothing sales to young men. The system is working. Stay tuned for AC/DC themed games for your favorite console, also available exclusively at Wal-mart.

Aside from misguided watchdog groups and guilds, there are plenty of viewers who don't like how visible these product placements are. Sorry kids, that's the way it goes. Not just for TV either, but for movies too. At the other end of the spectrum sits another favorite movie, "Repo Man." In it, every product had a generic name on a white label, and a bar code – that's it. See Emilio Esteves, below, with the can labeled "Beer."

Your "Sex and the City" ridiculous extremes notwithstanding, product placements have at times played a critical role, especially in independent productions that are truly strapped for cash.

Remember "Longtime Companion"? It was one of the first movies to treat gay couples as couples, not hustlers or closeted timebombs waiting to explode. The title refers to the euphemism used in obituaries when one member of the couple passed away. Although the movie was made in 1990, it was set in the early 80s when the New York Times refused to use the word "gay" and President Reagan refused to use the word AIDS. Both eventually came around of course, but the early 80s were a long hard ride into visibility.

As the first movie to treat homosexuality in a non-exploitive manner, and to deal with AIDS at all, funding was an absolute nightmare. The producers couldn't find one single vendor willing to step up and help pay for the thing with a product placement...until Miller Lite. When the bottles showed up in the movie, crowds in theaters literally cheered.

"Longtime Companion" was nominated for an Oscar, and won the audience prize for drama at Sundance. I don't especially care how you feel about homosexuality. I love the story of product placement coming to the rescue.

I'm all for it, especially when done creatively, even for fun. And even when it's ham-handed and boneheaded, it's no big deal. Unless you're one of the parties buying ads or taking the money, in which case it's a very very big deal.

Fun with Sony BMG music

Starting with "All You Can Eat" music. Sony BMG are working on an online music store. This would of course encompass the dozens of labels under their umbrella, making for a huge, eclectic selection.

It'll be a subscription model, which I've always been surprised has never taken off for music the way they do for movies and TV shows. DVD and iPods notwithstanding, the way that 99%+ of even the most plugged-in people watch their TV and movie content is via live or DVR'ed content, using a subscription model.

Call it "all you can eat." Instead of buying content one piece at a time, subscriptions allow you to have ALL of it, ALL THE TIME. You can load as much of it on to your computer or iPod as will fit. What's wrong with this? NOTHING. Because you can augment your collection with stuff you buy. Why NOT have both for music, just the way you do for TV and movies? It makes no sense to me.

It ESPECIALLY makes no sense to me having worked with a number of subcription services. I really, really love them. The only problem for MOST people is that they don't work with iPods.

Anyway, Sony is also considering that you'd be able to own some of the songs as well as "renting" them, so to speak. I'm looking forward to seeing how this plays out.

In further Sony news, they've been BUSTED.

They've been among the strongest proponents of DRM, going so far as to install malware on computers to monitor the activity of anyone who pops a Sony BMG disk in their computer. It may sound minor, but it created a gaping security hole in affected computers, that Sony flat out LIED about, then LIED about fixing. When they finally did, the security hole got EVEN LARGER.

I'm only touching on how heinous this is. The cool thing is that bloggers were largely responsible for breaking and carrying this story, and bringing Sony to its knees. Of course, the Department of Homeland Security stepping in and weighing criminal action against Sony didn't hurt.

Wired's computer security blog whipped up a fantastic summary of this corporate skullduggery, one of the most aggressive anti-consumer efforts ever undertaken.

As part of which, their end user license agreement was every bit as heinous. Unlike this nasty security stuff, the EULA applied to everyone who bought one of Sony BMG's disks:

• If you move out of the country, you have to delete all your music. The EULA specifically forbids “export” outside the country where you reside.
• If you file for bankruptcy, you have to delete all the music on your computer. Seriously.
• You can’t keep your music on any computers at work. The EULA only gives you the right to put copies on a “personal home computer system owned by you.”

Irony of ironies: they violated the copyright of the original technology holders! That Wired link above has the rest of the story. So they were behaving in a way that was anti-consumer, but also ANTI-CREATOR.

Now to the SONY BMG BUSTED part of the festivities: nearly HALF of Sony's IT software is likely pirated warez. It came to light when one of the IT dweebs called for support. He gave them his serial number, which they identified as pirated.

The breach was so obvious and so extensive that this tiny SIX PERSON software company called PointDev was able "to madate a seizure of Sony BMG's assets."

Can you believe Sony BMG's arrogance? Unfortunately, I can, and I bet you can too. Follow the link above to the Ars Technica article on this nastiness.

BTW, please note that I'm talking about Sony BMG the massive record label, which has precisely ZERO connection to the folks at Sony Media Software.

Anyway, more fun and games from the major labels. Yuck.

Russian Red Army Choir, part 1: Sweet Home Alabama!!

This is technically a project of the Finnish band, Leningrad Cowboys. The word "hijinks" comes to mind. It turns out that the Russian Red Army Choir is still around, and The Cowboys invited them to perform a few songs together. One of the two that's off the hook is Sweet Home Alabama, sung in English. Words fail me.

Russian Red Army Choir, part 2: Happy Together!

Our pals the Leningrad Cowboys teamed up with THEIR pals in the Red Army Choir for this outrageous version of the Turtles classic.

It's the only really essential performance from the concert they did together, but it really is essential viewing.

Less essential but still fun: 

So anyway, here's Happy Together.

Why is there Air?

I was reminded about our MacBook Air conversations (including the comments on a recent post from Walter) by seeing it as one of the minor stories on the cover of Laptop magazine. So I did some poking around the web to see what platform neutral and PC-oriented pubs had to say about Air.

By far the most often-cited reason to love it is how cool it looks, and how much fun it is to use. "An undeniable sexiness," says Gizmodo. PC Magazine tested it running Vista under Boot Camp, and says it's "hard to pass up." The reviewer at Ars Technica says, "I won't be able to go back to a MacBook or MacBook Pro—despite the Air's other downfalls."

I found a bunch more along these lines, and planned to keep going along the "pull quote and link" style, but got a little bored. The fact is that EVERY review I found said that they either wanted them, or had already bought one with their own money...even after much of their reviews were quite explicit about Air's shortcomings, including some you've never heard about, like the discovery that watching movies in iTunes destroys battery life.

These aren't consumers. They're people who work with computers for a living. Of course the one thing they had in common is, not a pro app in sight. And they ultimately love Air.

Which brings me back to my peeps at Laptop magazine. Look, there are a million ways and places and reasons to use a laptop, and the folks in our neck of the woods count for about a dozen of those million. I love Laptop's assessment because it very much agrees with my own -- why else?

This work of art is worth considering for corridor warriors who attend lots of meetings, as well as for commuters who do a fair amount of work while traveling to and from the office.

The last company I worked at was barely mid-sized, around 2,000 people worldwide, maybe a tenth the size of a corporate giant like Apple. And I saw scads of people spending their own money on super-light, super-small computers that they preferred to the corporate issued dogs. Not one of the disadvantages of Air mattered a whit:

All software was on the network, and even the wireless was fast (g speed then, probably up to n by now) and accessible (the only place in the buildings you can stand without being in sight of 2 AirPorts was in the bathroom).

I personally loaded software from disk TWICE - one was Final Cut Studio. That feature where you connect to another optical drive, Remote Drive, works great even if the computer you're connecting to is a PC. Connects automatically when there's one in the vicinity. You can even use the option key to BOOT from a Remote Drive. And that's without buying the $99 USB DVD drive. Which, by the way, can't be used with any other computer, including those from Apple.

Which also reminds me, I'd be more interested in an ethernet adapter than an optical drive. Oh wait, THERE IS ONE, and it costs $12.99. Pushes up to 100BaseT full speed through a USB 2 port. Did I mention that it's only $12.99?

The biggest benefit, as noted above, is the crazy portability. It wasn't unusual for me to be in meetings in 6 or 8 different rooms in a DAY, or that many CITIES in a WEEK. (No kidding. Sometimes more.) I'd have freaking KILLED for a computer like Air. If you think that cutting the thickness AND WEIGHT more or less in half doesn't make all the difference in the world, it's because you haven't gone through this.

Oh wait, one more reason. Every technology company, including the couple I worked for, is paved wall to wall with gear lust - cars, home theater and on and on. Laptop envy is darn near the top of the list, and tiny was always prized over powerful because, frankly, for business, they're all plenty powerful. This tiny computer would make any corporate weasel carrying it the absolute biggest of gear lust dogs.

And why buy a Mac at ALL if this isn't part of the reason you do it? 'Fess up. You know it is.

I can think of a whole bunch of other use cases scenarios where Air is absolutely ideal, but that's the one I lived in. Did I mention that I'd have KILLED for Air? You can find other scenarios at Amazon, where all 9 reviews so far are 5 stars.

Heck, if I had $1800 laying around, I'd buy one. Of course I'm very happy with my MBP, and there are a bunch of things I'd rather spend that kind of money on, all the rest of which my wife would enjoy every bit as much as me. Still, I don't mind being alone again -- naturally -- in my opinion on this, but after chewing on this for a couple of months, I think this is the most interesting Apple machine since...

...well, since the Cube. This ain't anything like that, but I'm just saying. Apple gets big when they do small, and I think this one's a lot likely to be bigger for Apple than smaller.

PS. The "Why is there air?" title is a reference to the 1965 classic comedy album by Bill Cosby of the same name. It's easy to forget today that he won an unprecedented SIX consecutive comedy Grammies, and he did them all IN A ROW. This one starts a run of truly indispensible discs that include Wonderfulness, Revenge, and To My Brother Russell With Whom I Slept. Not really a comic but a storyteller, he was the best at it since Will Rogers, and maybe since Mark Twain.

PPS. Look at the picture for Mr. Cosby's take on the answer to his own question.

Pirates? What pirates? I don't see any pirates. Part 1: The Radiohead Experiment

I initally agreed with Trent Reznor's argument that Radiohead's experiment with the internet release of In Rainbows for any price someone wanted to pay -- including zero-- didn't go far enough, but I was wrong. The more I've thought about it, the more I think the hypists were right for once, In Rainbows was the opening shot in a revolution that  the hypists said it was.

The best article on this (found on a blog of course) is Anti-Marketing In the Music Business. Amazing stuff, and well worth a read for anyone interested in music, distribution, online business, and the role of the internet in all of these. Regardless how you feel about Radiohead, this analysis by a student of political science and philosophy is as carefully researched and written as anything you'll read anywhere.

Here are a couple of things to note. First, even though Radiohead offered the album for as little as ZERO...and the album's tracks were 100% DRM-free -- they made so much money from their brief experiment that Thom Yorke, the band's lead singer and primary writer, says that it was more money than they'd every made for the entire release of ANY of their albums before that.

Second, In Rainbows is really, really, really good. "Brazen, bold, brilliant," and, as Rolling Stone says, "it delivers an emotional punch that proves all other rock stars owe us an apology." Here's a round-up of reviews to further underscore that Radiohead gave away something truly valuable...along their way to making more in a couple of months than they'd ever made before.

And all the internet hub-bub notwithstanding, the physical disk entered the charts at #1 in the US, the UK, and the United World Chart.

This mirrors their previous experiment with Kid A. They posted the entire album for free -- both free of cost and free of DRM -- two weeks before the physical release...which also entered the US charts at #1.

What? They gave it away on the internet and still made big money with their physical release?! Yes.

Before we get carried away with the whole internet distribution thing, it's worth noting that these albums -- Kid A for a major, In Rainbows for an indie -- were in fact released as albums. An internet-only release would have been "stark raving mad." Why? He observed that around 80% of music sales are still on disk. People like objects. "We didn't want it to be a big announcement about 'everything's over except the internet, the internet's the future', 'cause that's utter rubbish."

Still, Radiohead left a giant conglomerate to make the In Rainbows experiment on their own dime.

"We have a moral justification in what we did in the sense that the majors and the big infrastructure of the music business has not addressed the way artists communicate directly with their fans.

"In fact, they seem to basically get in the way. Not only do they get in the way, but they take all the cash."

(More about this in part 2 of this article.)

Note also that Trent Reznor also left a major in favor of independent distribution (AFTER Radiohead). And while he still offers the first 9 songs of his 36-track album for free cost, DRM-free download, he also sells physical disks to those who want them. The package that includes CDs, 180 gram vinyl, hardbound art books, prints suitable for framing and much more has sold out its limited edition of 2500...lots and LOTS of physical objects...at $300 each, for a total take of $750,000.

All part of the reason why, even with GIVING AWAY DRM-FREE files, or selling the same ridiculously high-quality DRM-free files -- all 36 of 'em, plus artwork -- for only $5, he still pulled in $1.3 million in ONE WEEK.

Sorry, got distracted for a minute. What were we talking about? Oh yeah, the colossal damage to the record companies caused by free downloads. Maybe to THEM...even if experiments by Radiohead while on EMI proves the EXACT OPPOSITE. 

But the artists are making MORE with free downloads, and physical disks distributed themselves, than they EVER did behind the iron gates of the majors and their multimillion dollar fight against downloads. And, for that matter, the majors' fight against artist's rights.

That's the subject for another conversation for another day. And so I shall soon. Stay tuned for part 2.