music

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've written before about my enormous respect for Trent Reznor and his impact on popular music. Now, he's raising the stakes for everyone distributing any kind of music on the web.

There was a lot of talk recently about how the release of Radiohead's latest album, In Rainbows, on the web before it was released in stores as a traditional disk, and how this was going to shake the music industry to its very foundations.

Here's the exact headline of one such story, one of a gajillion you can find on the topic: Radiohead's Album Threatens Music Industry. No need to mention the name of that news outlet here. You probably caught the story at the time, if not, you can look it up. The fact is that virtually EVERYONE got this story exactly wrong.

Yes, it was cool that Radiohead offered a DRM-free, web-only release of the album, for any price you wanted to pay, including zero. Even so, the band made more than they'd ever taken home on any album before. They haven't said how much money that is, or how much they made, but I love it. I'm a huge Radiohead fan, especially The Bends, which is definitely one of my desert-island disks. Anything that makes them money is a-okay in my book.

Here are the rubs: it was very low bandwidth (160 Mbps) compared to other DRM-free releases --less than HALF of some of them. Also, it's over now. You can buy it digitally from Amazon etc. at 256 Mbps, or as a CDm both at a fixed rate from a major record label. As far as you're concerned today, the web thing never happened. What kind of threat is THAT? None, that's what.

Now our boy Trent, on the other hand, HE'S shaking things up. He left his major label for the express purpose of controlling the distribution and cost of his recordings. He's not at all happy with what had been happening, including the outcome of his direct confrontation of his label regarding what he feels are outrageous pricing.

Here's what he expressed to fans:

"Has anyone seen the price come down? Okay, well, you know what that means - STEAL IT. Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealin'. Because one way or another these mother****ers will get it through their head that they're ripping people off and that that's not right."

You can see that clip below. I couldn't figure out how to add two movies to the page, so here's the link to

Feel free to disagree, but he said what he said. And indeed, he has put his money where his mouth is. I got my copy of his new recording free, directly from him.  And unlike other digital downloads, it includes ALL THE ARTWORK, including a 40-page pdf of photographs taken alongside the project.

Now the free part is only the first volume of 4: 9 songs of 36. But you can stream the whole thing for free, or buy it for only $5. That includes the release as 320 Mbps MP3, genuinely lossless FLAC, Apple's fake lossless codec (sorry, it's true). For only $20, you get the immediate download now, plus a 2-CD release when it's available: a 6-panel digipack with the printed PDF, along with some goodies like wallpapers and such. The kids eat that stuff up.

Things get really interesting from there. A $75 deluxe edition includes all of that, plus a Blu-ray release of the album in 2 versions, including hi-def stereo. Following a precedent that Trent has set for a few songs, all 36 tracks are available as separate multi-track mixes that you can play with in any audio editor on Mac or Windows. (Trent is a famous Mac zealot, so you can be sure that he had Garage Band in mind), plus all that other stuff.

Most interesting: a 2500 limited edition that includes all of that plus heavyweight vinyl, plus 2 large books of artwork, embossed covers, the whole deal in a fabric slipcase. Plus 2 giclee prints: enjoy as is, or ready to frame. The package signed and hand-numbered by Trent...and more...for $700.

The amazing thing: that edition has long sold-out, long before the actual release. It's among the reasons why Trent was able to take in $1.3 million in the first WEEK of its availability...again, before the releases in April and May of various versions.

Pay for only what you want, as few or as many goodies that you want, entirely outside the label distribution chain. Now THAT starts looking like a threat.

So about a week after my download, Ars Technica ran a pretty cool story about the whole thing...albeit without the link to the thing that I provided above.

PS. Trent wasn't the first to speak out about labels overpricing records. Tom Petty held up the release of his 1981 record Hard Promises because the record company raised the price of it after promising they wouldn't. It was a big deal at the time, but the story never comes up anymore. It had 2 big hits (The Waiting, and A Woman's in Love), but it's still among my favorite of his records.

The move "Once" was one of my favorites from 2007, and against all odds, a song from this lo-budget indie WON the best song award. It led to the most magical moment I've seen in over 35 years of avid Oscar watching. Too bad you're never going to see it. It only aired ONCE, and Oscar is trying to make sure that you never see it again.

"Once" is the story of two musicians who accidentally develop an intimacy that ultimately, very gently, pushes them back to their previous loves. It's sweet and beautiful, and has GREAT music. Hence the Oscar nom and win.

Among the reasons the movie itself felt so fresh is that the two lead actors are actually musicians who've never acted before. Glenn Hansard is a member of The Frames, another member of whom made his directing debut with the movie. Marketa Irglova, a classically trained Czech emigre, plays a...classicly trained Czech emigre. The Oscar-winning song is "Falling Slowly," and was written together by both the actors and the characters. Check it out on YouTube while you're waiting for Netflix to deliver Once to your doorstep. You HAVE to see this DVD.

When they won the Oscar, you've never seen two more surprised or grateful people in your life. And in typical Oscar fashion, they cut to commercial after Glenn's speech, and before hers. Grrrrr.....

Coolest Oscar moment EVER: host Jon Steward comes back from commercial AND BRINGS HER BACK OUT to give HER speech. It was an amazing speech, and the audience went nuts over the whole thing. It was no wonder that the whole thing, both speeches and Jon putting them together was YouTubed all over the place.

No wonder Oscar made them yank it down. This is the same industry that fought home releases believing FIRMLY that it would be the death of the movies. They fought rentals because it would undercut the money they started to make from home sales.

And here we are. While rentals boom, home sales are now BIGGER than box office sales...which are actually bigger than ever, and still trending upward.

SEE??? The more people can see good movies, they more they WANT good movies.  Even though plenty of movies bite (like books, music, TV, etc.), people find their way to good ones, and go to theaters hoping for more.

This was the lowest rated Oscar telecast since Nielsen started tracking it in 1973. You think that if people could see a moment of such overwhelming joy and surprise that they might tune in next year hoping for more? The history of movies says ABSOLUTELY ENTIRELY YESSSSS!!!!

And yet, they're determined that it air only ONCE, and you never get to see it. It will have the opposite effect than they hope....which, if the music business is capable of learning anything (still up for debate), is learning right now. Guard the gates, and guess what? PEOPLE DON'T GO THROUGH THE GATE.

While they don't have the video, at least Oscars.com has the speech in print. It doesn't give you ANY of the flavor, but worth checking out despite Oscar not wanting you to to ever get any of that flavor, EVER.

Fer pete's sake, why don't they at least sell DVDs of the thing? Again, following the experience of the movies, they'll make more from the DVD sales than they do from airing the Oscars ONCE. Even the NFL, who puts on the Super Bowl -- a MUCH bigger event than the Oscars -- re-airs the game on the NFL Network, and sells DVDs of it. Why? Because they want to MAKE MONEY, both from the people who didn't see it the first time, and more important, from people who DID see it, and want to see it again.

And Oscar, if you sell a DVD of the show with the award for ONCE, I'll be first in line to buy it, because I want to see the award-winning performance from ONCE, and the amazing speeches from the award-winners, more than ONCE.

The fact is that you can still find this Oscar moment online now and again, by searching "Marketa Irglova Oscar." You can also find pieces of the funniest host gig EVER, by Jon Stewart by searching "Jon Stewart Oscar."

And to end with a legit search, check out thedailyshow.com for some of Jon's stories about the Oscars. One of the best is him telling that Czech girl Madeline Albright, humbly but firmly, There was NO WAY Marketa Irglova was NOT coming back out.

You can also find the actual performance from Once at YouTube. Why? Because Glenn Hansard has been using the net, including YouTube, for YEARS to build an audience. You'll find plenty of other results for other live performances of it.

Too bad that the most uplifting, unpredictable moment in Oscar history only aired ONCE, and you'll never get to see it again. Maybe they'll eventually see that they'll make MORE money by giving people an opportunity to see moments like this more than ONCE.

So Nora and I were listening to Rubber Soul the other day, and during the piano solo in the middle of "In My Life," she wondered who played it. She guessed George Martin. I have Wikipedia as one of the search engines in the upper right of my browser, so I typed in "In My Life," and voila, it went right to an entire entry on that song!

I figured it would take me, at best to the Rubber Soul page...at best. My assumption was that I'd have to refine my search a bit. As Samuel Jackson said in The Long Kiss Goodnight, "Assumption makes an ass out of you and Umption." (A line written by Shane Black, who's written some great ones.

The story on the piano solo? There was a whole section of the article devoted to it! Still unsure what to do with the middle section, John left it empty. He settled on the idea of a piano solo, and asked George Martin to play it "like Bach." (Ahhhh, Nora's right again!) George wrote something he couldn't play fast enough, so he played it half-speed, and recorded it at double-speed! There was no way to get either of those precisely right, of course. The difference gave the piano a tone tending toward the harpsichord-esque, yet still unmistakably sounding like a piano.

Wow.

It's a really complete entry, with other sections devoted to musical analysis ("It is a chromatically altered plagal cadence"...but you knew that), the composition process, chart position, and much more.

It's also got a complete set of links. I followed the one for "Fifth Beatle," wherein George Martin states firmly that the title should only be applied to Brian Epstein...if it's applied at all. He's not convinced there was any such thing...although I think it should be applied to GM regardless of his (genuine, I think) humility.

I was impressed! It reminded me that I go to Wikipedia repeatedly most days, so I took the opportunity to make it my default search engine.

In a way, it's not a website, and certainly not a search engine. It's more a community for a group of obsessives, self-organized by their interests. As a knowledge base, it's self-correcting. Sound familiar?

It became really inspiring to me. It reminded me of the power of music....It works. And it probably works better than my version.

Here was the last question in the interview: How has all this affected your own relationship to "Hurt"?

I haven't listened to my version since then. I've been so proud of what they've done with it that I haven't thought that much about it.

Here's the rest of the article.

While John put his stamp on the song, what really changed Trent's mind was Mark Romanek's amazing video. Here are a few production notes at The Inspiration Room.

(Markromanek.com has some great stuff, including an entertaining bio, and his entire collection of videos. Unfortunately, another Flash site that's more pretty than useful, but worth poking around. Also worth buying the DVD that gathers some of his best work.










Romanek's video of Cash's "Hurt" is one of the great achievements of the form, but the song is quite remarkable too. There aren't many versions of it online, but this one is pretty slick: a duet with David Bowie. The emphasis is obviously on the song rather than the visuals, and while John's version benefits from being tighter, this performance underscores the emotion of Reznor's writing.

A few weeks back, I wrote extensively about the EMI/Steve Jobs press conference, as well as the DRM establishment's response. Check it out if you haven't. It's really good stuff, and not just because I wrote it.

Well, here's the rest of the story, or at least as much of it as I accidentally found this morning.

Here again is the transcript of the press conference with EMI Group chief executive Eric Nicoli and Jobs. You'll find that Steve does much of the talking (surprised?), but both guys come off as smart, funny and self-deprecating. A nice read.

Of course, you'll want to hear it yourself. So allow me to present an MP3 of the press conference!

And because you're a glutton for this stuff, here are the slides in PDF form. How cool is that?

On one hand, the slides don't actually say much at all. That's the point. You kids out there? Don't do drugs. And don't put a pile of crap on slides!!! That point-by-point build nonsense? Strictly for amateurs. Don't ever, ever, ever do it. Seriously. Give people a big pretty picture to look at, then tell 'em a story.

If you give them a slide with a lot of bullet points, they'll read 'em fast, assume that this is all you have to say about it (especially if you read even one line aloud to them), and stop listening. It's a waste of time for everyone.

But if you show them a pretty picture, they'll immediately turn back to you, breathless, waiting for you to tell them what it means. You think I'm kidding about this? I'm not. Pay attention to El Jobso. He won't lead you astray.

Okay, slides rant over. But I have plenty of other stories to tell on the subject some other day. For now, back to fun with DRM, EMI, Apple, etc.

Not long after the original press conference, EMI Senior Vice President Jeanne Meyer did a great follow-up interview with bloggers at The Download Squad. (In case you were wondering, bloggers do indeed carry enough weight to get VPs from multinational companies to sit down with them. I suspect that the Download Squad strategy included just asking. So if there's some heavyweight you want to interview for your blog, just ask.)

Here are some choice bits:

The reason we decided to go with a DRM free version was because of the lack of interoperability between the various stores and devices were becoming too confusing and too frustrating.

So it turns out that EMI's strategy was based, at least in part, on the limitations of the iPod/iTunes closed architecture! Read it again. It's her point not mine, but I'm surprised we missed this before.

Not that she's singling out iTunes, though:

It will allow any retailer to sell our music to the owner of an iPod for example, not just iTunes, at the same time it will allow iTunes to sell music for people to buy for use on any number of different digital music devices and in fact mobile phones.

This quote might be the most interesting to me:

When we offered DRM free in an standard format next to a DRM free but with a higher bitrateand priced a little higher consumers on a ten to one basis went for the premium product.

I'm totally in the majority on that count, but I'll be interested to see how it holds up. On the one hand, the MP3/MP4 format is a testament to how little sound quality matters when compared to convenience. (CDs are too, for that matter.) But when higher quality is every bit as convenient? Maybe.

Also worth remembering: that the average number of tracks that iPod owners buy through iTunes is 20. Twenty. But let's put it this way. Say every iPod is responsible for just a single download of higher quality, non-DRM music that they wouldn't have bought anyway. So 100 million times $1.29 equals....where's my pencil?....$129 million dollars. I'll take it.

She also notes, as Steve did, that nearly all music currently sold has no DRM. Even if every downloaded track had no DRM, it would account for far less than 10% of overall music sales. Which begs the question, what was the fuss in the first place? Anyhoo.....

Two last updates, one new and one old. The new one first. Steve says no dice on the subscription model for iTunes. ""Never say never, but customers don't seem to be interested in it," he says, "People want to own their music." Hard to argue.

On the other hand (I'm saying that a lot, aren't I?), I watch whatever it is, 20 or 30 hours a week watching subscription TV (okay, closer to 40 once you throw in Red Sox games), and maybe 2-4 hours a month watching DVDs I own. So all the hoop-de-doo about subscriptions being the wrong model is nonsense to me. Subscription models have been proven again and again. We just don't have the right model of the right model yet.

Wait! The whole XM thing is the perfect evidence that subscription models for music do work well enough for a sizable and fast-growing audience. And radio's ratings are up while TV's are down. So there. You don't have to either own music or steal it to listen to it.

Now here's the old "update." Folks as old as me will remember when Real Audio was the coolest thing ever. Cooler than QuickTime, by a long, long shot. (Not that QuickTime could stream then. Could it?) Rob Glaser seemed like a stud because, when Apple was adrift and a non-player, he left Microsoft with the express purpose of kicking MS's ass...which for streaming media, he totally did...uhm, until...well, I'm not sure when. But sometime around when they became RealNetworks, Real became (or was revealed as?) the lowest quality, most invasive annoyance on the net. Am I wrong about this?

Anyway, here's Rob at the end of 2005 saying that the iPod's reign is going to fade "closer to 2 years than 10" (although he makes an interesting analogy with Apple's computer market share sliding from 40% to less than 4% at the time of the interview), the reason the subscription model isn't getting traction is that most people steal their music (what?), and using Lynyrd Skynyrd as an example of why Real's Rhapsody music subscription service is the coolest. I was going to say it's hilarious and provocative in equal measure....but it's more like 75% hilarious, 10% provocative, and 10% "huh?" and 5% sad for anyone who remembers when Real was cool. But you'll dig the interview. Maybe a lesson to never say anything about anything about the future in print, even online, because you'll almost certainly look like an idiot later. 

Speaking of which, where's my dang rocket car? Didn't somebody say we'd have rocket cars by now?

George Ou over at Real World IT talks about his quest for a universal power adapter. Wouldn't it be loverly? Then he observes that USB is becoming the new standard for charging devices including iPods and other portable music players, portable GPS, and an increasing number of phones. All true. He leaves out PDAs and portable gaming devices like PSP  and Game Boy.

Then he says, Now all I need is a single cigarette to USB adapter and a single 110 V to USB adapter where ever I travel and I don't need to worry about forgetting a proprietary adapter. 

Done and done, my man. I've had USB-charged devices for 3 years, and have found all kinds of goodies. The exact chargers that George is talking about have been around well longer than that. (Yes, you can find white ones designed to work your iPod, for which you'll pay way, way too much.)

After trying the offerings from a handful of vendors, I highly recommend Boxwave. Here's the link for the wall adapter, which I've used more often than I can count in the last three years. The same page has links to other handy devices, including a USB adapter for cigarette lighters.

My very, very favorite device is the miniSync retractable USB cable. The one I have both connects my iRiver "multi-codec jukebox" to my computer and charges it at the same time. There are similar cables for every USB iPod, and even the iPhone. Again, I've used my USB chargers more times than I can count. Even if it's just a few minutes in the car, or a few minutes from a spare laptop, I can keep going.

Since my iRiver has a dandy built-in mic that records to both MP3 and WAV (among others), I've used it for interviews at tradeshows (easy enough to slip the USB connector into any laptop, especially the ones at the Apple booth -- shhhhh!) I've also used it in press briefings, plugged into the interviewee's laptop.

The most life-saving feature is drawing power for a phone over USB. I'll bet you've been in situations where your phone is dead, your laptop has juice, but the phone number you need is on your cellphone. Connect the phone to the laptop, and you're back in business. 

Of course, for regular travel, this also means that the only adapter I need is for the laptop. I can charge both a music player and a phone from a USB adapter the size of a 50-cent piece....if you're old enough to remember those...which means you're probably old enough not to say "fitty" every time you pronounce 50.

There are a ton of these little adapters that handle USB 2.0 transfers from the Canon XL-1, hundreds of digital cameras, and much more.

Anyway, Boxwave has a ton of such things: replacement styli for Palm and Treo; dual Firewire-USB adapters for car, wall, and planes; high-quality retractable earbuds (no more tangles!); international power adapters, and on and on. They're cheap, fast, and a pleasure to deal with: the road warrior's best friend since Odwalla Superfood juice.

Not a paid spokesman, just a satisfied customer.