Tristan_Geoff

I was talking to Qwertyy about it earlier. But I could see you playing in some weirdo electronic or folk outfit.

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innerspaceboy

Thanks so much, everyone for reading my inane rantings, tolerating my cluelessness, and for contributing your valuable insight. My goal in all this is to develop a better understanding of the world *out there*. As you were each so kind as to read and reply, I'll address each of your comments.

You are quite right, of course. The market for artisanal goods could never, ever sustain a customer base of 7BN people. But that was not my claim. I stated that, “more and more, mass produced goods have become obsolete” and that these newer direct print businesses render “the traditional print and textile industries practically irrelevant.” That data is only relevant in the context of demographics with the ability and potential to make online purchases for reasons of cost-saving, convenience, and the additional bonus of customization. None of those attributes benefit the 2.5 billion people who are more concerned with pressing issues such as clean water and adequate sanitation. But I’ll amend my statement to be more factually precise - e-commerce (including the markets I cited) have had a profoundly negative impact on brick and mortar real-world shopping trends.


WSJ published an article titled, Stores Confront New World of Reduced Shopper Traffic - E-Commerce Not Only Siphons Off Sales, but Changes Shopping Habits and featured some alarming statistics about the massive downward trend in shopping center traffic. In January of 2014 when the piece was published, online sales had increased by more than double the rate of brick-and-mortar sales.



So please forgive me for my narrow-sighted claim - it is e-commerce and not artisanal goods which continue to displace the brick and mortar corporate industries.

Yes. Yes, I was. (More on this after Tristan’s comment below.)

I’ll confess a dirty secret here - in art college, I had a 360-degree beard-afro and was captivated by madrigally-inspired prog. There were Tull and Gentle Giant LPs everywhere and I swooned many a lass with my 12-string acoustic guitar. I recorded a few albums back then but I don’t think the reels survived.

But then I left art school, found Eno, took a damn shower, cut my hair, and never looked back.

Funny you should mention music-making - I’m presently building an audio workstation with Ableton Live Suite, Reaktor 6 and a stockpile of VST banks. Now it’ll be MY turn to not get compensated for my work!

Touché.

Fantastic! I love having my eyes opened!

I in no way claimed the content was worthless. I claimed that the business model is wholly unsustainable as there is no incentive for the consumer to use the service. The only possible incentive is supporting the artist, which is entirely illusory as the artist only receives $0.0011 from your purchase. Even if 60 million users collectively decide to ignore the DRM-free, lossless FLAC+.cue+.log copies of the album they’re tripping over on their way to purchase the legitimate official cut, the artist is still making less than minimum wage. It makes no odds.

I’m simply claiming that that sort of a business model is patently unsustainable and unrealistic. And every few years, I create an account on Spotify and their competitors’ sites and throw a dozen or so albums at their database to see what’s available. The results have been painfully embarrassing without fail every single time. So, (speaking only for myself), streaming services are absolutely useless. They have horrifically-limited content libraries, and there is still the looming dystopian element of the fact that you don’t have any of the music you play. A corporation is in complete control of your access to that data. I’ve seen how this book ends.

An excellent point! You’re right - I haven’t given this fledgling industry a fair shot. But neither my displeasure regarding the limitations of their content libraries nor the nightmarish aspect of corporate control will likely improve without drastically serious changes to copyright law. And that’s a matter I am absolutely interested in participating in. I actively read every book and article published on Creative Commons and copyright reform, and I would love to take part in test markets of these concepts in practice.

Fascinating. Loving the new info you’re sharing. But I did do my homework. My statement was about iTunes music. And CultofMac reports that:

Correct. I made that very same argument myself a few paragraphs above the statement you contested. I never claimed this was something new, and said - “This was a critical fault of the music industry for nearly half a century where labels engineered a system from which artists could never profit, but which has been infinitely refined to a corrupt perfection with the latest digital model.”

But at least with the current situation, filesharing may help increase sales, as was reported in a study published by Queens University and featured in an article on TorrentFreak last January.

I certainly will; thank you for the suggestion!

Duly noted. I was not familiar with the term here in my tiny reality bubble. A quick Google Search yielded this article from The Washington Post with an animation of our nation’s shift from manufacturing to service courtesy of redditor, mobuco.

Acknowledged. See my amended statement in reply to Batlord’s same contentive remark above.


I’m on board. I’ll help fight to preserve net neutrality so that content distributors large and small can compete fairly, I’ll urge Congressmen to help stop corporations from telling ISPs what data to censor without following due process or filing DMCA notices, I’ll advocate for and utilize Creative Commons licensing as a better alternative to traditional copyright, I’ll promote remix culture and a society which thrives artistically with a rich public domain, and I’ll donate, vote, and fight to eliminate the media oligopoly to return distributive control to the artists. And I will support artists who offer their music direct to the listener through new and emerging services.

It’s tea I had imported from a comrade in Bristol. It’s prepared with French creme and I’m sipping it through a Paragon fine bone china mustache tea cup with Royal Warrant of Appointment by Her Majesty The Queen, issued between 1933 and 1936.

It’s lovely.

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innerspaceboy

After a decade of collecting rare, import, and exclusive vinyl, I've finally, finally succumbed to the pure saccharine-soaked nostalgia of my youth and bought vinyl issues of my favorite albums from high school. (I was born in '81)

I feel a bit dirty - like I'm committing a grievous audiophile sin, but hell, it's a lot of fun to own and spin giant gatefold 180g analog editions of my adolescence.

It's also the first-ever time I've blasted rock music on my hi-fi. Really a novel and enjoyable experience!







These MoV pressings are really impressive - well-mastered, heavy as hell, super glossy and solid jackets, resealable anti-static mylar bags, really nice color 12x24 inserts, audiophile 180g vinyl... well worth the $$$.

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Ol’ Qwerty Bastard

innerspaceboy listens to White Zombie!? Didn't expect that one.

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Frownland

I'm more surprised by Bush.

I would've told a young ISB to listen to Cows.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

innerspaceboy

I was locked up from 1995-1999 so my musical exposure was sorely limited. I would often pick up busted cassette tapes from people's trash and from the gutters as a child which I'd take home and repair. That introduced me to GnR, Ugly Kid Joe, Pantera's Far Beyond Driven and Vulgar Display of Power, Iron Maiden's Fear of the Dark, Suicidal Tendencies' self-titled debut, and more. But other than that (and a copy of Carcass' Heartwork I found misshelved in a mental hospital), I had no exposure to music in the 90s.

Astro-Creep was a sample-rich horrorshow and I really enjoyed the mythos of The Electric Head. I wanted to join Psychoholics Anonymous and eventually scored an original copy of Make Them Die Slowly at a rummage sale.

Good times.

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innerspaceboy

SO EXCITED!

It's coming!

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innerspaceboy

After discovering a fun graphical Linux desktop applet music controller for gMusicbrowser I was reminded just how many of my digital albums lack cover artwork. I decided that it was finally time to tackle an automation solution for the problem. The popular Bliss application failed to install so I explored the fetch_cover.pm plugin for gMusicbrowser, but the retrieve-cover-from-Google-or-Discogs feature isn't working correctly in the present build.

Thankfully, after a bit of experimentation, I found that Clementine's Cover Manager was well-suited to the task. It dynamically retrieves all albums missing covers and applies the logical Discogs/Picard/Google matches to the albums.

Best of all, it has a user-configurable option to export covers to image files and to nest them in album folders so that gMusicbrowser will detect and apply the artwork to my library the next time I load the application!

10,536 of my albums were missing covers and the automation is running presently. I've duplicated my library as a precautionary measure in case anything goes amiss.

CAN YOUR HEART STAND THE EXCITEMENT?

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innerspaceboy

In just 18 hours, I've automated the retrieval of the remaining 10,536 of my digital albums which were missing cover art, located and applied covers to 1,680 of them, (as the rest were non-commercial albums with no art to retrieve), and verified the applied covers with only 4 incorrectly assigned - a margin of error of just 0.23%.

For an encore, I installed a package of 66 user-configurable graphical layouts for the player application, selected my favorite and tweaked it to best fit my needs, added a lyrics plugin panel which scrolls in real-time with the audio, and activated a lovely desktop applet to control my music from the desktop.

gmusicbrowser's custom graphical interface with album art updated and newly-applied lyric plugin



Desktop environment with interactive player applet at the left.



Example of dynamic controls from the applet.



Yay for productivity!

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The Batlord

You, sir, are a nerd's nerd.

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