oh, go for it then

I know a lot of my peeps are aware of this dude, Ian C. Rogers. Majordomo, Grand Royal (r.i.p).
He seems to work at Yahoo now.

All I can say is, that Ian is right. Now that my memory has been triggered, I remember the mp3 saga. I try to be fair with ANY new technology (look, it's human mentality leading to group activity that makes anything bad, it's perspective based. Technology is just a fucking machine, wake up) and remember discussing it with some "geek" friends, ie, recording engineers, producers, etc.

Let's try not to apply any human (often greed) based filters on this. Look at it as connecting the dots. The dot is your point of input/ouput.

Let the data flow. If you're afraid, try with harmless stuff. Demo's outtakes, crappy stereo recordings of live shows. Put tags on them, follow their movement. Applications that enable that are readily available. If you don't know, just ask me or anybody that's willing to on the internetz. I'm just starting the day and I'm not humane enough to type all that crap.

I'm having more thoughts. Exciting day.

http://www.fistfulayen.com/blog/?p=127

Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context, a Presentation for Some Music Industry Friends

"Hello. My name is Ian Rogers. I’ve been building digital media applications since 1992, dropped out of a Computer Science PhD program to tour with Beastie Boys in 1995, and have been purchased by both AOL and Yahoo! in the ten years since then, with a stint running the new media department for a record label in the middle. Currently I work at Yahoo! Entertainment on Yahoo! Music."

First, a question: How many of you have tried Amazon’s MP3 download service?

Back in 1999 I ran Winamp.com for Rob and Justin. Napster came on the scene and we thought, “Wow! There’s a market for MP3s!” We had millions of people using Winamp, visiting Winamp.com for skins and plugins — it was by far the largest community of MP3-lovers. We naively and enthusiastically suggested to labels that we’d be a great place to sell MP3s. The response from the labels at the time was universally, “What’s MP3?” or “Um, no.”

Instead they commenced suing Napster. We were naive to be sure, but we were genuinely surprised by the approach. Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn’t invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP. It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.

Nullsoft subsequently built and prematurely released a program called Gnutella which became the basis for true P2P of the coming years. When Tom Pepper told Time Magazine that Gnutella was for “sharing recipes” he really said it all: This is so much bigger than just sharing music. This is physics. It’s trivial for one person to transfer bits from one person to another. Trivial. Unstoppable. PUT YOUR ENERGY ELSEWHERE, we thought out loud.

I caught a lot of heat from my music industry friends for Nullsoft’s Gnutella leak. In a long and impassioned email in 1999 I wrote to everyone I knew in a band, at a label, or music journalism (whatup, Jay!) and urged them to sell their content to their users in the format they were asking for: MP3. Make it easy, I wrote, and convenience will beat free.

Well, we (you included) did lots of other things instead. While running “New Media” at Grand Royal I released the first day/date digital/physical release with At The Drive-In’s “Relationship of Command”. Thanks to EMI requirements (hi Ted! hi Melissa!) it was DRM’d WMA and we sold about 12 copies in the first month, probably all to journalists. Years later I helped Yahoo! build Yahoo! Music Unlimited, a Windows Media Janus DRM-based subscription service. Record labels for their part participated in no end of control experiments: SDMI, Liquid Audio, Pressplay, Coral, etc, and they continue to this day.

But now, eight years later, Amazon’s finally done what was clearly the right solution in 1999. Music in the format that people actually want it in, with a Web-based experience that’s simple and works with any device. I bought tracks from Amazon (Kevin Drew and No Age), downloaded them, sync’d them to my new iPod Nano, and had them playing in my home audio system (Control 4) in less than five minutes. PRAISE JESUS. It only took 8 years.

8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years? How much naivety and hubris did we have when we said, “if we build it they will come”? What did we spend? And what did we gain? We certainly didn’t gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet.

Inconvenient experiences don’t have Web-scale potential, and platforms which monetize the gigantic scale of the Web is the only way to compete with the control you’ve lost, the only way to reclaim value in the music industry. If your consultants are telling you anything else, they are wrong."

I realy liked Grand Royal back then. As one of us put it "their public image became too large than what they really were", but at the bit where I crossed paths with them, around 1996 via Buffalo Daughter (myspace), the vibe there was crazy but exciting. Through this involvement, I made friends that I will remember and hope to keep in touch, for a long time to come.

Anyway, read Ian's post.

You fucking cunt.