Posts from August 2004

Those of you who are Bob Dylan and The Band fans have surely listened to The Basement Tapes. I have always loved the feel of those recordings. The songs are easy, the band is having fun, and it makes for a great listen.

I wish more basement tapes were available. I don’t really understand why there should be one “definitive” version of a song. But that’s usually the way it is unless we are talking about hip-hop where they do a number of mixes for commercial distribution.

One of the real possibilities of digital music distribution is that artists can sell more music and more versions of the songs they record.

I am listening to the demo tapes from Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot record. I found them on the Internet available via Bit Torrent. I read a review of them in Popmatters and then just did a Google search and found them. It was simple.

It’s a great set of songs. Many are different, and sometimes better, versions than what’s available on the record. Many are songs that didn’t make it on the record. I’d have easily paid another $10 for this set of songs but nobody is making them available commercially so I’ll just get them for free.

Imagine if every artist was able to offer a much larger library of music than they currently offer. Sure the record label isn’t likely to spend a lot of marketing dollars against anything other than the final version of the record. But for those fans who want more, they could make it easy to buy more music and make more money for everyone involved.

Jeff Tweedy of Wilco and Gary Louris of The Jayhawks front a wonderful group that is called Golden Smog. They’ve recorded a couple records and the one to get is called Weird Tales.

My favorite song on Weird Tales is a Woodie Guthry-style folk song written and sung by Jeff Tweedy called Please Tell My Brother. It’s a song about family. Since I am about to spend a week with my parents and one of my brothers and his girlfriend, I thought it would be a good choice for MP3 of the week.

We will have spent $144bn in Iraq by the end of this year in an attempt to make the US safer from terrorists.

The NY Times has an Op-Chart this morning on how we might have spent that $144bn on other ways to make us all safer.

Go look at the chart. Boy would I have loved to have spent the money another way.

My friend Stephen came out to visit with some other friends this weekend. Stephen loves to fish.

Stephen hired a guy named Capt Merritt to take us out. He was great. I highly recommend him to anyone who wants to fish in the Hamptons in the summer or Key West in the winter.

We headed out into Gardiner’s Bay and quickly found some really hungry bluefish.

The birds were everywhere and the water was “boiling” with fish jumping.

We must have caught and thrown back 30 blues before breakfast time.

Capt Merritt says that Gardiners Bay and Montauk has some of the best fishing on the east coast.

It certainly seemed like it this morning.

So I finally got my Gmail account from a friend at Google. I am [email protected] in case you are wondering. But I don’t check that account so don’t use it to send mail to me.

I am forwarding all my mail to my Gmail account to use as a searchable archive. I’ve been doing that for about two weeks. And you know what? It’s superfast. I mean lighting fast. I don’t know if it’s that Outlook is so slow or that Gmail is so fast, but I am going to stop searching Outlook for old mail and start using Gmail for that. I’ll probably pick up an extra ten minutes of productivity every day!

I walk 10 blocks to work and back everyday I am not travelling. It’s usually a nice walk unless it’s pouring rain. I’ve taken to listening to my iPod lately instead of yacking on my cell phone. It makes me a bit less productive, but I feel better when I get to work or get home.

Lately, it seems that everyone on the street has an iPod. I am serious. Today I made a point to count the percentage of adults I passed that were listening to an iPod (or some other digital music player). It was about 50%. That’s huge.

That exercise reminded me of the scene in Kurt Andersen’s Turn of the Century where the lead character walks around NYC counting people on the street for an entirely different reason. If you read the book, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Anyway, back to the point of my post. I learned in business school about price elasticity. The idea is simple. The lower something costs, the more it’s used. Clearly music is experiencing the same effect. Digital music is often free and the result is most people have a lot more music on their iPods than they ever had in their CD collections.

But I think there’s something else more fundamental going on. We are seeing place elasticity. People can listen to their iPods everywhere. It’s not just walking down 5th Avenue. It’s in their car with the iTrip. My friend Dr. Dana listens to her iPod in her hotel room with her cool little portable speakers. Mario Batali uses an iPod to power the music in all of his restaurants. And as a result, we are experiencing an explosion of music listening that is possibly more impactful than what happened when radio first made music portable.

I was walking by the Citigroup Center today on the way to the subway. My oh my. They’ve got a significant number of the NYC police force out front. Here’s a picture of the line of police cars they’ve got lined up on Lexington Avenue. Cops are everywhere. The guy in a helmet, bulletproof vest, and machine gun wouldn’t let me take his picture and I didn’t want to get shot so you won’t get to see him.

Regardless, there’s one hell of a show of force out front of the Citigroup Center these days. I guess that’s how it should be. But it makes me very sentimental for the days before all these color coded terror alerts. I sure hope they go the way of the nuclear bomb shelters that we had during the cold war.

AOL bought Mailblocks which makes a popular challenge response filter. It seems that this approach to blocking spam is getting some real traction.

But I must say that I hate these challenge response filters. Often when my mail gets bounced back for a challenge, I just ignore it or delete it and move on. If the recipient thinks their time is more important than mine, then screw them.

And then there’s the fact that I do a fair amount of email offline (planes, trains, hotels, etc). There’s no way to do the response offline, so it goes into the deleted folder.

I sure hope this isn’t the future of email.

Cross country flights are always a drag. Five to six hours stuck in a crowded plane is not my idea of fun. Tonight I had the added bonus of sitting in the middle seat at the back of the bus.

But Jet Blue makes it a lot easier. They’ve got TV just in case the book’s no good and the laptop battery dies.

Tonight I turned on the Yankees/Oakland game and was treated to some great entertainment. It was a hell of a game. Each time kept coming back again and again.

Sheffield hit a two run shot in the bottom of the ninth to send it to extra innings which is just what I needed since the flight wasn’t arriving until midnight.

And then in the bottom of the 11th, facing a rookie pitcher who fooled him with a big curve on the prior pitch, A Rod yanked a two run shot to end the game.

I took a picture of A Rod rounding first base. Not a great picture, but you get the idea. Live entertainment at 35,000 feet!