My attitudes toward music have changed drastically in the past few years, in several ways. It’s become so easy to obtain digital music, and squeezing it onto mobile devices so convenient over physical media, that I’ve bought more music, been exposed to more music, and seen more live shows in the past few years than [...]

Amazing glitch music visual tracker:

Open source, runs on Linux with PS2 pads. More details over at Planet Damage, he doesn’t seem to link the project website, but it’s fijuu.com.
(via The Day They Tried To Kill Me)

I’ve been sceptical of CDs and optical media since I last moved house and had to carry them. I’m purging my possessions of extraneous stuff at the moment, and last night ripped and tagged all of my remaining CDs. The pile came out to about 4 gigabytes of MP3s, which is the size of the [...]

I went to see Portishead play for the first time in a decade last weekend, and I’m very pleased with this shot I got of Beth Gibbons and Geoff Barrows.
I also got to see four members of the Wu Tang Clan play… at Butlins. They were good, but it was also hilarious to see a [...]

Raph Koster is on fire in this interview on Gamasutra today:
I think we have to look at the current game industry as being a subset of big media, and big media is running into some issues lately. It’s not that they’re going to go away, and it’s not that they’re going to have less power. [...]

An incidental comment from a talk by Adam Russell on AI:
Technological change is quick. Cultural change is glacial.
Nothing promotes cultural change like positive values, and the higher the value to people, the bigger the wave a zeitgeist can ride. A multitude of peers are the best marketing and distribution arm possible, near optimally communicating things [...]

Another gem via John Robb. It’s another part of the amazing story that I’m watching emerge this year: The black economies that have served as the scapegoats and bogeymen of ailing institutions are in fact suffering exactly the same shocks.
Fatal intersection: The arc of a crime crew:
Big gangs have a shadow of their former influence [...]

I just spent about 30 hours in a student house/record company HQ. Many gigs were being arranged via mobile phone and email. Around that, people we’re composing and rehearsing music in the house almost constantly.
There was a huge TV in the living room, which was on when I arrived, but noone was really paying attention [...]

I cannot believe how… sensible some things seem to be this year.
Today: Microsoft voice support of OpenID, and Steve Jobs begins to make some quite forceful anti-DRM noises.

Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

It’s been pointed out in many [...]

Marek Bronstring, of Idle Thumbs, has made an interesting post about The Great Games Experiment: a social networking site for gamers. His take:

There needs to be a place where small games can virally market themselves the way small bands have rapidly emerged from MySpace and YouTube. I don’t know if this is going to be [...]

Bob Lefsetz making predictions for 2007/8:

1. CD sales will continue to tank
Sometime in the next twelve to eighteen months CD sales are going to decline so precipitously as to cause the major labels to rethink their digital strategy. With the iTunes Store no replacement for discs, they’ll be forced to authorize a new method [...]

The best selling music album of 2006 in the US shifted less than 4m copies.
As Waxy has it: “tastes are splintering as music discovery and distribution gets easier”.
This doesn’t mean hegemony breaks or goes away, but I suspect it does mean it’s led more by social networks as they decouple from “big media”.

Beyond/within communication, aesthetics and play, here’s a reason that media is so important: it affects our emotions, feelings, moods, and temperament profoundly.

The conclusion that is supported by much of the empirical work is that positive affect generally facilitates flexibility, the ability to respond appropriately to the situation or task at hand, in thinking and problem [...]

Nowadays I far prefer digital media to physical media, which has to be stored and looked after to a much greater extent. Keeping real stuff costs time, space, cognition, and energy.
There’s a fundamental law of all behaviourally adaptive living things at work around media and piracy: Cater to your motivations, conserve energy in doing so. [...]

Here’s a snippet from a book I just read. It’s about use of the first transatlantic telegraph cable:

The original rate for transatlantic telegrams was about £20 – then about $100 – for a minimum of ten words. The cable actually became more profitable when the rate was halved and then halved again, because the lower [...]