Rick Rubin: Right idea, Wrong Price?
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Subs can save us The record producer and co-founder Def Jam has only been "co-head" of Sony's Columbia Records since May, but he's already setting about destroying the old business so a new one can be built in its place.â¦
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Is the time right for Madison Avenue to pick up the tab for digital music? Listening Post columnist Eliot Van Buskirk takes a look at SpiralFrog.
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Rick Rubin, the pioneering music producer who worked with the Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash, Run DMC and Jay-Z, predicts the future of online music will be subscription-based -- and that the iPod, inexplicably, will be obsolete.
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IT has never been able to prove it's true value to the business, and as such it is treated as a cost center, which is the first thing to get cut in poorly run companies. But with Web 2.0 booming, all the assumptions that you hold about IT should be put on notice: change is in the air. Web 2.0 companies have had to grow their own technology for economic functionality. Free means crap right? Wrong. How many of you keep Yahoo! Mail running on your BlackBerry's along with Exchange because you know Exchange will be down sooner or later?
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In the movie The Rock, the protagonist is a chemestry nerd who gleefully signs for a package as if he's a kid who's just gotten his box tops honored with a toy in the mail. He opens it- and it is an old, presumably pristine, Beatles LP.    His fellow chemist asks, "why would you pay $600.00 for that when you can get the CD for thirty?"    "Because," the nerd says, "these sound better."    But do they, really?
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Phantom sales lost to piracy? Get over it. It's time for the music labels to pull those master recordings out of storage and make some money. Commentary by Eliot Van Buskirk.
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The valuation is dirt cheap, but can it perform?
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Collectively, independent record labels are a sleeping giant waking up and demanding its due. Think many Davids versus a few Goliaths. Commentary by Eliot Van Buskirk.
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THERE is never a right time to buy technology. Something cheaper, faster and better specified will be on the market before you have even got your product out of its box.
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Tycho:  After seeing Chore Wars mentioned yesterday, the opportunities for manipulating people seemed...  rich.  The possibilities for mashups based on this data are also rich - I wonder if it could be exposed, somehow.  When my charge is old enough to manipulate in this way, my crib is going to fucking sparkle.
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Chris Brogan asks a question... What if you had $300K to spend on a luxury, an impulse buy, not something you need, what would you spend it on? I just answered -- I'd buy 30 full-page ads in the NY Times. What would you buy?
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Thereâs something not quite kosher about some private equity dealings, or so it seems to me. But I could be wrong.
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Blog: Some Webcasters say they're encouraged by recent offers by the record industry group charged with collecting higher fees, but nothing's set in stone yet.
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If it looks like a good deal ... and sounds like a good deal ... it might be a really bad deal.
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Yes, the product is overpriced and the constant barrage of piped in sound effects is enough to drive Seinfeld&#39;s Lloyd Braun into another nervous breakdown (hearing Ric Flair&#39;s patented &quot;Wooo!
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There's a mini-debate going on about whether podcasting is a success or worth it, or whatever, I'm not sure exactly what the issue is, but it's framed this way --> if you can't get advertisers to hitch a ride on your podcast then podcasting is not worth much if anything.  I'm having a slow Friday so far, it's cloudy and chilly here in the Bay Area, we're in the January doldrums, so I thought maybe I could liven things up a bit by saying both sides of this argument are full of shit wrong. Let me explain. My phone doesn't have a business model. Neither does my porch. I still like having a phone and a porch because they help me meet new people and communicate with people I know. Same with my blog and podcast. Meanwhile... There's another mini-debate about bloggers playing pranks at CES. The Gizmodo guys ran around with some gadgets that turn TV sets off. At CES is this a big deal because much of what goes on there is TV. They were being assholes, interfering with people's ability to do their jobs and make a living. As a result bloggers get a bad rep.  The problem is that they're not bloggers, they're reporters and they work for a company that's not a blog, it's a publication. Publishing stuff on the web with blogging software says nothing about the people and what they write.  A blogger is person who has an idea, expertise or opinion who wants to convey that to other people. The unedited voice of a person. What makes a blogger interesting is that they do something other than writing a blog. If all you do is write a blog, and if you want or need to make money from your blogging, it's really hard to distinguish what you're doing from what professionals who don't use the web (are there any left?) do. Same with podcasting. I do a podcast from time to time because I want to say something. Whether I can run an ad on my podcast means nothing to me because I would never do it. And if I went crazy and let someone put an ad on there, it would only be to reciprocate for them having hosted the podcast, as a way of paying for the podcast itself (I'm contemplating doing exactly that right now so I had to include the disclaimer). I would never burden my podcasting with the task of supporting me. It's not why I podcast. We keep having this argument. Amateurism is good and there's lots of it. Professional writers and broadcasters probably have a place, I don't know, it's not my problem. But let's be clear blogging and podcasting exist independent of a professional's ability to eek out a living using the tools of blogging and podcasting.  Now I'm going to try to get some work done.  See also: Podcasting News, Mashable.
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Let's make a deal: Door Number 1? Door Number 2? Or Door Number 3? The choice is yours when you try to rack up points in an experiment being run by Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at M.I.T. &#8212; who, by the way, is not trying to bring back Monty Hall's "Let's Make [...].