Paying for Lyrics
Wired recently ran a piece entitled “How Companies Pay Artists to Include Brands in Lyrics”:
Yes, you read that right: things have gotten so weird in the music business that high-profile acts are inserting ads into their song lyrics. The next time you hear a brand mentioned in a song, it could be due to a paid product placement. And unlike magazines, songs are not required to point out which words are part of an advertisement.
This reminds me of a scene from The Truman Show, where Truman’s wife gave a cheery 1950’s-like product placement ad. Product placement itself is an interesting advertising medium. I consider it less obtrusive, and therefore less annoying to customers, than traditional advertising, but I don’t know what the returns on investment are like.
Should musicians be opposed to “selling out” by placing product advertisements in their lyrics? I see no harm in a product placement or two in songs. Musicians already parody commercial interests openly as expression; whether those product mentions are corporate-sponsored or musician-inspired doesn’t make much of a difference.
One could also argue back to the debate about “What is art?” — most popular songs fade out of prominence very quickly. In a decade, most songs played on the radio today won’t be popular any more, and whether they contained product placements or not, they’ll be outdated anyway.
Musicians must assume the risk of product placement: An ad in a song will may improve the musical aesthetic and/or popularity of a song. It may detract from the song. Or it might not even have an impact on listeners. (How many of you actually know all of the lyrics to the songs you listen to?)
If a musician wants to incorporate corporate interests into his or her music, the more power to ‘em, I say. Great music — whether corporate-sponsored or not — will live on. The rest won’t.
MySpace Takes Aim at iTunes
MySpace has launched an online music distribution service that’s unlike any other online service I know of:
In a bid to spruce up its popular online hangout, MySpace plans to flip the switch Thursday on a much-anticipated service that will give its roughly 120 million users free access to hundreds of thousands of songs from the world’s largest recording labels.
The catch: the music can be played only on personal computers connected to the Internet and listeners have to tolerate advertising splashed across the screen.
As far as I know, this is a very new medium for music distribution; at the very least, I don’t know of any other services that have launched such a service at this scale. MySpace hopes to gain more content than iTunes:
MySpace is starting with several hundred thousand songs, but expects to surpass the size of Apple’s iTunes store, which stocks 8.5 million songs.
“When all is said and done, we will have the richest catalog of content on the Internet,” boasted Amit Kapur, MySpace’s chief operating officer.
It’s an interesting new venue, but I’d liken it to something like online radio rather than iTunes. If audiences can only listen to the music in such a restricted environment, it’s effectively an online on-demand streaming service. It’s like radio, but with audiences able to choose the songs they’re listening to.
They put an interesting spin on it, with a nod toward encouraging concert ticket sales (as part of their monetization strategy):
MySpace also hopes to sell more brand-driven advertising and establish its Web site as the go-to spot for buying concert tickets and music merchandise.
Will it be successful? I’m not too optimistic; it probably won’t crash and burn, but I don’t think many people will use that as opposed to other music services where customers can actually buy and keep their music, to play it whenever they want.
Battle of the Lookalikes: Helvetica, Arial, Helvetica Neue
Helvetica on Windows looks like crap. It renders poorly, with strange-looking spacing and weight. Fortunately, Microsoft’s Arial looks almost like Helvetica, so most stylesheets specify those fonts like this:
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
But OS X often has Arial installed too, meaning Mac users are left with a cheap knock-off of Helvetica instead.
OS X includes Helvetica Neue by default — a newer, tweaked version of Helvetica — which most Windows machines don’t have. So the next-best option would be this CSS rule:
font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
Mac users see Helvetica Neue, and Windows users see Arial instead. Not too shabby. Here’s how these three fonts appear on Windows and Mac, at 3 sizes:
Windows XP
Mac OS X Leopard
Not too bad. But I have one more nit to pick: Helvetica Neue looks scrawny at smaller sizes. Here’s a rendering from OS X at 12px:
Helvetica / Helvetica Neue, 12px
The first line seems more evenly spaced and easier on my eyes. YMMV.
You can’t get OS X/Helvetica and Windows/Arial through CSS cascades alone. If you list Helvetica first, Windows will display Helvetica. We want to ignore Helvetica on Windows.
The fix? Assuming you have your stylesheet initially defined with Arial first, you can sneak in a snippet of javascript (right before your closing </body> tag) to reverse the order for OS X:
<script>
// On Windows, Helvetica looks like crap.
// On Mac, it looks better than
// Helvetica Neue at smaller sizes.
if (navigator.platform.match(/Mac.*/)) {
document.body.style.fontFamily = 'Helvetica, Arial';
}
</script>
Perfect: Helvetica on Mac, Arial on Windows.
A couple of notes:
- You could switch the browser detection to give Windows a different font instead.
- If you specify your site’s font-family on a more specific rule in your stylesheet, you might need to change the javascript to make it override properly.
- This is completely obsessive and overkill. Your visitors will not notice the difference. Heck, you might not even notice. That’s okay.
- You can do just about anything if you put
your minda little javascript to it.
A little perfection now and then never hurt anyone.
Judge Orders New Trial in Music Piracy Case
The RIAA still has trouble pushing through court cases of music piracy. According to an article from the AFP:
A US judge has ordered a new trial for a woman convicted of pirating music on the Internet and denounced the awarding of 222,000 dollars in damages to record companies as “wholly disproportionate” and “oppressive.”
At issue here wasn’t the guilt or innocence of the defendant, but the amount of damages awarded to the record companies. To force music pirates to pay hundreds of thousands in damage for pirating twenty-four songs is certainly excessive. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime.
Muxtape: Bands Have a Voice Too
News from Muxtape, an online service which previously allowed users to create playlists of MP3s:
Muxtape is relaunching as a service exclusively for bands, offering an extremely powerful platform with unheard-of simplicity for artists to thrive on the internet. Musicians in 2008 without access to a full time web developer have few options when it comes to establishing themselves online, but their needs often revolve around a common set of problems. The new Muxtape will allow bands to upload their own music and offer an embeddable player that works anywhere on the web, in addition to the original muxtape format. Bands will be able to assemble an attractive profile with simple modules that enable optional functionality such as a calendar, photos, comments, downloads and sales, or anything else they need. The system has been built from the ground up to be extended infinitely and is wrapped in a template system that will be open to CSS designers. There will be more details soon. The beta is still private at the moment, but that will change in the coming weeks.
These changes came after Muxtape closed down due to complaints from the RIAA. The idea of becoming a portal for individual bands — a one-stop shop — has potential. Perhaps this will help give independent artist more of a voice.
Music & Religion
I continue to stumble upon new nuggets of musicopolitical thought for my Music & Politics blog, this time from my favorite tech pundit, Andy Ihnatko. Last year, he posted a series entitled the “iTunes Event Calendar” in which he wrote about many different song choices from iTunes (mostly in the holiday spirit).
Lo and behold, a sliver of insight about music itself:
Again I come back to the observation that you don’t need to be religious to be affected by religious music. If you can listen to Bach’s Mass in B-Minor and not be moved, then you definitely need to have a fresh set of batteries installed somewhere because somethin’ ain’t workin’ right. Great music is created and performed by people who truly believe in what they’re doing, who feel as though this thing they’re creating is important; people who are very, very highly motivated to not screw this up.
I’m religious, but I think he’s absolutely right. Anyone can be moved by music — even religious music. Emotion is an innate part of every human being. Music can stir our emotions. Music and humanity are inextricably linked; that’s why music can be so powerful.
