I want to make a bet with you today. By January 2014 I will wager that in the US almost all forms of tangible media will either be in sharp decline or completely extinct. I am not just talking about print, but all tangible forms of media — newspapers, magazines, books, DVDs, boxed software and video games.

I made this assertion in my thesis, too (though Dr. Saylor was skeptical). We’re going to see the end of the CD, and other tangible media, soon. Rubel’s right.

When the internet becomes ubiquitous, there will be little incentive to continue selling tangible media à la CDs. When bandwidth isn’t a concern any more, the internet will provide something CDs can’t: instant gratification, which our society so covets.

Related: Tim Bray reported that one of his favorite music stores has gone out of business.

Writing a good political song — without coming across as sanctimonious, naïve or worse — is a particularly tricky thing to pull off, but I knew I had to come up with something.

Lewis talks about how it can be difficult to write a good set of lyrics, especially for political topics. I hadn’t considered that before; I had assumed that words pour out of lyricists like water from a $10 kiddie pool.

It’s tough to write lyrics that deliver the message you want to convey, while still providing adequate room to breathe, let alone fitting it to an appealing melody. Words that rhyme well with surrounding text might not be the word that conveys your intent. That’s a tough balance, especially for controversial topics. Writers have it easy — they can use whatever words they want to convey their point without having to worry about how those words will sound when fitted with a melody.

It can also be hard to write about topics you aren’t familiar with:

In general I’ve found that writing political songs can feel like losing my home-turf advantage if the topic is not a part of my own life experience — what song could I write about a miners’ strike that would sound as good as a song an actual miner would write?

It takes a lot of thought and context to write lyrics that are worthwhile. Music can compensate somewhat for poor lyrics, sure. But actually creating lyrics that fit well to music, while also conveying the writer’s intent, is much more difficult.

McCain’s concession speech concluded with a theme from Crimson Tide, which was about a Navy man who was labeled as a Maverick — who was “stripped of his authority and ultimately beaten by a young black guy, somewhat new to the scene”. How incredibly fitting.

Obama’s acceptance speech was followed by clips from Remember the Titans — a movie about bringing together blacks and whites to work toward a common goal.

I don’t know who chose those themes, but someone obviously gave a lot of thought to the choice of music behind these speeches. Well done.

Last year, Fox News ordered John McCain to stop using a clip of himself at a Fox News-moderated debate. Last month, Warner Music Group demanded YouTube remove an amateur video attacking Barack Obama that included its music, while NBC asked the Obama campaign to pull an ad that included some NBC News video with Tom Brokaw and Keith Olbermann. No doubt, these corporations are simply trying to avoid controversy or embarrassment, but by claiming infringement, they are effectively censoring political speech.

Lessig concludes:

It would be far better if copyright law were narrowed to those contexts in which it serves its essential creative function — encouraging innovation and ensuring that artists get paid for their work — and left alone the battles of what criticisms candidates for office, and their supporters, are allowed to make.

The Internet continues to be a battleground for fair use, and Lessig illustrated that even high-profile political figures face censorship at the hands of the media. Should McCain be allowed to use a clip of himself at Fox News? I think so.

Copyright holders sometimes like to pretend that fair use doesn’t exist. Super Bowl craziness provides one example where I think copyright holders went too far.

Copyright shouldn’t be a declaration of ultimate control. It should be a utility that ensures copyright holders have the opportunity to receive credit and fair revenue for their efforts.

No, I don’t fall asleep and snore loudly. I don’t send text messages, do homework, or use my laptop when I’m in the audience, though I often scratch out a to-do list during performances. But as I sat in a saxophone quartet recital the other day, I found myself entirely disengaged from the music.

Let’s be frank: The only reason most students attend recitals is so that they fulfill their recital attendance quota. I’ll certainly admit that I would never be able to attend fifteen recitals in a semester if it wasn’t required of me.

I’m certain that MUS 021 (Recitals) only exists to ensure that performers aren’t met with an empty auditorium. Without MUS 021, recital attendance would be abysmal.

I’m part of the problem.

You could call it RADD (Recital Attention Deficit Disorder), perhaps. But it isn’t really a question of attention span; I simply don’t enjoy sitting in a recital hall listening to an hour of saxophone quartet music. Or vocalists.

Classical music, done well, shouldn’t be boring. But like chocolate chip cookies, you can have too much of a good thing — or someone can mess up the recipe, leaving you with a burned, bitter taste. Post-tonal saxophone music, then, is the boca burger of modern music. They took whatever ugly note combinations they could find, and crammed it into an emotionless three-movement saxophone work. The piano accompaniment is their napkin, wiped with whatever notes couldn’t fit into the saxophone part.

All things considered, I suppose it isn’t accurate to say that musicians have simply recycled centuries-old works for performance. They also include terrible twentieth-century music just to keep things balanced.

Today’s generation hasn’t learned the history of music; they don’t understand the evolution that brought us from Bach to Copland and beyond. Yet even for those of us who battled through a formal Music History course, recitals can be a drag if performers don’t set themselves apart with a phenomenal performance.

It’s a shame, then, that I found myself sitting in the auditorium the other night anxiously awaiting the concert’s end. Music should be enjoyable, and audiences should be engaged. Yet that clearly isn’t happening, and I see nothing to indicate that recital attendance will naturally increase. Today, we find university recitals filled with students who would rather be off playing Halo than watching a music performance.

Halo is more fun than a saxophone quartet, that’s for sure. Maybe music just can’t compete.

A more alarming thought: Our generation doesn’t appreciate classical music. When older generations die away, who will be left to advocate classical music?

Perhaps the future will be like Planet of the Apes, and hundreds of years from now a curious explorer may stumble upon recordings of Beethoven, wondering where that archaic music came from.

But then he’ll notice a Britney Spears recording, and realize that society was already dead at the turn of the millennium.

Part of the confusion, I believe, is that users must learn that “yahoo.com” is their OpenID URL. That doesn’t make sense.

If everyone had their own website — a “home page” for their identity on the web — OpenID adoption would be much simpler. I can promote my identity with one URL that will (ideally) never change: http://marcuscavanaugh.com/. I associate that URL with my identity.

But people without their own website must outsource their identity to their most trusted provider. In this case, Yahoo’s test subjects needed to equate their Yahoo! ID with their online presence everywhere on the internet. That’s a foreign concept, and a crucial difference.

It is completely counterintuitive to think that “yahoo.com” should be used as an OpenID URL; “yahoo.com” is not a unique identifier for any individual.

A better alternative: Yahoo! should assign users a homepage URL like “http://yahoo.com/myusername”, and then instruct users that their own URL (“yahoo.com/myusername”) represents an OpenID identity.

The URI “yahoo.com” represents a corporation, not an individual; “yahoo.com/myusername” represents an identity. It’s unique. When I’m looking to sign in to a site, even if I knew what OpenID was, I would never guess that “yahoo.com” was the OpenID URI.

Who are you? I’m “marcuscavanaugh.com”.
Who are you? I’m “yahoo.com/marcuscavanaugh”.
Who are you? I’m “yahoo.com”.

We must teach users that a URL is their online homebase.¹ If users learn that they have their own homepage URL, it’s not too hard to follow through that “OpenID means you type your URL into the box.”

OpenID won’t take hold magically; it will require some education to teach users to use OpenID. But users will understand OpenID better if they’re asked the right question:

Q: Who’s your OpenID provider?
A: Uh…
Q: What’s your homepage?
A: Oh yeah, it’s [myusername.blogspot.com].

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.

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.

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:

1. You could switch the browser detection to give Windows a different font instead.
2. 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.
3. This is completely obsessive and overkill. Your visitors will not notice the difference. Heck, you might not even notice. That’s okay.
4. You can do just about anything if you put your mind a little javascript to it.

A little perfection now and then never hurt anyone.

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 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.

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.

There are a bucketload of mediocre iPhone apps, but few great ones. Today I found one of those rarities.

Michael Carter and Mario Balibrera introduced me to the PC version of Galcon back at PyCon this past year. I enjoyed playing it there, but didn’t have the urge to drop twenty bucks on it at the time.

Phil Hassey recently ported Galcon to the iPhone. Regularly it sells for ten bucks, but it was on sale today, so I figured I’d give it a go.

I’m very impressed.

I can play against other human beings within seconds. On my phone. Multiplayer online games. In my pocket. Galcon on the iPhone is just fantastic. Go buy it now.

iPhone games that can do multiplayer, over-the-internet matchmaking have tremendous potential. Let’s do more of those!

Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals is one of my favorite albums this year, a hyperactive mish-mash sampling hundreds of songs from the last 45 years of popular music.

He compiled data on which songs were sampled in the album, sorted by time, and posted the results for all to see. (Perhaps more interestingly, he used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to find cheap humans willing to help him gather data. An article for another time.)

I downloaded the music for free and listened to a few songs, but I didn’t recognize much. Granted, this is all highly illegal, being a mishmash of copyrighted work, but it is very original nonetheless.

Musically speaking, these songs could certainly be considered a new, unique work, even though they are essentially smashed-together splotches of existing songs. Unethical? For the artists who created the original songs, I’d say yes. If I had composed a work that became a part of one of these pieces, though, I probably would not be too concerned. It’d have been nice to get permission first, but if it doesn’t cut into my (hypothetical) profit margin I wouldn’t be too bothered.

Profit is everything, in most cases. If money isn’t involved, people are much less likely to care… with nothing to lose, there’s little to be upset about. Artists gain extra publicity in most cases, which may actually stimulate sales.

I don’t like the music, though — I’d much rather they mishmash a collection of songs that I actually like in the first place. Ah well, I guess that could be a project for myself when I feel like evading the law.

The result? Pandora often selects an excellent stream of songs, customized to your particular listening desire.

They even have an iPhone application, which lets me get a Pandora stream from the cell phone network connection; essentially a 24/7 radio service custom-tailored to my desires.

The problem, politically speaking, has been that online radio stations currently face disproportionate taxes on the songs that they play, as opposed to traditional broadcast stations. They currently make $23-$24 million in revenue each year, but they pay $17 million in royalty fees, according to ZDNet’s interview. As a result, Tim Westergren had said that the future of Pandora might be bleak; his comments sparked an outpouring of support for the station.

Pandora does provide an excellent service to musicians and listeners; the article goes into more depth, describing how Pandora often brings attention to smaller artists and encourages listeners to buy the artists’ music.

Pandora really is a win-win: Listeners discover music that they’re likely to purchase, and musicians (even less prominent ones) receive exposure and profit. But if the royalty fees are disproportionately high — enough to kill off online radio services like Pandora — both camps will lose.

I hope Pandora succeeds as they work with the music industry to lower the royalty rates to a fairer level. The internet only becomes more prominent in everyday life; it’d be a shame to let bureaucracy get in the way of new services that benefit musicians and audiences alike.

Jazz One can crank out pretty good performances, but we face challenges during recording just as any university band would; players make mistakes, and we must record several takes in order to capture the song well.

But if someone misses a note, plays out of time, or forgot to come in, it’s all right — with digital magic, all of those mistakes can be corrected. In fact, I wasn’t even in the state the last time we recorded a CD; instead I just overdubbed everything when I came back by myself. Few people would be able to guess that I wasn’t actually there during the recording process.

The big question raised as we magically fix problems, of course, is of ethics. Are we misrepresenting ourselves by fixing a wrong note here or there? Probably not. If we fix an intonation problem? No? What if we fabricate entire phrases? The ground gets shaky real fast.

The philosophy our director subscribed (loosely) was this: There’s no problem when we splice together multiple takes, because splicing multiple takes just takes the best from what we are fully capable of playing. It isn’t misrepresentation if we can, and have, played the music at the same quality as the recorded version.

Pop stars do this all the time with AutoTune and the like. Sometimes digital alterations become part of the music itself, as in Cher’s Believe.

Digital editing isn’t going to go away; it will only get easier to modify and fabricate music as technology improves and becomes more accessible. I don’t think it’s immoral, nor do I think it’s harmful for music, as long as people don’t misrepresent their own abilities in cases like audition tapes or taped competitions.

Technology is here to stay; we shouldn’t fight it. We should use its benefits to bolster music in the world. To try to shun digital manipulation would be a losing battle.

Incidentally, I’m writing this while waiting for the Mac Pro in the booth to cool down. It was glitching when we recorded the last two takes, so we’re letting it cool for a bit to see if that’ll fix the problem. If not, we might be out of luck. Technology isn’t perfect… yet.

As the Drake football team edged past the Upper Iowa Peacocks, the band sat in the back of the stadium, entrenched in an epic battle of our own.¹

Almost every time we needed to play during a break in the game, Drake would turn on the loudspeaker with prerecorded music. Eventually, we just played during the breaks even when it meant playing against the loudspeaker music. But a few things struck me about the music they played over the speakers:

1. They spliced the “de-FENSE” drum beat incorrectly. I don’t know how they managed to mix that one up, but the “de-FENSE” theme lurched forward in 9/8 time. Good thing our actual defense didn’t follow suit.

2. Every song awkwardly faded out in the middle of a phrase. Someone decided that it’d be easiest to shove a ten-second fade on the end of each ditty rather than finding a suitable place to crop them. The interludes left you feeling as though something was missing.

3. The Drake Marching Band’s purpose during that game was to wrestle with the loudspeakers. We may as well have not attended; the small crowd didn’t seem to mind.

Thanks to the accessibility of prerecorded music and effective speakers, the audience no longer needs a marching band to receive musical support. The band’s role largely remains as a historical novelty; our physical presence is our only advantage over the prerecorded music.

You’d think that universities would go with one or the other — either have a band that actually manages the music, or have a loudspeaker instead of a pep band.

Instead, we face an unenjoyable battle between the new and the old, between technology and people. Even those controlling the loudspeaker can’t decide when they want the band to play rather than turning on the loudspeaker. If they’re going to run the loudspeaker all of the time, as they did in last night’s football game, they may as well just drop the pep band altogether.

Technology has given everyone the power to place music into any aspect of their lives. Physical bands and orchestras are more cumbersome to manage, move, and maintain than prerecorded music, and in many cases the prerecorded music sounds better than a live performance. There are few practical reasons to actually maintain a live pep band or marching band other than for its historical or aesthetic value.

Will the marching band become a relic of the past? Probably not in the foreseeable future. But it may see a slow demise as the band’s heydays slide deeper into history. Our grandchildren may one day view the marching band as some of our generation² view the orchestra: a historical artifact with little relevance to society.

Bugzilla reviewers may seem to be harsh, accidentally. They aren’t trying to be harsh or overly critical, they’re just pointing out what needs to be changed, which usually means they’re pointing out what’s wrong with the current code, instead of pointing out what’s right with it. Usually they don’t have lots of extra time in their life for reviews, so they just quickly write what needs to be fixed, without spending too much time thinking about the nicest way to say it. Sometimes they also don’t go into long explanations.

You’re not a terrible programmer or a bad person. All we’re doing is telling you what’s preventing us from checking the code into Bugzilla’s main codebase.

Being asked to write about the current state of minimalism is like being asked if you’ve stopped beating your wife.