Taryn .'s Bookmarks tagged digital_media →  View Popular

from the beginning the Web has been about inventing ways to make its own massness -- its miscellaneousness -- useful.

Talent is not either/or. Recording contracts are.

With the Web, we can still listen to the world's greatest, but we can find others who touch us even though their technique isn't perfect.

Note the "we can find." We couldn't if finding required creating our own taxonomies

our culture overall would be foolish to stick within the safe boundaries of the old credentialing system...

Especially since the old talent system, the fate of which you bemoan actually doesn't work the way you say it does, and does not yield the results you claim for it. The mainstream media's business model does not aim at nurturing talent. It aims at moving units. It therefore does exactly what you complain the Web does: It panders to the market.

He had thought that fans would willingly pay the price of a latte to support musicians directly. But fewer than 20 percent did so. “I think I was just naïve.”

At the time he called the project a failure, but he has reconsidered. “The numbers of the people that paid for that record, versus the people that paid for his last record, were greater,” he said. “He made infinitely more money from that record than he did from his other one. It increased his name value probably tenfold. At the end of the day, counting free downloads, it was probably five or six or seven times higher than the amount sold on his last record. I don’t know how you could look at that as a failure.”

emerging global culture of people relating to information, one another, and institutions in ways that, taken together, has great promise for the future of democracies. Digital Natives — people born digital — give us reason for hope that this global culture could emerge. Some of their behaviors also give reason to worry, at the same time, about things like privacy, safety, information overload, and IP worries. We need to take these problems seriously and get in front of them, without ruining the environment that makes all the wonderful things possible.

In this book, we argue in favor of greater connectivity. That connectivity might be between parents or teachers or lawmakers who don’t live any part of their lives online and our kids who do. That connectivity might be between those in industry who are threatened by what these kids and others (us) are up to online and the culture that we represent. That connectivity might be between technology companies and their users, whose identities they seek otherwise to control. That connectivity might be between those of us in the rich world and those in less rich parts of the world, as GV makes possible. And so forth.

So I am looking past downloads to subscriptions.” He spoke about the possibility of selling preprogrammed MP3 players—say, a fifty-dollar unit loaded with fifty hours of Mozart.

With some amusement, Heymann took note of a recent story in the Times Magazine, by Lynn Hirschberg, about the record producer Rick Rubin, who earlier this year became the co-chairman of Columbia Records. In the article, Rubin looked ahead to a time when a listener could forgo the buying of individual CDs or downloads in favor of a subscription to a large-scale online musical library. “You’d pay, say, $19.95 a month,” Rubin told Hirschberg. When pop moguls start taking tips from German classical-music producers, something new is under the sun.