Taryn .'s Bookmarks tagged industry →  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.

a huge ecosystem that supports and is supported by the book.

I am actually suggesting that cutting the middlemen out could have negetive repercussions for authors and artists. Authors could do it now if they wanted. Lots of authors do, but that means they have to find and hire their own editor, proofreader, and designer. They have to get an ISBN number, apply for copyright, get a library of congress number, and a tax ID number (if they plan on selling the book). Then they have to get bids from printers, prepare the manuscript, and pay out of their own pocket to have the book printed. Once it's printed they have to pay for shipping and storage. To sell enough to cover costs they will probably need help with their marketing strategy which might include a book tour (which they will also pay for out of their own pocket), book fairs, ads, articles, interviews, reviews, an author blog, etc... Oh, and if they want to sell to bookstores or even to Amazon, they have to contract with a distributor. If they are lucky enough to sell the books, they might need an accountant to sort out how much they owe Uncle Sam. And they will have to make sure to pay quarterly and in the midst of all this how will they find time to concentrate on writing the next book? Point is, without those "middlemen" the author is stuck doing all of this him or herself. It's difficult, it's a lot of work, and it's not something many authors are willing or able to take on.

The Kindle is the first platform to solve a handful of big problems for the self-publishing author.

the solution is _collaborative_filtering._

and i can also understand that some people,

like sara here, will completely and utterly

fail to comprehend it. fortunately, however,

their failure to grasp it has no consequence

bearing on the ultimate success of the tool.

it's not superstition. it will work even if

you don't "believe" in it...

tomorrow's authors won't waste one _minute_

of their time doing "marketing", because it

will be clearly understood as a kiss of death.

As New York City grew through the 1800s, it reached far up the Hudson for its very life. The river was lined with railroad tracks, sawmills, paper mills, ice houses, brick yards, iron foundries and other industrial sites, all feeding the metropolis.

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.”

Eliasson: I was interested in bringing life to a space that constitutes a non-space in New York, a space that simply doesn't count. Wall Street is traditionally more important there that the water. In other words, I wanted to draw attention to something that has always been there and yet goes largely unnoticed.

SPIEGEL: Do you always emphasize strong sensations?

Eliasson: Yes, because physical experience makes a much deeper impression than a purely intellectual encounter. I can explain to you what it's like to feel cold, but I can also have you feel the cold yourself through my art. My goal is to sensitize people to highly complex questions.

online, he said, "we're observing. We're not judging."

Of course, the TV industry has been observing and judging "quarterlife," wondering whether it could prove a model for future creative deals. Herskovitz says series owned by their creators could still make economic sense for networks, who could pay less for pilots in exchange for profit-sharing.

Indeed, it was producer-turned-NBC Entertainment co-president Ben Silverman, an early fan of the project, who approached Herskovitz with the proposal to put "quarterlife" on network TV, merging the webisodes to form a six-episode series. But Herskovitz said he's "had a sense of dread for months now that there was just too big a stretch from the Internet to NBC.

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