Entertainment

 by Brendon J. Wilson

Vodcasting?

Alright, maybe my last suggestion on podcasting went down like a lead balloon with Dave Winer, but I’m going to give another idea a shot. I’ve been ruminating about buying a Tivo, if only to stem the amount of time I spend in front of TV. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that a lot of the most interesting stuff isn’t on TV. It’s on the net.

I know I’m not alone in thinking the combination of RSS and Tivo (or a Windows Media Center equipped PC for that matter) would be a desirable thing to have. With the proliferation of cheap and easy-to-use digital video cameras, video production software, 3D animation tools, and Flash animation tools, I’d wager that the majority of content in the world is currently produced by independent artists. And they just keep getting better, partially because the artists are unencumbered by the traditional economics of distribution; the artists can rev fast, get good fast, and build audiences fast – all the things traditional broadcast video media can’t do. All that’s required now is a simply medium to enable Jill and Joe Couch Potato to access it easily.

I don’t know about you, but there are numerous online flash cartoons that I’d love to follow regularly (StrongBad and Red vs. Blue, to name two). They’re not only free, they’re high quality (nevermind what Craig Palmer might say). But it’s a pain to check back regularly for new releases, and I’d like to watch them on a TV, not a laptop. On the other side of the equation, the bandwidth demands of supplying video is likely a disincentive that is preventing artists from sharing a lot of content – adding BitTorrent capabilities into the mix would enable the audience for an artist’s work to contribute value by partially shouldering the bandwidth load.

All the elements are there. All it needs is a little software to kick start the revolution. The same explosion in personal websites that resulted when blogging software and syndication came on the scene could kick start another revolution in the visual arts.

Of course, once you’ve got this in place, it’s only a hop, skip and a jump from there to a future where people are using the same technology to scarf down the same content and sync it between their home media center and their portable video players. It’s inevitable that video will follow the same path as audio: from a broadcast medium to websites to syndication feeds to personal media devices. Is Video On Demand via Podcasting (vodcasting) an appropriate way to describe this phenomenon?

in Culture / Entertainment / Technology 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Why The Labels Will Fall

Saturday night, Ashley and I were wandering home along Castro Street in Mountain View, when I heard the strains of a bluegrass jam in full swing. We took a quick detour over to the Dana Street Roasting Cafe to see what was going on.

The place was, in a word, packed. Every chair filled, every patron’s eyes and ears glued to the band of the evening, Houston Jones, as Glenn “Houston” Pomianek ripped through a babbling bluegrass solo. We grabbed a coffee and stuck around for a half dozen songs and then toddled home to watch Saturday Night Live.

And that’s when Ashlee Simpson proved, once and for all, why the mainstream music labels are wholly unsuitable to be the stewards of culture.

Ashlee, as you may or may not know, is the younger sister of Jessica Simpson. She’s been following in the trend of other equally untalented starlets expanding their empires into the world of music. She (or at least the genetic pool that gave rise to her) can’t spell, I hear you saying, but surely she can play an instrument? Of course not, says I! Fair enough, you think, I guess she’s a vocalist.

Or so you would hope. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong.

In her first performance of the evening, Ashlee demonstrated that the task of lip-synching her performance stretched the limits of her meager abilities. And it only got worse, as the lip-synch track for the second song was for the wrong song, forcing her rush off-camera. Of course, the all-seeing eye of the Internet caught it all on video.

There are millions of independent bands out there like Houston Jones, stocked with real musicians, with real talent, and original material that they actually wrote. Previously, these bands were unable to reach an audience without the help of a label. But that’s changing. I expect that over the next ten years, the label grips will weaken, driven in part by dissatisfaction with the quality of product available, but also by the shear amount of much better (however the listener chooses to define “better”) material available from independent musicians.

The question now is one of discovery. Chris Anderson’s Long Tail article made a good point of demonstrating the value that lives outside the mainstream – all we need now is a way for people to easily find the stuff. Amazon.com recommendations can only do so much, as Amazon.com is ultimately limited by what it can carry. Bloggers will probably carry some of the weight, though I’d feel a little more confident in this turning the tide if there were some way to reward bloggers for directing traffic to artist’s sites, especially when such redirection resulted in a sale. With that kind of assistance, hopefully the money currently imprisoned in mainstream acts would get smeared across a much larger number of people. Nobody should be making millions for crap music; but any artist with talent and even a modest following should be able to make a living.

Of course, rewarding those who recommend products via their blog comes with its own set of issues.

in Business / Entertainment 1 comments