An Op-Ed piece by Charles Blow notes that analysts give the music industry 10 years:
A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.
The NYTimes has a nice graphic on the fadeout.
The New Yorker has an article about ticket sales, TicketMaster and LiveNation, ‘The Price of the Ticket.’ Within, John Seabrook interviews Princeton Economist states that, there’s “still an element of rock concerts that is more like a party than a commodities market,” and that it bears resemblance to the gift exchange.
Related, here‘s a piece on how the publishing industry, as it exists today, is doomed.
The ‘JK Wedding Dance’ bounced around the internet a few weeks ago… When I clicked on it, I didn’t recognize the people or the song, nor did I catch the interest in it. But I started snooping around about it when thinking about the Media, Technology and Society class. It turns out that a few people have thought about it. If I told you that it was a brilliant money generating video, you might think that it was viral marketing a la these Levi’s commercials. But it’s not. The song is Chris Brown’s ‘Forever,’ and it’s popularity has skyrocketed one year after the release, the iTunes downloads hit #4, and #3 on Amazon’s MP3 list (Amazon sells MP3s?).
This traffic is also very engaged — the click-through rate (CTR) on the “JK Wedding Entrance” video is 2x the average of other Click-to-Buy overlays on the site. And this newfound interest in downloading “Forever” goes beyond the viral video itself: “JK Wedding Entrance” also appears to have influenced the official“Forever” music video, which saw its Click-to-Buy CTR increase by 2.5x in the last week.
Part two of this story is that Chris Brown has been in the press more for his domestic abuse. (Click here for a sobering statistic that over half of Boston teenagers think that Rhianna was to blame for the incident). When I found the JK Wedding website, this issue was not lost on them. They write:
We hope to direct this positivity to a good cause. Due to the circumstances surrounding the song in our wedding video, we have chosen the Sheila Wellstone Institute. Sheila Wellstone was an advocate, organizer, and national champion in the effort to end domestic violence in our communities.
Even if the bride didn’t get into the dance too much, I do give them both credit for this. The Sheila Wellstone Institute is here.
On Iran, we have two uses of technology at work. The first is brought to us via the Iranian Government and Photoshop:
Iranian Photoshoppin'
This was dispersed via traditional media sources. (You might remember the Photoshopped missile launch too.) At the same time, we have a great deal of news coming out of Tehran via twitter, when Western Media has been otherwise exiled or confined to their hotels. Andrew Sullivan is hosting ‘LiveTweeting the Revolution‘ and has a nice discussion about Foucauldian ‘soft power.’ The Obama Administration asked Twitter to postpone their upgrades as to not interfere with the Twit-o-lution. (There was also an instance of Nigerians using texting to monitor their vote in 2007.) In a minor sidenote, Republicans are not only attempting to make waves by twittering, but Rep Pete Hoekstra twittered that what was going on in Iran was ‘similar’ to what they did last year in their shutdown of the House. (He’s being teased via twitter, in return.)
[ted id=”575″]
Clay Shirky points out that this is not technological capital, but social capital traveling from Nigeria to the Western World. This is a nice, clear example of how the producer-consumer relationship on news has changed drastically.
Updated (06/20/09):
Boing Boing has forwarded a request to help Iranian activists: By changing one’s Twitter location (in settings) to Tehran, GMT +3:30, to make it more difficult for Iranian authorities to hunt down Iranian activist bloggers and Twitterers. See the Iran Election Cyberwar Guide for Beginners. (I did it, but that’s the most that I’ve done with my account in weeks.)
Late Update (11/3/09):
The U.S.’s Joint Terrorism Task Force doesn’t really care for Twitter activists either. Read about an anarchist activist whose house was raided for using Twitter to disseminate information about police activity (gleaned from police scanners) to G-20 protesters in Pittsburgh here. (The charges were eventually dropped.)
Late Late Update (12/27/09):
Shirky vs. Evgeny Morozov here. (Also: A different kind of Twitter revolution, here.)
The long anticipated High Line has opened, and it is truly a wonderful public space. New Yorkers, I often contend, love to see their world in new and interesting ways, and the new High Line (designed by Diller Scofidio & Renfro) fits the bill. Even on a gloomy day, Erin and I bumped through the crowds, eager to catch a new vista. Including the nearby Christopher Street Pier (opened in 2003), two new public urban spaces are incredibly successful uses of ‘leftover’ spaces abandoned in the 1980s: a decaying set of piers and a stretch of elevated train trestle (see some old pics here, and a ‘virtual tour’ of the new park here), both testaments to eras gone by and monuments of glorious post-industrial leisure. A nice writeup in the Times, states that 30 projects will be spun off of the High Line, including an outpost of the Whitney Museum.
The High Line from above
At the other end of the scale, I read of Flint’s plan to return large segments of the city to nature, and that the Obama Administration has asked the treasurer of the country in which Filnt is located, Dan Kildee (“Decline in Flint is like gravity, a fact of life”), to concentrate on 50 US cities. The Times explains that the city’s population (about 110,000 people–a third of whom live in poverty–in 75 neighborhoods across 34 square miles) will be concentrated in particular areas, rather than having the city wait out to demolish abandoned buildings. This ‘planned shrinkage’ is just a
1. What are the different effects of city shrinkage on demographics, economics, social life, and urban form?
2. What urban and regional policies, programs and strategies have been successful in addressing the problem of shrinking cities?
3. What are the respective roles of public and private initiatives? How can they be coordinated? Who are the key players in the redevelopment process of shrinking cities?
Flint, MI, set in nature
4. What are the key factors linking globalization and city shrinkage? Can successful approaches be generalized, or are they locally/regionally specific?
5. Which assumptions, concepts, values and practices of planning and development need revision in view of the shrinking cities phenomena? Is there a need for a new vision and a shift in paradigm for urban and regional planning and growth?
6. What are the policy implications of shrinking cities for urban and regional development? What are the respective roles of local, regional and national policies and programs?
7. Globalization and sustainable communities, sustainable growth and possibilities of early warning systems?
This write up on Calvino reminded me of when my favorite professor, Frances Bronet (back when I was an architecture student) passed me a novella called The Baron in the Trees. I fell in love with Cosimo, who climbed an oak to escape having to finish his meal (as I recall, snails) and spends the rest of his life in a network of branches (first the oak, then an elm, a carob, a mulberry, a magnolia) that interlink above the entire city. It was the beginning of my interest in the connections made beyond the streets and sidewalks of cities, and it was probably the beginning of my journey out of architecture and into urban sociology. Invisible Cities (and some pushing from a friend), led me to thinking about stories of cities and, eventually, tour guides.
I read this essay about ‘biomapping’ with similar interest. Christian Nold (biomapping.net) measures emotional states (arousal, stress) of people as they walk through cities via a GPS device attached to a galvanic skin responce system. View his emotion map of Greenwich here, and San Francisco here. This could well connect with the essay I’m mulling over on Synecdoche, New York.
Chicago Tribune Map on 'Neighborhood Personalities'
I am, in a fashion, grateful that I didn’t get a chance to learn about geotagging until after I have completed my research on guides. I feel that, as a graduate student, this would have taken me in another direction.
Geocaching, and geotagging has been the purview of a kind of technological ‘upperclass.’ Some of these devices are fantastic, and pricey. New, friendlier technologies have made these activities available to a new, burgeoning ‘middle class.’ My iPhone is fully equipped for geotagging thanks to a very simple, free application (Geotag) and one for $2.99 (MotionX-GPS) that uses the iPhone’s GPS chip. These applications allow the user to find their latitude and longitude, flag a position (what is called a ‘waypoint’), and take a picture (your iPhone automatically geotags your photos by the way!). The first one is a little crashy, but it has the added benefits of being able to record two minutes of audio and link an email address or webpage to every waypoint. MotionX just as a photo. You can then create a path of a series of these points, a database of information to share or analyze, then export it to your computer over a wireless network, which pops onto your desktop as a kml file (for Geotag) or email it or share it with your Facebook friends (on MotionX). Double click on those files, and open them Google Earth. Google Earth can be crucial for the presentation of spatial data, and the way that Google Earth and Google Maps are synced further grow this ‘GIS middle class.’ It also allows for an opportunity to create a path in an urban space with your iPhone, export it, tweak it in Google Earth, and then use the Street View and 3D buildings (clicked on in ‘layers’) function, you can record a tour of one, or several spaces that you are going to talk about in a presentation. (The way that people can add 3D buildings through Google Sketchup is amazing as well. Look at this video about how this program is used by Autistic children.)
The Geotag application is clearly in its early stages (see the community section on their website), and I am pretty disappointed that there is a 2 minute time limit on the audio, however, I see that there are some powerful uses for conducting research in the field. (On top of that, urban geocaching is a great example of our urban alchemy.)
Now, when you pair this with gCensus, which is Stanford’s free program that allows you to export Census data into Google Earth, the iPhone can be a way to mashup quantitative data with qualitative, ethnographic, street level interviews and photos. Imagine doing a presentation of some ethnographic research on a community, where you geotag the who, what, when, and where of an interview and give your audience a full image of the social context of that material. (IRB issues of anonymity notwithstanding!) As soon as Google Earth’s iPhone app allows you to download kml files onto it… it will all come full circle.
For the last two courses, I’ve used images from Douglas Gayeton‘s book ‘Slow: Life in Tuscany‘ as a way to describe how to analyze an image. For some reason, I asked students to take a picture and analyze it, but I didn’t press them to do ape this method as an exercise. I should have. Next time. I also did not make the connection that he is the same artist I use later in the semester, when talking about the fictional (?), second life videoblog of ‘Molotov Alva‘ (which is airing on HBO). I find his work to be very, very effective. I think that this, plus a podcast exercise that students completed this week, will really make the next class better.
For anyone reading this who doesn’t know it–I teach a Media, Technology and Sociology course, which takes the idea of using M&T seriously as a set of sociological tools. For anyone who believes that such ‘alternative media’ for sociological purposes should take a look at what Mark C. Taylor (one of my all-time favorite books) wrote in a recent Op-Ed on ‘The End of the University as We Know it’ (and a critical response from the Chronicle: ‘No More Drivel from the New York Times‘), wherein his fourth recommendation for higher ed is:
Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.
A few studies that fall in the ‘research that confirms what everyone expects and doesn’t push us to think about it all a little differently’ bin: One on how blog traffic increases on the basis of reciprocation (no real surprise there to anyone who blogs, but also rendering Google’s new ‘Friend Connect‘ of note. Thanks Hepaestus. See how it works?), another on how high Facebook usage is correlated with low college grades, and another on how Facebook affects brain activity. The results of the latter? Here’s what they say: “As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilized, characterized by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize and a shaky sense of identity.” Hmmm.
In the ‘oh, that’s actually interesting’ file, the Wall Street Journal now claims that “there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers’ in the U.S.. That sounds crazy to me, but gathering their data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics they claim that there are 452,000 people who are paid to blog on their own sites, or someone else’s. (As compared to 555,770 lawyers and 394,710 computer programmers.) More from the WSJ:
Demographically, bloggers are extremely well educated: three out of every four are college graduates. Most are white males reporting above-average incomes. One out of three young people reports blogging, but bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall. It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year. Bloggers can get $75 to $200 for a good post, and some even serve as “spokesbloggers” — paid by advertisers to blog about products. As
The long anticipated 
