A few weeks ago, I attended a concert by Savages, a British post-punk revival band in the tradition of Joy Division and early Siouxsie & The Banshees. Along the entryway into the venue, and even in the Men’s room, the band had signs up making a request of the audience:
Nice typography. Awful photography.
Though not a requirement, the signs were effective enough that I did see a lot fewer phones and cameras out in the crowd at Terminal 5 than I had at most shows in the last few years. I kept my phone in my pocket for the entirety of Savages extremely intense set, though it took a lot of willpower at times.
A couple of weeks later, I was back at Terminal 5 for They Might Be Giants, who had less of an issue with photo takers and phone sharers. They even asked their Twitter followers to post pics of themselves in the crowd, pre-show, and re-tweeted them. (Though they didn’t retweet my picture…) At a previous TMBG show, John Linnell even snatched the camera from an audience member’s hand, recorded himself playing keyboard for a few seconds, and handed it back.
It was an interesting comparison. Looking back, I was more involved in the Savages performance, and not just because I got swept up to the barrier by the surging crowd during the song “Husbands”. Not taking and sharing pictures meant that I wasn’t looking down at my phone to see if it came out right, set the right vintage looking image filter, or see if the upload failed due to spotty reception inside the venue. Nothing taking myself away from the show meant I was as present as I could be. Something that I’ve missed out on in the past.
“Our goal is to discover better ways of living and experiencing music.”
People have been taking photos and video at concerts as long as it was possible to bring cameras into venues, whether the venue allowed it or not. It’s just easier to do now. There’s always been a desire to immortalize a temporary experience in something that can last forever: a photo, a video, a souvenir. Those have always been for ourselves, however. Now, when we immortalize something temporary, it’s for the world, or at least all of the people we know.
That changes things. The experience is no longer personal. It becomes instant nostalgia, and that’s not a crack on image filters. We become concerned about how our friends (and “friends”) feel about the cool thing we’re doing, and not the actual cool thing we’re doing. That concern is going to take up a part of our attention that can’t pay attention to the actual event unfolding in front of us. Mathematically alone, it diminishes out involvement in what we’re experiencing. We lose something this way.
I think at the next show I go to, I’ll take a couple of pictures early in the set, then shove my phone in my pocket until the house lights come back on. Those pictures won’t be shared on any social media service until I’m home, looked them over, and decided if any are worth even keeping, let alone sharing. I’d prefer to be more present for the concerts I attend from here on out—or any other experience I’m having. I don’t know if it’s a better way of living, but being fully there is certainly a better way of experiencing. And it goes way beyond just rock concerts.
“[Y]ou can’t devalue music. It’s impossible. Songs are not worth exactly 99 cents and albums are not worth precisely $9.99,” then went on to defend streaming services with the claim that “Music is priceless… The same song will always be worth different things to different people at different times. The online music revolution hasn’t changed that. It’s simply made the fact glaringly obvious.”
Tim is absolutely right about the pricelessness of music and art in terms of cultural value, and utterly wrong about the monetary value of music. People in the business of music as “content,” even former professional musicians, far too often forget that recorded, popular music doesn’t just spring up out of the ground to be harvested. Music costs money to make. Even an independent solo singer-songwriter with a beat-up acoustic guitar had to pay for the guitar, the strings, the clothes on their back, the hardware they used to record on, a car to tour in, fuel for the car, hosting fees for their website and audio files and more. They have to make that money somehow if they want to keep producing music, and the very real fact is that streaming services don’t provide the same amount of money as other distribution models. Tim knows this, but doesn’t see it as a problem.
“What’s new is that the casual fans no longer have to buy if they don’t want to. And while there is a lot of very real and quite justified angst that there’s not enough money coming in from everyone else to make up for that loss, those casual listeners are also exhibiting an unprecedented hunger for more and more music. That is not automatically a good thing, but it is a massive opportunity.”
In other words, you’re not making as much (or any) money on Spotify or Google Play, but you can make it up in volume. It’s the promise of future returns: more concert tickets, t-shirts, and possibly little plastic discs sold somewhere further down the line. It’s like when a startup company offers you equity in lieu of real money up front. The difference is that a startup is legally bound to pay you at least minimum wage if you’re actually an employee.
A musician is either independent, or signed to a label that fronted them expenses for producing and touring. If it’s the latter, they’re already starting out in the red, and every cent from your digital music streaming service of choice is going to the label until that advance is paid back. So, the artist probably isn’t seeing any of it. This is nothing new, but it is a problem exacerbated by the pitifully small royalty rates that streaming services pay compared even to terrestrial radio. And who listens to terrestrial radio these days?
Unable to escape the elephant in the room, Tim tries to spin streaming services as a discovery mechanism, likening his role to that of a Park Ranger. “[O]ur job isn’t to tell visitors what’s great and why. Our job is to get them from any given thing they like to a variety of other things they might.” Upon reading this, I immediately thought of what David Byrne said about Spotify and other streaming services:
“I also don’t understand the claim of discovery that Spotify makes; the actual moment of discovery in most cases happens at the moment when someone else tells you about an artist or you read about them – not when you’re on the streaming service listening to what you have read about… I’d be curious to know whether a significant number of people find new music in this way. I’d be even more curious if the folks who ”discover“ music on these services then go on to purchase it. Why would you click and go elsewhere and pay when the free version is sitting right in front of you? Am I crazy?”
I couldn’t find statistics on how many people buy music through streaming discovery mechanisms, either. David is right that in the music world, word of mouth is still the best way to discover what’s new to you. [1] It would go a long way to calming down people like David Byrne and Thom Yorke if Spotify, Google, or Apple could reveal how much music they’ve sold through their various “discovery” mechanisms, or even just how many people bother to use them. I am sure, however, that when given the choice between free and paid, most people will take the free option. Tim Quirk says that “…free in this context doesn’t have to mean copyright owners aren’t making money, it just means the listeners themselves aren’t paying.”
Wait. Who’s making money? Artists or “copyright owners”?
This is where things in Tim’s speech get sinister. Many record contracts, especially with major labels, force an artist to give up the copyright to their works to the label. A performer and a songwriter gets, in trade, a royalty, but the majority of the money goes to the label. If you still think the major record labels are struggling to make money in the face of online distribution, think again. Major labels and even large independent labels love streaming services. It costs them almost nothing, and they make a mint, sharing pocket change with the artists (if, again, they’ve paid back the advance).
The people who are winning from the online distribution revolution for music are independent artists like Jonathan Coulton, who maintain almost complete ownership of their work. Jonathan Coulton also had the good fortune to be making the right kind of music, at the right time, and found people willing to throw money at him. Some artists are better off joining labels, big or small. Whatever way they get their work out, financial success for an artist is predicated on being able to bring in enough money to both pay the bills, and the label, and support producing more music.
Which is why I worry that losing the “casual listener” to the “free tier” is making it that much harder for super talented artists who deserve better. This goes doubly so for emerging artists who need to get on a solid financial footing now, so they can devote more time to their craft. No flowery, pro-artist terms a former indie rock star turned technology executive chooses to couch streaming in, it’s looking like streaming will prove to be a shit sandwich for anyone who isn’t a record label.
This is one of the many reasons why I started Crush On Radio, so I could share the music I love with more people, and hear about music my friends love. ↩
A week ago, I turned the “Reduce Motion” setting on my iPhone and iPad, both running iOS 7.
I don’t get motion sickness. It just doesn’t happen. I’m the sort of person who, as a kid, could eat a giant corn dog and take on the nastiest wooden roller coaster at Cedar Point, and want to get right back in line. So I could stare down an icon as it zooms in at 20 miles per hour with no ill effects. Also, I think the parallax effect on the home screen is pretty neat. I even set my wallpaper to something with depth to emphasize the effect.
While I do miss the parallax effect a bit, I do find the gentle crossfade a much more aesthetically pleasing transition into an app than the zoom. On the iPad in particular, the zoom animation seems excessive for launching apps. I tend to close apps on my iPad with the five-finger pinch, which shrinks the display down into the center of the home screen, before it disappears entirely. This doesn’t go away with “Reduce Motion” turned on, and I’m glad. It’s much more visceral and responsive than the zoom out when you hit the home button.
The crossfade also feels faster when launching apps, though from some extremely cursory testing, it looks like both the crossfade and the zoom take the same amount of time. This corroborates with what I’ve heard elsewhere. Therefore, whatever makes me feel like my iPhone and iPad are launching apps faster is purely, 100% psychological. Fine with me.
Now that the furor over the icons has died down, the biggest pet peeve people have about iOS 7 are the new animations and transitions. It’s not surprising then, that just over a month after the initial release, Apple’s shipped an option that turns most of them off. Still, any software developer worth their salt will roll back a neat feature, or at least offer a way to disable it, if they find it’s actively harming some users. I’m sure Apple also has a way to see how many people are flipping the “Reduce Motion” switch, and will decide from that how to address the animations in a later release.
In the meantime, I think I’ll keep “Reduce Motion” on, and switch my iPhone wallpaper to something a little flatter. I just like it better that way.
I’m not really going crazy about the latest shiny gadget, or cool app that redefines how we “do email.” I don’t care about what product Google is launching that they’ll kill off in another year or two. I especially don’t care what rumored “new product category” Apple’s planning to enter in 2014. None of these affect me. None of these are going to be important in six months, or even six days. It’s just more noise.
What excites me are people that are making really awesome tools that help people do work better—not just more work, but better work. Too many tools are about either offloading the work we do to something else, or about letting us just do more in less time. Few tools are out there with the intention of helping us do our jobs better. Of course, “better” is a hard thing to quantify, and it’s harder to sell. Tell someone “our app will get your day’s work done in six hours instead of eight” and they’ll be interested. Tell someone “our app makes your work better” often comes off like selling snake oil.
Wow. So many things to customize!
And many of the products on the market, especially around creative work, are really just snake oil. Merlin hit the nail on the head with his spoof of “minimalist text editors”. One can be just as productive in Word as they can in vi, as long as they know how to use the tool. Stripping away features can help some of us spend less time tinkering and more time working. Adding secondary features that are mere window dressing designed to give the illusion of productivity, not so much.
Faster can be a part of better, but faster should not be the goal on its own. To put it another way: “Fast, good, cheap. Pick two.” “Cheap,” in this case, doesn’t just refer to monetary cost, but also to time. If it’s more important that something be done quickly, taking the time to incorporate a new tool into your workflow may not be the best option. Instead, stick with the thing you know—as long as the output is good enough.
The best tools are extensions of the self. They get out of the way and their tool-ness is subsumed by the use to which they’re being applied. Think of a hammer. A good hammer is one that feels like an extension of your arm, fits comfortably in your hand, and vanishes into your sense of self as you strike the nail. So, too, should any other good tool. It’s the same thing with a good piece of software. A good tool shapes us as much as we shape it. It’s hard to switch from something we’ve used for a long time because of that.
I think of the tools I use that have become extensions of myself: nvALT, LaunchBar, Launch Center Pro, Drafts, OmniFocus, 1Password, TextExpander and much more that I’m sure I’m forgetting. Still, not a day goes by when I don’t use at least one of those applications at least once. They help me work better—sometimes by shaving time off repetitive things I do, but also by giving me better ways to work. They reduce my cognitive load, giving me the ability to work better.
There’s people out there making tools to reduce the cognitive load of things we do every day, especially at work. They’re using the shiny gadgets and services that all the technology journalists flog to actually improve our lives. That’s the thing that really gets me excited. It should excite you too. An iPad Air is neat, and a high-speed omnipresent Internet connection is fun, but all that power is wasted on mere web browsing and book reading. The real transformative stuff is happening in the tools it can become for us. There’s lots of money in it for the people who can do it right.
Psychologists have found that when we work with computers, we often fall victim to two cognitive ailments—complacency and bias—that can undercut our performance and lead to mistakes. Automation complacency occurs when a computer lulls us into a false sense of security. Confident that the machine will work flawlessly and handle any problem that crops up, we allow our attention to drift. We become disengaged from our work, and our awareness of what’s going on around us fades. Automation bias occurs when we place too much faith in the accuracy of the information coming through our monitors. Our trust in the software becomes so strong that we ignore or discount other information sources, including our own eyes and ears. When a computer provides incorrect or insufficient data, we remain oblivious to the error.
Far too often, people think that using technology to improve our work means having technology do the work for us. Yet, what makes some of the best things out there so incredible is the human element. Algorithms can only go so far. The biggest risk, however, comes in the bit of Nicholas Carr’s piece I excerpted. Computers are still so new and tend to work so well that we are far too easily lulled into complacency that the machine will get it right. This means that when the machine doesn’t get it right, we end up in deep trouble, very quickly, as the example that starts off the piece will tell you.
