David Lowery’s “My Song Got Played On Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89” article has been picked up over and over and over, including by very respectable folks, often without comment.
This has left many readers with two impressions:
Pandora only paid $16.89 for 1 million plays.
Pandora pays much lower royalty rates than Sirius XM and especially terrestrial AM/FM radio.
Music royalties are complex, but both of these are patently untrue.
An interesting followup to the post that sparked my Devaluing Content essay. I don’t think it disproves my point, but it’s certainly fuel for the discussion we should be having about making a living as a content creator in the Internet age.
This would be a huge cultural shift. In the 20th century, U.S. firms aggressively promoted planned obsolescence, designing things to break. Buying new was our patriotic duty…
I’m unsure how well the Maker Movement has caught on outside of the geekier of circles. It’s a concept that intrigues me, coming from an adolescence as part of the Boy Scouts, [1] and envy of people who know how to do stuff with their hands. Like any good larval geek, I played with electronics kits, took apart alarm clocks that I couldn’t reassemble, and generally wondered how the heck all this crap we use works. I’m from a generation that could fix or upgrade computers when they grew aged. Of the various personal computers I owned, it was my first, a 486, that saw the longest time in action, lasting almost seven years before the RAM sockets broke. [2]
A fixer movement has the potential to change our relationship with technology. The level of agency we can get from learning how to add life to the gadgets we own and not throwing them away is beneficial to a greater understanding of technology’s role in our Thompson mentions in the article. Things start to fall down for me, just a bit, when I read his description of a “Fixer’s Collective” in Brooklyn: “A few feet away, a trio of people are elbow-deep in a vintage VCR, and there’s another team performing surgery on a lava lamp… As I watch for three hours, the fixers get everything up and running (except the lava lamp).”
While the article starts by depicting someone trying to fix a toaster oven, the articles Thompson chooses to mention make me think of the “Fixer’s Collective” as more kooky Brooklynite kitsch than passion for understanding gear. Precious few of us have need to fix a VCR in 2013, unless you’re really into grainy, low-res, pan-and-scan movies. It’s the sort of preciousness that also infects the Maker movement, with videos about hand-carved spoons on Boing Boing being the public depiction of something that is much bigger and more compelling. Thankfully, the “Fixer’s Collective” experience emboldened Thompson to tackle repairing a five-year old Dell laptop. It’s a story drives the potential of the fixer movement home.
If only everything were as serviceable. There’s a (valid) crack against Apple products, with their unwillingness to provide service manuals, and fetish for thinner and increasingly closed hardware summed up best in one quote. “Just to get an iPad open, Wiens [of iFixIt] had to make a rice-filled pillow that he could heat up and lay on top of the tablet to gently loosen the adhesive.” Considering that I’m writing this up on an iPad, that quote really hits home. Apple products have the benefit of longer usable lifespans than comparable hardware offerings, and a network of retail stores to provide fixes, but we shouldn’t need to rely on that. Considering that in 2005 I managed to replace the battery on my 3rd generation iPod (twice) with a guitar pick and some patience, it’s not a long shot to think we’re moving the wrong way.
The are two obstacles that a fixer movement needs to overcome. The is the fear ordinary people have of diving into the guts of their gadgets. The second is the sense that their time and effort are worth more than the cost of a replacement product. I expect that we’ll get most of the way to the latter by doing the former. Even the hardcore geeks I know swear by online guides like iFixIt for stuff as simple as RAM upgrades and iPhone screen replacements. I can also see this as an adjunct to Patrick Rhone’s no-grade. Squeezing all the lifespan we can out of our expensive gadgets, learning how to use them better, and learning how to fix problems ourselves—these all put control of our technology back into our hands, where it belongs. Start learning now.
Where I earned Merit Badges for leatherwork, wood carving, and basket weaving over subsequent summers. I set the bar high for myself. ↩
It trundled through when the computer repair shop installed shims to keep the RAM in contact with the sockets until we finally replaced the machine. ↩
What is Facebook to most people over the age of 25? It’s a never-ending class reunion mixed with an eternal late-night dorm room gossip session mixed with a nightly check-in on what coworkers are doing after leaving the office. In other words, it’s a place where you go to keep tabs on your friends and acquaintances.
Are we on these services to communicate, or are we on these services to show off? This post has me thinking a lot about how I use social networking. Hopefully, it’ll have you thinking too.
It must be a cultural difference. The Guardian, a British newspaper best known for lax editing, recently published an edited down essay by Rolf Dobelli with the completely not attention grabbing title of “News is bad for you”. In the United States of America, no news agency would dare publish such a thing for risk of losing their impressionistic target demographic, though maybe the straits of newspapers in the UK are dire enough to warrant the risk. Whatever the reason, it's surprising that a newspaper would publish something so antithetical to its mission. I'm almost proud.
Sadly, the essay is little more than a polemic with unsubstantiated claims about the effects of news reading on biology and cognition that lack even a token citation to a scientific or medical journal. The effect is that of a curmudgeonly old man, complaining about kids these days, especially this comment near the end: “I don't know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie… On the other hand, I know a bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs.” I so love when someone takes their own narrow worldview and expands it to the rest of the world. It makes deciding whether to dismiss their points a lot easier. This is a problem, because Dobelli is actually on to something, just going about it in a pigheadedly wrong way.
News is fundamentally broken, or at least commercial news is. The example Dobelli uses when he starts making points illustrates this, but only to a point. “A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car… But that is all irrelevant. What's relevant? The structural stability of the bridge.” Certainly, the structural stability of the bridge, or lack thereof, is the relevant part. The human element, however, is what brings the reader in. Without it, a news story reads like a bunch of dry facts that would only interest a Dr. Drang or John Siracusa type, and even they write with an ear towards how normal humans think. If the news story is exclusively about the car and the driver, and not the bridge, we have a real problem. Some newspapers and websites will cover the human interest angle exclusively over exposing the stability issues of our bridges. Those are the ones people should stop reading.
There's also a point to be made about the shallowness of a lot of news. Breaking news updates, sensational headlines, Twitter alerts, and the 24-hour news cycle add up to a lot of repetition of very little information. During the Boston Manhunt, not only was criticism leveled at news channels for fighting over being the first to report information—sometimes even inaccurate information—but also for the endless parade of talking heads that fill time by telling you how little they know in different ways. It's a Catch-22. They can't not have something on the air, but they don't have anything to talk about. The more new articles a news site puts up during a news event, the more slots they have to put ads, and more chances to bring up their page views. This is a situation that is antithetical to good news reporting.
This may come up in the book that Dobelli is promoting 1, but another way that news is broken is the echo chamber effect. This occurs in two ways, the simplest being that in a situation with limited information, the various news media will just echo what everyone else is reporting until new information comes along. The other is more insidious, and has only amplified in the last decade as a consumer can now pick and choose exactly what they want to hear, down to political slant. You can choose to get the liberal slant of NBC News, the conservative slant of FOX, or the whackadoodle slant of Alex Jones. 2 Worse, you can choose to have this be all you get. The problem here should be obvious.
The majority of my personal news consumption is limited to the five minute NPR Morning News podcast. I typically avoid most anything else, unless it affects me, or it's big enough to be unavoidable. I love to read long-form articles on issues in technology, and I'm a sucker for a good Apple rumor (but only the good ones). I put, I think, more thought than most into the choices of what news media I consume, erring towards impartiality, freshness, and relevance. A bridge collapse in Minnesota might not seem relevant, but if I'm driving to work over a bridge every day, it might get me to worry about whether I'll be the next human interest angle.
We shouldn't stop paying attention to the news. We should demand to get better news. The tradeoff may be that we get less news, less often—less all-you-can-eat buffet, and more upscale causal restaurant. However, the models by which news is made, distributed, and paid for make such a proposition almost impossible. Still, as profits dwindle among the big newspapers, and as TV news crumbles under the weight of needing to be fast, accurate, and profitable, maybe someone will stumble upon the formula for good news that's informative, relevant, and worth our time. But first, there's a special report on how what's in your child's lunchbox may cause cancer.
Of course, his essay is promoting a book. Any time you come across a deliberately antagonistic essay like this, it's typically to promote some product by the writer. (n.b.: I don't have a book. Yet.) ↩
I've already set up a filter in gMail to send anything containing Alex Jones to the trash without me seeing it. Don't bother. ↩
This simple statement is quite often overlooked by people trying to be a success on the internet and is quite often thought about in the reverse. But I have had much greater success in my endeavours since I considered things this way.
I’ve written before about our bias towards big numbers of eyeballs (or ears, in this case), but Myke Hurley expresses it far better than I could. A smaller, more engaged audience is more valuable. They’re more likely to give you money, and they’re worth more to advertisers because they’re more likely to give them money. Most importantly, an engaged audience gives you, the creator, the most valuable thing of all: the knowledge that you’re creating something that resonates with people. A number is just a number. An email, or an @-reply from an audience member is something real, tangible, and powerful.