That's very much like the advice that Marshall Kirkpatrick gave to Reznor writing on this blog in January after Reznor complained about the download-to-pay ratio the pay-if-you-want Saul Williams album that Reznor produced received late last year. "Times are changing and if you can, it's better to work on innovating along with them than it is to make dragging your feet and suing people your business model," advised Kirkpatrick.

At the time, Reznor wrote that he was "disheartened" that just 28,322 of the 154,449 people who downloaded Williams' album chose to pay the $5 for a higher quality copy. At the same time, though, that's nearly as many as who bought Williams' previous traditional CD release in 2004 (which sold 33,897 copies) and far more who are hearing his music -- which could theoretically translate to increased concert ticket and merchandise sales. Further, because by not dealing with a label the artist is likely taking a much larger cut of the download revenue than they would receive of CD sales revenue, Williams probably made more money on fewer transactions this time around.

Clearly, Reznor was not disheartened enough to forgo trying a similar type of release for his own new album. Ghosts I-IV part I is available as a free download on the NIN site, as well as on BitTorrent. The entire album is available as a $5 download, a $10 double CD, a $75 "deluxe" package with CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray copies, and a $300 "ultra-deluxe" edition that also includes vinyl copies and signed giclee art prints. The $5 download can also be had via Amazon -- where the album has quickly shot up to the #1 spot on the sales charts.

The 9-track free edition of the album is licensed under a Creative Commons license and is free for non-commercial use. "We encourage you to share the music of Ghosts I with your friends, post it on your website, play it on your podcast, use it for video projects, etc." said the band in release notes.

Conclusions

While it is impossible to predict how this release will fare compared with previous traditional NIN releases, that may not be a fair question. The dynamics of the music industry have changed and artists like Reznor and Radiohead are blazing new trails as they attempt to figure out how to best release music under these changing market conditions. If 18.3% of downloaders pay -- as they did for Williams -- then that's probably not a bad number for NIN, who can bet that they'll get far more downloads than Williams (Ghosts is already the most downloaded torrent at The Pirate Bay) and will presumably be pocketing most of the revenue.

What do you think? Is Reznor's release a harbinger of the future of the music industry? Let us know your thoughts on the issue in the comments.

Warner is hoping for a few things from the DVD. First, to generate additional DVD revenue without much more cash put into production (now "Watchmen" can have an additional "ultimate" edition in witch both releases are edited together). Second, to help launch the movie project into a potential new franchise. "As television advertising becomes less effective because of declining TV viewership, movie studios need to reach a mass audience somehow, and having what amounts to ads sitting on store shelves is seen as a crucial antidote," writes the New York Times.

But it doesn't seem like it will work. If DVD sales are down -- off 3.2% last year, according to Adams Media Research -- why would more DVDs be the answer? Will an additional, direct-to-DVD release of a secondary storyline really help sell more DVDs four months later? Doubtful. Remember, Warner Brothers isn't putting the additional storyline on the "Watchmen" DVD as a value-add for fans, but instead asking people to shell out more money for additional content. It's an advertisement on store shelves, yeah, but one that you have to pay for.

The Reznor Blue Print

Speaking to the New York Times about the potential for a "megamovie" that edits together both "Watchmen" and the direct-to-DVD release, director Zack Snyder says, "The überfans of this property are going to go crazy for that." He's right. The überfans -- what Kevin Kelly might call "true fans" -- will buy anything related to the thing they're fans of. That was the concept behind the March release of the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I-IV.

NIN frontman Trent Reznor realized that in order to make money, he needed only to appeal to his true fans, his überfans. He gave the first part of his four part album away for free on the Internet, and then offered higher quality downloads, and "deluxe" physical packages for a price ranging from $5 to $300.

The result was that his true fans ate it up. Reznor pulled in $750,000 in three days from sales of music to his core fan base, and may have picked up a few new true fans along the way via the free downloads.

The movie studios could learn from Reznor's blue print. Clearly $750,000 is not enough to recoup the costs of a $100 million movie, but the movie studios don't have to give anything away for free. What they should do is offer users a low cost, legal alternative to BitTorrent where movies can be had cheaply at high quality and DRM free. Then for the überfans -- fans of the director, writer, actors, or movie itself -- sell additional downloadable content, and offer high priced, physical "deluxe" editions with value added features, as well as all the normal movie merchandising and promotional tie-ins.

Alternatively, maybe simultaneously producing a direct-to-DVD release is a good idea. But make it a direct-to-web release, and use it as a promotional vehicle for the movie. Break it up into small chunks (under 10 minutes each), and put it out on BitTorrent and YouTube in episodic format for free leading up to the full DVD/download release of the main feature. That's akin to what Reznor did by releasing the first part of the Ghosts for free, and asking fans to pay for the rest of the album.

Conclusion

Speaking of a direct-to-web release, in addition to the direct-to-DVD side movie, Warner is planning a series of a dozen 22-26 minute animated "webisodes" that will attempt to create buzz for the film and introduce viewers to its complicated plot (more precisely, they will be semi-animated story boards narrated by an actor). That's a step in the right direction, unfortunately 26 minutes might be too long for the web format -- especially for what amounts to a narrated slide show. That demonstrates that maybe Warner just doesn't yet understand the new medium of Internet video.

According to Snyder, the webisodes will eventually be combined as part of a later DVD release -- which is the type of value-add that those überfans will pay for. But if the goal is to build buzz for a potential franchise, then studios should seriously think about the Reznor distribution blue print. It may not be as profitable in the short term, but could work at scale and help to turn some casual fans into true fans for future releases in the franchise.

That photo above, for example, is of Chris Messina holding up the In Rainbows "diskbox" he paid $80 for.

As Rex Dixon, the hardest working man in the web 2.0 business and a former touring musician, told me today - that's always been the way it is for most musicians. Playing gigs and selling shirts, that's where the money is if you're willing to pound the payment pavement (typo - lol).

What Were the Numbers?

Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails fame, was the producer for the new Saul Williams album. The two made the album available for download, asking that people pay $5 voluntarily for an otherwise free lower-quality copy or buy a higher quality copy for $5.

Here's how the numbers broke down, according to a post on Reznor's blog:

As of 1/2/08,
154,449 people chose to download Saul's new record.
28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning:
18.3% chose to pay.

Reznor says this shows that very few fans are willing to "do the right thing," which is ironic given that the artist in question, Saul Williams, sings all about "doing the right thing" in his music. His music is also rather annoying, in my opinion, and this might have skewed the validity of the science here. (I'm joking, mostly.)

It is possible, though, that contemporary standards of what constitutes fairness in music consumption have simply changed. While today the news broke that the last of the four major US record lables, Sony BMG, has announced it will offer DRM-free music - that may not be a shift as far as the market would like things to shift.

Given the huge numbers of music downloads that are free and illicit, the market seems to be voting for free music. That despite the risk of being sued, even.

How are concert ticket sales, merchandise sales and other forms of monetization going? That's what I'd like to know.

Times are changing and if you can, it's better to work on innovating along with them than it is to make dragging your feet and suing people your business model. Stop your crying, Trent Reznor.

How does the rest of the record industry feel about these issues? I found one person close to the business who preferred to remain unnamed but who had some interesting thoughts on the subject.

Value is ascribed to things that people covet- at one point people coveted what they downloaded. They still do to some extent (ie, dimeadozen and the bootleg market, which is a nice self regulating distribution system) but with rapid adoption of one behavior, the commodity behind it shifts and goes toward ubiquity, ie free. You just have to shift what people will covet. It's the same way with books, newspapers, TV, movies, memory, CPU, etc - every free market system follows this path. Intellectual capital complicates it but can also provide more impetus to be innovative.

These are interesting times!

The new album, which has ten tracks and clocks in at 43:45, is release under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial share alike license. The band encourages downloaders to "remix it, share it with your friends, post it on your blog, play it on your podcast, give it to strangers, etc."

This begs two questions: 1. Just how many new albums does NIN have? and 2. Should all artists give away their music for free?

True Fans Theory at Work

What Reznor has done with Nine Inch Nails over the past two months is confirmation of Kevin Kelly's "true fans" theory, on a much larger scale. The theory basically states that any artist can make a living if he or she can cultivate 1,000 "true fans" -- people who will support anything the artist does. The actual number of true fans necessary to make a living will vary depending on the artist and the economics of what he or she produces.

While it is hard to find examples of this in the long tail, we are beginning to see it play out with more and more major label artists. Because Trent Reznor's true fans came through for him for the Ghosts release in March, he was able to release The Slip for free in May. At this point Reznor doesn't have to make money selling albums en masse -- his true fans will still buy the CD and and vinyl copies even though the download is free, they'll still come to his concerts and buy t-shirts and posters.

As we've pointed out in the past, this is also essentially the same theory employed by music startup Sellaband (our coverage), which asks music acts to generate $50,000 from "believers" -- usually in the form of $10 donations from 5,000 true fans. Any band that reaches that goal gets studio time to record a full album and distribution via the site and other retail channels.

However, it is still not clear whether Reznor's success can be duplicated by long tail artists. Clearly, cultivating enough die hard fans to make a living, especially while giving away your core product for free, is not easy. For Reznor it took 20 years and he had the backing of major labels along the way (Reznor's Nothing Records is owned by Interscope, which is in turn owned by Universal Music Group).

"If success for independent artists requires the cultivation of 'true fans' then awareness is paramount," we said in a March post that argued for the positive effect that putting music out for free into viral distribution channels like social networks can have for artists. But for independent artists who don't have major label backing, free might be a Catch-22. Give away tracks to build awareness and cultivate true fans, but try not to cultivate fans who expect everything to be free forever.

As we discovered earlier this year, Kanye West has huge followings on both Twitter and Facebook. He was a regular Twitter user at that point, although he's only tweeted 4 times since the beginning of July (the last time on 21 July). Google Plus emerged onto the scene at the end of June, and Kanye posted his first message there on 27 July.

One of the most popular music entertainers around is Kanye West. The rapper (or probably more likely his PR team) has begun to use Google Plus to promote his new album, a collaboration with Jay-Z called Watch the Throne. Kanye has 885 followers on Google Plus at the time of writing, but is following none.

It's a mere dip of a toe in the waters for Kanye, when you consider the popularity of his Twitter account (3,973,470 followers) and Facebook Page (7,999,755 likes).

Meanwhile, Kanye's rapping partner Jay-Z has just 416 Google Plus followers. His first message on the service was 30 July. Jay-Z has 418,168 Twitter followers and a massive 9,781,922 Facebook Page likes.

Clearly, Jay-Z has bragging rights over Kanye West in terms of Facebook followers!

However, it's good to see that record labels have begun to experiment with Google Plus for their clients. One of the more interesting profiles is that of Lady Gaga. She has 5,289 followers at time of writing. The account is updated regularly, including by the lady herself.

Perennial social media early adopter, Trent Reznor of the band Nine Inch Nails, isn't using Google Plus much at this point. Reznor has 21,317 followers, but has posted only 4 times since joining on 6 July.

Google Plus may be going mainstream in terms of overall user numbers, but big name entertainers are still in the experimental stage. It'll be interesting to track whether this changes over time and if Google Plus will ever challenge Facebook and Twitter as a mainstream promotional tool for entertainers.

Some may roll their eyes and dismiss these complaints as thin-skinned... but it's hard to underestimate just how debilitating the deluge of abuse can be. While XKCD offered one ingenious solution to the problem, and others are suggesting an end to anonymity online, I'm inclined to agree with Sarah Perez, who suggests the only real answer, for now, is that celebrities who can't cope with the torrent of crap should staff up with a communications team to handle it for them.

More Noise to Signal.

"They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans."

This is interesting given the Nine Inch Nails release. As commenter Shannon Clark pointed out, very quickly the limited edition signed $300 "super deluxe" package of the new NIN album sold out. While clearly Trent Reznor is working with more than 1,000 true fans at this point (especially considering the "super deluxe" edition was limited 2,500 copies), the same concept is at play. Because his true fans came through for him, whatever else happens, Reznor will likely profit from the Ghosts experiment.

But how hard it is to find those true fans? Reznor had the benefit of a long career backed by major labels that help push his music out to a wide audience. There is an interesting debate raging in the comments of yesterday's NIN post about whether any artist has ever gone from obscurity to mainstream success without help from a major label. Of course, Kelly says mainstream success isn't necessary, with work you can connect on a more local, personal level with your true fans.

I've actually seen this happen up close with a friend of mine who plays music in a rather obscure genre. By doing things like playing free house shows, blogging on MySpace and Facebook, having email and IM conversations with fans, inviting fans to help in the process by doing things like copying CDs and designing case inserts, etc. he has made sure he stays connected to his true fans. The fan base he has cultivated, albeit small by record label standards, ensures that there are enough people who will buy every new CD he puts out and come to his shows and drop $30 on t-shirts and stickers that he can continue to pay his bills.

This is also essentially the same theory employed by music startup Sellaband (our coverage). The web site implores music acts to generate $50,000 from "believers" -- usually in the form of $10 donations from 5,000 true fans. Any band that reaches that goal gets studio time to record a full album and distribution via the site and other retail channels.

Kelly's blueprint for long tail success works because he is talking about goods that you sell directly to your fans. Alex Iskold wrote last year how that blueprint won't work in the blogosphere. Because most blogging is ad supported, and because advertising is based on volume, a small number of true fans won't cut it.

However, though Kelly's argument may not apply to those looking to make money directly from blogging, blogging is probably a good way to make connections with and create a base of true fans. So even though you can't make money directly in the long tail of blogging, as Iskold said, perhaps you can use blogging in the long tail to cultivate a base of fans to make money via other methods (i.e., by selling books or booking speaking engagements).

But "hanging out with people online" is supposed to be the promise and the potential of social media today, not something from days gone by...so what's going wrong here? Have the trolls ruined social media for good?

In our culture, celebrity-bashing has almost become a sport of sorts. Entire web sites have been set to profit from the game of picking on those far-more-fortunate than ourselves. From Perez Hilton's gossip blog to smaller sites focused on celeb's style (or lack thereof) to the paparazzi pic-filled giants like TMZ, our guilty pleasure of celeb-watching has turned into the much guiltier pleasure of celeb-hating.

That hate has extended out from the traditional gossipy sites to the very platforms and pages that the celebs themselves maintain. In Stephenie's Meyer's case, that was her MySpace page. At one time, Myer was credited as having made excellent use of social media, notes the Christian Science Monitor. She was responsive to fans and even credits some of her novels success to the friendly and positive community she built there.

But as her fame grew, so did the backlash. After several imitators posed as her online in an attempt to deceive fans, Meyer finally just called it quits. "It was a lot of fun while it lasted, and I really miss the early days when I could hang out with people online. Many of you are hilarious and insightful, and I wish it was easier for me to talk to everyone the way I used to," she writes on her personal web site.

In Meyer's case, it sounds like she made the mistake of thinking she could manage social media on her own, but at her level of fame, she could have really benefited from the help of a public relations team who specialized in social media. Let them handle the Facebook fan page and Twitter account, deal with the trolls, moderate the comments, etc. Unfortunately for her fans, she just quit.

But cases like those from Reznor and Meyer may just be the canary in the coal mine of social media. As tons of celebs flock to Twitter in an effort to regain control of their image and express themselves online, they may be in for a rude awakening when they have to deal with the vitriol and hate spewed towards them from those that resent their position...or from those who frankly just get their kicks from making others feel bad.

How Can We Fix This?

But what can be done to resolve this? Reznor thinks that Twitter needs more blocking mechanisms, but it's possible the problem goes deeper than that. Blocking the bad guys is just a band-aid on this situation. What we really need is a way to force the trolls out into the light.

This could be easily accomplished by simply putting an end to online anonymity - a trend that hasn't quite arrived yet. You see, if you're allowed to leave a comment with no name, no email, and no other unique identifier, then you have a free pass to be as hateful and rude as you like. It's a blank slates with no consequences. While there are some cases where anonymous comments make sense, when engaging in social media activities - be them blogs, social networks, Twitter, etc. - it's just not productive to allow the anonymous trolls to disrupt what's otherwise an often productive and insightful discussion.

As much as some may rail against the lock-in and closed nature of Facebook, the promise of Facebook Connect is that it could address this problem. Finally, people could identify themselves online and have to stand behind their words.

We've heard, too, that Twitter is flirting with the idea of verified accounts. Maybe they should consider extending that option beyond just the public figures and come up with a system that lets everyone verify their account by linking it to their other online profiles.

Online anonymity is just a leftover from the early days of the web - a time when there really just weren't other options. You just created a handle, set up an account, and began to write. Now that we have the tools to identify each other, shouldn't we begin to use them?

Think of all the problems it would solve - not only would it address troll behavior but it would also out the marketers and advertisers who were manipulating the user reviews and ratings on sites like Yelp and Amazon. It would let you know if that blog commenter who disagreed with an article or hated a product had a secret agenda (like maybe they worked for a competitor?). Maybe it would actually put an end to such behavior, allowing the forums of social media to finally be returned to those who just wanted to discuss, communicate, and connect.

What do you think? Leave your comments, anonymous (sigh) or otherwise below.

Update: Join a FriendFeed Discussion on the topic - here or here.

Why Pay for Free Music?

Trent Reznor himself questioned the viability of the 'free' music model earlier this year, but clearly, his own band has been able to make it work. While overall album sales were down last year (even when accounting for digital downloads), bands like the Nine Inch Nails have been able to leverage their fanbase and bypass the traditional music industry channels, while still making a profit.

On the Creative Commons blog, Fred Benenson asks why people chose to pay for the NIN album even though they could have had it for free. While, as he points out, ease of use is surely one reason, most fans probably simply want to support their favorite musicians by actually paying them directly for their music.

Not so many years ago, consumers had little choice when it came to buying new music. If you fell in love with a favorite song from an artist or band, you bought the CD. Singles had already been phased out for the most part, so the choice was either to buy the CD or nothing at all. For this reason, artists were able to make oodles of cash even when they were only a one or two-hit wonder. Yet somehow, the music industry is convinced that people actually bought CDs for all the nifty content contained in the included booklets. With the iTunes LP, they're reinventing that booklet for the digital age and packing it full of media like lyrics, liner notes, album art, photos, and even videos - that last one being something that you certainly couldn't cram into the CD case in days past. With this digitally enhanced LP, labels hope consumers will once again buy complete albums, not just individual songs.

Unfortunately, this "interactive" album of the future, meant to rev up album sales, is a sad, uninspired effort which tries to cram the old business model of the past down the throat of today's new digital platform. While the extras are nice to have, the iTunes LP doesn't offer anything more than what fan sites do, as we noted yesterday in our critical analysis of Apple's new offerings. And unlike fan sites, which evolve and change over time, the LP is a static offering that doesn't take advantage of the platform it lives on - an internet-connected digital music player.

Forget the Album, Buy an App

Meanwhile, as record labels scramble to save themselves with this new format (and possibly even one of their own dubbed "CMX"), some artists are starting to figure out the formula for success in this new era of single-track purchases and app-laden phones...and it's not an album. A handful of forward-thinkers have come up with a way to offer true interactive content to fans, which in turn, encourages fans to purchase more of the artist's music. The answer? The iPhone app.

Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, these music-themed apps are innovative new ways for fans to interact with content produced by their favorite artists. For example, Nine Inch Nails released a multimedia application earlier this year where fans can access a mobile version of the fan site nin.com, interact with other fans through location-based chat and photo sharing, stream tracks and exclusive playlists, download wallpapers, and much more. Although the app is free in the iTunes app store, the side effect of having more engaged fans means having more people interested in buying the band's music. NIN, headed by front man Trent Reznor, is no stranger to this sort of out-of-the-box thinking. He has experimented with a number of ways to make rockstar-worthy income in this digital age, including last year's introduction of a creative multi-level pricing scheme for albums where consumers could download tracks that ranged anywhere from completely free all the way up to a $300 premium package. Within three days, that experiment grossed $750,000 in sales. Not a bad way to sell an album.

But Reznor isn't the only artist with an app these days. American DJ and singer-songwriter Moby has also just released an official app created by social music service iLike which offers similar functionality. Besides providing access to exclusive content, fans can interact with each other through Facebook and iLike and they can post photos directly from the app to the Moby fan community. However, unlike NIN's offering, this app isn't free. It currently sells for $1.99. Whether or not this particular money-making gambit will work, though, is still to be determined. The app is only a couple of days old at this point so it's unknown whether fans will pay.

While apps like those described above essentially provide mobilized fan communities, hip hop artist Soulja Boy went a different route earlier this summer. Using a new app platform called Romplr, his $2.99 application, "Soulja Boy Tell 'Em," lets fans remix the artist's tracks and share them with friends via email, Facebook, or via www.romplr.com. In many ways, this app represents the best use of today's digital platform by allowing for true interactivity with the music. In fact, the press release about the launch even claimed "the next wave of fan and band interaction is going to be through the iPhone." Perhaps it will be the future of music sales, too.

The trend of artists with apps shows no signs of slowing down. Just today, popular R&B artist Usher launched his own app, too, "Usher's Top 100." This app, basically a streaming radio station of Usher's favorite tunes, will appeal to fans who want to know what music has inspired the five-time Grammy award winning star. It, like Soulja Boy's app, is not free either. The price is $2.99. Again, it's too soon to tell how well it will sell.

Only the Beginning

Although this is only a handful of examples of the new ways artists are using the mobile platform to interact with fans, all of these methods are arguably more inspired than the iTunes LP digital album. Instead of thinking that the old way of doing things can simply be tweaked for the new economy, these artists are developing compelling interactions which will either be direct sources of income as paid applications or will indirectly encourage sales through a more engaged fan base. While it's too soon to tell how much extra income these apps will add to the bottom line, if we had to bet on anything that could potentially "save" the music industry, we wouldn't put our money on the LP. It looks like the future is apps, not albums.

Greenwood's biggest complaint about MP3s was not quality or sound compression, but rather abundance. He suggests that MP3s make it far too easy for fans to hoard music without "giving it their full attention". In a recent Pitchfork article Eric Harvey suggests the opposite. Says Harvey, "The mp3 may have atomized music into millions of little pieces, but each piece, it seems, found a publicist. The average music fan now has the built-in capacity to double as promoter and distributor in an ever-expanding arena that's making and eliminating rules every minute."

Whether you see them as hoarders or promoters, one thing is certain, the iPod generation is changing how music is consumed. But if they can't depend on tiered pricing for audio quality, how can companies monetize the new music fan? While a Stanford study suggests that the iPod generation prefers the flat sound of an MP3, it doesn't mean today's listeners aren't willing to pay for their music. According to an NPD Group report purchasers of digital music downloads increased by 29% last year with iTunes controlling a quarter of all music sold. Some of the ways fans still generate revenue for bands include streaming music subscriptions, track and album purchases, concerts tickets, merchandise and paid application downloads.

Update, Ed: there can be a big difference in audio quality of MP3s promoted on the Web. For example the quality varied greatly between Radiohead's In Rainbows album and Saul Williams' album (promoted by Trent Reznor). See Kim Gaskins' post on the new Latitude Research blog Life Connected for further analysis.

Photos taken from Dead Air Space

Free Music

I elbowed in between elder bloggers Tim O'Reilly and Dan Farber in the interview to ask what Young thought of Trent Reznor's giving away free music and RadioHead's saying they aren't going to do so anymore. At first I thought he wasn't going to give me anything good, saying: "The recording business is going somewhere but I don't care about that, I try to remove myself from the business part. The artistic part of me tries to. The world will work it out."

He went on though to point out that his project Living With War always was and still is fully listenable for free on his website. It delivered a message he wanted to get out, he said. His thoughts about the content included in his giant life collection? Blu-ray may be riddled with DRM but Young doesn't think that will be an issue.

"Ten Blu-ray disks doesn't lend itself to P2P," he pointed out. "They [the fans] are going to do that anyway - people are going to copy all this music. We don't have to deal with that. All we're doing is supplying the mother-lode, trying to give them quality whether they want it or not. You can degrade it as far as you want, we just don't want our name on it."

More than just indifference, Young was downright enthusiastic. "It's up to the masses to distribute it however they want," he said. "The laws don't matter at that point. People sharing music in their bedrooms is the new radio." Go Neil!

MP3s Sound Like Shit

Wonder how Young feels about the ongoing debate over the impact of the MP3 format on sound quality? He's pretty clear on it.

[When it first came out] "digital music sounded like shit," he said in the interview. "It was no fun to listen to turned up. Instead of water poured on you it was like being attacked with ice picks. [His recordings on Blu-ray] are like snowflakes."

"I don't listen to music, it's in my head. Putting on headphones is like hell for me. I can hear an mp3 from a half mile away because the air has a chance to make it sound natural."

Young said that MP3 was convenient - but that it's like a vision of paradise that's only inches deep and slams you in the face when you try to walk into it. "I'm a music guy, a sound guy - I went through hell in the 80's," he said. "Now we're coming close, climbing up the quality wall. I make all my music analog, when a new format comes along I will dump all my music to it." Would he advise other musicians to do the same? He said that wasn't realistic. "I'm too rich and elitist, most people can't afford the machines [for analog recording] and the people to take care of them." Young says he's been hoarding tape for a long time, sometimes recording over content that didn't work out.

Finding Freaky Scientists on the Internet

Young spent much of the interview talking about his work building an electric car that users don't have to plug-in to a wall. The end of roadside refueling is his ultimate goal. He and Tim O'Reilly discussed the plans in some length and it was fun to listen to. Nothing else Young talked about is nearly as important. It's also not very relevant to RWW, except for his thoughts on how the web has assisted his work on the car.

"The internet is a fantastic place to find science experiments," he said. "That's my favorite thing about the internet. People who are kooks in their garages - the tools are here for us to look to the edge of the scientific world. You can seek them out and tell them if you think their ideas will work. You can tell them you'd like to connect them with other scientists in other parts of the world and if the work succeeds or fails you'll put them in a movie about the project."

That's not a perspective I've heard about the web before, and I like it.

Neil Young was a personable, intelligent and well spoken interview subject. I'll remember getting the chance to interview him fondly for the rest of my life.

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Disclosure: Sun is a client of my personal consultancy and paid my travel expenses to JavaOne.

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Web Products

Hemlock: An Open-Source Real-Time Web Platform

Hemlock, a new open-source framework for building real time web apps in Flash with an XMPP back-end has been released by MintDigital, a development shop in London and New York. Real time apps that use efficient methods of communicating information between the browser and the server are all the rage these days. Now Flash developers will have an easy way to get in the game. Hemlock joins services like Notify.me (our review), Urban Airship (our review) and others in offering developers a way to get hip to the real-time just like the big guys at Facebook, Twitter, etc. Some of these implementations are open source, like Hemlock, and some are not. It's clear though that the developer world is ready for some real time technology to build on.

Morgan Stanley's Matrix: An App From the Future

Financial services company Morgan Stanley released an incredibly ambitious new application this week called Matix and many of its features will make hard-core web users hopeful that apps like this will emerge in other sectors as well. Matrix is a Rich Internet Application, or software that sits on the desktop but leverages web connectivity, and it's pretty as can be. Adobe worked closely with the company to create what it believes is an app that pushes the envelope with regard to what can be done with Adobe technology. We believe there are a number of trends in play here that go beyond Adobe as well and are likely to be key features for many apps in the future.

Apple's WWDC 2009: MacBook Updates, Snow Leopard, iPhone 3GS

At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, Apple announced aew iPhone: iPhone 3GS. The S stands for Speed: it's apparently 2.1x faster to send messages and large websites load 2.9x faster. The pricees are: $199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB in black and white (prices are for new customers). The old iPhone 3G will retail for $99. The release date is June 19 in US, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, Switzerland, UK. It will be released in 6 more countries a week later.

Trillian Astra Enters Public Beta: Does Anyone Still Care?

Nearly three years ago, internet users were buzzing about the upcoming new version of the multi-network instant messaging program from Trillian, a software application that would be called "Astra." But as time went on, Trillian just couldn't deliver. Eventually, we all moved on...to Digsby, to Meebo, and to plain ol' Google Talk, which we could easily access from our email inboxes. Then, out of the blue, Trillian Astra emerged into private beta last month, although how "private" a beta is debatable - it seemed anyone asking got an invite. Now, the Trillian blog is announcing that Astra has gone public - no invite code needed. Yet as the long-anticipated Astra finally emerges, we have to wonder is it "too little, too late" for this company?

AccuTerra iPhone Maps win Apple Design Award

Anyone who has read the tragic true story Into the Wild will understand why Intermap's AccuTerra for iPhone is an amazing and possibly lifesaving service. While many map-based applications utilize Google maps and require a wireless connection, AccuTerra and competitor GPS Motion X let recreational adventurers view maps of U.S. national and state parks, both online and offline from their iPhones. It's not surprising AccuTerra was just awarded an Apple Design Award for best iPhone OS 3.0 Beta App.

Google Launches A Guide to Enterprise Apps Deployment

If you're about to deploy Google Apps for your business, an official site dedicated to Google Apps Deployment for Enterprise was unveiled this week. Broken down into deployment planning and user adoption, the new resource is basically a treasure-trove of information on rolling out Google Apps in your business. It's targeted specifically at larger organizations; for deployments of less-than 100 users, Google recommends their usual "Getting Started" guide. In the wake of yesterday's announcement of syncing with Microsoft Outlook, this is just one more reason why Google is getting serious about pushing Apps into larger enterprise deployments.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

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ReadWriteStart

Our new channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

IBM's Venture Capital Group (RWS Interview)

We recently spoke with Claudia Fan Munce of IBM's Venture Capital Group. IBM doesn't invest equity in startups; rather, this small group within IBM works with 120 of the world's leading VCs to give their startups access to IBM technology and, more importantly, IBM's customers in 170 countries. Since forming in 2001, the IBM Venture Capital Group has nurtured close to 1400 of these relationships. So, it is (1) oriented around later-stage ventures, and (2) focused more on B2B and enterprise ventures than consumer ones.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Trends

Are Trolls Ruining Social Media?

You may have heard the news this week about Trent Reznor quitting Twitter due to the behavior of internet trolls who made the experience both uncomfortable and upsetting. OK, he didn't quite use those exact words - his rant was much more profane - but you get the drift. However, Reznor is not alone in wanting out of the social media scene. Popular author Stephenie Meyer also recently ditched her MySpace page for good, lamenting how she missed the early days when she could hang out with people online. But "hanging out with people online" is supposed to be the promise and the potential of social media today, not something from days gone by...so what's going wrong here? Have the trolls ruined social media for good?

The Sociology of Twitter, Video Interview with Liz Pullen

Sociologist and ethnographer, Liz Pullen, spent a month tracking the top 500 Twitter users (as ranked by number of followers) as well as the much-contested suggested users list. In tracking these accounts, she also closely analyzed the behaviors of new adopters and their expectations of the service. Perhaps her conclusions will help us all understand - and hopefully improve - the dismal attrition rates for the service.

Facebook Gets Vanity URLs

We've heard rumors about this for at least the last couple of weeks, but this week Facebook finally announced that it will allow users to pick and choose their own vanity URLs. Instead of http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=432123451, you will now be able to pick something like http://www.facebook.com/ihazvanityurl as your URL. Facebook opened this new feature up at 12:01am EDT on Saturday (9:01pm PDT on Friday). At that time, Facebook users saw a notice on their homepages with instructions for how to obtain their new URLs.

Social Networks Around the World

Italian PR professional and former Microsoft Italy marketer Vincenzo Cosenza sent us an interesting visualization this week. It's a map of the world, showing the most popular social networks by country. The map was built using Alexa and Google Trends for Website traffic data in June 2009 and we think it shows some interesting trends. After all, our world is becoming smaller and it's good to know what services our friends on the other side of the globe are using to connect with each other.

The Digital Magazine: Has its Time Come?

We all love to flip through a glossy, interesting magazine on the plane, in the dentist's waiting room, or stretched out on the sofa in the evening. However magazines have not been isolated from the troubles that print media are having due to the online world. Many magazines are struggling to survive and some of them are moving completely online in order to stick around. In November we reported that leading tech magazine PC Magazine would go 100% online from February 2009, after 27 years of existing in print form. Let's look at how PC Magazine is doing, along with another digital magazine that we like called Avantoure.

Common Tag Brings Standards to Metadata

Let's suppose you uploaded some pictures of a trip to New York City to an online account. Do you tag them "New York City," "NYC," "newyork," or all of the above? How do you know your content will be correctly identified and related to other content on the web? And if you come across the tag "Tesla," how do you know whether it refers to the scientist, the car company, or the band? Common Tag is a new tagging format that creates references to concretely defined concepts with their own metadata and URLs. With Common Tag, site owners can simply topic hubs, cross-promote content, and enrich pages with data, images, and widgets.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Highlights this week: Richard MacManus ended 2007 with a review of the top 10 Web Tech stories of the year. Marshall Kirkpatrick produced an awesome toolkit to keep track of Web Tech trends in 2008; he also showed how to fall in love with tagging again and asked some big questions on privacy in the Web age. Josh Catone offered a guide to Online Giving to start the new year and he explored how the Web is affecting the US presidential primaries.

It was naturally a quiet news week, being the first week of 2008. But the Web had a significant part to play in the US Presidential primaries, which kicked off this week in Iowa. Josh Catone wrote pre-Iowa that if the web were an indicator of political results, then Ron Paul and Barack Obama would likely be squaring off in the US presidential elections next November. But with the first state contest out of the way, it looks like the web was only half right (any maybe didn't have much to do with it at all). Obama, who was in a statistical tie with Hillary Clinton and John Edwards according to pre-caucus polls, convincingly defeated his rivals. Paul, however, finished fifth - exactly where he was polling - and still no where near the winner, Mike Huckabee, who collected 34% of the vote to Paul's 10%.

Trends

What's Next on the Web: a ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008

This is a MUST READ post by Marshall Kirkpatrick, in which he outlines 5 big topical trends in Web Technology in 2008. He also provides the following resources:

* An OPML file of top blogs on each subject. This is a bundle of feeds you can import into your reader.
* A filtered RSS feed of just the most popular items regarding each topic (using AideRSS). Remember, whenever you subscribe to new RSS feeds - some of the magic won't be visible until you mark all the initial items as read and new ones come in again.
* A Custom Search Engine that you can bookmark and use to search inside the top news and reference sites regarding each topic.

5 Ways You Can Fall in Love With Tagging Again

Tagging content online is something that doesn't seem to have taken off the way some people expected it to.

Is it too complicated for widespread adoption? Is it too arbitrary to have the impact that formal taxonomies offer? Is it just too much work while you're zipping around the web? Who knows - what's important is that tagging web pages can still be very useful!

Marshall stopped using social bookmarking tools for a big part of 2007 because saving things for his own future reference wasn't enough motivation to invest the time required. In the latter half of the year, though, he's seen what some other people are doing to make it worthwhile again. Here's five and a half ways you can fall in love with tagging URLs again.

Related: The Glory, Bliss and How-to of Screen Scraping for RSS

Is it Time to Declare Music Downloads a Loss Leader?

Radiohead's widely heralded experiment with free downloads plus a premium package and request for donations (effectively) remains shrouded in mystery, but Trent Reznor and Saul Williams released some numbers this week about a similar experiment. Those numbers indicate that very few people want to pay for recorded music these days.

Related: Threatened by the Internet? Music Biz Should Rock Like Librarians

Web Products

Songbird To Build Out Music Power-Browser

Songbird is a desktop music player Marshall been using lately instead of iTunes and he's really been enjoying it. Based at core on Mozilla technology, this week the company kicked off a 6 week campaign to build the 40 most-requested Firefox extensions for Songbird. This big burst of functionality could put Songbird over the edge as a music-lover's dream-come-true, though it's pretty close already.

Author Uses Amazon Kindle to Beta Test New Book

In his former occupation as a programmer at Microsoft, Daniel Oran developed the "start" button for the Windows 95 taskbar. As an author about to publish his second novel, Oran continues to innovate, this time by using the recently released Amazon Kindle e-book reader to let early readers help him refine a draft of his latest book. Oran's use of the Kindle is one of the more interesting we've seen, and really demonstrates the device's read/write potential.

Related: Yahoo! PDF Ads In the Wild on Kevin Kelly's Latest Book

RWW Network Blogs

last100

On our Digital Lifestyle blog last100, the big news this week was Sony BMG’s decision to, in part, ditch DRM and start selling tracks on Amazon MP3 without copy-protection. That makes four out of four, with Sony BMG joining the other major labels: EMI, Universal Music and Warner (as predicted in last100's Digital Music 2007 year in review). In a follow up post, Daniel Langendorf asked where this leaves Apple’s iTunes Store?

On the Internet TV front, Netflix made a splash with its announcement of a partnership with LG to deliver movies over the Internet directly to a TV.

In their main feature-post this week titled ‘Mobile: the Year of Wireless hasn’t arrived — yet‘, last100's Dan Langendorf took a hard look at the changing face of the mobile industry (particularly in the U.S.), calling 2007 part of the transition years — with much bigger changes yet to come this year and realized in 2009.

AltSearchEngines

This week on AltSearchEngines, there were two interesting sets of posts: the first was a pair of very telling posts about vertical search engines. The message: verticals are no longer "gaining strength," they have now arrived.

Also this week ASE investigated ChaCha - with a review of ChaCha's mobile launch, followed by Natalya Murakhver's interview with ChaCha CEO Scott Jones.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

At the moment, it's hard to have been anti-SOPA and yet appear proactive against piracy.

Making some of the first public statements in favor of restarting a pro-active dialog are individuals speaking out on behalf of artists and musicians, including one group whose members were already instrumental in the anti-SOPA protests last Wednesday.

The American Association of Independent Music (A2IM) is continuing to advance this statement, released last week, concerning websites that led Wednesday's protest:

"They are taking a unilateral action to make their content unavailable. However, under current law, A2IM members whose copyrights are infringed upon cannot take similar action. Our independent labels and their artists have no practical way of taking down illegal links to their music from rogue foreign websites accessed via U.S. search engines.

"The media has portrayed the issue as that of two giant industries (movies/music and technology) in conflict, as though this was a battle solely between very rich businesses. In fact, our members are small- and medium-sized independent businesses that invest in the creation of music and whose very existence is being threatened by the availability of illegal content on line. We look forward to solution-oriented discussions among all parties."

The public stance of the Association did not stop individual A2IM members such as indie group Wye Oak from signing a letter of opposition to SOPA/PIPA last week.

A2IM's statement echoed the sentiments of Brian Philips, CEO of Viacom-owned cable music channel CMT. Over the weekend, Philips' pro-SOPA/PIPA sentiments appeared in The Tennessean - too late, of course, to keep PIPA from being indefinitely tabled.

"Opponents of this legislation... are raising phantom issues, through vague threats of censorship and other unspecified dangers. Unfortunately, their arguments are based more in fear than in truth. No domestic websites would be shut down by this legislation. Plain and simple: The target is overseas piracy websites. Creative endeavors are not alone as targets of piracy."

A Fate Worse Than SOPA

An examination of the Justice Dept.'s indictment of the proprietors of cyberlocker site Megaupload led the CTO of Sydney, Australia-based Web advertising firm Pinion to wonder whether squashing the SOPA bill could spark the creation of a worse alternative that could do even more damage than had been feared. David Banham was inspired by having used Megaupload to distribute files to clients, only to find the site taken down last week.

"It is easy to generalize, in the vein of SOPA, that all these smart people working in tech should just make sure that no-one uploads copyrighted material to their services. It's easy right? If someone uploads a Hollywood movie just delete it! In reality, though, every time any file was uploaded, an extensive search would need to be conducted to determine whether, where, how, and by whom it was copyrighted. The rights holder would then need to be contacted to determine whether or not the use was permitted. In the case of transformative or derivative works, the decision would have to be made (and the associated risk assumed!) by the service.

"That burden can never be placed on those shoulders. It would be crippling for Google. It would be completely impossible for any startup out there and would stifle a massive amount of innovation.

"SOPA merely (merely!) required that every link be checked against a blacklist provided by the US Government. If the allegations in this indictment are allowed to stand, industry will not only have to enforce that blacklist, but create and curate it."

"Knowledge Shall Be Increased"

Last Friday, the CEO of cable arts channel Ovation, Charles Segars, issued an outright pro-SOPA statement that echoed the expressed sentiment of Vice President Biden back before the entire SOPA debate began.

"They're calling the SOPA bill 'censorship' and an infringement of our First Amendment rights. And the entertainment industry is painted as 'greedy' for supporting this legislation. But I wonder... What would happen if all the movie theaters, cable and broadcast channels, book stores and radio stations did the same thing - went completely dark, off the air, closed their doors? Would you miss Wikipedia more than, say, being able to watch 'American Idol' or go to AMC theaters and see the latest movie in 3D? Would it take a total shutdown to make the point that entertainment content is something of value and therefore needs protecting?"

Despite Segars' and Ovation's public stance, some of the artists participating in Ovation's own forum ended up supporting the protests instead. "One thing I don't want to see happen is the old farts in Congress deciding what sites and material are appropriate!" wrote Mark Sean Orr, in response to another member's request for clarity as to where they should stand as artists. "The Internet is not a corporation or government agency and should never be. What it is, is a network of citizens world-wide sharing and connecting through this awesome new technology."

That led another member, named Cheryl, to share her view that precisely because the Web is beyond the control of any one government, some government somewhere will see that as a challenge and try to control it anyway. "The Internet and the World Wide Web are not owned by anyone. How do you control something that is a cloud?" she wrote. "How do you tax and fee something if the players involved refuse to participate or if your own dependence can be hacked?"

Perhaps inspired, perhaps depressed, and perhaps both by the prospect of blacklists and whitelists appearing on the Internet in one form or another eventually, another Ovation member closed the thread by citing the Book of Daniel, Chapter 12: "And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book... But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased."