jeremyvaught

An article in the telegraph says that EMI, or at least someone that can begin change, has begun the change.

In case you are not aware, Radiohead has released an album, only available from their website, and letting the fans choose the price of the album. Revolutionary? You bet. So much so, their former music distribution company, EMI, is sitting up, taking notice, and looking to make changes.

This is good news for EMI, but is it too little, too late? Stay tuned…

I had never heard this song until a couple of weeks ago I saw it on an iPod Nano commercial. I am clearly not alone in enjoying this song. I have seen many similar posts to this one, so I’ll just put the video down, and let you listen. (again)

And on a side note, Universal Music Group initially put this on youtube. This is great. What is not great? I went to get the code to imbed the video in my blog, and it says, “Embedding disabled by request”. Eh? Why would they do that? Is it no surprise that the video I embedded has been viewed nearly 3 millions times, and the non-embeddable one has only been viewed 290,000 times?

In fact, initially I specifically scrolled down the page to get the official one from Universal to embed to give them credit for having at least half a brain and putting their stuff up on youtube. Now a music company with a half a brain is a HUGE compliment, and when they get another slice of brain, they will let me embed the video so me and all the myspace kids can put it on our webpages, rather then just put a link to it on youtube. (oh, and possibly just upload our own version so we can embed it. Imagine that, you put up barriers, and those of us on the tubes just go around them. Right or wrong, it just is, and it is a lesson to be learned.)

btw, check out other stuff by Feist. I’m enjoying a whole range of it, and may just go try out the Amazon DRM free downloading and buy me the album. [yes, I know that is bad english]

After having committed huge amounts of time to Second Life before this summer, I have pretty much taken the summer off. I jumped in for a while today, and re-enjoyed it. Did some searching around, visited new places, visited old places… Had a short chat with Eric Rice which I haven’t done in a while. He invited me to a party he is hosting in San Jose coming up during the Virtual Worlds Conference. He really bummed me out because I had been trying not to think of the conference and surrounding activities because, well, it bums me out. I REALLY enjoyed the first conference in New York City early this year, and met a lot of great people. My good friend Jean-Ann Mills will be speaking at this conference, and I’m insanely jealous. :-)

I’m reminded of when I wanted to meet Corey Bridges of multiverse.net in NYC at the VW Conference. The conference was over, and everyone was saying their last good byes, so I figured, “Well, now or never.” Corey was finishing a conversation, I walked up to him and said something like, “Hi, I’m Jeremy Vaught with the Electric Sheep Company.” (which I was at the time, for a few more days anyway) And he said, “Hi, I’m Corey Bridges.” To which I replied, “I know. I know who you are, and now you know who I am.” And Jerry Paffendorf (also of the Sheep at the time) who was nearby said, “That’s the way we role at the Sheep.” It was a pretty funny/awkward moment. But I smile a big toothy grin each time I think about it. If you know me personally, you know this is not the way ‘I’ usually role.

That’s all I have, if you read this entire post, thank you. Come back again :D

As I’m pondering the question of whether themed virtual worlds will be attractive or not, my mind is going in all directions, so I’m writing this out to get some clarity. The different issues as I see it:
1. Second Life, the VW with the most hype, is not themed, but has themed aspects (furries, trekkies, etc… there are many)
2. Should I differentiate VWs and MMOs? MMOs have thus far been largely set, not flexible in terms of user control. You are there to play the game, not alter your surroundings. (please take with a grain of salt, I have not played many MMOs or spent much time doing so since the MUD, something I need to change)
3. Perhaps the answer to my question is, “of course they will be attractive to small groups (relative to the population as a whole), there is no need for another ‘catch-all’ VW like Second Life.”
4. Seems like there were more… I’ll add them as I think of them…

I’m not here to answer this now, just ask the questions.

I was just reading through my regular routine of news sites on the internet. I read what I wanted to, and decided to see what The Onion had these days. However, after being shocked after I read a few headlines, I realized I was still in ‘news’ mode, and forgot this was ‘fake news’. :-) Word to the less-then-wise, remember when you are reading real news, and when you are reading ‘The Onion’. Before you know it, I’m going to start taking Stephen Colbert seriously.

Certainly a sad day. The way I understand it, is this is the first person of 26,000 sued by the RIAA. Rather than pay the few thousand dollar settlement/extortion, she decided to fight it and take it to jury. She lost.

What is the most sad here is how sharing a few songs can cost record companies $220,000. She is guilty for sharing 24 songs, and at $.99 for a song, this is quite the markup. Each song would have to be downloaded over 9,000 times for record companies to be out that much money. Now I’m sure there is law mumbo jumbo I don’t understand here, but I’m not a lawyer, I’m just a level headed guy looking for the justification here. And this is simply wrong.

Sharing files is wrong, I agree. Nobody should share copyrighted material. Artists should get paid for their work if that is how they choose to distribute it. However, from what I can recall, every industry that is on it’s way down tries to sue themselves back into relevance. This is a last gasp at the air they have left. And this is exactly what is happening to the big music companies. At one time I felt bad for this, until I realized this is just the way of things, and if those big music companies refuse to change with the times, they will be replaced. Right now, it seems the replacing industry will be independent bands and record companies, smaller ones, that understand what is happening, and are willing to change.