Steal This Column!
[ No. 38 - December 1999 ]
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What's New
Real's Lucky 7
The latest version of RealNetwork's RealPlayer (Version 7)
is available from
<www.real.com>. The free
"Basic" version expires in 120 days. The "Plus" version is
$29.95. Both are available from the website and come with
a handy "Un-Installer" in case you've had enough. The audio
still sounds like RealAudio, which, like other streaming
audio technologies is: not very real. 7 does have some new
features though, including helpful stability patches for
live SureStream content (allowing for multiple bitrates in
a single stream in case your connection gets clogged) and
"multi-instance" capability, allowing multiple player
windows open at the same time (similar to how a web browser
can have simultaneous windows). Manual resizing of open
windows is a great addition and each window can be discreetly
targeted. This is useful for you content creators who want
a cool SMIL or Flash interface to link to a different player
for displaying video or audio while the user maintains the
original Flash window for navigation. The FezGuys recommend:
unless you have a need for the "Important Message," "Search,"
and "Content Panel" features, go immediately to the "View"
menubar and deselect. This will keep the player from taking
up an unnecessary amount of screen space. It's nice to see
RealNetworks finally making all of those areas easily
toggled. And, at long last, a Mac version is included from
the get-go.
RealNetworks also introduces "Take 5", a persistent button
on the player to link to "best-of-web" content. Clicking
the icon gets a main menu of items each from five varying
topics, changed daily. A one-minute mix of audio highlights
plays while you decide what (or whether) to choose. Clicking
an item launches a new player and each topic has another
deeper level available. Content is chosen by RealNetworks
staff, which, as far as we know, doesn't accept payola.
Once again Real flirts with content but this time the goal
seems to be highlighting the offbeat yet interesting.
Beatnik and Mixman, MixNick and BeatMan, ManMixNickBeat...!
Beatnik, the technology company that brings you RMF audio
content for tiny/quick music files over the Internet, and
Mixman, a sexy tool to create multi-track audio and then
encode it in a variety of formats, have merged. Seems like
a nice fit; two smallish companies creating something
greater than the sum of their parts. The two companies,
though blended, will retain their names.
<www.beatnik.com>
<www.mixman.com>
MacAmp now MACAST
Venerable (by Internet standards) MacAMP has renamed itself
"MACAST." Something about an ongoing domain name dispute
resulted in the change. A new version has been released
and a maintainance update, v1.1, will be announced shortly.
Among the updated restriction terms in the demo version
are a two minute playback limit per song. Registration is
$25 for full, $15 for light.
<www.macast.com>
"Get Onto The Bus..."
As reported here last month
<www.garageband.com>
had a good idea. In order to upload their own music to the
site, musicians are requested to vote on each other's music
to vie for a $250,000 recording contract prize. The idea
is so good Seagram's giant Universal Music Group has now
created its own version of garageband.com called "Farm
Club" where (you guessed it) musicians vote on each other's
music to vie for a recording contract. UMG will partner
with AOL, MTV and others to promote the site. Like the
FezGuys said: if you see a good idea, rip it off!
<www.farmclub.com>
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Ahh, the ever-morphing face of the Internet. What started as
a New Hope for leveling the playing field is mutating before
our eyes into a cannibalistic, sycophantic rush to be a Big
Player in an exclusive old boy country club. MP3.com, Riffage.com
and most of the rest of the sites spend more energy pushing
themselves than promoting music. Upload a song to almost any
of these sites and get bombarded by spam from other similar
services trolling for musicians or an "Amazing CD Duplication
Deal That Can't Be Missed!". Retail sites engage in a radical
new business model: stocking shelves of a store with product
requiring people to actually travel in physical space. What a
concept! Take the promise of the Internet and ram it into the
old school business model. The corporate old guard looks down
at the face of brown-nosing, fawning Internet audio and says:
"You clean up good! Here's a biscuit." Maybe it's too hard for
the upload sites to think new thoughts.
Someone must be doing something interesting and useful out
there. And yes, here they are, suffering the premature loss of
their spiritual guide, recently disbanded and energetically
mourned; The Grateful Dead. Unwilling to fade away, the remaining
members (in their own corporate form: Grateful Dead Productions)
actively promote new releases (of old material) on the Internet.
The occasion is a new five CD box set, "So Many Roads (1965-1995),"
released by Grateful Dead Productions (GDP) November 9th, 1999.
Though the band has a traditional distribution deal in place
with Arista they chose to take the extra step of creating an
immersive and compelling website
(www.boxset.dead.net) to grow
interest in the album. (FezGuys full disclosure: a FezGuy had
the happy opportunity to assist in the creation of the site.)
The box set promo site is built as a section of the popular
and comprehensive <www.dead.net>
web site and offers exclusive online-only content to fans.
You, the happy FezReader, can liberate any and all of the wide
array of methods used on the site. The best ideas are stolen,
right?
Launched one week before the album's release in stores, the
site features three complete free bonus tracks not available
on the album (downloading and streaming in no less than five
formats: Quicktime 4 [QT4], RealAudio G2 [G2], Liquid Audio
[LA], Microsoft Windows Media [MSWM] and MP3). A new video
retrospective of the band's thirty-year career for the song
"Liberty" (produced by Justin Kreutzmann - son of band member
Bill Kreutzmann) is also offered in Quicktime 4, Windows Media
and RealPlayer. One minute excerpts from 15 album tracks were
uploaded one per day to keep fans coming back. There's a full
track listing with song times, and album credits are posted as
well. There's a nice photo gallery of images from the booklet,
and essay excerpts. Fans are encouraged to participate in a
charming contest by submitting a 300-word essay describing
their favorite era of the Dead and why. Winners receive sampler
CDs and a lucky (randomly selected) winner gets a two-night
stay in the Jerry Garcia suite at San Francisco's Triton Hotel.
A lot of time and energy went into the creation of the site
and more than a few software tools were brought to bear. Sorenson
Video and QDesign Music codecs were used to create the QT4
video files. Terran Interactive's powerful Media Cleaner Pro
was used to easily compress and encode audio and video into
files in multiple formats so the site creators could provide
users with different audio quality choices sorted by bitrate,
video size (by pixel), or connection speed. The Dead own their
publishing rights; they have the flexibility to make their
content available in any way they wish. Hence the site is
technology agnostic. Covering so many bases benefits visitors
by allowing them to use the format that works best on their
computer and Internet connection.
The site allows GDP to collect email addresses (by user choice)
for a maillist promoting future events and news. A
Help/Configuration page includes test sample clips and a
follow-up form if visitors have questions or problems. These
email questions are actually answered. One thing The FezGuys
would have liked to see: full integration throughout the site
to immediately purchase the album. Because of GDP's relationship
with traditional distribution channels, they still find it
useful to share the point-of-sale.
The FezGuys offer a few thoughts: Contests are always good ways
to inspire people to visit. Make it look and feel above and
beyond the standard corporate marketing idea, instead, make it
something interesting and personal. Instead of giving away a
readily available album for guessing a well-known fact, ask
for fan's opinions and choose interesting ones to post on your
site. Give away a CD-R of the band's first rehearsal tape or
something equally arcane. Provide a deep level of information
on the site: when and where was the music recorded,
behind-the-scenes photos, etc. Offer original content not
available elsewhere. It can be prohibitively expensive to
include a 10-page booklet of the story behind your music in
every traditional CD, but you can do it very affordably on your
web site. The more energy and effort you put into it, the more
you'll get out of it. That's the FezGuy Promise. And answer
every email! Your Mom told us to remind you. Go to:
<www.fezguys.com/audio/everyemail.mp3>
if you don't believe us.
The self-styled saviors of the music business prove themselves
double agents for the Dark Side with the release of a "new"
promotional vehicle called "Payola." Designed to ratchet up
some revenue, Payola is an online auction for high-visibility
placement of musician's downloads on the site's main page. Song
popularity no longer rewards the singer. As usual, this puts
the power in the hands of the people with the most money. It
ain't about community, it's about bribery. At least MP3.com
didn't sugarcoat it, the name says it all. It's too bad they
have to resort to this. It shows they're not even remotely
interested in being part of the solution. The FezGuys think
they should be using their high profile to bust out with some
new ideas instead of exhuming old ones. Try to think outside
the box, gang. Yeah, yeah, you're right, of course, we're a
little tough on MP3.com. But when you represent yourself as
the cowboy in the white hat you better show some grace and
class to back it up.
Another new program on MP3.com, "Payback for Playback," is
supposed to actually reward musicians based on number of
downloads. MP3.com has apparently set aside no less than $200,000
of its multi-billion dollar resources to reward musicians (who
are the only reason the site exists). It's a step in the right
direction.
RealNetworks got slapped on the wrist when it was discovered
they were secretly collecting data from users. Information
about users' music choices was sent to RealNetworks' servers
by globally unique identifiers (GUIDs). GUIDs enable transmission
of RealJukebox (still Windows only!) users' data back to
RealNetworks. This pissed a lot of people off. After all,
they're collecting information about what you do and you don't
know what they're doing with it. Imagine visiting some big
stock brokerage web site to research investment ideas and
immediately recieving an email from the IRS reminding you about
tax ramifications. It should be remembered that the collected
information was never intended to be used for anything other
than music preferences and was thrown away immediately. What
Real did wasn't evil, just clumsy. They apologized publicly
and promise to be good in the future. Effective immediately:
"It is imperative for senior management of a company to be
active in communicating the importance of consumer privacy and
trust through the design and development of their products and
services." (R. Glaser - RealNetworks CEO)
The FezGuys aren't convinced he wrote that himself, yet are
hopeful he truly means it.
We almost forgot to mention the Official FezGuys Favorite Albums
(OFFA) list. Since most people seem pathologically focused on
distilling the "best" of the Twentieth Century, we thought we'd
bring you our favorite albums of the Nineteenth. A complete
list follows:
Now, in other news....
The FezGuys told you never to call us here!
