I love the Sound Opinions podcast from music critics Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot and listen to it every week. Last week they did a great show where they broke down their favorite live albums of all times. As usual I learned a few things and discovered some music (in this case the Ani Difranco album). But guys, how do you not even mention the live music that promoter extraordinaire Bill Graham gave us from his Fillmore East Club in the East Village?
We still have great albums coming out of the re-opened Fillmore West – check out Lucinda Williams Live @ The Fillmore double CD, and the 60s produced some killer stuff by Santana, Chuck Berry and the Jefferson Airplane on the west coast. But to me the Golden Age of Live Recordings occurred in New York at the Fillmore East in the roughly year and a half after New Years Eve 69-70 when Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsies the recorded their incredible live album Live At The Fillmore East. Two months later Alvin Lee and Ten Years After made a seminal live album Live At The Filmore East, and in March Neil brought his new band Crazy Horse down to work the kinks out of Down by the River and Cortez the Killer, which was only released recently as Live At The Fillmore East as part of Neil’s archive project. Later in the year Clapton came by and recorded his amazing Derek and the Dominos Live album Live At The Fillmore. In April of the following year the Dead recorded 5 shows there that turned into Ladies And Gentlemen…The Grateful Dead: Fillmore East, New York City, April 1971. Frank Zappa brought the Mothers and closed out the run in June 1971 with a solid live album shortly before the venue closed. And of course what is in my opinion the greatest live rock and roll recording ever made – The Allman Brothers Band “At Fillmore East” (rereleased as The Fillmore Concerts) which was recorded in March 1971.
Other notables who made great live records at the Fillmore were Aretha, John Mayall, John and Yoko, Miles Davis and the Byrds.
Some of the greatest live guitar solos ever recorded happened on Second and Sixth in Manhattan in that 18 month period, and damn it Jim and Greg, you blew it by not including them in your show.
If you haven’t used Boxee, its an interface for media based on the XBox Media Center (XBMC) platform. You can install it on your Mac and it’ll scan all your media folders and give you a browsable interface thats compatible with the little white Apple remote. It also does a good job with streaming content sources (like Hulu, Comedy Centtral, etc) and it is social (you can make friends and see what they are watching, etc.)
But what really had people excited was that you could install Boxee on AppleTV and access all the same functionality on your living room on your sweet HDTV with your home stereo etc. I’ve been following this space for a long time and it seemed like just maybe someone had finally cracked the living room media center code, which has seen hundreds of millions of dollars in flame outs. Why? An open architecture that would work on any living room based linux box with a good mix of streaming vs. owned media and a nice UI and some lite social networking. No DRM, no prepackaged content deals with a locked partner set. And a small company with a moderate burn rate that didn’t need to become a behemoth to be successful and provide a good return to its investors. Success would mean that the streaming/caching models that are developing on the internet would work on your best media-watching screen.
And Boxee has been going about their business the right way. They preserve the Hulu interface, preserve its commercials, don’t allow stream ripping, etc. Its basically the same experience you can have right now on your PC. Any Macgiver with some duct tape and some patch cables can already put Hulu on their TV. Boxee just made it easier.
I don’t actually use Boxee a ton, but it’s great for what it is. I NEVER watch live TV, I always time shift so I never watch commercials in my living room. The only exception being on Hulu on Boxee on Apple TV.
So if you are a media company and you’ve already come to terms with putting your content on Hulu, why on earth would you not want entrepreneurs to figure out ways to get that content on more screens? Of course this means that existing models and franchises (like Sat TV and cable TV esp.) are threatened, but that was the case before Boxee. And as Mark Cuban has so elequently (and correctly) argued the internet is a long way from being able to replace satellite and cable for breadth of on demand HD content in the living room at a mass market level. Companies like Boxee are exactly the kind of companies you want innovating for you, because if the innovation doesn’t happen there its all hacks and hackers and torrents. Plus if they start picking up steam you can buy them and have them help you evolve and live to fight on. Its like our experience with the music industry all over again.
The living room TV is a screen, just like my phone and my computer screen. Captive media audiences are a thing of the last century, you can’t lock down the content and you can’t completely control distribution. If you can’t figure out a way to create loyal followers with great user experiences, your content is useless. Pissing off early adopters is a horrible way to go about evolving your business.
Sometimes art and music makes you scratch your head I didn’t think I much liked The Replacements all this time. I even went to college in the midwest while they were still together in the late eighties and had lots of friends from the Twin Cities. I bought their studio greatest hits compilation a bunch of years back and listened to it a few times and basically thought it was unremarkable.
Then last week I pulled a DownThemAll from Aquarium Drunkard straight to a playlist on my ipod for a flight to Denver last week. (Highly recommended quick iPod refresh technique – we can call it Raymonating your iPod). Luckily for me it included the entire Shit, Shower and Shave compilation, which is a “long-traded compilation” from some live 1989 shows opening for Petty (which wikipedia calls a disastrous tour for an unknown reason).
Holy shit shower and shave, I’m a huge fan! Sort of a Springsteen everyman point of view (switch out Asbury Park for Sheboygan) with a Waits gift for turning a great metaphor, combined with a Drive-By Truckers brawling drunken coming straight at you live personality and a Ramones intensity. I can’t get enough of it. How did I miss these guys for so long?
Chalk up another victory for the mp3blog era – I will definitely be rounding out my collection from some timely reissues of their studio stuff – a positive activity music economy-wise the lousy label greatest hits compilation didn’t trigger 10 years ago. But I’m preaching at the choir.
I’m not going to bother to rehost the tracks, head over to the AD if you want to check them out.
For the first time ever, I found myself hitting refresh on a liveblogging Jobsnote this morning. (Engadget blew away Techcrunch in the coverage, clearly). There was nothing surprising about what they announced (slightly different form factor, 3G, GPS, push Outlook) except for the we’re-ready-to-grab-market-share pricing. The phone’s only Achilles heel is that the keyboard doesn’t work as well as a berry’s. Its a calculated trade off versus slim form factor and big beautiful screen. Wonder if they are considering a flip keyboard form factor?
Great consumer electronics products are not merely the sum of the feature set. If I had a nickle for every time a CE maker told me that their fill-in-the-blank mp3 player was better than the iPod because it had an FM tuner, I’d have at least a quarter. Damn iPod still doesn’t have an FM tuner. Even better example: GPS. Obvious that its a killer app for mobile phones – every phone will have it 5, 10 years from now max. I use the poor resolution triangulation version on the iPhone *all the time*, its awesome, I don’t know how I ever got along without it. GPS on the iPhone is probably reason enough for me to drop $300 on a new one. But before iPhone had it, phones that had it jammed in to their overloaded interfaces and subpar form factors, weren’t superior phones. They were inferior phones that had GPS.
Brand matters. Working on another blog post about that (TEASER ALERT!) but anybody who has ever owned an Apple product knows what I’m talking about. There isn’t another CE/Mobile/PC company in their class, not even close.
Don’t release a feature until it is rock solid. Supposedly (this is an unconfirmed rumor but it could be true) GPS was an iPhone 1.0 feature but they backed off because the battery drain was too great. They were right to wait a year and get it right.
My twitter circle is having a little tiff about suitability of twitter posts. Specifically, @emayoh has been bombarding everyone with Hype Machine updates for the last few weeks. So about every 2 or 3 hours during the day everyone who subscribes to him sees a text message on their phone saying
And some people who follow emayoh are starting to twitter back asking him to tone it down. Which of course is often the worst part about spam – all the stop spamming spam.
This reminds me of the spam wars I had to endure during the first few weeks at B-school. Every student in the school was on a list-serv from which they couldn’t unsubscribe and to which any other student could post. With over 600 full-time students on the list obviously a strict etiquette was required. The funny part was how fierce the (admittedly 99% type-A) student body was in mocking and calling out the poor souls who complained about prices at the coffee shop or otherwised spammed the high volume list. People got seriously called out, and once it almost came to blows. The community quickly figured it out, and the rudimentary social networking tool worked fairly well for the 2 years I was there.
Twitter is way more advanced, and the policing and self correcting that needs to take place on the network is orders of magnitude easier and all in your control.
Don’t have all the updates go to your phone (you can turn device notifications off on a user by user basis). Use Twhirl or Twitterific etc. to follow people who update too frequently or who’s twitter updates aren’t valuable to you on your phone. I do this for @nprpolitics and @techcrunch among others.
If #1 doesn’t work for you, stop following the person who is twittering too much for you.
Asking someone to twitter less so you can follow them is, by the mores of social networking, rude. Its like asking an author to write less or a photographer to take fewer photos. Twittering is self expression and works (like all social networks) because its opt-in. If a twitter user is interested in having a lot of people follow them, he/she will self moderate.
So @emayoh: Heart all you want on Hype Machine. I turned off device updates for you a few weeks ago. But every so often I check out your pick via a quick click on Twhirl.
PS: The group of people whom you follow (and who follow you) on Twitter need a name. Like a pride of lions or a covey of quail. What should it be called? I sort of like “my twique”, or “my tweeps”. But then again, those are really terrible names.
I bought an Apple TV on a spur of the moment as a Christmas present for my wife (lame, it was really for me). I had never really given the product much thought before, I bought it primarily to be able to access the huge number of mp3s I have on hard drives in my house from the living room. We live in a relatively small place, I really only need to send music to 1 set of speakers with 1 control panel so I didn’t need to do much thinking. When purchasing the Apple TV (I got the $300 version with the smaller 40G hard drive), I sort of felt like I was overpaying for a box/functionality that if I did some research I’d be able to get much cheaper.
But I knew (instinctively, that the Apple solution would look good, minimize cables, and work with my iMac and home network out of the box. So I said screw it and shelled out.
Damn what a great brand they have. There are all kinds of case studies you do in business school about brand marketing, but my experience with Apple in the last year basically tells you all you need to know about brand marketing. Oh and don’t forget the engineers and product people, because the whole experience has delivered.
After this latest free software upgrade here is what I can do with my 6 button remote.
Access all the music/photos/video on my iMac and any external drive connected to it
Browse iTunes and purchase music
Browse iTunes and purchase or rent movies and TV shows
listen to or watch free podcasts
Youtube
Flickr
I can’t power the thing off, oddly enough, which I don’t get.
But there isn’t much more internet functionality I really want on the TV. I’d love to add some tweaks on the margins and I’m sure new stuff is coming, but for really anything else (ie. requiring a keyboard or mouse) I can grab my phone or laptop or sidle up to the desktop. A year ago I was hoping Apple didn’t get the internet, now it’s obvious they really get it.
I’ve been working on the fringes of the Interactive TV space since I went to an international conference on the subject in the fall of 2000. eNow/Relegence founder and product genius Edo Segal had the web 2.0 server-side xml/rss syndicated feed model down before just about anyone else and I was over there looking for distribution opportunities for our content indexing tools. WAY too early of course, thank god my Amsterdam boondoggle was the limit to our investment in interactive TV at that time. Of course at Musicmatch and then Yahoo I had lots of meetings and numerous deals with hardware companies, software companies, MSOs, and retailers about digital home products and concepts. It would be scary if I actually listed them all out. I even helped launch and market a few. The “digital home” space is a lot like mobile on a smaller scale: there have been a lot of entrants, a lot of ideas, a lot of money spent bringing failed products to market. Big corporations with vested interests in yesterday’s cash cows creating walled gardens, copyright issues muddying the waters, competing standards, etc. Meh.
So where are we in 2008 on the digitl home front? There are basically 3 products that can be considered really good in the market: Tivo, Sonos, and Apple TV. And Apple TV is by far the best (I think – I don’t have a Sonos or a Tivo anymore, but I know people that do). Not to flog a dead horse as Ned Martin would say, but notice none of the products were brought to market by cable companies, satellite companies, non-Apple PC companies, MSFT (although Xbox 360 deserves honorable mention even though they have lost close to $30B on it), Intel, telecom companies, etc. My DirecTV DVR sucks, but I had no choice if I wanted dual tuners which is the killer app. And I have no hope that it’ll ever improve to the Apple TV level.
These 3 products have a few things in common
They set out trying to tackle specific problem (time shifted TV integrated with personalization and guide; synchronous or asynchronous streaming music in every room of your house, getting the content from your computer onto your TV/stereo) and avoided extra features that added complexity.
They were willing to lose money at the beginning (and for a while) as the market filled in
They charge a premium for the device, making sure it has a feature-set rich enough for early adopters, and avoid the temptation to compete downmarket with undercutting products.
Generally this is is the model that worked so well for Apple with the iPod. Focus on making the hardware excellent (interoperable, reliable, easy to set up). Don’t aim for the mass market at first. The last point is the interesting one IMO, because it goes against what we are taught usually happens in consumer electronics and PC businesses. Calculators, walkmans, boomboxes, CD players, HD TVs – they all started diving in price almost immediately upon release.
Of course, Apple needs to open up Apple TV at some point – same problem they have with iPhone. Let me add cool 3rd party apps. And I’m not buying any content with DRM on it (ill happily rent DRM’d content though). But they definitely nailed it with this upgrade.
The mountain biking in Santa Monica has been off the hook with all this rain we’re having. I’ve ridden Sullivan Canyon 4 or 5 times this year, its always a different ride because the stream keeps jumping its banks. You need to ford the stream at least a dozen times coming down, sometimes riding in the stream itself for extended periods. I caught this shot with my iPhone camera. About 40 minutes later I broke the screen trying to switch the music without stopping. Grrr.
There is only one true artist, and his name is Gordon Savicic. He used a Nintendo DS and some good old fashiond German ingenuity to invent a corset that inflicted pain when he was in a Wifi zone. And not just a little pain judging from the scars. Apple/ATT should have this guy stand in front of the silly black screen and tell his vignette. Gordon – Prost!!
Those of you who know me have been pretty obsessed with bringing a new class of portable music device to market for the last year and a half. Maybe overly obsessed. But we finally got there with the Sansa Connect. Digging back to a powerpoint that I presented to a major CE company (who shall remain nameless because they passed on the opportunity to build it) at their HQ in Asia in MARCH 06 I found the following slides:
Optimized Device Strategy
Create clear standards for service device interaction and performance
Launch a line of mobile devices to bring consumers best-in-class services
Initially focus on complete audio solution
Compete effectively with Apple by innovating
Bring discovery and personalization together on the devices
Offer a great, intuitive user experience
Define “connected” mobile experience – WiFi
Partner to get widest exposure at the best economics
Develop a unified marketing strategy
Service provider, device manufacturer, and retailer
Create value for all parties to justify promoting the devices on a large scale
Product Concept
Tight integration with Yahoo Music
Partner with best-in-class vertical integrator
Jointly designed, built, and tested from the ground up – focus on ease of use
Integrated Marketing
Bundled service sold with device
Device promoted on Yahoo!, YME, etc.
WiFi enabled
Music discovery on device
No PC required for synch or content acquisition
Community (messenger)
Personalization (captures ratings, behavior)
Scalable design for additional Yahoo! services
Full line of accessories and flanker products
Competitive pricing and margins
Market Inflection Point – WiFi
Connected devices break iTunes/iPod
Navigating a $0.99 per track catalog on a portable device is not interesting
Unlimited catalog, personalization and auto synch are paramount in an always connected environment
Community – playlist sharing, influencers
Layer other Yahoo! services going forward
Transition to mobile handsets over time
I love it when a plan comes together!! Note to CE companies – people don’t want choice. They want cool products that work well and are simple. If you dont want to work with Yahoo! pick someone else and build some good products! My friends at Zune had the right idea, but fortunately for me they are at Microsoft so they are doomed to fail in the content game.
We had a major snafu in the release (it snuck onto shelves a week early, causing a massive scramble), but the press and industry reception to the product has been nothing short of incredible. Sort of worked to our advantage cause Engadget and mobilitysite put favorable sneak peak reviews out, which gave us some buzz leading into a great overview article by Nick Wingfield in the WSJ on Monday. The article was favorable and balanced and featured Ian’s sweet quote:
“We want to be the music dial tone for connected devices,” says Ian Rogers, general manager of Yahoo Music.
That, ladies and germs, is a man who is on top of his game from a strategy standpoint. Eleven words, says it all. Boom. We’ll forgive him for getting the blogoshpere twisted around the old P2P/mp3 rathole issue on Ymusicblog. Oops.
From there it just exploded (told you it was da bomb). On Monday alone:
“Welcome to a social you might want to attend. While Microsoft was one of the first to build Wi-Fi into a digital audio player, the Zune’s limited sharing options didn’t exactly set the word on fire. The Connect gives you many more options, built around a partnership with Yahoo…As the first truly useful wireless MP3 player, the Connect is sure to be a popular gadget.” – Eric Dahl, PC World
“Yahoo! joins a new mp3 player to compete with Apple’s iPod. This comes with a twist. If you were waiting for the iPod to go wireless, you can download the music in the air. These guys got it before Apple does. It’s called Sansa connect. It looks a little thicker than most iPods. It uses wi-fi so you can get the songs if you’re at Starbucks or at home. You can download them directly.” – American Morning, CNN
“The idea is to give users a way to download new music on the go, something the iPod doesn’t currently allow users to do. Even Apple’s new iPhone, due out in June, won’t initially let people buy music wirelessly. – Nick Wingfield, Wall Street Journal
“I am thoroughly impressed with the features available on this little device. Once you hooked this player up to your wifi network, it is almost impossible to put it down. This is what the Zune should have been. Instead of sending songs to one another and then separately listen to the music, you can just unplug the earphones and actually listen to the music while interacting with your friends. With this device, I can honestly say ‘Welcome to the Social.’” – Gadgetaholic
“So far, we’re pretty impressed with the Connect’s inclusion of desirable features and its snappy processor performance in preliminary testing.” – Jasmine France, CNET
“Though touted as competition for the iPod, it’s really more of a Zune-killer. Microsoft’s withered-on-the-vine player’s biggest hook was its WiFi song-sharing features, now slam-dunked by something that puts WiFI to more extensive use.” – Wired News
“Yahoo announced the SanDisk Sansa Connect–a new Wi-Fi-enabled portable MP3 player loaded with a bevy of Yahoo services such as Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Music and Flickr–and the early reviews are good. “ – Larry Dignan, ZDNet
“I have been very impressed with the Sansa Connect and so have the 20 or so folks I have shown it to over the weekend.” – Mobility Site
and the mother of all quotes:
“Fictional Spinal Tap guitarist Nigel Tufnel, in pure mockumentary glory, once pronounced that his amps were superior because they went all the way to 11. Conventional amps max out at a setting of 10. Well, the digital music revolution just went to 11 this morning. Let’s see who turns up to turn it up louder.” – Rick Munarriz, Motley Fool
All in all a pretty fun week. Now we just need to sell the damn things!
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For the first time ever, I found myself hitting refresh on a liveblogging Jobsnote this morning. (
My 
But every so often I check out your pick via a quick click on Twhirl.
