Results tagged “itunes”

I'm a fan of The-Dream, the producer-turned-singer who was born Terius Nash and is responsible for pop gems ranging from Rihanna's "Umbrella" to Mariah's "Touch My Body". His solo albums have been genuinely entertaining and well-produced, a fact that is particularly fortunate given that nearly all of the catchiest choruses to his songs contain expletives that can't be sung on the radio. The-Dream's excellent debut Love/Hate, in particular, demonstrates this trait. (Listen to the samples to hear for yourself!)

However, a few days ago, I was recommending The-Dream's work to my friend Ben since we share similar musical tastes, and I was surprised to hear that he had been reluctant to listen. Ben was balking because, as he correctly pointed out, the extraneous hyphen in The-Dream's stage name is annoying.

Then I realized: The-Dream is one of the first successful pop acts in the world to have deliberately incorporated search engine optimization into his stage name. (If you're fortunate enough to not be familiar with the practice, SEO is the effort that many people put in to making their content easier to discover on the web. It's part necessary evil, part spam-inducing cargo cult.)

You see, without the hyphen, "The Dream" would have been almost impossible to find on Google or iTunes or YouTube before he got famous. In fact, unless you have a fairly distinctive (at least in English-speaking parts of the world) name like I do, this can be a common challenge. But I posit that the hyphenation of his name made him unique enough to be easily discoverable even before he had hit songs. Simply showing up when people are searching for music or videos is a pretty important part of getting your name out there if you want to be a big star.

I used to make predictions on my blog years ago, but one of the ones I forgot to write down was that Google would influence business names just like the Yellow Pages did. Instead of naming yourself "AAA Plumbing" so that you are listed first, you'd make sure you were easy to search for on the web by naming yourself The-Plumber, presumably.

Semi-related:

• Defining One's Identity Online, from 2005
• Privacy Through Identity Control, from 2002

When launching the new version of Amazon's book device the Kindle, Jeff Bezos offered up the vision that the company has for the device: "Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds." It's a message that Amazon has been consistently advocating since the device's initial rollout, and meshes nicely with the early Amazon vision of being the world's biggest bookstore.

Others have noted the audacity of the Kindle's vision. That kind of vision obviously evokes Google's early mission statement of striving to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". In truth, Google doesn't talk much about that mission these days, which might explain why a lot of their recent efforts do pretty well with the organizing the world's information part, but can be downright abysmal at making it useful. Virginia Heffernan articulated this quite well in the New York Times recently in regard to Google's image archive of old Life photos:

Google has failed to recognize that it can’t publish content under its imprint without also creating content of some kind: smart, reported captions; new and good-looking slide-show software; interstitial material that connects disparate photos; robust thematic and topical organization. All this stuff is content, and it requires writers, reporters, designers and curators. Instead, the company’s curatorial imperative, as usual, is merely “make it available.”

But at least Google's trying. That does count for something. And articulating that vision in cultural terms, phrased in language that explains the benefit to society, not just to stockholders, is important. Now, I think Google has a gap between their intention and their reality because the organization lacks theory of mind, but perhaps that's a problem that can be fixed.

And hell, I still even have a soft spot for Microsoft's old vision of "a computer on every desk and in every home", not just because in retrospect it seems so modest. It's also because it was a more ambitious vision that, if realized, would mean benefits even for people who never gave a single dollar to Microsoft. (As turned out to be the case.)

And these statements of vision are particularly resonant to me because we seldom hear any sort of similar vision from Apple. When the iTunes store was launched, the vision wasn't to "make every song in the world easily available". Instead, the clear goal was purely commercial, to make people buy music from Apple instead of Walmart.

And the truth is, Amazon, Google and Apple all make billions of dollars — that doesn't happen by accident. They should have clear goals about how to make money as part of their efforts. But since all of these companies also traffic in commerce derived from the artistic and expressive works that shape our culture, it makes sense for us to evaluate their efforts based on how well they articulate a desire to give back to our culture. They should make something meaningful for the world while making their money, at least as a happy byproduct if not as an intentional output. It's a lot easier for me to believe that employees at Amazon are doing something that's meaningful to the world at large than to feel that way about Apple's similar efforts.

I point this out not to be harshly critical of any of these companies; Indeed, I regularly give my time and money to all of them. But we often rush to describe Steve Jobs as a "visionary" for being the best showman in an industry where most people have the stage presence of a bowl of oatmeal.

The truth is, Apple has a chance to redefine what it considers vision while Steve Jobs is on leave. He could return and say that every copy of Garage Band will have the ability to instantly upload a user's songs to iTunes, unleashing an immense market of independent music to the world, and using their enormous market presence to let individuals help create culture, not just consume it. Or Apple could use its leverage with the record labels to impress upon them the importance of getting all of their back catalog of recordings online and available for people to consume — most of the music that's ever been released on any record label isn't available for purchase today, at any price, by anyone.

And just as importantly, we can use this criteria of vision, of responsibility for culture, as a way of analyzing announcements and releases in the technology world. So, last night, Amazon released their Kindle software for Apple's iPhone. Most of the reviews understandably focused on the readability of the text, or how well the synchronization features work. But I'm hoping that at least one or two lines of future reviews will spare a moment to think "is it a good thing for the world if this thing takes off?" My sense is that we're more likely to get positive answers to that question if the teams that are making these products are led by an appropriately ambitious vision.

I found Frank Hilario's rant entitled Microsoft’s Mr Bill Gates And The Boy Who Cried Worp to be largely incoherent, but from what I could deduce, he thinks my assessment of Microsoft Office 2007 is off-base. Actually, he says:

If you can’t beat them, don’t join them; instead, change the rules of the game. That’s what Worperer Microsoft did with Word 2007, Paul Thurrott (2006, cited) says. Yes. Anil Dash (2006, cited) says: ‘By radically changing the user interface in Office 2007, Microsoft made the riskiest bet in the history of commercial software. And I think they’re going to win the bet.’ Wanna bet?

So, here’s another idea, also from me: Go get a fresh tablet of stone and etch on it the idea of an entirely new word processor. Worperers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your worps!

Once you've lost your worps, you may enjoy Rafe's musings on music collections, inspired in part by my loss of my iTunes library. There are also a lot of really great comments on that thread, thanks to everyone who's contributed.

From Ron Liecty's rumination on developer evangelism on Nokia's site, "Microsoft apologist Anil Dash, in ComputerWorld’s Jan 9th article, said Microsoft's openness contrasts with traditionally secretive companies such as Apple Computer Inc. or Google Inc."

Meanwhile, Pierre Igot offers a blunt assessment of my chuckle-headedness:

Someone like Anil Dash should know that all this information is highly valuable, that it is stored on a hard drive, that it is modified daily, even hourly, and that the risk of file corruption or hard disk damage is very real.

I mean, we are all guilty of having lived dangerously for years without proper backups. But I really believe that, today, in 2007, we no longer have any excuses—especially those of us who are comfortable enough with the technology.

Actually, both posts are absolutely right, and I'm taking their words out of context. But you might enjoy reading them anyway.

My iTunes library, of about 12,000 songs consisting of 60GB of data, got corrupted today. The MP3 files themselves are okay, but all of the metadata is blown away -- playlists, play counts, ratings, and all my little tweaks to song and album titles.

I'm surprised by how much grief this causes me. As it turns out, my experience of these songs is determined by the record of how I've lived with them -- without the information about how I've listened to them, and how often, and what I thought of them, they're just not my songs. It makes sense, at some level; Art without curation or creation without witness leaves a work mute. But as geeks, a lot of us wouldn't even necessarily see this as data loss -- the original files, after all, is still there.

There's a lesson here for the prophets of abundance, and for all of us who see formerly valuable things becoming commodities. We might be able to replace the raw materials with their abundant, or even free, counterparts. But if our emotional experiences are lost along the way, the perfect digital copies are worthless, too.

Lots of people in both the music/media and technology businesses are obsessed with beating Apple's work on the iPod and iTunes. With the CES show being this week, that obsession will reach its annual peak, so I figured I'd take the time to post a list I'd made some time ago. Herewith, a list of the key dos and don'ts for beating Apple's iPod and iTunes, in no particular order.

• Do: Be Rock and Roll. Have an attitude, be All About The Music, and express yourself. Now, that doesn't mean you have to have faux-edgy marketing copy for your service or device, but just that you should make decisions for your products based on what a music fan would want.

• Don't: Try to teach kids about DRM. Now, if and when iTunes eventually loses in the market, it will be because of DRM. And you can get significant advantages by just embracing unprotected MP3s, since that's what most people want and they work with everything. But the thing is, DRM is boring. Teaching consumers about DRM is like giving your cat a bath: You're only going to piss her off, and she'd do a better job of it on her own anyway. Explain your lack of DRM in terms of user benefits instead of technology, and you'll avoid disgruntled customer testimonials.

• Do: Make something that breaks in, instead of breaking down. The iPod's greatest flaw is that it's designed to inspire reverence and requires being coddled. Remember being rock and roll? Rock is about leather and denim, which wear with time and get more personality as they're used. Kind of like a good guitar. And being able to drop an MP3 player in a crowded high school cafeteria without everyone laughing that your expensive device is destroyed is a killer app.