brentashley

I just watched The New Music on City TV in Toronto. Today’s show was largely about downloading and its effects on the industry. All through the piece it was all about the artists, how downloading affects *their* livelihoods.

I’d be interested to see/hear artists describing their revenue breakdown. How much do they as artists make from the records and royalties? How much do they make from concerts, appearances, merchandise?

My impression from articles and letters from Janis Ian, Courtney Love, and the recent court statements from one of the Backstreet Boys about never receiving royalties is that the artists themselves make very little if anything from the recording industry. The assumption I’d like investigated is that they view the recording industry as a necessary evil that allows them to graduate into revenue streams that actually make it as far as their own pockets – concerts, merchandise.

Assuming that these observations hold true, with professional recording and wide distribution having become reasonably affordable via computers, might it not be true that artists could be far better off in the future producing and distributing their own material for free consumption in order to jumpstart their personal payback of concert and merchandising streams, thus cutting out the RIAA middlemen who seem from many accounts to be taking close to all of the money and exerting all of the control?

This is fairly closely tied to the CARP issue that has effectively shut down internet radio stations, who were also encroaching on the recording industry’s ability to control what is played on increasingly centrally-owned broadcast radio. Both downloading and internet radio are threats to the RIAA et al in that they realize that if enough artists wake up to it, they will realize that completely disintermediating the process will give them direct control over their art, their profits, and their marketing.

It sounds almost too simple. Am I wrong?

I’m finally dropping Robert Scoble’s RSS feed. There was a time when he had some insightful things to say, but lately I’ve just been waiting for him to post photos of his hickeys. I really am trying to be happy for his newfound naivete and lovestruck giddyness – I really do appreciate that it’s a fantastic force in his life, but it’s an ongoing spectacle I somehow feel uncomfortable being privy to in an increasing way. My brain’s auto-meta-tagger taxonomy engine wants to recategorize him from useful industry bellwether to the highly ignorable zits-and-angst teen blog category.

Robert and Rageboy seem both to be running around wagging their boners in the air lately (although RageBoy in a more abstruse and discreet way). Must be a California thing. I’m happy for them to be bonking like bunnies, but guys, consider pulling the blinds, or start using categories and let me spare myself the soap opera. For now, I’ll just avert my eyes.

Looks like Microsoft’s subscription pricing strategy isn’t gonna fly. I saw the holes in their plan way back in May 2001 and made my own plans to get off the merry-go-round a year ago.

Funny how they spin it that we’re the idiots for not understanding it. I understand it well enough, of that you can be certain.

I’ve always said it stood for International Bowel Movement. Seems I was right.

Just in time for Canadian Thanksgiving! Dramatically expand the size of your
Pilgrim in just a few links! Guaranteed increase in girth!

I just discovered David Skyrme via Phil Wolff. In this article he presents some solid planning for moving an organization towards effective knowledge sharing.

Jessyca Wallace is really very thoughtful. That’s all you gotta know.

One of the many many things I really like about VNC is that you can start up a listener and then have someone throw a remote control session to your address. This came in handy for me at a client last year.

The client’s VPN software wouldn’t work through my home cable router at that time (since fixed with a flash ROM upgrade). I couldn’t use PC Anywhere or VNC in their usual ways because the machine was various levels deep into the network and it would be impossible to expose its ports to the Internet at large.

What I ended up doing was writing a Perl program to run on the PC in question that would once a minute check a file on my webserver called vnclisten.on. If that file exists, it reads from it one text line containing the IP address I want it to throw a connection to, and tells VNC to connect there.

Once that’s running, to control that machine, I make sure my port 5500 is exposed on the internet wherever I am, and then I drop a file called vnclisten.on onto my webserver in the right spot, containing my current IP address. Within a minute, I have a remote control session pop up! At that point, I have one minute to go kill or rename the vnclisten.on file so I don’t get multiple sessions popping up.

It doesn’t matter how deep into the network the serving machine is, as long as it has net access and your listening machine can expose its port 5500 on an external address either directly or via port forwarding.

Here is the Perl program:


#
# listencheck.pl
#
# checks url every minute to find address of
# listening vnc client and throws a vnc session
# to that address if so

# syntax: listencheck url interval


my $url = shift || 'http://www.myserver.xxx/vnclisten.on';
my $interval = shift || 60;
my $logfile = "listencheck.log";
my $vnc = ""c:\program files\orl\vnc\winvnc"";


use LWP::UserAgent;
$ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
$ua->agent("ListenCheck/2.0");


while (1) {
 my $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $url);
  my $res = $ua->request($req);
  if ($res->is_success) {
  my ($addr) = $res->content =~ /\s*(.*)\s*/;
  system("$vnc -connect $addr");
  open LOG, ">>$logfile";
  print LOG localtime(time) . " connect to $addr \n";
  close LOG;
 }
 sleep $interval;
}