Shut Up and Dance With Me

"She took my arm,
I don't know how it happened,
We took the floor and she said
Oh don't you dare look back, just keep your eyes on me,
I said you're holding back,
She said shut up and dance with me."
Shut Up and Dance With Me, Walk The Moon.

It's presented in a very upbeat song, but the more I think about it, the more this sounds like one awkward young guy in a club who was being laughed at behind his back, and the kind, energetic girl who made a point of dancing with him so that he would never know. It is simultaneously heartbreaking and beautiful.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The next lyric about her being his destiny just adds to the heartbreak.
PPS - But maybe all this is just me projecting onto the lyrics anyway.

The Cleverness in The Fear

I know it's an older song now, but I just realised that there's a bit of a clever lyric in Lily Allen's "The Fear":

"I look at the sun and I look in the mirror,
I'm on the right track, yeah I'm onto a winner."

So just this week I figured it out. She's not just talking about vague self-reflection, gazing off into the distance or examining herself, although it's that, too. Because, you know what? The Sun and The Mirror are tabloid newspapers in the UK. She's talking about getting tabloid-famous! How did I miss this? Well, probably because I don't live in the UK and I don't read newspapers at all.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I like discovering that kind of layer in music.
PPS - Or in anything, really.

Streaming music is not for me

Spotify has just launched in Australia, which is nice for fans of streaming music, but the times when I most want such a service are when I have extremely limited resources at my disposal - low battery life and limited mobile data quota. So, personally, I don't think I'll ever fully switch over to internet-based music, if only because I won't be able to get to it when my monthly data quota has run dry or I am out of a high-speed service area. If my mobile plan included an unmetered option to sync and store music on my car radio, then I might consider it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also, I'll need a more impressive car stereo for that.
PPS - And that's not going to happen soon.

Entertainment superabundance

There is a superabundance of entertainment these days - music, movies, games and TV. What do we start to do when we move from scarcity value to superabundance? Well, one thing we do is stop trying to pay attention to everything. There's plenty of everything, so we only need to look at the best stuff, and we decide what's best by crowdsourcing our decisions. When there are tons of movies on, we don't even go looking for one to see. We wait for a recommendation to come to us. We don't scour the TV ads looking for new shows to fill our time, we get recommendations from friends and try out new shows a few episodes at a time. If they don't meet the mark, we don't need to bother with them.

The other things we do is value each individual item less and also don't bother trying to archive them all for ourselves. We only watch (or read or play or listen to) the best of what's recommended, and we only keep the best of what we experience. That's what physical media - printed books, DVDs, physical CDs - are for these days. They are the archive of the very best of what we experienced through some other means, not the means by which we get our entertainment in the first place.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess people have always been ignoring bad entertainment.
PPS - But these days, we can also afford to ignore the merely good, in favour of the outstanding.

In charge of entertainment

Who is really in charge of the entertainment industry? There are those with limited scope veto power, there are the writers and actors, directors and editors, publishers and distributors, then us, the audience and customers. If all of any group left, it would come undone, but the industry can survive the loss of any one person.

In a way, every song, book, TV show or movie happens not because one person wanted it, but because no one group involved didn't want it to happen. There weren't any writer strikes, the director didn't quit over creative differences, the actors didn't walk out in a huff and the crew didn't down tools for more money. Because all of those things didn't happen, a completed product comes out the other end of the pipeline.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There does have to be some actual work, too.
PPS - Or else things that don't happen would result in spontaneous entertainment everywhere.

Supply, demand and digital distribution

When digital copies are abundant and selling like mad, should the price be lower or higher? I think that's probably looking at the problem backwards. A lower price drives demand, and because the supply never runs out, you don't have an incentive as the supplier to raise prices in order to maximise your profit. The lower the price, the more people will buy your movie, book or music and vice versa. Already music and book downloads are settling into a $1-per-unit price model, simply because that's where the maximum demand and profit lies. Movies and TV shows will probably get there too. It's just a matter of time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I look forward to those times.
PPS - Then they just need to get rid of the DRM and I'll actually start buying things.

Tripod - Fabian

This Christmas Eve, remember the least-famous reindeer, as brought to you by Tripod:



Mokalus of Borg

PS - They have a few other Christmas songs.
PPS - This is one of my favourites.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Christmas Carols

"It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Zombies! A Book of Zombie Christmas Carols" features zombified versions of Christmas carols. I'm hoping it's not just a case of all the lyrics being turned to "brains".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Although a group of zombie carolers singing about brains would be a sight to see.
PPS - Right before they eat you, of course.

Discounting iTunes gift cards

JB HiFi and various other retailers occasionally sell iTunes gift vouchers at a discounted price, so you're able to get, say, $40 iTunes credit for only $30 outlay. This means two things. One, it is cheaper to go through a middleman retailer for your iTunes credit than to hand your money directly to Apple. Two, Apple are selling these cards to retailers for less than their face value, presumably as a form of advertising for iTunes, and cutting off part of their profits as a result.

Whatever proportion of the sale goes to Apple when you buy directly from iTunes is probably half or less what they get from selling cards to retailers. And as it is easy to verify from many online sources, Apple's profit margin on iTunes is massive compared to what the publisher and artist get, so there's plenty of room to bargain. But why undercut themselves by so much? Well, it's either a way to get non-credit-card-holders onto iTunes or simple advertising, as I said earlier. If you get in the habit of buying from iTunes, sooner or later you'll stop bothering with the cards and just buy direct.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Even when they're generous, they're insidious.
PPS - Did you expect anything else?

Sick and singing don't mix

This week I got too sick to sing at church on Sunday, and it got me thinking. When I travel, I often get sick, and traveling and singing is pretty much what touring musicians do. So either they've got better infection control than me, or they know how to take better care of their voices. Probably a combination of the two. It's got to be a big deal for a singer to get sick on tour, because they don't exactly have an understudy they can send on for the night while they recover.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Deb suggests that they might just lip-sync for a while.
PPS - But those kinds of singers are probably doing that without being sick.

Friday Zombie Blogging - The Musical!

Zombie! The Musical! Enough said! More exclamation marks!

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This was a while ago now. It might not be playing any more.
PPS - There's still a YouTube behind the scenes clip, though.

Music technology for portability

With electronics ever-improving, the portability of what could be called a musical instrument will only increase. I saw someone on the train playing the drums with his thumbs on his iPod Touch. We can play Guitar Hero on our Nintendo DS consoles and if you use the right software, any laptop is a sythesiser. I also glimpsed an ad for a "Paper Jamz" electronic toy guitar that I guess is comparable in weight and thickness to cardboard.

So sometime in the not-too-distant future, I expect it will be possible to carry a guitar, piano or almost anything just about anywhere, folded up small enough to fit into a pocket, and wirelessly connected to a media player for sound output. It won't be exactly like traditional instruments, but that is never the point with new technology.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Now if only I knew how to play anything.
PPS - None of my self-teaching experiments ever got far.

Guitar Hero as music notation

I wonder if kids growing up with games like Guitar Hero will expect a new and different form of written music when they come to learn real instruments. Maybe the "roadway" real-time view might come to replace traditional sheet music entirely for some instruments. Instead of sitting down with a paper book, you'd sit with an iPad or a computer screen to display the notes and timing.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then again, displaying real, full musical scores like that might be a bit much.
PPS - Someone has probably already tried.

Music as a service

I wonder whether it is an artifact of my middle age that I don't buy so much music any more. It might be the changing world, or I might have less money available, what with having a mortgage and a wife, or maybe I just don't care about music the way I used to. Or it might be that music is more like a service now, rather than a product, and it's everywhere. Do you want to hear a particular song right now? Just go on YouTube and you can watch the video, or minimise the window and just listen. Wherever you drive, the radio plays the same few songs from their current playlist, and they do you the courtesy of updating it regularly too. Why would I ever need to buy more music?

Well, there are some things that I'd like to have, like Pink and Green Day (who should definitely do a collaborative album, with names that go together like their colours) and when we drive from Brisbane to Roma once or twice a year we pass through several radio dead zones where recorded music is a necessity. Apart from that, there's little reason to bother buying anything. My enthusiasm for a given song is likely to run out by the time it disappears from the radio.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Often my enthusiasm disappears long before that.
PPS - I don't understand why some songs get so much air play.

Alternative audio formats with chapter marks

Sometimes chapter marks in audio files would be helpful, but I don't know of any format that provides such a thing. The best we can do is multiple MP3s kept in order by name.
I'm thinking mostly of audio books or long podcasts here.

Not too long ago I heard of someone, probably in the music industry, working on a new audio format designed to be a replacement for whole albums, including cover art and liner notes along with multiple tracks inside. I don't see it taking off after the world has so long embraced MP3, but that's close to what I mean.


Mokalus of Borg

PS - The multi-track format is CMX.
PPS - iTunes has a similar "iTunes LP" format.

Why is iTunes only partly DRM-free?

If Apple still puts DRM on TV shows, music videos and movies bought over iTunes, then they are in favour of DRM in general. They have the industry clout to flip off the MAFIAA and say "our customers want DRM-free, so we're getting rid of DRM", but they aren't.

So here's my question: what made them start offering DRM-free music in the first place? If it was customer demand, then why not for all media? It wasn't industry demand. If it was an experiment, it's proved overwhelmingly that DRM-free is the way iTunes customers prefer their music, and that opens the door for a similar experiment on video. If it was just an altruistic internal decision, then (again) why not for all media? I don't get it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - They weren't sued into that situation either.
PPS - Perhaps they were competed into it by direct sales from independent big bands.

Signing musicians on per-song contracts

The music industry should now be free to support artists that are signed for individual song contracts rather than whole album deals. The slow death of the album format (masterpieces like American Idiot notwithstanding) is no secret, and since it's so easy to sell individual tracks over iTunes now, the market is ripe. I'd be surprised if some of the one-hit wonders we've seen lately were not signed on a single-song contract.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course, artists don't need music labels to sell their tracks directly.
PPS - That's the beauty of the internet.

Tim Minchin vs Christianity

Last night at Tim Minchin I laughed a lot, but I also remembered how vehemently he is opposed to Christianity. Deb suggested that he sings some of those songs just because it's what the audience wants, which I suppose is possible, but would then move the venom all to the side of the audience.

Tim has obviously positioned himself as a materialist, and made a few comments both to bolster that position on its own and to ridicule Christians and Christianity, such as:
- Faith means ignoring facts so that belief can continue.
- This world is diminished by suggesting that it is the handiwork of a Creator.
- It is as foolish to imagine a causal relationship between prayer and positive results as between a rain dance and rain.
- Christians spread hatred, particularly towards homosexuals.

Now besides all that, he did produce some very funny and clever music for us, which I appreciated. It's just that I was also left with an urge to debate him on his personal world view.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I found it interesting that he could also profess general ignorance at one point.
PPS - That, coupled with some intellectual arrogance is an odd combination.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Plants vs Zombies fan video

A fan-made music video for the Plants vs Zombies credits theme.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's ... well, it's extremely geeky.
PPS - But fun.

What's so great about the Single Ladies music video?

Call me crazy or weird if you like, but I don't see what's so great about the Single Ladies music video by Beyoncé. There's dancing, and I get that, but I don't understand why it caused such a positive reaction from so many people. Perhaps dance isn't my thing, but it just looks like a lot of knees-bent hip thrusts to me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If anyone can explain what's revolutionary about it, feel free.
PPS - I'm willing to learn.