itunes store killes? (maybe not, but alternatives probably)

www.bluetracks.ca

www.beatport.com

reporting on statistics of physical and mental violence in heterosexual couples (in french) showing more men are victims of violence than women. This is specifically canadian data, although they do hint at US and new zealand data as well. I’ll have to search that stuff a bit . . . → Read More: I’m writing up]]> in the meanwhile,

itunes store killes? (maybe not, but alternatives probably)

www.bluetracks.ca

www.beatport.com

reporting on statistics of physical and mental violence in heterosexual couples (in french) showing more men are victims of violence than women. This is specifically canadian data, although they do hint at US and new zealand data as well. I’ll have to search that stuff a bit more once I’m done.

cyberpresse

Update: On the topic of violence in relationships, here’s arguments from the other side of the story. Maybe it’s really just a faulty diagnostic tool?

inspq1

inspq2: critique de l’outil CTS

Always be careful with statistics…

“Amateurs and enthusiast will take millions of pictures. Every once . . . → Read More: From amateur to amateur]]> I’ve heard and read the rant (from pro and semi-pro photographers) that the “rise of the amateurs” will destroy photography. Photographers complaining about how flickr will destroy photography. Mostly, the rant is about stock photographers’ loss of a business model. The argument I’ve heard goes like so:

“Amateurs and enthusiast will take millions of pictures. Every once in a while, they will be lucky and get a good shot, which means that with so many amateurs, there will be still a lot of good enough images made. These amateurs don’t know how much images are worth, so they’re going to sell them for almost nothing. Buyers will get used to buying cheap images and will demand lower prices. Pro stock photographers will be out of a job and so there will be no photography left.” (It’s a generic argument, I can’t seem to find an example of someone actually blogging this, probably because they’ve been drowned in the sound of happy amateurs rejoicing about microstock agencies. Bear with me.)

This scenario may well happen one day. I’m not saying this will undoubtedly happen, only that’s it’s a possibility. The problem with the argument is obviously that it equates pro photographers with photography. If the doomsday scenario unfolds, there will be no professional photographers left, but there will still be plenty of photography being done. This scenario may also well not happen. For one thing, it’s hard to give a particular amateur a particular assignment and get an excellent picture out the end, which brings me to my point. How do you connect amateur artists with other amateur artists in a digital age such as ours? We have amateur musicians and amateur photograpers, both without much ressources. We also probably have more of both because new technologies have made it possible for more people to participate in the online environment. Are the “risen amateurs” doomed to fail, a passing trend, or is there a real way for amateur artists to interact with other amateur artists in order to create more?

Here comes a recent experience of mine.

I discovered the website pixish. It’s still in beta, but the concept is interesting. There are two classes of users (and you can be both). One publishes images, the other one posts assignments. So there I was a few days ago, looking at assignments, when I came across this (fairly typical) assignment for an aspiring musician, Andrew Combs.

Need album artwork for my record that will be recorded this summer. Was going to do it myself, but figured it might be interesting and fun to see what others have to offer.

My music is in the folk/americana genre, if that helps at all. I like photography, illustrations, or mixed media. Some other artists whose album artwork I find great would be Steve Earle (particularly the artwork of Tony Fitzpatrick), Bruce Robison, Sam Baker, Wilco, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, Elvis Costello, Glen Phillips, The Jayhawks, Josh Ritter, Buddy Miller, Lyle Lovett, and Neko Case. Im sure there are many more…

I also love holga photography.

You can listen to my music @ myspace.com/andrewcombsmusic

Maybe that will help or something.

The winner will receive $50.00 via paypal.

Thanks,
Andrew Combs

I actually went and listened to some of his songs on myspace, some of which I thought were pretty good. And I started getting an idea about an image that could make great cover art. I’ll try and find time to set it up and do it. It may not get picked. I may not even have enough time to do it. We’ll see. But the point is that I found an unlikely source of inspiration and a possible avenue for collaboration. An aspiring musician and an amateur photographer who, at first sight, have nothing in common and no way of meeting. Imagine for a second that I submit something for that assignment and that he accepts it. Not only do I make 50 bucks, but we, amateurs, will have created something more, art which didn’t exist before.

Even if all pros disappears, I don’t think the rise of amateurs will signify the end of art. The way artists interact and collaborate will change for sure. Art will change, but art will survive.

First, here’s how it works when you publish a . . . → Read More: Of science and music]]> After my last post, I had a comment by Alex, who didn’t believe one could compare science publications with musical records. I’ll give him right that there are many differences between the two, although I still think there’s one important parallel that can be drawn between the two.

First, here’s how it works when you publish a paper. Once your paper is accepted, you have to sign a form, transferring your rights to the journal. (I’m assuming the more common “traditional” journal. There are open-access journals, where you retain the copyright, but typically you have to give them away.) Editorial edits (grammar) are finished and the journal sends you a bunch of preprints to give to colleagues and to impress your mom. To be serious, I don’t think it really matters nowadays. You just end-up sending them the pdf with the proper citation information. Yeah, I know, I shouldn’t but their library probably subscribes anyway. It’s just easier this way than telling people to go click through twelve web pages just to get to your article. I guess you could send a link. Anyway, you get the idea. People get an electronic version of your paper and you end up with a pile of dust-gathering preprints (minus the one you sent to your mother). Once that’s done, to get access to your paper (technically), you’re supposed to go onto the journal website. Technically, if you’ve signed away your rights, you’re supposed to ask for permission before reusing a figure from your paper as well. Some journals (in fact, I would guess/hope most, but I haven’t done an exhaustive study) have “rules” in place so that people can re-use material for a certain purpose or the authors can reuse material if it’s in a publication owned by the same organization/company.

In any case, the point is that you sign away your rights and the journal then sells access to your paper to people, including to you. You, as a scientist, don’t get a dime from it. But you probably know that already.

Now my understanding of how the music industry currently works is that artists sign away certain rights to the label in exchange of financial support to produce one or more albums. These albums get sold, debts get repaid and, in the end, the artist really gets very little from the sale of the CD (or vinyls if you’re radiohead). The money artists make really comes from putting shows together, selling t-shirts, appearing in magazines, endorsing products in ads, etc. At least, that’s my understanding of it. I may be slightly wrong. Some artists may make more money from CD sales than I think. Still, I don’t think artists without 1 billion fans (and let’s face it, of all artists trying to make a living, superstars are a minority) really make much from every CD you sell. I don’t have hard data at this point, this is from reading journal articles left and right and meeting several artists (none of them superstars, mind you, so I can’t compare).

In any case, my point is that you have artists who produce music and labels who profit from the distribution of the actual music in album form.

This is where I see the similarity. In, both, the world of science and the world of music, we have people who make actual content (scientists write scientific papers and musicians record music) and people who wrap that content up in plastic and ship it to you to make money. In both cases, content distributors (scientific journals and record labels) profit from distributing the content, while content producers (the scientists and the artists) profit in some other derivative way.

This is where Alex’s criticism comes in. ”

Business chases profit, scientists chase prestige. Profit means you hoard as much as possible, releasing carefully controlled product to people for as much money as possible, build barriers for competitors, etc. Prestige means you try to distribute as widely as possible, collaborate with the best people possible, have the best and coolest ideas possible, etc. They lead to totally opposite outcomes.”

I disagree. Artists (and I’m not implying record labels here, but really artists) are after both profit and prestige. They want to win a Juno award, or a grammy award, or get one of those platinum records. That’s not money, that’s “prestige”. Let’s call it recognition. Artists want to be told by others that they’re good. They want people to write books about them that say they created a whole new genre and revolutionized the world of music. Artists also want money. Who wouldn’t want a million dollars? Do artists (in general, if there’s such a thing) want money more than fame? I don’t know. I don’t quite care. Both money and fame are “profit” in a loose sense. You start out with goals, you do something, you get to your goals. You’ve profited from what you’ve done. Important to note is, as I’ve said up there, the money artists make (presumably) doesn’t come primarily from record sales, but through other means. Even more important to note is that people get to like an artist by listening to their music. This is what leads to the blog post I quoted the last time. As an artist, you want to get your music out there, by any means possible. You want everyone to get to listen to it. The most efficient way to do this used to be to sign to a label. They had huge distribution channels. They could get your albums sold in China and Europe while you were enjoying a beer in Canada. Labels still have huge distribution channels. But they’re no longer the biggest. Now, if your goal is to get your music out there to as many people as possible, you put it up for free on the internet. THAT gets you listeners.

Now in all this, the business model of the artist hasn’t changed. First, you find a way to get your music listened to by people, then you sell them concert tickets. The business model of the record labels changes, though. They’re less and less valuable to artists.

Now, just as equally as artists are after both monetary profit and recognition, so are scientists. Hold on, are you so sure? Yes. Nobody has any trouble recognizing that scientists want recognition. We all would like a nobel prize, or a medal from a mathematical society. Scientists also want money. Seriously. Some more than others I’m sure. Still, when applying for a research/teaching position, everybody negotiates the best deal. So you’re not doing this out of the kindness of your own heart. You’re not going to tell your kids you’ll never be able to take them to disneyworld because you have a greater goal to achieve. Some want millions and whole building for them and their graduate students. Some just want to be able to afford a decent living and do interesting stuff. Some may not want money at all really and would be fine living in the basement of the school. It’s irrelevant to the discussion. Both are ways of “profiting”. You start out with goals, you do something, you end up closer to your goal. You’ve gotten something out of it, whether money or fame, that’s your profit.

Now, the business model of the scientist hasn’t really changed. You do research. You write out papers. You get the papers out there. You get more research contracts/medals/students/book deals/newspaper articles/biography/office space/lab space/money from your employer so you don’t end up at another university (pick as many as you’d like). It used to be that scientific journals were the best way to get your stuff out there. They’d bundle the papers together and they were quite good at shipping these bundles around the world. Not so anymore. The internet can get your stuff out there (once it’s written) faster than any scientific journal can. So the business model of scientists hasn’t changed. The business model of scientific journals, though… well… hasn’t changed yet.

One small detail remains in favour of the traditional scientific journals. Peer-review. Somehow we still believe that these journals are just better than anybody else at getting stuff peer-reviewed. Now, there is something which doesn’t happen in the music world. That’s where I say, the stage is just ripe for a new paradigm. A system which allows you, even a single person (or more realistically a group of a few people) a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Or a non-peer-reviewed journal if you’d so like. A framework which lets you also know, as a reader, what you might be interested to read.

More on that later.

 If you are an unsprung artist (unsigned, unknown, undiscovered, emerging) and your wondering how to make money from music, you should not plan your future around selling CDs . . . → Read More: Unsprung Artists and ]]> I was strolling around the tube, reading the different blogs I like to read when I came across this posting by an internet company, SONGboost. What are they saying?

 If you are an unsprung artist (unsigned, unknown, undiscovered, emerging) and your wondering how to make money from music, you should not plan your future around selling CDs or digital downloads. In fact, holding out for your portion of a $.99 cent download may be hurting your career.

They go on to show, with some back of the enveloppe math, that at a profit margin of .69$ a song, breaking even on an album which cost 100k$ (50k$ in production costs and 50k$ in advertising) would require 142 000 downloads. According to their estimate, this would require your band to be in the top 2000 artists in the english speaking world.

More back of the enveloppe calculation takes home the point that there’s a simpler alternative.

Because nobody completely appeals to 100% of the population, your music needs to be in 200,000 to 300,000 iPods now, to convince and convert 5,000 fans (2 to 2.5% conversion rate) to pay to attend your show, to buy a shirt, buy a hat and/or visit your website numerous times over the next year.

Omitted but implied is that this alternative is much closer to reach than the former. Their final conclusion is interesting. Basically, you should treat digital music as a publicity (I would imagine this to lower to marketing costs, so your initial investment is then more in the line of 50k$) and get it out there to make fans and get them to your shows.

I believe you should put your music on every site/system, legal and not, in the world. You should turn on the download option and deploy download buttons everywhere you can. You need spins to get to the point where you can sell shit that has a higher margin than .69 cents. The CD is dead, digital music is here to stay, illegal file sharing will live on, and the sun will shine tomorrow. Go for exposure and get to a point where you can make money; if you hold out for digital music download revenue, that business may not be around in three years.

Is this correct? I don’t know. Is it an interesting point of view? Absolutely. Thinking about this issue recently I came to the (uninformed) conclusion that this shift is happening right now, though. My understanding is that, traditionally, the music labels would take most of the profits from music sales and that artists would take more profits (I don’t know if it’s most) from shows and other stuff they sell (shirts, hats, etc). So as far as the artists are concerned, the model hasn’t changed. Your  income is still from shows and what not. The problem is for the music labels, whose business model is basically dead. We’re now able to distribute music in far more countries at once, in far more convenient form, at much faster speeds and for much lower cost then they could by pressing little plastic coasters and packaging them in 3 layers of plastic

How does that relate to the distribution of knowledge in the scientific world? Good question. I don’t think the analogy is very easy to make, mostly for two reasons:

1. There isn’t a direct monetary gain for scientists from their knowledge. Basically, we don’t sell papers. Well, we kind of do. We sell reports and teaching time, the idea being that if the papers we’ve written before were good, we’re likely to produce more good ones in the future. Still, we don’t perform our papers, really, in the same sense as artists do.
2.  The distribution system has been intimately intertwined with the appreciation system. And that’s not fun. So, depending on how your stuff gets out there sort of influences how good people think you are. We know it’s not right. Just because nature publishes your stuff doesn’t actually make it right. It just makes it published in nature. We assume that nature has more stringent rules and that nothing gets passed them (or at least less does). It may well be so. I’ll have to look around and see if someone has a compilation of # of retractions per journal or something similar compared with the impact factor of the journals. (The current “good” method of assessing whether you’re writing crap or not. Well, really, it’s a way of saying whether people are reading the crap you write, not really how good it is, but anyway. It’s a proxy for how good we are and we don’t really challenge it these days.)

In any case, I’ll have to dwell on this analogy for a little and write more later on.