While reading about the new History Channel series Life Without People (brief review: fun, highly derivative of the excellent World Without Us, but the movie-guy narration is ridiculously overblown), I happened upon a reference to the seventies BBC TV post-apocalyptic TV series Survivors. It turns out that they’re in the midst of remaking the series–they’re currently shooting season (which, in BBC terms, probably means six episodes) two.
I really dig post-apocalyptic works of art, so I immediately went looking to watch the remade series. I read on this (Official? Unofficial? Hard to tell) blog that season one was available on iTunes. Great, I thought, I’ve got some travel later in the week, I’ll plunk down my 20 bucks or whatever and download them.
Alas, “Survivors” is not available on iTunes Canada. Nor, as far as I can tell, is it available on the American or Canadian Amazon sites. I’d gladly pay for the show, even with iTunes’s imperfect system, but I can’t. What’s left? Illegally downloading the show using BitTorrent.
The Excellent Yet Distant Online Content Distribution Model
This is, of course, a very common complaint. Over the last decade, as Cory Doctorow likes to say, content producers must be ““dragged kicking and screaming to the money tree”. Farhad Manjoo reflects this ethos, and describes some of the reasons behind it, in his latest Slate article:
In my dreams, here’s what it would look like: a site that offers a huge selection—50,000 or more titles to choose from, with lots of Hollywood new releases, indies, and a smorgasbord of old films and TV shows. (By comparison, Netflix says it offers more than 100,000 titles.)
Things, of course, are even worse up here in the Canadian digital ghetto.
I’m buying more and more audio books these days. I’m choosing audio books because I can consume them while I’m exercising or walking from place to place. Plus, of course, it eliminates the environmental costs of manufacturing, packaging and shipping the book to me.
I went to iTunes to purchase the “Hot, Flat and Crowded”, and was a bit shocked at the price. Then I compared it with Amazon.ca and Chapters:
I’m usually happy to pay a ‘green tax’ for more sustainable options, but this is a bit ridiculous. I’d have to pay more than twice the hardcopy cost for, ostensibly, less value. It’s ironic, too, given the subject of the book. Why do you suppose the audio book is priced where it is?
“Borrowed Tunes” is one of my favourite albums from the nineties. It’s a two-CD set, featuring 37 Neil Young covers by Canadian bands. Like Young’s classic Rust Never Sleeps, the first half is acoustic and the second is electric.
There are so many good songs on this album. The Rheostatics and the Bourbon Tabernacle Choir do a wonderful, loosey-goosey cover of “Everybody Knows this is Nowhere”, Marc Jordan sings “Borrowed Tune” like it’s a lullaby and Crash Vegas kind of reinvents “Pocahontas”:
I forget exactly how (it originated with Cover Lay Down, an excellent blog of folky covers), but yesterday I learned that last year a second “Borrowed Tunes” was recorded, by a (mostly) new generation of Canadian artists. I have yet to hear any songs from it, but I’ll definitely buy a copy. Not from Amazon.com, mind you, where it’s listed as an import and priced at $47.99. Instead, I can get it at Amazon.ca for $21.99 or Chapters.Indigo.Purple.Monkey.Dishwasher.ca for $20.99. Or, I suppose, there’s always iTunes for a mere $14.99 (link goes to iTunes store).
I don’t really want the physical CD, and buying digital is greener. Unfortunately, I can’t find the album on eMusic or Zunior, so I may have to buy it from iTunes and convert the songs to MP3s.
Proceeds from sales of both albums (plus another earlier, more indie cover album) go to support The Bridge School, a California instution which assists children with severe physical impairments and complex communication needs. Both of Young’s sons have cerebral palsy and his daughter has epilepsy.
I take an embarrassing amount of pleasure in pruning, tweaking and annotating my iTunes library. It’s strangely important to me that all of my songs display the right meta-data for song title, artist, album and so forth.
One of my long term goals is to rate every song I own. At the moment I’ve got 8487 songs in my library, and I’ve only rated 2856 of them.
So, most of the time, I have iTunes playing a particular ’smart’ playlist through Party Shuffle. The playlist looks like this:
When I remember, I alt+tab over to iTunes and rate the currently playing song. I play it through Party Shuffle because, otherwise, when I rate a song in my ‘Unrated’ playlist, it instantly stops playing and disappears from the playlist (it is, after all, only obeying the rules).
My rating system is largely ad hoc, and works like this:
1 star = Awful, and I usually delete these.
2 stars = Not great, but I want to keep it because I have the whole album. Also, it could be a specialty song, like a Christmas song or a novelty track.
3 stars = Average.
4 stars = I like it, and would be happy to hear it once or twice a week.
5 stars = Songs for the ages. If this song was playing on my iPod when I was killed by a bus, that’d be okay.
Back in the eighties, Vancouverites would frequently made odysseys across the border and visit the foreign temples of capitalism. At that time, there were a ton of brands which didn’t have a presence north of the border: Old Navy, The Gap, Banana Republic and so forth. People felt thrilled and sophisticated to be wearing clothes that you couldn’t buy in Canada.
Times changed, and we have more than enough of those once-exotic stores up here. However, there’s a new segregation in town, and it’s digital. Canucks can’t watch Hulu, the popular TV on demand service. Likewise for a lot of BBC programming.
Personally, I’m frustrated by the fact that I can’t use Rhapsody’s or Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 services. I’d happily pay ten bucks for an album, but not if it comes with DRM or in some proprietary format. So iTunes is out. I already subscribe to eMusic, but they often don’t have albums that I want (Hem, for example).
Canadians are second class citizens, I assume, because these services haven’t negotiated deals with Canadian rights holders. And they’re probably in no hurry–there’s only 30 million potential buyers up here.
In the meantime, my only alternatives are going to a store and buying a hunk of plastic (unreliable and not very green) or illegally downloading the albums I can’t buy on eMusic (sometimes unreliable). I trust we’ll get MP3s on Amazon.ca eventually, but hopefully it takes less time than for The Gap to come to Vancouver.
Here’s the scenario. Bear with me, it’s kind of tedious:
My local copy of my music files are stored on a Windows desktop. We’ll call that PC1. For the record, I also store a synched backup at MP3Tunes.
Julie and I both have iPods. We listen to podcasts. I use iTunes on PC1, but she subscribes to her own set of podcasts on her Mac. We’ll call that Mac1.
As far as I can figure, you can’t load stuff (songs and podcasts) on the same iPod from multiple computers, particularly when those computers use different operating systems. When I plug my Windows-formatted iPod into Mac1, it wants to reformat it and wipe the thing clean. The same happens in reverse with Julie’s Apple-formatted iPod.
In short, I want to load music from PC1 and then podcasts from Mac1 onto the same iPod. I think this is impossible, at least if I want to use iTunes. What do you think?
This problem would go away if iTunes offered support for user profiles. I guess I’d better submit a feature request.
I think the least painful solution is to remove my Windows PC from the scenario by copying all of the music to an external hard drive. Then we can just attach that to either of our Macs, and access the music library that way. Alternately we could try to set up a home network amongst all our computers. Both of those solutions feel like way too much solution for such a simple problem. Such is consumer computing in 2008, I guess.
Microsoft named this developer platform “PlaysForSure”, and they (and their partners) ran many, many ads decrying the fact that music purchased from Apple’s iTunes Music Store would “only” play in iTunes and on iPods. This was, technically speaking, true — and indeed it is still true, and it is why I have cautioned Dora and you and anyone else who would listen that you should never “purchase” anything from the iTunes Music Store that you might want to “own” longer than Apple was willing to allow.
I can’t get very excited about digital rights these days, but this is a well-written explanation of why this stuff might matter to the average Normal Human.
They toured with this husband-and-wife duo of an indie band called Mates of State. I liked what I heard, so I figured I’d purchase some MP3s and give them a more extended audition in my music collection. But which songs to buy?
First stop: Wikipedia, which indicates that they have five albums, dating from 2000 to a May, 2008 release.
Next stop, eMusic, where I’m a subscriber. eMusic only offers their first three albums. eMusic says their most popular songs are, in order, “Ha Ha”, “The Kissaway” and “Fluke”.
To Amazon. Amazon claims to stock four albums, but one is, in fact, just an EP. Plus, they say that the 2004 album is Mates of State’s “latest release”. Clearly this is not the case. Top songs on Amazon: “Goods”, “Along for the Ride” and “Jellyman Kelly”.
Next, the iTunes store. I don’t usually buy from them, but I figured I’d have a look. iTunes lists six albums (including the EP). Confusingly, one album is listed twice. Assuming the 2008 album isn’t out yet (though why isn’t it available for pre-order?), iTunes has the most exhaustive catalog. Most popular songs: “Goods”, “Along for the Ride” and “Fluke”.
On YouTube, the top videos are for the songs “Fraud in the 80s”, “Get Better” and “Fluke”.
Finally, there’s Last.fm. The most popular songs there are “Ha Ha”, “Think Long” and “Like U Crazy”.
Finally, I visited the band’s website. Why did I go here last? Because band websites are often lousy, and rarely help me to answer the question “which songs should I buy?”. I see that their forthcoming album isn’t out to May 20th, 2008. Their first single is out, though, and the video features a scooter rider in rabbit mask:
There’s clearly little consensus out there on the best three Mates of States songs. Is there a market out there for a website that just answers that question? It could be FirstThreeSongs.com. It could grab data from the above (and other) sources, and produce a reasonably definitive three song starter list for every band on the planet.
Speaking of podcasts, does this ever happen to you? I don’t auto-synchronize my download podcasts in iTunes to my iPod. Instead, I choose which ones to move over and listen to.
As a result, iTunes periodically stops downloading new episodes of each podcast. It doesn’t matter how recently I’ve listened to an episode–every couple of weeks it just freezes the downloads. I looked for a setting to turn off this, uh, moderation, but couldn’t find one.
A couple of years ago, I downloaded The Waifs’ great cover of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” from the iTunes store. I’ve bought less than five songs from iTunes, so I suspect this was one of their free weekly downloads.
When I acquire a song from iTunes, I usually convert it to MP3 format, and delete the iTunes file. I did convert this song, but didn’t delete the original.
This song came around in the big, randomized playlist on my newish MacBook, and I got the dreaded digital rights management-powered message. This is the first one of these I’ve seen from iTunes (click for a readable version):
Let’s see…those five machines would be my Windows desktop, an iMac at the office, our two old laptops and Julie’s MacBook.
It’s no skin off my nose, because I already converted the file to MP3. Interestingly, I only have access to one of those five machines anymore. I could only de-authorize one, therefore extending this file’s life by only one machine.
From the error message, it looks like the authorization is account-wide, not song-by-song. Does anybody know if that’s the case?
In any case, this is pretty complicated stuff for Nomal Human computer users, and it’s a cautionary tale for iTunes song owners. If you forget to de-authorize your old machines, I think you’re limiting your music library’s lifespan. Do I have that right?
