www.music.ME

With the advent of customization, people are looking for personalized services when they come online into the internet music community. Services such as music.com and myspace music allow aritsts and bands to have a centrally located homepage which is also part of a larger social networking system.

Music.com is primarily an online store where artists can hawk their wares. Artists can set whatever price per song or album they choose, and there is a set fee or percentage that the website charges per transaction. Like iTunes, songs are 99 cents and a user can pick and choose individual songs if they don't wish to purchase the entire album.

Myspace music, on the other hand, is primarily a social networking tool that has a music feature integrated into it. It is extremely useful for small or local bands in that they have a place to post pictures, show dates, blogs and most importantly, their songs. Along with having a host for their songs, bands can become "friends" with other bands or individuals on the website, and thus keep their fan base apprised of their latest updates and records.

Myspace recognized the popularity of this service, and jumped on the opportunity to create its own record label, Myspace Records. It may seem like a strange idea to merge a social networking site with a record label, but really it makes a lot of sense. The record company has a built-in talent pool - the bands using their myspace.com capability - along with a built-in customer base. The people who are already "friends" with the band on myspace would probably support them when it came time to purchase a new album, and the opportunities for direct marketing are endless. This was a brilliant move on the part of Myspace, which was formerly relegated to the back seat as a creepy version of Facebook.

Alternative Spring Break

For Spring Break this year I did a service project instead of going on vacation, to a place where my family had been imprisoned for 4 years during World War II. The project required a lot of physical labor, outside in the sun, and I took this time to do a lot of personal reflecting and to get to know my groupmates a little better. What struck me was that even though we were working in spaces often smaller than 10 X 10, some of them whipped out their iPods and plugged themselves in as we were working. At first I was slightly irked by it, but then I realized that these kids have never known life without some sort of iPod-like device. After four years of music school, I still don't have an iPod, but this device is completely impacting generations of kids and how they interact socially.

Instead of plugging in, I took some time to think and wrote this after the trip:

When I felt the sun burning into my skin, the dryness of the air squeezing the moisture out of me, and the wind and sand whipping into my body I sort of began to understand what happened to my family. There's this weight around your heart and your soul when there's nothing but desolate stretches of wasteland and emptiness as far as you can see. It feels like hopelessness and desperation and an intense loneliness - like your neighbors and your state and your country have turned their backs and abandoned you in this horribly Godforsaken place. That your freedom, something so sacred to Americans, could be taken away for an interminable amount of time. I wanted to cry but everything was so dry that I couldn't.

I wanted for nothing more in the world than for my Grandma to still be alive so I could call her and tell her what I was doing. I wanted to ask her so badly where my family's barracks were, if she had visited the gardens that I shoveled out from under many feet of overgrowth and windblown sand, where the fire station where my grandpa volunteered was, and where my aunts and uncle had gone to school. Who the man was in the story she told me years ago, that was playing catch with his grandson and wandered too close to the perimeter to retrieve a ball and was shot by the military police because he only spoke Japanese and didn't understand when they told him to move away. But mostly I wanted to tell her that people were coming to Manzanar every day, and looking at the museum and that there were park rangers here from all over the U.S. who cared so deeply about protecting the site and its history. That I was doing
something small but important - helping other people to remember what had happened here and the things that are so much more important than differences and fear and hysteria. When I saw my grandparents in the roster of prisoners, and saw a photograph of my aunt going to
Pilgrimage in the museum there, I knew that what I was doing was important, and I want my kids to do this too. Learn the history of our people but not the anger and hate that I felt for so long.

Causing a Ruckus

In yet another attempt to force college students to stop downloading, the music filesharing service Ruckus has introduced yet another platform into the fray. You can download music onto your desktop for free, and share it with friends too, all legally. The catch? If you want to move your music off of your desktop and onto a mobile player, you have to pay. And it's not compatible with iPod. And the music, of course, is encoded with DRM.

The popularity of downloaded music is huge, and continues to grow. But the problem of illegal downloading has cramped the progress of the industry. It doesn't make sense to allow people to use the music "however they want," but people have gotten used to it and are rejecting DRM.

The University of Southern California, previously subscribing to Napster in a highly unsuccessful campaign to stop downloaders, recently began providing the Ruckus service to its entire student body. Coinciding with 125, the subscription was touted as a leap into the digital future. Interesting, but I don't think it will work. People are so used to BitTorrent, DC++ for public schools and other services that they have absolutely no problem "stealing" media. And when they aren't able to find what they want, people automatically go to iTunes. The 99-cent song/$9.99 album model makes everything seem like a deal, and in theory, you will then own that song forever - at least for your own personal use. For the subscription model, as soon as you get rid of your monthly service, you no longer have access to the songs. And this, for many people, is a deal-killer.

¿Puede la música latina ahorrar la industria?

In a time where record sales are pretty much universally tanking, there is one beacon of light in the shipwreck. The Latin music market has actually been growing slightly every year in terms of sales, giving the labels a bit of hope in a time of drastic changes. Unfortunately, this is a false hope.

The demographic that listens to Latin is quite different from your average consumer. The purchasing power driving these sales are reluctant to use the internet, or may not be savvy enough to be able to use downloading software. No matter what format the consumer is interested in, the demand for Latin music will continue to grow. And it is only a matter of time before the the digital revolution comes to Latin America.

In my experiences with my students at a local middle school, I found the Spanish-language boy band Rebelde extremely popular with the next wave of Latino young people. Part of the reggaeton revolution, rapper Pit Bull - who is slated to perform at the Shrine Auditorium - also commands an impressive sway over a younger, more technologically advanced fan base. As these fans grow older and begin to purchase music on their own, I predict that their purchasing method of choice will soon become digital downloads.

The trend is already implementing itself. Although iTunes, Napster or BitTorrent might not yet be household names in Latin America, times are changing. Digital downloads have increased by 15 times since 2005, with high quality ringtones for wireless devices comprising a good amount of that increase. This already shows a shift in the Latin American culture in general. With the explosive popularity of mobile devices, consumers are becoming less and less reluctant to forgo the CD format.

Big Bad RIAA vs. Little Red Trojan Hood

My ninth grade physics teacher always said that for every action, there was a consequence. And in this case, USC students must now come to terms with their misbehavior.

Today the Daily Trojan announced that the school has agreed to help the RIAA catch illegal downloaders - ostensibly students - on campus. The school provided access to information about how their networks are used, and rightfully so, but USC has been put in a difficult position. Do you protect your students or do you obey the law? Kind of a catch-22.

Right or wrong, USC will soon deliver letters to 20 students detailing their downloading misbehavior and offering them a settlement. However, even taking the settlement is bad news because the RIAA may fine you up to $150,000 per infringement, so for every song (file) swapped. Even if you do manage to avoid going to court, it will be expensive regardless.

The record labels have to deal with new and creative downloaders every day. For example, in Japan downloads to mobile devices total almost 350 million while downloads to PCs are only about 23 million. Kids in Japan have already moved on and are downloading directly to their phones, and comparatively ignoring their less-portable desktop computers.

So through all of this, there are going to be 20 very unhappy college students tomorrow. But it all comes back to my personal adage: Why pay for something you can't use however you want, when you could get the exact same thing for free off a file-sharing program that is DRM free?

How Bluetooth Faced Extinction

Although it may seem as if Bluetooth is making its first foray into the music industry, this is definitely not the case. Strangely, the famously wireless company has now released a desk-bound stereo set that is Bluetooth enabled. The idea behind this device is that you can easily play music beamed from your Bluetooth-capable mp3 player directly to the stereo. Sony has also come out with a Bluetooth-enabled amplification system that is even simpler. However, from $150 - $300 per system, I could be very easily convinced to burn mix CDs and physically pop them into a player.

What seems strange is that unlike the rest of the industry that is moving quickly to embrace the demand for portable, all-in-one devices such as the iPhone, some Black Berrys, etc., Bluetooth has created a non-portable, single function device.

Perhaps before they had tried to market Bluetooth-enabled mp3 devices such as the Diva Gem, which comes in three colors. And even earlier, the Sony HBM-40, a simple Bluetooth music-and-phone. Although perhaps these devices didn't sell that well when they were first introduced several years ago, but I think this type of device could be very popular today. People want portable, functional, durable devices that offer them wireless convenience. So before we all start wearing our music players, i definitely think this type of device would be more popular with today's consumer than it was when first introduced.

Dell's latest effort

One giant step backwards for mankind

It appears that the record companies are not willing to let go of DRM. Not only has Steve Jobs' plea to the record companies fallen on deaf ears, but music purveyors are finding new and more intrusive ways to bring DRM into our lives!

The RIAA is still hunting downloaders, most recently releasing a list of the top offenders in terms of college campuses. The worst offenders? Ohio, Purdue, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Tennessee and the University of South Carolina. They have sent out 15,000 complaints to the schools, which is triple the amount sent last year. And despite everything, music sales are still going down, which they claim is due in part to piracy. However, even though the record companies are working in concert to stop illegal downloading, a student at Amherst (the sixth worst offender on the list) said: "You know, downloading is such a part of student culture that college kids will never stop."

In another step back, BitTorrent has broken down and joined the ranks of the new Napster. They are planning to launch a site called the BitTorrent Entertainment Network which will legalize the software in the eyes of the law. However, just like iTunes, BitTorrent's legal material will be encoded with DRM. It makes sense...this company had been vilified in the eyes of the record labels, which were hesitant I'm sure to take on this deal. However, with Google's purchase of YouTube, the validity of the online video download market is quickly growing.

A recent study claims that 62% of record executives think that dropping DRM - so that people can use the songs on any mp3 player - will encourage people to increase online sales. So where's the action behind those words?