Month: October 2012

Why We Can’t Trust Subscription Music Services Like Rdio, Rhapsody, Spotify, MOG, etc.

In the post-CD world of music, the challenge is to keep our favorite songs forever even though we have nothing physical to hold and protect.  If your computer crashes or you lose your smart phone, can you recover all your favorite songs you’ve bought over the years?  (Or stolen.)

Digital music is in a total state of chaos.  I have songs in Windows Media Play, iTunes, Google Music, Amazon Cloud Player, iTunes Music Match and I have rights to listen to albums in Rdio, Rhapsody and Spotify, plus I own about 1500+ CDs.  No one site can play all the songs.

My favorite way to listen to music is via Rdio.  Rdio plays on all my computers at home and work.  It plays on my iPod touch, iPad 2, and it plays on my TV/stereo through a Roku box.  However, it doesn’t play all the albums I own, nor out-of-print albums, but it does play millions and millions of songs, so for 90% of what I want it’s excellent.  However, for those favorite songs it doesn’t have, it ruins the whole concept of subscription music.

For example, one of my favorite albums is No Guru No Method No Teacher by Van Morrison.  It’s now out-of-print, and I recently discovered that  when the song “Thanks for the Information” disappeared from my Songs Rated 10 playlist.  I thought I had it on CD, but evidently not.  I did have it on LP, but I got rid of my LPs years ago.

I probably didn’t get it on CD because it was on Rhapsody and Rdio and I got used to it being there, and thought it would always be there.  I was wrong, it’s been pulled.  I just ordered a used copy on Amazon for $10.25 + $2.98 shipping.  I’m sure I could have gone and found a stolen copy, but I’m not into that.  Once I get it I can rip it and put the songs on Amazon and Google.  I’m not renewing iTunes Music Match.

The problem is my favorite way to play my favorite songs is via playlists on Rdio.  Over time some songs disappear from subscription music services because the album goes out-of-print.  I HATE THAT!  I’ve been trusting subscription music services for years, and slowly it’s becoming obvious that if you really love a song and want to play it for the rest of your life you have to buy it.

But buying digital songs is iffy.  I’m trusting Amazon to always preserve the songs I buy from them – but what if Amazon goes out of business or gives up on Amazon Cloud Player?  How long will Amazon, iTunes and Google back up music if you buy it from them?  And what if they don’t sell the songs you want?

I should consider the CD as my master copy for life, but the CD format might not last that much longer.  Is the MP3 any kind of real archival medium?

Because music goes out-of-print and gets removed from Rdio and Rhapsody I’m going to have to change the way I listen to music.   I might need to move my playlists to Amazon Cloud Player (and maybe Google Music) and then use Rdio and Rhapsody as tools to discover music.  When I find a great song I want to listen to the rest of my life, I’m going to have to buy it and put it on Amazon Cloud Player.  I’m paying Amazon $20 a year to store the 20,000 songs I own so I can play them from all my computers and mobile devices.

Or I could stick with Rdio and just let out-of-print songs become forgotten songs.  I wish there was a way to upload out-of-print songs I own to Rdio so I could keep all my songs in one library.  Rdio is far superior to Amazon Cloud Player for managing playlists.  I can’t even find a way to delete a playlist on Amazon Cloud Player.

Why can’t I have all my music in one place where I can play it from all my devices?  Life was so much simpler when I had LPs and all the music I owned was on one bookshelf.  But back in those nostalgic times, I could only play that music in one place.  Now I can play my music anywhere, if I can keep up with all my song files.

JWH – 10/28/12

When I Was a Remote Control

If the remote control had been invented before 1951 I’m not sure my parents would have had me and my sister Becky.  As toddlers, my parents taught us how to change the channels on our Sears black and white TV, so they could laze on the couch smoking their Camels and Winstons and drink Seagram 7 and Canada Dry ginger ale while we twirled the knob to locate Topper or Have Gun Will Travel.

tv-1950s

Kids born today come out of the womb with giant IQs, able to handle hundreds of stations and dozens of gadgets.  I wonder if my four-year old self from 1955 could have competed with a 2012 four year old at all?  If my parents were still alive, I wonder if they’d long for the days when things were simple without all these goddamn gadgets.  Life was easier with a Kid Channel Flipper, or the Rug Rat Reciting TV Guide.  Oh yeah, that was another childhood duty – to memorize the TV schedule and let my folks know when their favorite shows were on.  It’s also why my parent’s generation had so many kids.  We baby boomers were conceived to manage TV technology for the Greatest Generation, or the radio generation.

Today, anyone with a finger can change the channel, and onscreen guides have made the Rug Rat Reciting TV Guide go the way of the Bad Child Switch Fetcher.  If political correctness had been invented before 1951 and my parents told that kid herding couldn’t involve belts and switches, they’d definitely been willing to get off their Brooks Brothers covered butts and do their own TV knob twirling.

I’ve seen some real cultural and social changes in my lifetime due to fantastic inventions like the TV clicker and screen guide.  Young people really have no idea how hard life was back in the 1950s.   Toddlers today are whizzes at iPads, but could they have dialed a rotary phone?  OK, I admit they could – modern tot nerds would beat wee baby boomers at any kind of pre-school smack down.  We never had any of those fancy Sesame Street advantages, but we did have to work harder for less rewards, which us boomers like to brag is character building.

TV was dinosaur primitive back then, with small low-rez screens that frequently got out of adjustment so you had to fine tune the vertical and horizontal hold knobs just right to see a steady, but grainy black and white picture.  And that picture had visible scan lines.   There was an array of other knob-less adjustment dials inconveniently located on the back of the set that required a screw driver to twist and mirror to see the results.  If you were too lazy to get the dressing mirror off the back of the closet door you could try to talk someone into describing the picture while subtly adjusting the settings from verbal clues.  What a lost art!

Also, TVs had vacuum tubes instead of solid state devices, and when a tube blew you had to get dad to drive you to the 7 Eleven. While he waited drinking his Schlitz in the Pontiac, you dashed inside to run the tube tester and hopeful find the arcane coded replacement in the test cabinet.  All this just to see some show call Huckleberry Hound that was so moronic you’d poke your eyes to avoid seeing it today but your seven year old self thought state of Eisenhower era pop art brilliance.

But back to the future – or our present.  Even though today’s TV pictures are rock solid, hi-rez, and huge, the show selection takes more brain power to select than that famous wild hair guy figuring out general relativity.

Now this brings us to the greatest invention in television history:  Netflix streaming.  It’s not perfect, but it’s almost as easy as Samantha’s twitch of her cute magical nose.  If they could only combine Siri with the Netflix interface, and we could sit in our recliners like Captain Picard and tell the HDTV what show we wanted and then say the words, “Make it so” we’d all reach video nirvana.

Recently I had to anxiously wait for Netflix to send me Blu-ray discs of Season 3 of Glee after watching Season 1 and Season 2 via their streaming service.  Don’t get me wrong, a Blu-ray picture and sound is Breaking Bad better than the current state of Netflix best streaming resolution, but the convenience of clicking to Glee on the Roku is Friday Night Lights goodness.

What a philosophical conundrum!  Fantastic picture versus fat-ass lazy highness.  Well, you know which one we’ll always choose, don’t you?

Music on iTunes iPhones is 5 transistor* radio crappy, but it’s what people prefer over the pain-in-the-ass fetch the CD and put it in the player hard work.

Streaming video and music is going to kill off the CD, DVD and BD disc.  So it goes, as Mr. Vonnegut used to say.  Vinyl, formerly known as the LP, is making a technological comeback, even through it requires the physical effort of storing albums, cleaning them, and playing them on mechanical players.  I’m sure it’s a passing fad.

If you pay attention to technology there are two consistent trends.  First, the evolution towards fewer moving parts.  Second, the evolution of ease of use.  We’re all heading to a future of moronic simplicity and slothfulness.

I love the CD and Blu-ray disc for their wonderful high resolution music and video, but they are goners.  Resting on my big motionless butt enjoying the brilliance of streaming music and video will always overcome the theoretical desire for high fidelity and high definition.

My wife and I never had children.  We never needed them.  We grew up with the remote control.  If you charted this essay on a graph, it would show the decline of civilization.  Well, like I said before, so it goes.  If you don’t believe we’re actually devolving with all this technological evolution, just picture this:  The Victorians had to play their own musical instruments if they wanted to hear music.  Even cavemen could drum like crazy man.  Imagine what Spotify would have done to the British Empire.

Stream with the flow.  Make it so.

JWH – 10/22/12

* When I was a kid, the cutting edge technology of portable sound was the transistor radio.  They came with a single mono earplug, and you listened to AM radio.  Of course 1961-1968 AM radio was the peak of musical genius in the 20th century.  These transistor radios were about the size of a iPhone (which by the way have millions of transistors) and  a tinny sound.  50 years later, I think portable sound still sounds tiny and tinny.   Listening to The Beatles on an iPhones makes them sound like they are five inches tall.

I Need A New TV Show!

I just finished 70 episodes of Glee and I need a new TV show to feed my TV addiction.  I’m not a super binger like those described by John Jurgensen in “Binge Viewing:  TV’s Lost Weekends.”  This Wall Street Journal article reported on heavy weight TV bingers like Chad Rohrbacher who watched 22 straight hours of Breaking Bad in one sitting.  I’m a fly weight when it comes to binge TV watch, just watching 2-3 episodes at a time.  At the end of the day, I love to have one or two episodes of a fabulous TV show to watch before I go to bed.  And if they’re really fantastic I might stay up past my bedtime to watch a third.

breaking-bad

Having a TV series that covers several TV seasons is like having a very long novel to read before falling asleep.  I recently read Anna Karenina, which clocked in at 42 hours on audio.  That’s about three seasons of Big Love or The Sopranos.

Before I watched all of Glee I watched all of Breaking Bad.  I go months without a TV show fix because I can’t always find a series insanely great enough to trigger the addictive response.  I really hate when I don’t have a TV show to look forward to each day.  I’m in one of those dry periods now, and I need a new TV show!  I ache with TV withdrawal.

That’s kind of sick when you think about it – I should use these long periods on the wagon to go cold turkey and break this habit, but I don’t want to.  I should work on my novel.  I should write on my blog.  I should finish the essays I’m writing.  But instead, I want to veg out with another epic TV series.  I know this is the worst kind of escapism – I’m turning off reality and switching on virtual reality.  But this kind of TV is fiction at its very best, and I’m a life-long fiction junky.

Here’s my problem.  I need GREAT television to feed my addiction.  Merely good, is not good enough.  I thought after Friday Night Lights, Downtown Abbey and Breaking Bad that I’d never find television that good again.  Then I discovered Glee.  Now, it’s not that Glee is better than those shows, but the shear creative innovation that went into Glee made it stand out.  I was hooked on it’s extreme novelty.  Now, I’m going through Glee withdrawal.

It seems every TV series I consume must be better than all the ones before it.  And sadly, re-watching old favorites don’t ease the cravings.  Neither do shows that are self-contained in each episode.  I need long story arcs.  I need my nightly soap opera.

From the WSJ article, Jurgensen describes the social change that’s going on.

Binge viewing is transforming the way people watch television and changing the economics of the industry. The passive couch potato of the broadcast era turned into the channel surfer, flipping through hundreds of cable channels. Now, technologies such as on-demand video and digital video recorders are giving rise to the binge viewer, who devours shows in quick succession—episode after episode, season after season, perhaps for $7.99 a month, the cost of a basic Netflix membership. In the past, such sessions required buying stacks of costly DVDs ($66.99 for seasons one through four of “Mad Men”) or special broadcast marathons.

Having a great TV show to look forward to each week was the standard way I watched TV for almost fifty years.  Then came DVD box sets and that changed everything.   Thinking of TV as whole seasons was a game changer.

Now with Netflix, where you can pick a show like Glee and have 66 episodes waiting to be seen one after another.  That’s another quantum leap in TV watching.  Is it good or bad?  I don’t know.  I don’t care.  I love it.  It’s better than binge eating, it’s even better than drugs, may even be better than sex.

I think the first TV show I watched from first episode to last in a binge fashion was Northern Exposure, when it was first syndicated.  I printed an episode guide off the Internet and watched its entire 110 episodes.  After that I watched seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, starting with season one and catching so I could watch season seven live.  Battlestar Galactica was another show I caught up with before watching the last season live.  That also happened with Breaking Bad and Friday Night Lights.  I watched the final season not on cable, but on Amazon, buying the new episodes a day late.  I prefer to have shows I binge on to be finished, or have many successful seasons.

So, if you know of a great TV show to recommend, please let me know.  Here’s are the ones I’ve already discovered – in no particular order.

  • Breaking Bad
  • Glee
  • Friday Night Lights
  • Big Love
  • Sopranos
  • ER
  • Dexter
  • Weeds
  • Californication
  • Six Feet Under
  • Deadwood
  • Mad Men
  • Hell on Wheels
  • Dead Like Me
  • Most Masterpiece Theater shows
  • Battlestar Galactica
  • Lost
  • United States of Tara
  • Nurse Jackie
  • True Blood
  • Rescue Me

JWH – 10/21/12

How Many Books Would You Have to Buy to Manipulate Amazon’s Author Rank Page?

How many friends would a writer need to buy their books to get on Amazon Author Rank page?

Amazon says it’s Amazon Author Rank pages are based on hourly sales.  The New Times Best  Seller list seems based on weekly sales.  We don’t know if Amazon is basing their rankings on hourly total sales, or the weekly sales looked at hourly.  So I’m speculating here.  I sorely wished Amazon gave the actual number of books sold.  That would be fascinating.

Let’s say there are 730 hours in a month on average.  If a book sells a million copies in one month, it’s selling at 1370 books an hour.

There is 168 hours in a week, so if a book sells a million copies in one week, then it’s selling 5,952 copies an hour.

It would be very expensive to manipulate the Author Rank page if books are selling that fast.  However, few books sell in the millions.

Let’s drop down into the Science Fiction Author section for books, not Kindle sales, where we see many less famous authors, and book sales are less furious.  Would it be possible to affect the Author Rank at this level?

My favorite science fiction author is Robert. A. Heinlein.  He’s currently #34 on this list (#36 when I started writing).  How many books would we have to buy in one hour to bump him to the #25 spot?  Heinlein has been dead for a long time, so it’s surprising his continual sales are so high.

heinlein-author-rank 

How successful is #34 on this list?  Amazon represents book sales for all of America.  So in any given hour how many people think, “Wow, I’m in the mood for a Heinlein book?”  What if that number is 25 books?  That’s a rate of 219,000 books a year.  If he sold 100 an hour that would be 876,000 books.  Remember, these rankings are based on sales of all books sold by the author.  My guess is Heinlein sells between 25-100 books an hour.  That’s just a hunch. 

And what if the #25 position author sold just 50 books to get to that position?  If I could talk 25 people into buying Heinlein books Saturday morning at 10am Eastern time, would his sales rank jump in the 11 o’clock hour to #25? 

Maybe the #25 position is selling 100-400 books an hour – too many to manipulate easily, but almost any news about Heinlein on TV, or in  magazines, or even on the Internet, could sell that many books.

Let’s imagine Heinlein is profiled on CBS Sunday Morning.  This won’t happen, but it might for a newer science fiction writer.  Such a lucky bit of press could send her to the top of the Science Fiction list for Authors, or even put her on the main Author Rank list.

The current author at the bottom of the Science Fiction Author Rank page is Mark Kalina with a single 99 cent ebook, Hegemony.  It shouldn’t even be on this list because I picked the Books list rather than the Kindle list, however, there he is with a single self published novel.

I’m thinking it doesn’t take too many book sales to get on this list, but it takes a lot of sales to get near the top.

I’m curious why Lois McMaster Bujold is at #63.  Bujold is a very popular writer with many award winning books in print.  Sales of all those books add to her Author Rank sales totals.  So why are many unknown writers selling Kindle books beating Bujold in the rankings?  My only guess is science fiction sells very few books per hour.  So an ebook author selling several $1.99 titles out sells a major author selling many physical books from $7.99 to $25.

I really can’t believe Heinlein is outselling Bujold.  I hear far more people talk about reading Bujold than Heinlein.

Either that, or Amazon Author Rank Beta isn’t working very well.

Selling ebooks cheap must be big business.  It might also imply that the science fiction book marketplace is very tiny.

Does this mean selling $1.99 ebooks leads to more fame and profit than selling physically printed books that sell for much more money per copy?

I really wished Amazon would put the total sales with the rank numbers.  Like:

Robert A. Heinlein #34 (127 books sold from 27 titles, for $13,750)

JWH – 10/15/12

The Implications of Amazon’s Author Rank Page

Amazon has a beta program for ranking book sales by author that is somewhat controversial, at least with some writers, according to the LA Times.

Amazon says the rankings are based on all books sold by an author updated hourly .  I assume it’s total sales for the previous hour, and not total cumulative sales.  This is a new, never before seen, way to look at book sales I think.

Before the Internet,  the premier best seller list for books was the New York Times Best Sellers list.  If a you got on it, you were made as a writer.  Now there are zillions of best seller lists, but probably the most important one is Amazon.com sales ranking for all books.  Amazon is such a powerhouse at selling books that their sales rankings are a national poll showing the reading interests of the American public.

Amazon is now taking the book buying pulse of Americans based on an author’s sales hourly.  That’s kind of cool.

amazon-author-ranking

However, Amazon isn’t the be-all-end-all of bookselling, as John Scalzi so carefully points out.

Among my online book club friends, they commonly complain that Amazon’s new Author Rank list doesn’t reflect 1) quality of writing, 2) their favorite writers or 3) the best authors according to whoever.   But was that ever the point of best seller lists?

I think we need to take the Amazon Author Rank pages with several grains of salt.  Let’s assume they don’t reflect true U.S. sales, writing quality or best of anything.  Let’s just assume it’s a Gallup Poll for what readers are buying every hour of the day, what do the various Author Rankings tell us?  In polling, the quality of the poll depends on the sample size, and Amazon’s sale figures are a huge sample size.

The fact the E. L. James is the #1 best selling author at Amazon (her books 4, 5, 6 on the current NY Times combined list), and Sylvia Day is #2 (#1 on NY Times) is very revealing.  It bugs me that people criticizes Amazon’s Author Ranking system as a huge failure because they hate E. L. James for whatever reason, but usually because they think she’s a bad writer.  Big fucking not the deal.  Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.  Americans are gobbling up James’ erotic novels like there’s no tomorrow, so what does that mean?

We’ve long heard the truism – sex sells – and boy is this proof.  I just finished a book Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace, about sexual repressed Victorian English society of 1858, but the success of E. J. James makes me wonder if we’re not just as repressed 154 years later?  I know I’m going to be shot down for being sexist, but are the huge sales of erotic and romance novels bought by women telling us something about women in general that’s not being reported in the news and literature.  In another 154 years will future writers explain all the clues were there in our times about some huge gender issue we’re not recognizing now?

Romance, mystery, fantasy writers dominate the main Amazon Author Ranking.  Men read these genres, but I think the general impression is these kinds of books mostly appeal to women.  I’m not saying writers on the list don’t appeal to men (how many women read Andrew Peterson) but one impression from studying the list over the past couple days is books women readers love dominate book sales.  I know this is unscientific, but study the list and tell me what you think.  And I think I’ve read more than once that women really do buy more books than men.

My favorite genres writers are pretty much a no-show on the overall author rank list.  I love science and science fiction.  And please don’t point to all the fantasy books and say science fiction is well represented.  The Amazon Author Rankings change hourly, so it’s hard to generalize about what it reveals.  Philip K. Dick started out at #18 when the LA Times wrote it’s piece.  He was #50 yesterday and #84 this morning, and #93 right now as I write this.  Two days ago Amazon had a ebook sale on several PKD’s ebooks for $1.99 each.  I’m pretty sure that got him on the list.

See, the rankings aren’t about writing quality but so many other factors.  It’s very revealing about how to sell books.  Here are some other factors I see contributing from watching the Author Rankings.

  • Movies sell books (Argo, Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Cloud Atlas authors are on this list because of them)
  • Writing a popular book series that stay in print (many example)
  • Being a very popular writer with many books in print (Stephen King and Nora Roberts)
  • Writing a current bestseller (Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s Killing Kennedy)
  • Writing something sexy (E. L. James, Sylvia Day, Gillian Flynn)
  • Being a mega best selling writer with a new book (J. K. Rowling)
  • Winning the Nobel Prize in Literature (Mo Yan)
  • Having a TV series on HBO (George R. R. Martin, Charlaine Harris)
  • Being a fictional writer on TV (Richard Castle)
  • Writing about heaven (M. D. Eben Alexander III, Todd & Colton Burpo, Mary C. Neal)
  • Amazon puts your books on sale (Philip K. Dick)
  • You’re an innovative self-publisher (Hugh Howey)

But that doesn’t explain all.  How come Octavia Butler, who died several years ago, come in at #20 on the Author Rankings at this moment?  And she is #1 on the Science Fiction author rankings.  Butler was a ground breaking African-American science fiction writer whose reputation is still growing.  Are enough kids being assigned to read her books in school a possible consideration for her being on the list at the moment?  I don’t know, but I would like to know.

That’s the thing about studying the Author Rankings.  I want to know why these authors are popular at given given moment.  Some writers are just perennial best sellers with a huge backlist of books that are constantly selling.  I have never heard of Debbie Macomber (#28) in my life, but I’ve discovered from the Author Ranking list she’s sold more than a 100 million books and been on the New York Times Best Seller list 55 times.  I have to ask myself if I’m missing out by never having read one of her books.

I love the idea of sub-cultures, and I think every genre and sub-genre, appeal to different sub-cultures of American readers.  Reading the Amazon Author Rankings makes me want to try new authors and genres out just to see what I’m missing.

The main page for Amazon Author Rank Beta is for all books.  But you can drill down into Kindle and Books, and then pick a one of these sub-headings:

  • Biographies & Memoirs
  • Business & Investing
  • Health, Fitness & Dieting
  • History
  • Literature & Fiction
  • Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
  • Religion & Spirituality
  • Romance
  • Science Fiction & Fantasy
  • Self-Help
  • Teens

Where’s Science, Math & Technology?  Or Non-fiction?  Some categories have sub-categories, like Science Fiction & Fantasy are broken into two separate categories.  But they aren’t accurate.  I don’t consider The Game of Thrones series by George R. R. Martin to be science fiction.  But the advantages of having sub-groups, and even sub-sub-groups is to reveal the popularity of more authors.  The Science Fiction category under Science Fiction & Fantasy shows the continual success of such classic SF writers as Asimov #23, Heinlein #29, Niven #41, Herbert #45, Clarke #83.  It’s great these old writers still appeal to new readers – but it also shows a long list of emerging new writers.  Because of playing with the author rankings, I bought The Complete Atopia Chronicles by Matthew Mather, a writer I’ve never heard of before.  And I shall return to try out more new writers when I finish reading it.

If I was a budding young author I’d be sorely tempted to start writing a genre series based on a continuing character, even though I strongly dislike reading such books.  If your goal is to make money, this technique seems to boost your chances for success.  It must also mean that bookworms love series and continuing characters.

I wish Amazon would expand the lists beyond 100 slots.  I’d love to see the Top 1,000 authors or titles in Amazon’s listings, but for most people that would be too many.  However, if they just expanded it to the Top 200 so many more writers would get noticed.  Adding 100 more slots would make a tremendous difference.

To see what I mean, look at Sci-Fi Lists Top Sci-Fi Books.  Then look at the Next 100 List.    If you are familiar with the classic books of science fiction, you’ll see why expanding the list to 200 entries is so important.

The more I play with Amazon’s Author Rank page, the more fun I have with it.  But then I’ve always been fond of lists.

JWH – 10/14/12