jameswharris

Web Sites I Want – Best Essays from Printed Magazines

Even with the social bookmarking sites, reading from the internet is like drinking from a fire hose. What I’d like to see is highly selective bookmarking site, and in particular, the one I’d love to have most would be Best Essays From Printed Magazines. The top writing on the net is usually reprinted from the major print magazines, but those essays are overshadowed by the gigantic volume of web journalism. Hey, I’m a blogger and love getting readers, and I love reading blogs, but the heaviest of the heavy duty essays are still from print magazines. The cutthroat survival of the fittest in the print magazine industry by its very nature acquires the best writing.

That’s why I’d like a site that helps me find the best essays over 1,000 words. Adding the length requirement is important because too many magazines have gone to filling up their pages with short web level writing. Social bookmarking sites like delicious and StumbleUpon are great for snacking on popcorn and candy level reads, but not so yummy if you’re looking for literary steak. Yes, they will link to long quality essays from printed magazines, but you have to wade through zillions of peanut size stories of questionable value, more akin to Television’s funniest videos in informational nutrition.

No, I want a site that’s very specific and limited. I’d like an editorial board that selects the Top 100 magazines that publishes their content on the web, and offers a system that lets users bookmark and vote on the best essays they are reading. Hell, I’d even pay to subscribe to such a site if they got permission to reprint articles that don’t get reprinted on the web.

The web has gotten too big and mangy, so when I want to know something I go to a specific site, mainly Wikipedia. I’ve given up subscribing to magazines, mainly because I’m against paper for environmental reasons, but also because when I was subscribing to dozens of magazines, all too often I’d only find a good article here and there. Most of the content was filler, like the web. I guess I’ve gotten spoiled by the iTunes model – who wants to buy an album when it’s the hit song you want. This is why I prefer Netflix to cable TV. We need more ways to cut out the noise.

Here’s are examples of the kind of long essays I’d like to read:

Publish or Perish (The New Yorker)
How to Save the News (The Atlantic)
Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists (Wired)
A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome (Science)
Yes, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare (Times Literary Supplement)
L.A.’s Pot Revolution (Reason)
Green Giant (The New Yorker)

I guess what I really want is a web version of the Best American Series to be published monthly, instead of the yearly printed volumes they have now. And if they wanted to make extra money, reprint the monthly web site editions as ebooks for $9.99 for Kindles, Nooks, iPads, etc.

JWH – 5/12/10

“—All You Normal Zombies—"

Ontology is a fancy word that few people use but we all seek to understand. Imagine a stoned hippie with a Cheech & Chong accent asking, “Hey man, where the fuck did we come from?” That essentially explains ontology. Robert A. Heinlein wrote the definitive science fiction ontological story called “—All You Zombies—“ in which every character in the tale, both male and female, turns out to be the same person. Heinlein used time travel and a sex change operation to create an infinite ontological loop to explain his character’s existence. In the end, he/she tells the reader she knows where she came from but asks them, what about all you zombies. So how do you and I explain our ontology?

In ancient times we had hordes of mythological beings to answer every question about existence, but by the time I got around to being born there were only three left, the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and God. In the first grade my fellow students killed off the first two. And like all kids who grow up to become atheists, I asked the fatal question that killed God when I was quite young, “If God created everything, then who created God?” Parents hate that question because they know their offspring will grow up to be annoying know-it-all heathen brats.

Most of the billions of souls that inhabit this world stopped their ontological exploration as soon as they heard about the concept of God. This is quite revealing. It says most people aren’t really that into ontology. They obviously don’t care for the gritty detailed explanations of existence, or truly want to know how we got here, because the God answer is no more realistic than the Santa Claus solution for explaining presents under the tree on Christmas morning. For most, it is satisfying.

The God solution is easy to acquire, the concept being quite viral, and addictive, and very hard to throw off. Usually only a few words from a preacher, yogi, shaman, rabbi, priest, spoken to the youthful, will instill a lifelong ontological belief that God created everything. Nice story, but too bad it’s not true. The reason why this idea sells so well is because it comes with promise of eternal life.

Ontological reality appears to be quite different. Science can follow the origins of existence back 13.7 billion years, but now suggests that a multiverse existence has been around for an infinitely long time, and further suggests, it will continue to be around just as long afterwards, in the other direction of time. Our universe had a birth and will have a death, just like us. So on a local scale, everything is finite. Thus asking where reality comes from becomes meaningless, and we move into existentialism.

The real question of ontology becomes more immediate, “Where did I come from?” If you can see beyond the theological, you will know that an infinite amount of time existed before you were born, and an infinite amount of time will exist after you die, so the essential aspect of reality is the few years we get to know existence. Can you explain who you are and how you got that way? After decades of life, I think I can.

I come from a dysfunctional family – my parents were alcoholics, my mother suffered from depression and was probably bi-polar, and my father, from what I can piece together, also came from a dysfunction family, joined the military, which he worshipped, because it was a family substitute that gave him structure. Before I and my sister were born, I believe my parents had a relatively happy and stable life following wherever the U.S. Air Force led them. I was born on their sixth wedding anniversary, and my sister, two years later. We were too much stress for their fragile marriage. My father was restless, and asked for transfers. We moved almost every year of my life until I finished high school, when my father died. I only had two school years where I attended one school, and two years where I went to three schools in one year, and all the rest I attended two schools for each grade.

Who I am is explained in that paragraph. I don’t blame my parents for anything. They had their own problems to cope with, and I was lucky to learn that at an early age. It did take me awhile. Up until high school I was embarrassed to bring friends home because I was afraid one of my parents might be home drunk or passed out. Then the sixties really began, and things changed, and I’d bring friends home and point to my parents and say they were on their own strange trip. However, this upbringing created my personality which makes me isolated from most of humanity.

Growing up I’d see all you normal zombies walking around and wished I had your life. I dreamed about being born into a family that lived in one place, where I made lifelong friends, and knew the same people all through my K-12 education. I wished I had gotten a proper social education where I could belong to groups without feeling like an alien. That was not meant to be, and probably explains why I could escape the trap of theology. But it left me lonely.

Even though I’ve been married for thirty something years, probably in reaction to my parents doomed marriage, I can’t achieve It’s A Wonderful Life integration. I really wanted family ontology to be Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver, and all those other black and white TV myths I grew up with. We all want myths, but what we get is reality. I live in a reality of mental isolation.

With the study of science I have explanations for most aspects of reality back 13.7 billion years. I spend my time reading books and watching documentaries that add more pieces to a very consistent puzzle, so I’m pretty sure where I came from, but I’m not sure about all you normal zombies. Your stories explaining existence scare me. But I’ve got to accept your beliefs in religion like I accepted my parents strange trip they were on.

[This essay is what happens when I wake up at 4 am and can’t go back to sleep.]

JWH – 5/11/10

Rhapsody 2.0 App for iPhone/iPad/touch

This video really says it all.

Now, the implications are something else. 9,000,000 songs on my iPod touch for $9.99 a month sort of competes with what Apple is selling at their iTunes Store. However, Rhapsody isn’t trying to sell songs to iPhone/iPod/touch users – in fact, if you click the buy button inside the Rhapsody 2.0 App, Rhapsody directs your request to iTunes. That’s very gracious of Rhapsody. Or was that the price for Rhapsody to get into Apple’s App Store? I don’t know, but it works for me. Why buy songs when you can rent them so cheaply?

I loaded the Rhapsody 2.0 App on my touch, logged in, picked my current favorite playlist, and started playing music. A breeze. All the existing playlists I’ve built on my regular Rhapsody account showed up. Right now you can search on albums and songs within the app, and add them to a playlist for playing, but as this video promises, soon we’ll be able to play songs and albums directly, without adding them to a list. Although, I’m thinking it might be easier to always use the playlist, but make one called “New Albums To Try” and then when Tuesday rolls around, put anything I want to listen to on it, and clean it out before next Tuesday.

And I tried the trick in the video of downloading my the songs in the playlist and then shutting off the Wi-Fi. The 55 songs on my Songs Rated 10 played instantly. Very cool. I have a first generation iPod touch and it drains the battery very fast when Wi-Fi is on, so this is a great feature for me.

It took me a bit of poking to find the random play and repeat play buttons – they are hidden away on the song time scale that only shows up if you touch the screen near the top of the album cover. When a song plays you get cover photo to look at, and behind it if you hit the info i button, you’ll get a short essay about the artist. Overall, the app does everything I want but I’m expecting some nice surprises in future versions.

Rhapsody is a subscription music service and most music fans don’t cotton to that marketing model. Those that do love it. It’s another reason why Apple allowed Rhapsody in their app store, because renting music is so unappealing to the masses. This latest version of Rhapsody (the service, not the app) is cheaper and has more features.

And it makes a lot of sense to stream music to a phone where people have limited storage space. I’d need a 128GB iPhone to store the songs I own. Streaming 9 million songs works just as easily with an 8gb phone as a 16gb or 32gb model. Because the Rhapsody 2.0 app lets you pick out albums using your mobile device, you don’t even have to mess with a desktop other than to sign up the first time.

Rhapsody is great for people who like to try a lot of new music. It doesn’t take much effort to try out 20-30 new albums a month, and of those, I might add 10 songs to a playlist. I won’t own those 10 songs, but I will have tried a lot of new albums. It’s pretty cool to read your favorite music review magazine and just play the album while you’re reading the review.

It’s also convenient to have all your favorite songs and albums tagged into playlists for quick and easy access. Think of an artist, group, album or song and type it in the search box. If Rhapsody has it you can play it. I’d say 90-95% of what you can think of is available. There are a few famous holdouts, like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. If I could convince Rhapsody to change anything, I’d ask them not to sell songs and albums from artists that don’t stream. I don’t like paying to promote their work.

Generally where Rhapsody and other subscription services are weak is for finding out of print albums. Of course, no one else is selling them either. This is why people should still buy CDs. Any time you find an album you really love, buy it on CD to save forever, because even in the digital world where keeping things in print would be a snap, albums disappear into obscurity.

JWH – 5/2/10

Your Life in the Cloud

Cloud computing is a hot topic in the computer world, but if you’re not a tech geek you may be wondering about the term. In the early days of networking, when system administrators drew diagrams of their local networks they’d have little symbols for their computers, printers, hubs, wiring, but when it came to picturing the connection to the outer world, they’d draw a cloud. Eventually, they’d draw a cloud and write Internet over it.

The cloud was just a mysterious place at the edge of their map. Back in the old days, they’d describe two networks, the LAN (local area network) and the WAN (wide area network), but the WAN just meant all the branch offices. The Internet tied all the LANs and WANs into one big world wide network. Any computer equipment you don’t manage is part of the cloud.

The shift to cloud computing means trusting other people with your data, programs, and even CPU processing. Picture this. The old way was taking photos, processing them with Picasa, and keeping your snaps on your laptop. The new way is taking photos, uploading them to Picnik, crop and process them in your browser, and then creating a Show to send your friends to view online. Nothing really happens on your computer. You use your computer to manipulate photos at a distance. It doesn’t even matter what kind of computer you have, Mac, PC or Linux.

Now, there are pros and cons to cloud computing. If your computer is stolen, you don’t lose your photos. But if Picnik goes out of business, you do. But Picnik was just bought by Google, so hint, hint, see the direction of things? Google already has Picasa, so why would they want Picnik?

Well, a little story might explain that. In the fabled old days of writing computer programs, a programmer would develop and test a program, and then take it to each computer in the building and install it, and then wait for the users to find more bugs. If your business had PCs and Macs, you’d have to write two versions of the program. If the OSes were upgraded, you’d sometimes have to rewrite your programs. It was a pain. If the boss wanted a new feature, you’d rewrite the program, and then walk around and reinstall the program on all the machines again. A bigger pain. Then came web based programs. You write one program that runs on a web server that worked with PCs, Macs, and Linux machines. No more going around installing on individual computers.

Right now when Google updates Picasa everyone has to download and install the upgrade. If Google switches everyone to Picnik, all that goes away. They no longer have to worry about supporting millions of users, or maintaining PC and Mac versions of their programs. But it does mean they need to offer users a lot more disk space to upload their photos to. Instead of keeping your photos just on your computer, you can also put them on Google’s computers, in the cloud. If you are trusting, you could even delete the photos off your camera and computer. In other words, you are letting Google be your hard drive, at least for photos. And if you use Google Docs, you are letting them be your hard drive for word processing and spreadsheet documents.

Cloud computing has tremendous ramifications. Can you trust the cloud? Actually, can you trust the companies that maintain a cloud presence? Many people aren’t trusting by nature. I assume they might use the cloud, but keep copies of everything they own on their PC and backup drives. But what if there were more security features to the cloud? What if you could back up your stuff on Google to SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage? Or what if something like databanks emerged, that offered the same security for your data as they do for your money? What if there were governmental regulations and safeguards to data stored in the cloud?

Let me assure you of something, you will want the cloud to work and be safe because it will make your computing life infinitely easier. It would mean the end of viruses, and new computers that run slower and slower, and computers that start acting weird in ways you can’t understand. Computers could become solid-state devices with no moving parts, and the OS could be burned in ROM, so they can’t be changed, or infected, and your machine could become instant on, like a TV. And the OS wars will be over too, no more I’m a Mac, I’m a PC commercials, even though they were cute.

This is explained in “The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash” by Charlie Stross, the cutting edge science fiction writer, and over at TechCrunch in “Apple’s Secret Cloud Strategy and Why Lala is Critical” by Michael Robertson. It’s why the iPad and iPhone are more important now to Apple than the Mac. It’s why Intel is worried about its dominance of Intel Inside chips. It’s why Google is trying to take over the world with Android. It’s why Netflix can get almost any kind of device to stream videos directly to your TV. It’s why the iPad can run blazingly fast on a 1Ghz processor.

When everything is moved into the cloud, computers can become very simple. Steve Jobs knows that in the future no one will pay extra bucks to own a Mac. It’s why the iPad started out so cheap that HP and Microsoft cancelled their tablets. Computers will go through a paradigm change like when they morphed from mainframes/minis into microcomputers, that caused the personal computer revolution. For decades the network computer has been predicted, but it’s taking a while to emerge. Network computers can only succeed if everyone has fast broadband.

You are already living in the cloud if you use Netflix to stream movies. You are already living in the cloud if you do your banking online. Most people who did their taxes this year used cloud programs rather than installing TurboTax on their machine. Most people store their photos in the cloud. Soon you’ll store your music in the cloud. Eventually they will make video cameras that have WiFi and your video will be saved immediately to the cloud. If you watch Hulu, you are getting your TV from the cloud. When you put your medical records online, they will be filed in the cloud.

I use Safari Books Online, and so I read computer books from the cloud. Kindles and Nooks could just as easily display pages of books from the cloud instead of downloading whole books. I read my newspaper on the cloud. I’m starting to read magazines on the cloud.

Now I’m sure some of you are wondering why invent a new word for the Internet. Or we could simplify everything by just calling it the net. Everything will be on the net. The distinction is that your old computer and hard drive are on the net now. They are a node on the Internet. Using the term cloud implies the that node is different. It should eventually do away with hard drives, and seldom mentioned, but also do away with printers. If you combined tablet computers with cloud computing you can do away with paper.

One of my tasks at work is to monitor the helpdesk tickets for my college, so I know what kind of problems pester users every day. Cloud computing will make most of the problems I see now disappear. Sadly, it will put a lot of tech support guys out of work. If one geek guru can support a hundred users now, he or she will be able to support five hundred in the future. But this won’t happen overnight.

Most businesses will not let their workers put business documents in the cloud any time soon, but I expect most students to start saving their work to the cloud now. Why spend big bucks for Microsoft Office when you can use Google Docs or Windows Live for free? Poor OpenOffice should just fade away. All the free cloud computing services will convince home users and students to switch pretty quick. Business will install SitePoint and create their own private cloud services for awhile, but when security and privacy get better, I bet they will move to paid cloud services.

Using the cloud will cost money. We see a lot of free services now, but it will be tiered, so if you want more or better functions, you will pay. Picnik is a good example. I’m expecting iTunes 10 to incorporate Lala technology in a way that puts personally owned songs into the cloud. Whether Apple sells us the space or gives it to us is another issue. I’m thinking as long as you’re a loyal iTunes shopper, Apple might give their customers lifetime space, but we’ll see.

I’m anxious to see what Steve Jobs announces in June. Apple has leaped into the forefront of the cloud computing revolution with the iPad and iPhone. By fiercely controlling its App Store, it controls the quality of its cloud experience. That was a brilliant move on Apple’s part. I would expect further control in the future. It’s great to say you have over a 100,000 apps, but it’s another thing to say you have 10,000 A+ quality apps. I see the iPad as the model of future computers. Personal computing wild west days are over.

Right now computer users can muck up their machines by installing anything they want, or carelessly allow hackers to install dangerous programs on their machines. If all applications came from a tightly control app store, then things will be different. I expect the replacement for Windows to be an OS tied to an app store, so Microsoft can control the entire experience. I’m not sure what the Open Source crowd will think.

Right now the iPad represents a hybrid of cloud computing. It still downloads apps. A true network computer won’t. HTML 5 will go a long way towards making everything a web application. Most iPhone/iPad apps are really just hybrid web apps. This is a murky area for my crystal ball. A totally streamlined OS for a net computer will be little more than a HTML 5 browser. It should also mean the end of the app store. If you play a game, the game will run at the game server, not on your device. Your scores and saved games should be saved on the server. Anyone who is really into thinking about cloud computing will see this as a conundrum for the phasing out of dedicated computers. Games require the most local hardware, so they will be phased out last.

Other people will say that’s what the Xbox and PS3 have been doing for years, phasing out PC gaming. Will cloud computing ever have the power to compete with gaming consoles?

JWH – 5/2/10

Why is Apple Killing Lala?

I love Lala, the online music service, and it grieves me that Apple is shutting it down. I’m not sure how many people love Lala too, but there were three of us in my office. I get up every morning and put on Lala, and I go to work and put on Lala, and when I come home I put on Lala. I’m playing Lala as I write this essay. I’ve been listening to music since the 1950s when my first source of songs was my Dad’s 55 Pontiac’s push button radio, and Lala has been the best system I’ve ever found for playing music. I’ve been seeking song finding Nirvana for over fifty years.

If you haven’t lived with Lala you won’t know what you’re missing. Apple is renowned for innovative technology, and when I first heard it bought Lala, I figured it knew a good thing when it saw it, and maybe Apple just wanted to make iTunes the perfect killer app. But it looks now like iTunes is a different kind of killer app. The best gossip I can find suggests Apple merely bought Lala for quick access to its cloud music technology. That’s like killing a person for their kidneys. Or was Lala music sales model really a threat to iTunes?

Most of the news stories about Apple shutting down Lala didn’t spend any time mourning Lala. Anything Apple does is big news, but that’s all. I just don’t think people know how cool Lala really is, and I want praise Lala before its forgotten, and maybe explain why Apple is killing it off.

It’s all about ease of use. Lala is far easier to use than iTunes, far cheaper, and even more important, it’s far more exciting for finding new music and sharing that excitement with other music lovers. All is this is much easier on Lala, I kid you not. On Lala you can play any song or album for free once. When the new albums come out on Tuesday you can play them all on Lala for free. (Or could.) How fantastic is that? See an album with a neat cover, well give it a try. See an album with a funny name, give it a play. Remember flipping through bins of albums wondering what the music was like from looking at the album covers. Well, with Lala, it was only a matter of taking the time to try them.

But even more important than that, was how cheap it is to buy web songs on Lala. A dime a song and you can play it forever, or until a giant corporation comes along and stomps Lala. I’d load up my Lala wallet with $20 and whenever I heard a song I like I hit the Add Song button, and ten cents would disappear from my wallet. If I really loved the song I’d click another button and add it to a play list. The year I’ve been a member of Lala meant collecting just the songs I loved and making playlists. I could play my friends playlists and not spend a cent. I could play stranger’s playlists for the same great price. But if I found a song I loved, it was one click, one dime, and it was mine to keep playing. And I never had to worry about backing my songs up, or finding the song in iTunes, or in Windows Media, or on which computer, or on a shelf, or where I left that CD. Lala was perfect for keeping my songs organized.

Like I said, ease of use is the key factor here. I own about 1,500 CDs, and I have them ripped to 18,000+ songs in my Windows Media library, but it’s far easier to use Lala. I also subscribe to Rhapsody and have access to millions of songs. But I’d rather use Lala. In fact, it was easier to pay Lala ten cents for songs I already owned than play them somewhere else. Hell, Lala was even willing to give me credit and link my 18,000 songs to my Lala library, but I didn’t want to do that because I loved Lala and I wanted to give it money and I didn’t want my Lala library cluttered up with thousands of songs I didn’t want to play.

Damn you Apple!!! I’m playing Lala right now and Laura Bell Bundy started singing “Please” and I went to add it to my collection, but the Add Song button is gone. Luckily I didn’t ditch Rhapsody when it came up for yearly renewal this month. Now I’ve got to figure out how to configure it to be easier to use. Having unlimited access to millions of songs sounds great, but it takes work to manage them. Lala is great at managing my library. I had already paid Rhapsody and could play the same songs there as I was paying again on Lala for ten cents a song, and I was more than willing to spend my money again on Lala because it was so easy to use, and because Lala is so great at sharing.

Whenever I discover a song I love all I had to do was hit the Share button and send it to my friends. And they could play it once for free, or add it to their collection for a measly dime. And that’s a great bonding experience. By the way, thanks Apple, you are at least letting me replay songs in my month of mourning without taking my dime. I would add “Please” to my Songs Rated 10 playlist, but that button is gone too. I’m playing it for the third time in a row. Steve Jobs, why are you taking this all away from me? Is it greed? Must you destroy anything that is better than something you invented? Do you merely want to crush the competition? Do you even know the beauty you destroy?

The rumor mill says Apple is killing Lala for its cloud technology that allows users to add their songs to their online library. This will be great for iTunes users. One of the HUGE negatives of iTunes is if you lose computer you lose your music. Web streaming is so freeing because you don’t have to worry about maintaining your music files. I’m guessing Apple won’t offer web streaming, but they will sell you a song, and they will validate any songs you own, and then let you play those songs from the cloud. I bet Apple plans to combine the purchase model with the streaming model, so you won’t be renting music, but you’ll get the advantage of streaming once you paid for the song.

The trickier part is whether or not they can load the song onto your iPod. That ain’t streaming. But iPhones, iPads and the iPod touch have WiFi and broadband and they could stream music. One of the greats features of Audible.com is they remember everything you ever buy, and even if they lose the right to keep selling a digital audio book you still have the right to download it again if something happens to your computer. iTunes never offered such a wonderful backup feature, but Lala type streaming comes close to that.

If Apple kills Lala and then puts all its features into iTunes 10 then I won’t hate Steve Jobs so bad. I doubt this will happen. There is no reason why iTunes couldn’t let users play songs and albums once for free like Lala. There is no reason why iTunes couldn’t sell web streaming songs for ten cents apiece. Zune offers streaming on a portable device. You pay $15 a month and can wireless stream any album to your player. I have a Zune, but I don’t like playing music through ear buds. I like hearing music through big speakers. And I dropped my Zune subscription because their desktop software wasn’t as good as Lala or Rhapsody.

Apple could recreate all the features of the Zune Marketplace with its Lala technology and offer streaming to portable players, but that would be the end of selling songs for $1.29. I’ve written many blog posts begging my readers to try streaming music and got damn few takers. People are all hung up on owning songs. Paying Rhapsody $10 a month is even a bargain compared to stealing music, but people can’t even comprehend it. The work of stealing and maintaining the songs is so time consuming that only someone with no money would consider a stolen song a bargain.

Does Steve Jobs want to stomp out rental music? If the music companies were against it, why do they let so many services offer it? Lala was much cheaper than Rhapsody. I spent $40 during my year on Lala, and $120 at Rhapsody. At Rhapsody I could listen to the millions of songs as often as I wanted. At Lala, I had to pick which songs I wanted to hear again and pay ten cents for unlimited listening to each. I played more new albums at Lala because it was easier, and I only bought a few hundred songs because that’s all I discovered I really liked enough to want to keep playing.

We’re getting closer to a new paradigm for owning music. Unless you’re a music nut you might not understand these distinctions, but here’s the evolution of music ownership.

You bought and owned the physical 78, 45, LP, CD, cassette, 8-track
You bought the physical CD, but could rip it to MP3
You could steal MP3s, illegally possessing the file
You could buy MP3s without getting the physical album, legally owning the file
You could rent unlimited access to all music but you didn’t own anything
You could buy the streaming rights to a song, but keep it in the cloud, so you own the right to hear the song as often as you want, and you don’t have to worry about maintaining it
And it looks like you will be able to buy the song for download, but also have unlimited streaming rights.

I thought step #5 was the ultimate, but ended up loving step #6, which is the sales model that Lala used. I’m guessing Apple will modify #6 and make it #7. But instead of buying the streaming song for ten cents, you’ll buy the song for $1.29, and I guess either keep it in the cloud or download a copy for your iPod. I wonder if Apple will make a deal with the music companies to get you the legal rights to be able to download that song as many times as you like.

Model #5 came in a number of flavors. Rhapsody and Napster started off charging one fee for web streaming and a larger fee for the rights to put rental music on a portable player. Lala didn’t rent music, but sold it in a two-tier pricing. Ten cents for unlimited streaming (#6), and 79 cents for a download (#4). I’m guessing the Apple and the music industry will consider ten cents too cheap for the rights to listen to a song for the rest of your life.

I have to wonder if you subtract all the manufacturing costs of CDs, the shipping costs, the warehouse costs, the distributor’s costs, the retailers costs, how much does a song really cost, that is if you remove all the cost factors that don’t go into a digital download. I’m guessing a physical song was probably 20-40 cents of your $12-15 you spent for a CD. People used to complain bitterly over the prices of CDs, so a $1.29 for a song is actually more expensive if you factor in actual costs.

Rental pricing is different. If I played a 1,000 songs for my Rhapsody rental of $10, that’s only a penny a song. But if I only play 100 songs, those songs cost me ten cents each. But if I play the same 100 songs next month, it’s another ten cents each. The beauty of Lala was its pricing of ten cents per song for unlimited streaming. Plus it had the inherent side affect of tracking the songs you love, and this beats two problems of rental. You only pay for the song once, and Lala’s tracking of ownership also was a kind of tracking. I can listen to 6 million songs on Rhapsody but I have a hard time keeping up with just the ones I love.

Steve Jobs is no dummy. He knows the future of computing is the cloud. He knows people will get tired of “buying” the same songs over and over again. I have some songs I’ve bought on vinyl twice (they wore out, or I lost them), CDs twice (first release, then remastered release), once on SASD, then again on MP3, and by more than one rental service. Ownership doesn’t appear to be forever when it comes to music. That’s why I like the idea of rental music, why pretend otherwise?

This rant about Apple destroying Lala is getting too long. But I hope you get my drift. Lala was a great model for finding, playing and sharing music, better I think than any other sales model I’ve discovered. I can’t but believe Steve Jobs will take a step backwards from this model, but I’m sure he sees a music sales model that will dominate in the future, something beyond what iTunes uses now, and maybe one that might last awhile.

JWH – 4/30/10