Internet – Page 17 – Auxiliary Memory

A New Kind of Reading: iEssays

What’s the best economic model for finding the absolute best essays to read?

I decided to go paperless with my periodical reading back in February, 2008, and my last magazine subscription (Popular Photography) has finally run out. At one time I subscribed to over 20 magazines. I love magazines, and I spent six years working in a periodicals department at a university library back in the 1980s.

At first this effort was to do my part in fighting global warming, but over the last few years I’ve realized that magazines aren’t the most efficient way to read about the world. Out of a year’s worth of The New Yorker, I might only read 1/20th of the printed pages, and it was probably less. I now subscribe to The New Yorker on my Kindle, but I don’t even look at every issue, so I’m wasting my money. I do wish I read each issue cover to cover because it’s a great magazine, but in reality I spend far more time reading on the Internet. There’s something compelling about jumping from one web site to the next grazing on information.

Long before the Internet was a gleam in its designers’ eyes, magazines and newspapers were the world wide web of information. Most print magazines and newspapers have a web presence today, and they all compete for eyes and dollars, while still trying not to compete against their own print editions, but I can’t imagine that lasting for many more years. With ebooks, smartphones and tablets all offering periodicals and news reading apps, how can paper periodicals compete?

I wish I could take a news pill every morning and just know what’s happening around the world, but that’s not possible – yet. But here’s the modern reality of reading – petabytes of data are being created daily, but we all still live in a 24 hour world, and at most I might spend 7 of my 168 weekly hours keeping up the world by reading short non-fiction essays, and when I’m busy or lazy it’s a lot less.

The Challenge of Keeping Current

We live in exciting times, and this is a happening world, but it is surprising how ill informed we are about what’s going on. For most of my life I’ve watched the half-hour evening news and then supplemented it with some magazine reading, and figured I was doing pretty good keeping up with current events. But I realize now that I’m not. Too much of the evening news on television is worthless. Are daily stories about natural disasters, politics, and economics really that valuable to keeping up with external reality beyond our tiny lives?

In any 24 hour period, what really are the most worthwhile stories to know about? Let’s say we spend 60 minutes a day, whether surfing the net, scanning RSS feeds, watching television, reading a newspaper or magazine – what’s the most productive way to spend those 60 minutes in terms of learning about what’s going on in reality?

Generally, we all have a passive attitude towards acquiring news. We take in whatever’s in front of us, whether it’s the NBC Nightly News or Slashdot.org. But what if we read with conscious intent? What if we systematically reviewed data sources ourselves, instead of letting editors at newspapers, magazines and TV shows decide what we need to know?

The Old Way

Before radio and television, people read newspapers. Your daily paper might present 25 stories and you picked the ones you wanted to read. With mass broadcasting on radio and TV, news was bundled into shows of 30 or 60 minutes and you just sat through all the stories, even if you really weren’t interested in all of them. If you wanted to know more you subscribed to magazines and hoped they presented in-depth coverage for stuff you missed from your newspaper, radio and TV. Before the plague of attention deficit syndrome hit the world, magazines often presented long essays, thousands of words on a topic, offering far more data than you’d get in a one hour documentary.

The Current Way

The Internet publishes thousands, if not millions, of stories every day. There are many ways of finding stories to read. You can go to a editor driven sites like Google News, MSN, Slashdot, Engadget, or any of countless other outlets and scan for interesting items to read. Or you can go to social sites like StumbleUpon or Digg and hope serendipity will bring you a great news surprise. Or, you can add all your favorite sites to a RSS feed reader and try to manage the internet fire hose of data that way.

With the advent of the tablet computer we now hold a magic magazine that can overcome the limitations of the printing press.

The Better Way?

Money makes a great editor, in more ways than one. I guarantee if you go buy copies of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Scientific American, or any of the many top printed periodicals and read the longest articles you’ll get the best bang for you reading time. These publications pay writers top dollars and there is a kind of survival of the fittest in information quality going on. However, we still have the problem of subscribing to paper copies, or tediously searching the net for the web editions. And whether we pay for paper copies or subscribe to digital editions, we’ll buy a lot of content we won’t read.

What we need is the iTunes of essays, iEssays or a Readers Digital Digest. Articles under 1,000 words should be 49 cents, 1,000-4,999 should be $1, and stories greater than 5,000 words that aren’t considered books, should be $1-3. If you buy one $5.99-6.99 magazine a week, you’re spending a $1 a day for essays, and I doubt many people would read more than one long essay a day, so these prices are about equal to average magazine reading. Leave the under 500 word content to free web sites supported by ads.

Picture The New York Times Most Popular section but getting content from hundreds or thousands of magazines, newspapers and web sites. This is how I read the NY Times, start at this page and only reading the best/most popular articles.

At our iEssays site, we could follow best seller lists set up by topics to quickly find the Hit Essay of the Day from a variety of subject categories. They can also keep lists for Hits of the Week, Month or Year. Imagine sitting down with your iPad once a day with the intent of spending 30-60 minutes reading a very high quality article and you’re willing to spend a buck. This would definitely weed out the crap and silly stories you mind at most social news sites.

And it’s important that the site not charge a subscription for the whole site. What we want to do is generate hit essays like iTunes creates hit singles. It would be important to still read newspaper sites or watch TV news to get a general impression of the news, but if you wanted to really learn something new every day about the world, I think the iEssays would be the best way to go.

Also, to help the survival of the fittest process, I think as part of your purchase you get to send an article to up to five friends, or link it on your blog. So articles could be promoted up the Hit List by purchase votes, recommendation votes, or link hit votes. The New York Times allows free reading to its articles if they come in via links. I think that’s an innovative way to promote stories and still collect payments.

And finally, I think the iEssays should be an app that stores your purchased articles forever in the cloud, so they become part of your digital memory.

Conclusion

I’m not expecting this system to supplant subscription systems. Most people prefer passive news gathering. Most people are happy to subscribe to a newspaper or magazine and just skim and read, tossing the issue out when they are done. But I think there’s enough people like me who are annoyed at buying far more content than we read, and wanting to get the most for our money. It’s like cable TV plans, spend $60 a month and get 200 channels. Some people don’t mind channel surfing, but I don’t. Not only would I like a la cart cable, I think I’d like to buy television by the show.

Unless magazines and newspapers go the way of subscription music, I’d prefer paying by the article rather than the issue. I pay $4.99 a month to Rdio and get to listen to essentially everything. I use its social tools and charts to narrow my listening. But I think by the essay pricing would help me find the best article reading the fastest.

Right now The New York Times charges $20 a month for unlimited tablet access. That seems way too expensive when compared to what I get from the music business. If The New York Times also presented content from many major newspapers and magazines, then I might consider a $20 monthly bill, like how I spend for TV and movies through Netflix. But the NY Times is trying to price their digital newspaper like the old paper copies, and this is different world. Netflix and Rhapsody are changing content pricing models in people’s minds and I don’t think they will go away.

I think the Rhapsody pricing model is superior to the iTunes pricing model, which is superior to the old CD pricing model. iTunes sells hits, and I want to buy hit essays. I don’t want to buy whole papers and read just a handful of its stories. I want either the Netflix/Rhapsody model which is gigantic piles of content for one low monthly price, and I’d use built in tools to find what I want, or I want the iTunes model, where I buy just the hits.

When it comes to reading quality essays (or short stories and poems for that matter), I predict the price per song model is superior for quickly finding the best reads. And ultimately I think more writers and publishers would benefit from this model too. If I spent $20 a month for The New York Times I doubt I buy any only periodical. Which is why I can’t make myself spend $20 for one online newspaper. If they added 20 top magazines to their deal, I would gladly pay $20 a month, but I’d rather pay $1 an article for an even larger pool of hit providers.

The monthly library model like Netflix and Rhapsody is great for music, movies and TV shows if you like to try out lots of different songs or programs. But reading is different, at least for me. I have a limited amount of time I spend reading, and I only want the very best stories to read. It’s like people who prefer iTunes to Rhapsody. They just want to get a few hits to play and aren’t concerned with trying out one or two dozen new albums a week. That’s why I think some enterprising Readers Digest wannabes should apply the iTunes model to creating iEssays. Or if the Best American Series editors came out with a monthly digital issue rather than a series of books once a year.

JWH – 7/17/11

Fans Wanted!

We live in a world where fans are in high demand. There is so much neglected art that needs to be discovered, and your duty as a fan is to discover new work and share it. It’s how social networking works.

I was looking at the new album releases in Rdio and I noticed that many of the albums had not been listened to all all. They had 0 plays, and thus no fans. That made me feel sad for those artists. Lady Gaga has legions of fans, and I’m not saying she doesn’t deserve her fans, but I think some of her devoted following should spend some of their time listening to new artists who have none. Consider it a form of artistic charity. It takes so little to become a patron of the arts, just love and attention.

It’s amazing how many new albums come out every week. And if you subscribe to a subscription music service you can listen to them all for just $4.99 a month. So, it would cost you almost nothing to be generous and play a few albums that are going without listeners. We are all too addicted to success. We want to hear the top albums of the week – but what if some of those CDs that never make it even to the bottom of a chart have good tunes on them? Don’t they deserve to be heard?

And think about all those selfish baby boomers who play the same old hits from the sixties over and over again. Wouldn’t they benefit from hearing something new? So I say to you, become a fan of some up-and-coming band or singer. I’m listening to Costello Music by The Fratellis who’ve gotten 11,664 plays on Rdio. They really don’t seem all that different from a British Invasion band in the 60s. But eleven thousand plays means they have a lot of fans. There are 50+ pages of new CDs on Rdio and most of them have no plays at all.

It used to be you had to buy albums to become a fan, but that’s no longer true. For $4.99 a month you can listen to dozens of new albums every week from one of many subscription music services. And you might be surprised by the rewards of becoming a fan and discovering a new group. I’m listening to The Naked and Famous new album, Passive Me, Aggressive You, and it makes me feel young again. It has a wonderful 80s pop feel to it, so it’s both nostalgic and energetic. It’s more popular than the last album, with 132,155 plays. They are famous by Rdio standards, but they should become more famous.

I’m now listening to a very nice song now, “One Hand Loves the Other” by Bodies of Water off of Twist Again. It reminds me of Judy Collins. It’s only had 256 listeners. It deserves way more fans than that. As I page through the new releases I find albums with fewer and fewer listeners. Natalie Walker only has 113 for her album Spark. If you’re an old fart baby boomer and don’t like modern pop like Lady Gaga you might find Walker worthy of your fan attention.

With little effort I found three very enjoyable albums tonight by people I never heard before. In the old days of CDs that would have cost me $45-55, but it’s just part of my $4.99 monthly fee on Rdio. I figure if I’m going to get such a bargain I have to do my part and try several new CDs every week and help promote new artists. Because Rdio is built around social networking, playing an album encourages other people to play it too. Playing a song produces ripples. If I play an album enough other people in my network will see it and maybe give it a try too. And then people in their network will see them playing, and hopefully we help the artist find more fans.

I like myself better when I’m discovering new music. I still love my old favorites songs that I’ve been playing for almost fifty years, but I don’t want to be trapped in my past. Finding new music makes me feel younger. I know I’m not, but my mind feels younger as long as I’m still discover new art. There are rewards to be a new music fan.

JWH – 6/21/11

Google Music Beta v. Amazon Cloud Drive

Problem #1 – Should I Spend $659 for a Proper Storage Rack for My CDs

Currently, my wife Susan and I have 1,500 music CDs we store on a built-in shelf behind the door of our spare room. This isn’t a good place for them because it’s not easy to get to, and it only has 9 shelves, and I need 15, so we have to go double high on some shelves, and even double deep on others, so finding and shelving a CD is very annoying. This whole system is so annoying that I don’t like playing my CDs. The solution would be to buy a nice CD rack from Boltz.com and put the CDs near where we play them.

Convert that to this

Problem #2 – We Hardly Ever Play CDs Anymore

Susan plays her music on her iPhone, and I play my music through my work computer, my home computer and my HTPC in the den that’s connected to the big stereo system. The only time I like playing the CDs is when I want to sit in the den and play them loud so I can enjoy the music’s full fidelity. That’s happening less and less often. And for 97% of the time I play music from my Rhapsody subscription. So why spend hundreds of dollars and hours of efforts to organize my CDs? Could we get rid of the CDs altogether? They are our proof that our digital copies are legal, so I suppose we could box them up and put them in the attic. But when I retire I’d like to move around and dragging 20 storage boxes of CDs will be like carrying a boat anchor everywhere I go.

Problem #3 – Making and Maintaining a Perfect Digital Copy of Our CD Collection

A couple years ago I spent weeks ripping our collection, but since then we’ve discovered the results had been imperfect. Here and there a cut will be missing, and on rare occasions a cut will be bad. And since then we’ve bought many CDs that we haven’t ripped, but we’re not sure which ones. And we have the worry of maintaining a backup. I have the whole library copied on external drives, some of which we keep off-site, but each copy has gotten out of sync and we’re not sure which one is the master anymore, and all of them are now incomplete. What a pain. I love Rhapsody, but I’m being forced to maintain my own digital collection of music because Rhapsody doesn’t have everything. For example, no Beatles. Or if the CD goes out of print, it’s removed from their collection. Basically Rhapsody provides most of what music is being sold at any given moment, with the exception of a few butthead bands that won’t sign with them.

Problem #4 – I Don’t Like Most of the Music in My Collection

Of our 1,500 CDs, or 18,000+ songs, I’d guess I really only like less than 6,000 songs. And that’s only a guess, it might be much less. Most albums have only 1-2 songs I really like, some CDs I never liked any of the songs, or have since turned against them. And Susan and I like different songs. What we’d really love is two digital collections: His and Hers. And we want each collection slimmed down to just the songs we love. But going through 18,000+ songs to find those gems would be months, if not years of work.

Solution #1 – Forget CDs Completely

I could probably live without my CDs because I have Rhapsody. Susan has most of everything she already wants in her iTunes library, and whenever she wants something new she buys a CD and rips it to iTunes. If we weren’t worried about proving our digital songs were legal, we could just get rid of the CDs completely. We could start buying MP3 songs instead of CDs. This is a very appealing solution because it would be the most hassle free. The downside is we’ve paid a lot of money for our CDs, and I don’t want to buy those songs again. Many of those albums we bought as LPs, and then bought again as CDs, and some of them I bought a third time as SACDs, and many CDs we bought a second time as a CD when the remastered version came out. I hate the idea of buying MP3 songs that we’ve already bought one more more times, and then getting a lower fidelity copy. Will MP3 be the last format? Is this the last time we have to buy our favorite songs?

Solution #2 – Move Our Collections to the Cloud

Google Music Beta is promising some lucky people storage for up to 20,000 songs for free. Right now if we moved our collection to Amazon Cloud Drive it would cost us $125 a year to maintain. And since Susan and I would like to have our own separate collections, if we both uploaded our collection to our Amazon accounts, it would be $250 a year. Of course, we’d both like to thin out our collections, so eventually that cost would be smaller, but it would take us months to get to that ideal music library. Google is promising free for awhile, and that might be enough time to reduce our collection to just the songs we love, but we don’t know what Google’s final cost will be. More than likely, we’d want our collections in both clouds as backups, or case one service is down, or one goes out of business. Is it possible that Google Music or Amazon Cloud Drive will survive for the rest of our lives?

The down side of this is I’d still be managing four collections: CDs, Rhapsody, Amazon and Google.

Solution #3 – Give Up Music Ownership

I could go with Rhapsody, Pandora and other streaming music sites and just forget about owning songs at all. This has a tremendous appeal to me, but it also has a scary downside. If I get in the mood to hear a certain song and it’s not on Rhapsody I’m shit out of luck. For $120 a year I get access to 11,000,000+ songs through Rhapsody. That’s almost perfect, except that once in awhile I want to hear a song that Rhapsody doesn’t have. Can I live with that? It’s not like I don’t have more music than would ever have time to hear.

Solution #4 – The Compromise Solution

The compromise solution for now is to put our all-time favorite music into our personal cloud storage sites, save out my all-time favorite CDs to play loud, continue to listen to Rhapsody, and put the rest of the CDs in the attic. This is still a big mess though.

Hope for the Future

If Rhapsody and other streaming music services could serve every song ever recorded then I’d give away my CDs and forget about owning music forever. I wouldn’t even mess with cloud drives.

Amazon Cloud Drive is very appealing because I can buy music from Amazon which they promise to store for free and hopefully they could manage my music collection for the rest of my life. If my music collection could be slimmed down, and their prices came down some, Amazon Cloud Drive might be a great long term solution for owning music. I buy all my books, CDs, and DVDs from them now anyway. The downside for Amazon is their lack of an app for iOS for Susan to use, and their player is rather primitive, but I’m sure that will improve. They should offer some kind of incentive like for every $10 spent on music they will add 1gb of lifetime storage to your cloud drive.

Google Music Beta is even more appealing because it’s free right now. I could put my whole collection online at no cost. Another big plus that Google Music has over Amazon Cloud Drive is its player, which I’ve only seen in demo videos. It looks far more sophisticated than Amazon’s player. The downside is Google doesn’t sell music. It would be weird to have to buy songs from Amazon and then copy them to Google.

Apple still hasn’t come out with their cloud drive yet. Susan is very tied to iTunes because of her iPhone, and depending on what Apple charges, it could be a great solution for her. I have an iPod touch, but portable music isn’t that important to me. I’ll probably get an Android pay-as-you-go phone, so it will work with Amazon or Google. If Apple came out with free unlimited for life music storage and offered a streaming service, I might be tempted to go with them, and then start buying my songs from iTunes. Their downside is iTunes isn’t very good for managing large music collections, but that could be improved too.

I have yet to see any rumors that Rhapsody will offer a cloud music drive for its users, but it could be the best of both worlds. Especially if Rhapsody could develop an app that looked at my collection and then upload only the albums they didn’t provide that were out of print. And they could warn users when an album was going out of print and offer their users a chance to buy songs before they disappeared from the streaming collection. In other words, Rhapsody could manage both of my collections.

Who knows what will happen, but these new cloud music services could be solutions to some of my problems.

And I can imagine another solution. Why have millions of copies of “Hey Jude” stored on drives all over the world? Why not have an international music registry, and when people buy a song they get a license to play it for life, and then music services would only have to cache one copy of a song wherever they stream music. There would be no need to have massive server farms storing everyone’s songs. That would save a lot of energy. You could buy and play songs from any service you like and they would register the license for you. All music services would be given rights to check the license registry.

Why make Amazon keep a million copies of “Hey Jude” on their servers for a million users when they could link to just one copy?

JWH – 5/15/11

Gullible and Malicious Gossip–Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness

Politics is depressing – in our times it brings out the worst in men and women. We are not a nation that pulls together, but one that everyone wants to pull apart.

I don’t know why there’s such a passionate hatred for Barack Obama, but there is. To me he’s a decent man, a good family man, a man who works hard to do his job the best that he knows how. I’m sure he has plenty of flaws, but he’s a far better man than I could ever be.

There is a growing mob of people that want to tear him down. Conservatives have always complained that national news is biased, but Fox New’s in-your-face bias is little more than rabble rousing, yet it is nothing compared the rumor mill of blogging.

Blogging isn’t journalism although many bloggers want to be taken as serious as national papers, yet they have no self-control, respect for journalism, or decent sense of human fairness. Writers on the internet can say anything without any checks and balances, and the lies, misconceptions and slander they create is almost unstoppable. There’s a reason why Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness was in the top ten sins that the old Testament God wanted to stomp out.

Although, I’m not really worried about Barack Obama, he can take care of himself. Any conspiracy theory about him that percolates to the national news will be properly investigated. No, who I worry about is my friends and relatives who believe the lies they send to my email box. The beliefs you hold reveal more about your personality than any lack of clothes reveals about the nakedness of your body. Hatred is ugly. Passing on gossip, especially a hateful kind of gossip, undresses people’s ugly side.

In the old days people were careful to keep up a positive persona. People dressed themselves in positive attitudes and acted with a aura of self-control. If people expressed their negative side, their hatreds, it was usually only to very close friends and family members. Only uncivilized people were nasty. But two exceptions come quickly to mind: racism and xenophobia. Growing up, whenever I visited the South I was always shocked by mild-mannered church loving people, letting it all hang out when it came to expressing their feelings about black people. It was frightening to me.

Poor Obama seems to bring out people’s racism and xenophobia.

I believe that most of the hate mongering over Barack Obama is because he’s black, and maybe because people think he’s Muslim from another country. I know conservatives hate liberals like Clinton and Gore, but they go beyond the pale in their attacks on Obama and try to find endless ways to discredit him. Evidently the Presidency is one Jim Crow barrier they never wanted to take down.

Here is an example of one of the emails I’ve gotten: Wadda Guy!!!!.

Here is the Snopes.com site that answers most of the issues: Obama’s 50 Lies.

The trouble is conspiracies are very hard to pull off, and most of these stories are just gossip that people want to pass on because they oppose Obama’s politics by smearing him with lies. And most often these emails come from Christians. Don’t they know they are breaking the 9th commandment? And remember what Jesus said about the golden rule….

I have to assume that most people who pass on these types of emails are just gullible and not truly malicious, but I might be wrong. First off you shouldn’t gossip, but if you’re going to pass on these emails verify them first. Would you want lies spread about you? It’s easy enough to do, just get on the internet and research the issue. Snopes.com is a great place that focuses just on this problem – verifying urban legends.

Malicious people know the stories are lies but pass them on anyway because they feel righteous about their cause. However, if they are Christians it doesn’t justify breaking the 9th commandment. Whether gullible or malicious, bearing false witness is very immoral and unethical.

I’m not religious, and I have two ethical rules which I apply to this kind of problem. First is the Golden Rule, a concept that has appeared in all religions, by all philosophers and is part of all ethical systems. If you don’t want people spreading lies about you, don’t spread them about other people. The second rule is much simpler – don’t lie. It should be obvious that lying is wrong.

Now if I would ask these people why are they spreading lies they will innocently claim they are revealing the truth, and they will feel quite righteously about what they are doing. Does spreading lies when you honestly believe they are the truth a sin? I have to say yes, because being ignorant should be a sin too. We live in a world of ready information, so it should be everyone responsibility to fact check anything you say bad about someone else. In the old days it was a virtue never to say anything bad about other people, but that practice is no longer common sense.

A long time ago I read a little essay called “Rules of Thumb” about how to judge facts without having to actually look them up. Rules of Thumb is the idea that you find facts you know and compare them against what you are trying to verify. For example, how many gallons of water does a bathtub hold? Most people have no idea. But people are quite familiar with a gallon jug of milk. It’s easier to imagine how many gallon jugs of milk can fit into a bathtub, so that can be a rule of thumb.

When getting internet gossip apply rules of thumb to it. Any story you read in an email that conveys something not publically known about a public figure should be suspect. Here’s one rule of thumb to use. We live in a society of pit bull journalists that would sell their mother’s souls for a story. If you haven’t heard in the national news the story you find in an email figure it’s a lie. Of course it might not be, but the odd are 999 to 1 it is. We just don’t keep secrets in this society. If Obama had not been born in the U.S. he never would have gotten elected. Hundreds of reporters would have snooped out that story immediately. To believe otherwise is to be very gullible.

But if you still think a story is valid, research it on Snopes.com. If they have investigated it and say it’s true, or could be true, feel free to pass the story on. You might include the link to Snopes with your email.

The email I got made a big deal proclaiming both Barack and Michelle Obama had had their lawyer licenses taken away from them for dishonest actions. The email made 11 attacks on the Obama. It had been forwarded at least 7 times because of the quote indicators, so one person can spread gossip at a speed never known before the internet.

How do I know these are lies. Why should I trust Snopes.com? The wise thing is to check many sites. There is one problem though, there are a huge number of websites with conspiracy theories about the Obamas. If you read enough you’ll find a reasonable answer, but if you’re not looking for a reasonable answer, you’ll find plenty of fuel to ignite the gossip. Why aren’t these web stories front and center on all the national news programs? Again, rule of thumb? Would any national reporter pass up such stories if they could be proven? No, they wouldn’t. Look at the success Woodward and Bernstein created for themselves with their stories about Nixon.

So, why all the gossip about Obama? Edge.org has a new theory that might apply here, “The Argumentative Theory.” Now this is probably way to subtle and abstract for thinkers who believe Obama is a Muslim born in another country. Basically it says we aren’t reasonably people because reason isn’t part of our nature, but to argue is. In other words, most people can’t tell shit from Shinola but they will fight to the death thinking they know the absolute truth when in fact they are quite clueless.

I’ve thought about this. Everyone acts like they know something, but for the most part we all know very little. Most people like to think they are smart, at least about a few pet subjects. But here’s my last rule of thumb. Even the most specialized subjects around have hundreds of books written on them. Some Ph.D. specialists may have read thousands of books and journals on their expertise. Clueless people think they know it all after reading one page on the internet. If you don’t want to be seen as something other than a crank, don’t profess facts unless you’ve read ten comprehensive books on the subject, and that will only be the beginning point where you can say you have a minor interest in the topic. And even then, if you read the article at Edge.org, you’ll probably have found 10 books that support your personal bias. We really don’t have the brains for exact reasoning – just remember that you want to pass off a fact.

JWH – 5/5/11

Amazon Cloud versus iTunes versus Rhapsody Music

All my music loving friends are building their digital collection of tunes, but we’re all doing it differently. Many of us have bought the same music over and over again in different formats. I’ve bought LPs, CDs, SACDs and currently pay for streaming rights. I know some people that have done LP, CD, and are now back to buying LPs again. Younger people tend to have only acquired MP3/AAC files, but they have a hard time maintaining them. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever had a computer go dead or stolen, or have gone from an iPod to an Android smartphone, or any other platform or hardware shift.

When Amazon Cloud came out the other day I bought “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” by Bob Dylan in the fourth format I’ve owned in since 1967 (LP, CD, SACD, MP3), and that doesn’t count the monthly fees for streaming that I pay to hear it.

What me and my music friends want is a place to collect our music so that we can organize it once and for all and have it for the rest of our lives no matter what kind of gadgets we own to play our music. On the surface Amazon Cloud looks very promising, but if I put my 18,000+ (117gb) songs in their cloud I’ll be paying Amazon as much for cloud storage rent as I pay Rhapsody to have access to 11 million streaming songs.

Obviously I think anyone who is willing to spend at least $9.99 per month on music gets their best deal at Rhapsody, and all other choices depend on spending less per month.

I very seldom listen to my CDs any more, and I rarely buy them. When I discover an album I really love and I’m afraid it’s going to go out of print someday, or I’m anxious to hear it in its highest form of sound fidelity, I buy the CD. But I can almost see myself giving up CDs and living with Rhapsody music for the rest of my life. If I only knew that streaming music will catch on and will always be offered in the future, I’d sell my CDs.

There’s one huge downside to streaming music – services like Rhapsody can only offer music that’s for sale. If an album or song goes out of print then it’s removed from the service. Maybe in the future nothing will ever go out of print, but for now I can’t trust that. If I really love a song I have to buy a copy. I don’t want to be an old man crying, “I’d give anything to hear that song one more time.”

Now, if I was as unethical as kids and willing to steal my music things would be different, because everything seems to be available for free online. However, there is a cost for stealing music that I think is pretty high. Building a collection of stolen MP3s take a lot of work and time. Rhapsody is easy and convenient. Amazon Cloud is easy and convenient too, but I’d have to always buy MP3 versions of songs I wanted to keep, and that means I’d spend more money than I do now at Rhapsody. First would be the fees for storing my old ripped CD songs, and second the price of any new songs I added in the future.

Also, if I switched to Amazon Cloud service, I’d have to give up listening on my iPod touch, and would need to buy an equivalent Android device, like an Archos 43, or start spending a lot of money and get a smartphone. Rhapsody works wonderfully from my iPod touch, but Apple might screw things up for Rhapsody in the future. Amazon seems to have no plans to offer their cloud service to the iOS devices.

I could go with Apple, but that would mean listening to a tiny fraction of music that I do now for the same money. iTunes is absolutely the worse deal of the bunch. If Apple had kept everything about the Lala streaming music service they bought, I would have probably given up Rhapsody. Lala was a fantastic social service for music lovers. Apple seems to have no plans to provide a streaming music service despite years of rumors.

Rhapsody.com and Audible.com are two Internet companies that I spend money on. Not only are they a commercial success with me, but I’d hate to live without them. Both work well with my iPod touch. Both have great clients for my PC. Both support a wide range of devices and smartphones in case I want to use something new. And I don’t have to worry about backing up any of my files I get from them.

Sorry Amazon and Apple, your model of owning music just isn’t practical, efficient or cost effective. I don’t know why all my music friends don’t use Rhapsody or other streaming music services. I think most of them started with Apple and just don’t want to switch. I discussed this with a woman at work Friday. She has 32gb of music in iTunes. She’d like to get an Android phone because they have physical keyboards, but she doesn’t want to deal with porting that many AAC files to MP3.

Now that is one advantage to the Amazon Cloud for owning music – if Amazon stays in business, is always trustworthy, and protects its cloud data 100% – because the cloud takes over most of the hassle of managing the files. If there was no subscription music services I’d definitely be going with Amazon. But like my friends stuck in iTunes, what happens if something new comes out in the future that doesn’t work with Amazon’s cloud?

So what would be the ideal music delivery system? One that offers every song ever recorded with the most convenient interface to whatever device I’m listening with at the moment with nearly instant and perfect search tools. Whether that’s based on buying songs or renting them, it would make listening to music the easiest possible outside of telepathic transmission of music.

But it’s not the best way to collect music. I’m reading The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett, about a rare book thief. The book provides a great insight into compulsive collecting, and I think it’s also a clue as to why some people will always want to buy music in a physical format. It also explains why LPs are making a comeback. Those big 12” discs in beautiful jackets are an art form that some people love. But if you love to listen to music, streaming music is to great to resist.

It will be interesting if I live to 2020 or there about, because I bet this music problem will probably be completely resolved by then.

JWH – 4/9/11