Apple – Auxiliary Memory

The Beatles and Other Forgotten Bands

By James Wallace Harris, June 30, 2015

Now that Apple has entered the streaming music business it’s obvious that streaming is the future. After more than a century of wax cylinders, 78s, LPs, 45s, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, DATs, SACDs, MP3s, music will arrive by subscribing to bits and bytes. We’re now in a transition phase. Some people will listen to music they own, and others will listen to music they rent. As the advantages of subscription music become apparent to all, most listeners will forget about owning. If songs aren’t instantly available on their smartphones, they will be forgotten.

Because I listen to ninety-nine percent of my music through Spotify, The Beatles are becoming a forgotten band. I’m sure Apple hopes to make an exclusive deal to stream The Beatles like they did for selling their songs and albums by digital downloads. If The Beatles make such an agreement, I might forget them completely. I bought twelve of their thirteen re-mastered CDs when they came out a couple years ago, but I don’t play them. Some are still in the shrink wrap. Listening to music on Spotify is just too damn convenient.

Most of the famous bands that held out against the subscription music tide have given in – AC/DC is the latest example. I have to admire that group for not making an exclusive deal. During the transition phase to a complete subscription music age, we will have to find ways to deal with forgotten bands. There are several reasons why music from the past isn’t offered today.

First, a band will refuse to allow their music to be streamed. That’s becoming less likely as people quit buying music. Second, music is often tied up in legal battles. Again, that will be resolved. There is a lot of music from the past that is forgotten because there’s no demand or its creators aren’t around to promote it. I assume this will change over time as those who still remember will complain. Finally, what we can hear will be limited by exclusive deals. There’s over a dozen subscription music services out there now with more coming on line all the time. The best way to capture subscribers is to promise the biggest catalog, especially catalogs with artists and albums that other services don’t contain. I find this mercenary practice a heinous aspect of the music business.

Right now the standard price for subscribing to a music library is $10 a month. If some services seek to dominate with exclusive deals, there will be a tendency towards monopolies and squeezing out the smaller services, or for people to subscribe to more than one music site. One solution to make subscribing to multiple libraries possible is to change the fee structure. For example, if Spotify and Apple charged $2.99 to be a subscriber, and then one penny a play, then fans could easily enjoy two sites and pay artists fairly.

One reason why artists have avoided subscription services is the low royalty payments. Between the music publishers and subscription services, they seem to make the best deals for themselves. Apple almost got away with giving people three months of music to new subscribers without paying the artists. I think the artists would get a better deal if their payments were separated from subscription fees.

One cent a play is the perfect payment. That cent should be divvied fairly between the composers, performers and record companies. The one cent fee should only be for specific playing of songs. For random background listening, artists should get a lesser fee paid out of the subscription service fee. That way, unless a fan plays specific songs all day long, most listeners will still stay close to the $10 a month bill.

With better royalties I believe most music from the past will be unearthed and put online. Forgotten bands and their albums will show up in libraries, making subscription music nearly perfect. Right now there are many favorite songs from the past that I can’t add to my playlists. In the future, when everything I want to hear is in my subscription, I can’t imagine another system of music delivery ever replacing it.

Pictured are just some of the albums I can’t play on Spotify today. I hope they will all be available within a year.

JWH

Redesigning the Television–Will Apple Revolutionize the TV Next?

Before Steve Jobs died he told his biographer that he wanted to create a television set that was completely easy to use. Can you imagine a TV that’s as revolutionary as the iPhone or iPad? Well, I think it would be fun to guess its features.

World TV

Right now there are different technical broadcast systems all over the world so I would think the first area of simplification would come from jettison outdated technical standards. Why not design one TV that will work with all 7,000,000,000 citizens of the Earth. I can’t imagine Jobs would want to design a TV that had to work with set-top boxes from other companies selling content. Nor could I imagine he’d want to design something that used over-the-air channel reception. Because the Internet is universal across the world, why not just design the future TV to be an Internet TV?

Picture a TV with one power plug and built-in wireless networking. Now that would be a simple and elegant design. It would essentially be a computer with a 24”-62” screen using 1080p, that could work anywhere in the world with a different power cord.

The TV antenna will go the way of the buggy whip, and so will set-top boxes and DVD-Blu-ray players.

Physical Design

Now we need to imagine the design of the device itself. Currently I have 5 remotes and a keyboard with trackpad to use with my 52” TV entertainment system I built myself. If our new future TV used something like Siri, we could get rid of all remotes and keyboards. The only external control that Siri couldn’t handle is a game controller, and with a Kineck type sensor even that might be eliminated.

Having to connect a receiver and surround sound speakers to HD TVs is a pain. Our perfect TV should have a sound bar built-in with great surround sound. And it should play music fantastically too. No more Hi-Fi component, speakers and wires cluttering up the living room.

My new LG computer monitor has no physical buttons on it, but light sensors, even for the on/off switch. I think our perfect TV wouldn’t have mechanical buttons either. It should be voice activated only, but if it did require a manual power switch it should be light activated.

This TV will be more futuristic than anything on the Jetsons.

Content

Now I can’t imagine Jobs thinking he could design this TV and just throw iOS 5 on it. The TV opening screen and menu system is the hardest feature to imagine. This is why Apple is the success it is, and why other companies copy its design. Our prefect TV needs to show:

Internet broadcasts – live TV
Recorded shows from the past
Movies
Personal videos
Photographs
Internet
Games
Music
Telephone
Teleconferencing
Online courses
Presentations
Business and education software

For Internet TV to work we need TV networks to switch to streaming their content, but there’s needs to be a paradigm change first. How many shows need to be live? Think about that. The news, sports, reality shows, special live concerts and performances. We actually don’t need live TV all that much. Most of what’s on TV is recorded. Because of DVRs and services like Hulu, how many people even watch new TV shows that premiere each week live? Cable/satellite services provide hundreds of channels because of their technical limitations, not because we need hundreds of live TV channels.

Content from networks like TCM, National Geography, Discover, History, etc. can be served just as well from a web page, they don’t need to be live.

Recorded TV shows and movies can come from services like Netflix, iTunes and Amazon Prime.

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s we had 3 television channels. There were no DVDs or DVRs to catch a show later. You either watched the show when it aired, or maybe had another chance the following summer during rerun season, and that was it. Each fall we were presented with a new line-up of shows and they would generally run a whole season – shows were seldom canceled mid-season. Once you learned the lineup on shows in September you pretty much knew what was going to be on television until next summer. Special shows were indeed special and rare. That was simplicity then.

Back then watching TV was as easy as basic arithmetic. Today with cable, satellite, iPads, smartphones and internet television channels, along with DVDs, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Blockbuster, Redbox and DVRs deciding what to watch on television is more like advanced calculus. We now live in a TV age of painful complexity.

Watching TV fifty years ago meant three channels of choice. Today we’re getting closer and closer to being able to watch anything that’s ever been on television at any moment. The choices aren’t infinite, but when someone asks “What’s on TV?” it might be safe to say, “There’s a million things on TV tonight.” And that’s painful to deal with.

Our perfect TV needs to have an operating system that allows the viewer to find what they want to watch as quickly as possible. It needs to be as simple to use as an iPad for a two-year-old. When the set is turned on it needs an opening screen – the top menu, and the basic functions can be simplified to these:

TV
Library
Telephone
Games
Music
Computer

This makes six tiles – is Microsoft on to something? TV would be live TV, Library would be recorded shows, either TV, movies, personal videos, photographs, or other content. Telephone could be two way video or conferencing. Games and music are obvious. Computer would be anything from online courses, business presentations, science simulations, word processing, blogging, etc. I think we’ll be surprised what we’ll want to do from the family TV in the den.

Think what a game changer such a television would be. It would be the Holy Grail of integration between TVs and Computers, but also phones, stereos and game units. Is it any wonder that Steve Jobs wanted to tackle such an exciting project? Sadly, think how many companies it will put out of business. We won’t need Blu-ray players or discs, or Google TV or Roku, or music CDs, or movies and TV shows on DVD.

How To Get From the Complexity We Have Now To A New Simplicity?

If you have cable with hundreds of channels how do you even know what to watch? And what great shows are you missing?

Live

The first thing we need to do is separate live content from recorded content. We need to bring back the demand and understanding of live TV and we need to reduce the number of channels offered. Because our system works with the world, live TV could be from anywhere on the planet. We want our TV user to select any channel they want, but we need to simplify the TV menu system. I like how Roku does things. It offers hundreds of channels but you only add in the ones you regularly use to you main menu. I’ve done the same thing with my over-the-air TV, reducing about two dozen local channels down to five. It makes life easier.

When the user says “Live TV” to our new set they should see a small listing of favorite live channels. They could be numbered on the screen so the user could say “Number 4” or just “PBS.” Or they could say “Add channel” and then go into a menu of all possible live channels to add. They might say, “Japan” and see live TV channels from Japan. Or they could say “American football” or “British reality shows.”

This system would allow for simplicity from an unlimited offering.

Also, the Live function could connect to web cams around the world. TV doesn’t have to be produced.

Library

The selection of recorded shows could run to the millions. Any movie, any TV show, any documentary, any home video, etc. We’d need a system to help people find good content. The basic search engine could find things if user already knew the name of the show, or certain related details, but for discovering new shows they would need help.

What we need is the wisdom of crowds – hit lists of all kinds to let people find what other people are watching and rating.

The default Library screen could have pull down menus on the left and a list of shows on the right. The pull down menus will let you pick for Year, Genre (and Subgenre), Audience, Now/Then, Rating, and maybe others. The default might be Current to see the most popular shows people are watching right now. But under Time you can change it to a listing by year or decade. Under genre you’ll see a detail list of genres and from Audience you can pick age group.

This way you could put in 1950s, Science Fiction, 60-65, Now – and you’d see a list of 1950s science fiction shows and movies that people 60-65 are currently watching the most. You can also switch to Then and see what the people back in the 1950s watched the most.

So if you want your daughter to learn about astronomy you could request the most popular documentaries on astronomy that are viewed by 10-20 year old girls that are rated 8-10 stars.

We’d need supplemental features that used the techniques of Amazon customer reviews, Netflix, Wikipedia, Rotten Tomatoes, MetaCritic etc. to help people find shows.

The system could have an encyclopedia of TV shows and you could find any TV series that’s ever been made and start watching them from the first episode to the last. Such a TV system will kill off DVDs.

Finally, our Library feature could also integrate with your local libraries, to their special collections, or to libraries around the world. There’s more to our culture than old movies and TV shows.

Telephone

Wouldn’t it be cool for one family on Christmas to see and talk with other family members who can’t make it home that year? The possibilities are endless. Science fiction has been predicting for the wall screen telecommunication device for decades. It’s time to get around to making one.

Games

It’s pretty obvious games need to be integrated into this system. Essentially our TV will be a computer, whether it runs Mac OS X or Windows 8 or Linux, it will be competing with console gaming. It could signal the end to console games. But won’t Angry Birds be cool on a 62” screen at 1080p? Or future versions of World of Warcraft?

Music

Apple wants you to buy music from iTunes – that’s such ancient 20th century thinking. I’m surprised that Steve Jobs didn’t recognize the simple beauty of streaming music libraries like Rhapsody, Rdio, MOG, Spotify, Zune and others. Why mess with owning music and having to worry about backing it up and protecting it for the rest of your life. Streaming music rental libraries is just too damn easy to use.

Like the “Live” TV function, the “Music” screen should allow users to add subscription services to the default screen. Probably only one, but they should get to pick which one. I’m sure the future TV from Apple will show iTunes, but unless iTunes starts its own streaming music service, this will keep the Apple model of future TV tied to the past. Right now I subscribe to Rhapsody and Rdio, and use the free version of Spotify.

Computer

Lot’s of people want to predict the death of the desktop computer but you just don’t want to do everything you can do on a computer from a 4” screen, or even a 10” screen. Online education is going to be big. Doing business presentations is already huge and getting bigger. Everyone will learn to create content, whether you’re an artist, teacher, musician or mathematician. Imagine letting kids paint on a 62” canvas? Or studying math from a library of the best teaching programs from around the world. For many families the desktop might go away, or it might become the family TV. Or the bedroom TV. Pretty soon a TV will be a computer and a computer a TV.

Summary

It’s like Dylan said, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Many young people have already abandoned the family TV to get all their content from smartphones and tablets. The shift to Internet TV has been going on for years, so it doesn’t take much imagination to predict a perfect TV. I wished Jobs would have lived into his 90s to see everything he could have revolutionized. Actually it would be fun to see if he ran out of things to reinvent.

At some point things have got to settle down. If you contemplate this TV I’ve imagined here, it integrated a lot of technologies into one simple device. I’d expect one screen in every room. And then everyone would have a 4” smartphone and a 10” tablet and maybe a 12-16” laptop if they needed one. After the war of gadgets we’ve been seen in the last decade will we see a gadget peace for a time? Reading Engadget makes that hard to believe. But the Flip video camera was killed off because of video cameras in smartphones. What will the iPhone 4s do to the digital still and video camera market? What’s happening to portable DVD players and handheld game units? Does anyone buy handheld GPSs anymore?

Just when Microsoft was getting into touch, Apple comes out with a voice interface. Schools are giving up teaching cursive handwriting. When will typing disappear? Always remember, the evolution of machines is away from moving parts. Now that consumers have access to 3 terabyte hard drives do they really need them when everything is moving to the cloud? How much does the iMac look like the future of computers and TV? Evolution appears to be moving toward intelligent flat screens. The smartphone suggests that everyone will have a personal 4” screen they take everywhere. Some people will also need 10” screens (tablets). At what point does voice controlled touch screens invalidate the need for 12-16” laptop computers? And when does the 24” computer monitor in the bedroom merge with the TV? And can one OS handle all screen sizes? Will it still be Microsoft v. Apple v. Linux?

My recommendation if you are buying a new TV now is to pick one with the most Internet features built in. But expect Apple to come out with something in 2012. Will it be as revolutionary as the iPhone? I don’t know. Too much depends on TV networks, cable channel systems and content providers. But I can’t help believe that cable TV will go the way of the floppy disc. Expect CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs to disappear quickly too. Cable TV and Satellite companies will put up a big fight for years, but the Internet will allow content produces to do an end run around them.

How quickly will all this happen? Well, how quickly are ebooks taking over printed books?

JWH – 10/30/11

Ad Pollution

In these bad economic times, it might be heresy to attack marketing, but advertising is starting to crush my innate cheery disposition. The web is being choked with ads, reducing the signal-to-noise ratio so low that many sites and searches are worthless. Google, the darling of weberati, whose motto is “don’t be evil,” has become corrupted by advertising revenue. Slashdot.org should stop making Borg allusions about Microsoft, and start making them about Google. Too often a search on Google leads to page after page of links to sites wanting to sell me something directly, or links that take me to honey-pot pages, with tiny bits of info nestled in large screen acreage of ads. For the most part, I’ve replaced the World Wide Web with Wikipedia when I’m searching for knowledge.

I stopped listening to the radio decades ago because of advertising and annoying disc jockeys. I can only watch TV because of PBS, HBO and DVRs. I know people who have stopped watching television altogether because of the advertisements. I’m quickly approaching the decision to stop going to movies because of advertisements. The only place I don’t mind advertising is the Sunday newspaper, but I feel guilty about all that wasted paper. Shouldn’t there be a better way?

There are sites on the web that will reward or pay you for looking at ads. What we need are systems to bring ads to us when we need and want them. There are times when I’m shopping that I would be open to sales pitches, and I wouldn’t even mind an AI shopping companion. Marketing really should be on the basis of don’t call me, I’ll call you.

Are ads really effective? Sure, sometimes. Those “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” TV mini-dramas from Apple are effective at making me hate them for selling misinformation and promoting style. I’ve never bought a Mac. Microsoft is miserable at creating ads, and I always buy their products? Neither decision has anything to do with advertising. When I want to buy something, I research it, and then look for the most convenient place to shop with the lowest prices. And how often do you see ads on TV selling on the basis of price? I suppose if Apple ran ads that said, “Buy the latest Mac Book with the hi-tech aluminum cases for $899,” I might rush out and buy one. Instead they sell comedy on TV, without mentioning the details of their products, or the price of the one I want. Me to Apple, if you want “me” to be a Mac, then sell that $1299 Mac Book for $899, and I’ll come visit your store.

My point is I’ll buy something I’ve studied if the price is right. The rest of the time I’m just avoiding ads like I avoid mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, germs and viruses. Of course, the real test of reality is whether or not the various forms of mass communication could exist without advertising.

If there were no advertising, how many television channels would we have? How many TV shows would exist? How many college sports programs would exist? How many professional sports teams would exist? Can you imagine racing cars without their advertising paint jobs? HBO and PBS exist without advertising and have outstanding programs.

I’m not alone in my aversion to advertising. It’s obvious some big economic bubbles have burst this year, and I’m wondering if the advertising bubble will not burst soon too? As we move into a world-wide recession we’re going to see a lot of companies cut their advertising budgets. Unless there is real proof that ads bring in dollars, companies will start seeing how naked their marketing programs really are, and close them down. Recession has a way of cutting out the fat, and mean vicious recessions, like I’m guessing we’re moving into, trims away every gram of grease.

I would like to see more marketing along the HBO model. I’d rather pay $5 or $10 a month per channel for a handful of quality channels, and abandon all the rest. I’d rather pay a subscription fee to an online digital magazine if they could provide me the content without the advertising. Theater owners and movie distributors need to cut the ads before people give up on going to the movies. And that’s for three reasons. One I hate seeing the ads. Two I hate people trying to find seats at the last moment trying to avoid the ads. And three, I hate that they waste my Saturday afternoon time.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There are occasions when I want ads. I’ve been meaning to buy some new shirts, and have wished I could get some stylish ones that fit better. My wife complains about the constant boring shirts I wear now. I wouldn’t mind going to a web site and telling it I’m in the mood to buy shirts and then see some healthy competition to market me new styles, especially if I had more choice in sizing and material.

I don’t know what to do about the web. I can’t believe that all those web pages with Google ads really make enough money to pay their bills. I was just researching on optical astronomical interferometers and I couldn’t believe the “Ads by Google” signs I was seeing on pages with links to scientific papers. The reality is we have too many web sites trying to direct us to too few places with real content by paying for their useless help with web ads. Go away. Please, turn of your servers, and go away. If you try to make money on the web by solely linking to other sites, you are worthless. Google and other top level search engines can do all that work.

Comment to Microsoft, if you want to beat Google, offer a search engine that is based on subscription income and only provides links to 100% content. I can’t guarantee it will work, but if you offered such a service for $19.95 a year, and you filtered out all commercial web pages, you might have an alternative to Google. If I’m sick enough of Google’s commercial results and willing to pay, there might be others like me.

This recession is going to shake up how we earn money and how we spend money. Inflationary bubbles will be bursting everywhere. I think the advertising world will be one big bubble that’s going to pop big time. In all the various mass market venues, we’re going to see disappearing players, fewer networks on TV, fewer magazines and newspapers, and fewer web sites. I’m an ordinary guy, so if I’m reaching the tipping point of running away from advertising, I imagine there are lots of other ordinary folk feeling the same way.

JWH – 10-25-08