March 05, 2013

There are basically three ways to go about this. You can put up a paywall; you can ask for donations; or you can sell non-digital things to your digital audience.

On its face, Palmer's talk is about the second strategy, but in fact it's about all three. (And yes, I’m the "financial blogger" referred to in the talk.) For instance, when it comes to online publishing, why are paywalls more common than tip jars, despite the fact that they're much more difficult to implement? Palmer does a great job of walking us through the answer to that question: there's something shameful, there's a whiff of the panhandler, in asking strangers for money.

However, researchers often overlook students' personal beliefs about how they learn and study most effectively. Their resistance to replacing paper textbooks with e-textbooks together with an ongoing desire to be able to print electronic content suggests that paper-based information serves students' needs better in the educational context.

February 11, 2013

February 08, 2013

February 06, 2013

16bit 44.1 K WAV - This is CD quality with no digital compression. i.e. it's exactly like a CD. This format may not be compatible with some devices.
320kbps MP3 - This format is compatible with most devices.
24bit 96 K WAV - This format may not be compatible with some devices.

Zumba fans have already helped revive the career of Rob VanWinkle -- better known as the rapper Vanilla Ice. Last year, Mr. VanWinkle rerecorded his 1990s hit "Ice Ice Baby" with a Latin flavor and Zumba-friendly tempo, then starred in a video featuring Zumba choreography. Released last August, the single has sold nearly 17,000 copies.

January 30, 2013

"Unlike the royalties from a sale, these payments accrue every time a listener clicks on a song, year after year."

December 12, 2012

December 06, 2012

I've been testing this major new version, called iTunes 11, and I consider it a significant improvement in the look, feel, speed and function of the program, which had become somewhat bloated, sluggish and dense over the years as new features were added.

Is the new iTunes any better? Not markedly, to my eye. I've been using it for a few hours now. Naturally, the interface has been completely redesigned, though it's too early for me to tell whether the new version is better or just different. Now, instead of a pane of options on the left side, you click between functions using buttons and menus on the top. Is this a genuine improvement, or just a face-lift masking the rot beneath? I suspect the latter: While some parts of iTunes move a little bit faster (the iOS app management screen, for example, used to be unusably slow; now it's OK) most of it still feels lumbering.

"Originally, it wasn't going to be an album," says Tilbrook, 52. "It was going to be a series of rerecordings that we could offer to movie and ad people as an alternative to the original versions. But the closer we got to the end of it, the more I realized that we put a big amount of effort into it, and it stood up on its own, as a record."

November 20, 2012

Most users merely stream the music; it's a hundred cassette trays, in the Cloud. But you can download some of it, too. Some have been downloaded so often they'd be gold albums, were someone paying for them. (Anything the Dead release commercially gets removed from the Archive.) A mediocre recording of an unremarkable 1979 gig at Madison Square Garden has been downloaded almost seven hundred thousand times.

It never ceases to amaze me how much new music is released by quantifiably popular artists -- and Buckingham's sales statistics are better than most -- that you never hear about in the media. It reminds you just how futile it is to even pretend that you can cover popular music at all comprehensively. At best, you can rope off a small portion of the overall landscape and convince yourself that the rest of it doesn't exist.

Readers today are forced to choose between buying a physical book or an ebook, but a lot of them would really like to have both on hand – so they’d be able, for instance, to curl up with the print edition while at home (and keep it on their shelves) but also be able to load the ebook onto their e-reader when they go on a trip. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business.