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Eno time: The long and the short of it

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I found myself waiting on a long line at Fort Mason Friday night, one that stretched from the doors of the Herbst Pavilion all the way out the Fort Mason parking lot gate. You don’t often see a crowd that size at the warren of funky non-profits and arts groups. A man wandered up to the line at one point and asked, a little incredulously, “Are all you people waiting for the Annie Leibovitz exhibit?”

No way. We were waiting to hear Brian Eno, who was giving a free talk to kick off a lecture series by the Long Now Foundation. But the makesift lecture hall proved all too small for the huge crowd, so a lot of people had to listen to the talk piped in over a PA to the bigger room next door. You could mill around and look at Leibovitz’s homages to ephemeral celebrity while listening to Eno talk about the value of taking a 10,000 year view.

In the mid-1970s, when Eno’s still-amazing solo albums “Here Come the Warm Jets,” “Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy” and “Another Green World” shaped my teenage musical imagination, an Eno lecture might not have filled a small broom closet. So as I waited Friday night — while distinguished ushers Danny Hillis and Kevin Kelly handed out programs and warned us we might not get in — a part of me was thinking, who cares if I get in? I’m just glad to live in a time where Brian Eno has found a following, and a place where he is a bigger draw than Annie Leibovitz.

But I’ve grown a little old for that sort of in-group pride, and besides, the topic of Eno’s talk was one that deserves mass distribution beyond the narrow circles of the Bay Area art-and-science-crossover world. If you haven’t already encountered the Long Now perspective, this essay by Eno does a pretty good job of recapitulating his Friday talk.

Lit from below just a little demonically, Eno explained the Long Now Foundation’s aim of expanding our frame of reference in thinking about the future: What if we were thinking not just about tomorrow or next year or even “the rest of my life,” but about the next 10,000 years? (One thing the foundation does in all of its literature is add a zero in front of the year — for instance, it’s 02003 right now — to “avoid the Y10K bug” and keep that longer time span in the front of our minds.)

As a longtime devourer of science fiction, I’m probably a bit of a pushover for this vision. I remember reading Olaf Stapledon’s “Last and First Men” as a 14-year-old and savoring the sense of temporal vertigo its ever-expanding timelines induced.

But there are perfectly pragmatic and down-to-earth rationales for the Long Now idea — not just in the obvious ways, like fostering a (literally) more conservative treatment of natural resources and the environment, but in personal, psychological terms. While the kind of long-term thinking Long Now promotes certainly encourages activism today, Eno argued that it also “takes the pressure off” individuals — “it makes you slightly less precious and tight about your own time on earth.” Long Now projects, like the clock for which it is most famous, are inevitably collaborations across time between people today and future generations.

Eno outlined four misapprehensions of the Long Now ideal: “The Realist” sneers, “Do you really think you can predict the future?” (They’re not trying to predict anything.) “The Pessimist” snaps, “”What bloody future?” (“If he’s wrong,” Eno argued, “it would have been a good idea id we had done something about it.”) “The Optimist” takes a Panglossian, passive approach: “Everything is working out fine,” so why do anything? Finally, “The Designer” believes that “we’re smart enough to design the future for you — we can create a perfect world.”

Each of these responses misses the basic point here, Eno said — one of “encouraging a habit of thought”: “We are building the future, whether we like it or not. We can do it with our back to it, or we can turn around and look.”

For many people, religion provides a moral framework for this long view — but if, like me, you are simply not a believer in any organized religion’s tenets, the Long Now argument makes a great deal of sense. I’ll look forward to the rest of this series.

Farewell to Emusic

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I’ve written rapturously in the past about the Emusic service, for which I’ve willingly paid for many many months, based on its high quality of unusual music and its smart policy on downloads.

Well, all good things must pass, and now it seems that Emusic has been acquired by new owners who’ve decided that it should become just like all the other online music services, limiting the amount of music users get for their money. It’s not all bad news; it sounds like Emusic will continue to offer real MP3s rather than DRM-crippled files, for instance. But the real value of the service as a place where you could get turned on to musical obscurities in abundance looks like it will vanish.

It’s tough to run any sort of business online these days and I assume Emusic is doing what it has to do to stay afloat. But I’ll probably be canceling my subscription, and something tells me a whole lot of other people are going to do the same.

Music to our ears

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My recent post comparing the RIAA to Richard Scarry’s “Pie Rats” occasioned some vigorous debate in the comments, along with a couple of interesting emails: Jeremy Schlosberg, who did some writing for me years ago when I edited Salon’s technology coverage, wrote in to point me to his Fingertips site, which catalogues freely and legally available MP3s: “Something that tends to get overlooked whenever the MP3 situation is debated is the fact that there are actually an amazing number of free and legal MP3s available online for discriminating music fans, and it’s not all amateur crap either. Discussion tends to focus on the illegal stuff people trade or the legal stuff people are tentatively starting to buy, but there is a rich middle ground of free and legal music that’s worth knowing about as well.”

And Shuman Ghosemajumder emailed to tell me about his Open Music Model proposal. Many readers may already be familiar with Terry Fisher’s proposal for a royalty system for file sharing. These ideas and others like them floating around are evidence that the RIAA’s critics are not simply saying “to hell with the artists” or “to hell with business models.” We’re saying, online distribution — and redistribution — of music makes sense and is here to stay. So what can we do now?

There’s more good stuff on this over in Salon Technology: a point/counterpoint on the RIAA lawsuits, and some letters, and some more letters.

The music industry’s pie rats strike back

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My kids are big Richard Scarry fans, and one of their favorite books is a little paperback titled “Pie Rats Ahoy!” (Yes, these successors to Captain Hook are tiny rats who steal a pie from the seafaring hero.)

I thought of that punning title as I read the latest batch of headlines from the file-swapping wars. The RIAA and its member labels have now taken the final step (one I predicted nearly four years ago, as I recalled here) of declaring all-out war on the music fans who are their own best customers — and who have in recent years taken to file trading en masse because of the music industry’s price gouging and its pathetic reluctance to adapt to new technology.

As the RIAA slaps lawsuits on 12-year-old girls, while industry executives admit to the Wall Street Journal that they are unable to keep their own kids from trading MP3s, one of the most ludicrous figures being tossed around is the amount that the industry has supposedly lost thanks to piracy. A conservative guess by an analyst in the New York Times placed this number at $750 million. Music industry lobbyists have put the number in the billions.

These numbers are reminiscent of the old software-industry complaints about software piracy: They assume that each illegal copy of a program or a music file represents the loss of a sale — that if the alternative of piracy were not available, most or all of the pirated stuff would have been bought fair and square at full price. (By this logic, every time Free Republic members rip off Salon Premium articles and post them on their site, Salon could claim that every single Freeper reading them represents a loss of a $35 subscription fee.)

This is self-serving nonsense. First of all, it treats the digital realm — in which each additional copy costs essentially nothing to make and does not limit the original’s availability to its owner — as if it were the physical realm, where copying carries costs and stealing involves depriving the original owner of his goods. Even more importantly, it ignores the essentially transitory nature of much or most file-sharing — which music lovers use to sample music, to see whether they like it, and frequently just to listen once or a handful of times. Each download does not and cannot represent a lost sale. But the record labels have an incentive to artificially overstate the size of the pie-slice that online piracy has cut out, and they have done so with all the scurrying zeal — and comical ineffectiveness — of Richard Scarry’s rats.

I get all my online music these days legally from the great Emusic service. But back in the days of Napster I used the software to listen to bands I’d heard about and see whether I liked them. I bought more CDs as a result. This year for the first time in my life I have consciously decided to cut my music purchases way back. I won’t support the pie rats!

Itunes, have you met Emusic?

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Haven’t had time to test drive the new Apple music store. I’m glad that Jobs & co. seem to have broken the logjam in getting the big labels to find a reasonable way to distribute their music online.

The one drawback of the Apple service many users have complained about is the absence of a wide selection of independent and alternative music. I can imagine the organizational explanations for why this is, and I’m sure it’s not Apple’s preference — after all, in the world of mainstream personal computing Apple has always been an “alternative.”

Still, it underscores how happy I continue to be with the Emusic service, which I’ve now had for a good year and a half. $10 a month; unlimited downloads without annoying DRM mechanisms. Since in any month I find at least a half-dozen CDs I want, that’s a bargain; plus I get to sample lots of artists without having to negotiate stupid streaming-only limitations. If your musical taste runs to obscurities anyway, this is one of the best bargains on the Net.

You can’t always sing what you want

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So you’re the chief censor for the Chinese Communists, looking at the Rolling Stones’ set list for the forthcoming tour (drawn from their “40 Licks” hits collection) and deciding which songs Mick and Keith can or can’t play. Do you —

(1) Ban the incendiary “Street Fighting Man” and the nihilistic “Sympathy For the Devil,” songs with genuinely subversive and violent messages?

or:
(2) Ban “Brown Sugar,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Beast of Burden” and “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” because they’re somehow lascivious (though lord knows why they are considered more objectionable than other Stones hits like “Under My Thumb”)?

China chose door number two. I guess trying to fathom how the censor’s mind works is a hopeless undertaking.

Cloudy channel

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My radio listening habits tend toward college stations and public radio — what the Replacements celebrated as “Left of the Dial.” So my awareness of the continued degradation of the commercial part of the spectrum has been provided mainly by the dogged investigative work of Salon’s Eric Boehlert, whose exposes of the Clear Channel monopoly have justly earned him a passel of awards.

Today’s New York Times brings a new twist on Clear Channel-ism: David Gallagher reports on the remarkable process by which this radio mega-conglomerate has assembled a DJ from database parts. Basically, they’ve taken the recorded voice of Carson Daly, chopped it into little snippets and used those soundbites to re-assemble pseudo-local broadcasts — so that listeners in, say, Atlanta hear a localized “top 40” broadcast, with Daly introducing each song in the particular order that applies to that market, yet Daly never actually said those words in that order.

It’s hard to know whether to applaud the ingenuity required to create such a DJ-bot, or barf at the complete triumph of corporate homogenization that it represents. I think the gagging in my throat tells me which reaction predominates for me.

Unlocking the Silos

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Time for a music break. I’ve always been a fan of the Silos, but recently I’ve been delighted to find that their earliest recordings are now available again on CD. The mid-80s EP “About Her Steps” was (I think) their first commercial recording, or at least my first introduction to them, and it now forms the cornerstone of “Ask the Dust,” which also collects other early work by the band and its leader, Walter Salas-Humara. Also newly available on CD is the album “Cuba.” The Silos have never sold a lot of records, but their style of domestic folk-rock — “About Her Steps” begins with a description of cleaning up a house and “Cuba” is shot through with the love and pain of marriage — has prodigious staying power. The Silos sprang out of the same scene as (and once shared some members with) another little-known but much-loved band, the Vulgar Boatmen. (Read Charlie Taylor’s great paean to them here.) Today’s practitioners of “alt-country” are mining a similar vein but without quite the same spirit or simplicity. Music like this is worth having a reunion with.

Paint it Black

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Interesting link found on Tenorman.Net: EMUSIC OFFERS TWO NEW FRANK BLACK ALBUMS IN MP3 — Former Pixies Leader was the First Artist to Partner with Pioneer Downloadable Music Service. (This page is from the new Blogcritics project, which looks like it’s off to a great start.)

Now, here’s the thing — I subscribe to EMusic’s service. I also just bought those two CDs at Amoeba here in Berkeley. Now, theoretically, I should be upset, right? I just paid about $28 for music that I could have downloaded, legally, as part of an online service I already pay for. But guess what? I’m not upset. I’d have bought these CDs anyway. I’m a Frank Black fan, I buy all his CDs, and that’s that.

The point here is simple: Some music you want to own. Other music you just want to try out, sample, see whether you want to own it. The problem with the current music industry position is that they don’t provide us with enough options for trying stuff out, on our own terms.

RIAA’s new brainstorm: Let’s sue our customers

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In Feb. 2000, I wrote a column about Napster and the future of online music that noted:

  …if the RIAA goes after the entire Napster user base, the music industry will find itself in the awkward position of suing a whole lot of its best customers. Which doesn’t sound like smart business.

Well, it now appears that — having successfully crippled Napster and several successor outfits — the RIAA is getting set to do precisely that. As Declan McCullagh reports on News.com, the record companies’ trade association is adopting a two-pronged strategy: sue individual file traders and get the federal government to take action against them, too.

And when all the file traders are in jail, who’ll be left to buy music?