Thursday, 9 September 2010

The Internet is a killer of art--or at least that's how a couple of former rock 'n' roll gods see it.

John Mellencamp, known for such '80s hits as "Jack and Diane" and "Hurts So Good," last week said the Web is the most dangerous creation since the atomic bomb. Stevie Nicks, the Fleetwood Mac songstress, concluded in an interview this week that the "Internet has destroyed rock."

Jac Holzman, the man who discovered The Doors, founded Elektra Records, and nudged the big recording companies into adopting the compact disc, considers the Web and says: "I think the music industry has a bright future."

Wow, that's quite a contrast in views. The difference is Holzman has witnessed most of the industry-shaking technologies during his six decades in the music business--and he's not panicking.

This year, the 79-year-old celebrates Elektra's 60th anniversary, and at a life stage when Holzman's biggest trouble might be choosing the right 9-iron, he's helping to search for answers to the music industry's burning digital questions. He has said in the past that there were those in the record business who didn't think he was relevant any longer, but Holzman is back in the thick of it. Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. sought him out, hired him as a senior adviser, and sees value in the context Holzman can provide.

"I love the way Jac approaches the intersection of music and technology--through the lens of opportunity," Bronfman said.

At spotting opportunities, Holzman has a notable record. As a 19-year-old, Holzman started Elektra with $300 he received at his bar mitzvah. The label would later go to sign such acts as Queen, Judy Collins, The Stooges, and Jim Morrison. After Holzman sold Electra to Warner Communication (a forerunner of Warner Music Group and Warner Bros. Pictures), he became WCI's chief technology officer. In that role, he helped oversee some of the company's film and TV ventures.

"We met right around the time when Napster came together, and I said 'There are opportunities and there are potholes. How are you preparing for a digital future?' He said to me, 'Jac, I just want it to go away'."

--Jac Holzman

When Jack Valenti, the chief of the Motion Picture Association of America, was trying to kill video recorders and comparing them to the Boston Strangler, Holzman was steering WCI into the home-video market. With cable TV he recognized its potential early and contributed to the development of pay-per-view programming.

In music, Holzman saw the rise of the LP, 8-track tape, DAT, compact disc, MP3, and BitTorrent. After all that, new technologies don't spook him. On the contrary, he says many of these technologies helped make a lot of artists and industry people rich. When it comes to the Internet and digital distribution, Holzman is confident music labels can capitalize on them too. He says they really don't have a choice.

"I was having lunch with a very dear friend of mine [in the record business] sometime around 2000," Holzman said during an interview this week with CNET. "We met right around the time when Napster came together, and I said 'There are opportunities and there are potholes. How are you preparing for a digital future?' He said to me, 'Jac, I just want it to go away.' Well, you can't continue that conversation."

It's hard to imagine that anybody would want to put Holzman out to pasture. At a time when the industry is trying to make sense of the Internet, wouldn't it make sense to have people around who have a history at capitalizing on technological advances?

Holzman recounts the meeting where he introduced the compact disc to some of the label chiefs, including Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records, and Mo Ostin, who headed Warner Bros. Records. Holzman said that what eventually appealed most to some of the leaders was the money they could earn by reselling their catalogs in the new format. While the CD proved to be a financial boon, Holzman recognized much later that by selling the discs to the public, the record labels were essentially placing digital-master recordings into every home.

That proved to be a liability when CD burners arrived on the scene and enabled people to make high-quality, unauthorized copies to share with each other via the Web.

"I didn't see that coming," Holzman said mournfully. "I knew that CD burners were out there, but when companies began putting them in computers...that surprised me."

On Napster

If Holzman's advice to Bronfman sounds anything like the opinions he offered during our interview, here's what he might be whispering into the CEO's ear.

Holzman suggested that the big labels goofed when they sued Napster out of existence. At that point, the rise of the CD had left the industry without an effective way to sell individual songs. Before the CD, the 45-rpm vinyl disc was the perfect singles vehicle. The costs of manufacturing CDs, however, made that format more suited to selling full albums, according to Holzman.

"With Napster, it would have been easy to proliferate singles," Holzman said. "You would have had no manufacturing costs. You would still have the value of the single as a calling card for albums and you could have sold [songs] for something like 79 cents, made it affordable. You would have had ability to count because all of the transactions went through a central server at Napster, unlike peer-to-peer where you bypassed servers. Now, would P2P still have happened? Yes it would. But we would have established a principle of being paid for digital music."

On fair use

Holzman agrees with some of the arguments made by Lawrence Lessig, the academic who has called for making copyright and trademark laws less restrictive.

"I think Lessig has some good ideas," Holzman said. "We have to be free enough with our music to permit people to adapt it for their own purposes and to create new works out of the building blocks of our music. I know that will drive most of my fellow record company people up the wall."

On ISPs

He said he thinks that the lawsuits filed against accused illegal file sharers by the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group representing the four largest music labels, was a mistake. He also believes, however, that artists and record companies deserve to be compensated.

"I think we need to be paid for our music," Holzman said. "I think we are entitled to something from the ISPs. They have been getting a free ride on our music for a long time."

If some former marquee acts are wringing their hands about the future of the music sector, Holzman said he's encouraged by signs that the top labels are beginning to get their digital feet under them.

"I don't think anybody is afraid anymore," Holzman said. "I'm looking at all the labels, and I know them all and I've sat down with all their digital guys. Everybody is embracing digital technology, but they're just trying to figure out how to make it work for them."

Greg Sandoval @'cnet'

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Scientists identify moves that make men irresistible on the dancefloor

The enduring mystery of why men rarely flatter themselves when they take to the dancefloor may finally have been solved. A team of psychologists used video footage of men strutting their stuff to pinpoint the killer moves that separate good dancers from bad. Men who were judged to be good dancers had a varied repertoire and more moves that involved tilting and twisting the torso and neck.

But the majority of men displayed highly repetitive moves that used their arms and legs, but not the rest of their bodies.

"It's rare that someone is described as a good dancer if they are flinging their arms about but not much else," said Nick Neave, a psychologist at the University of Northumbria, who led the study.

"Think about a head banger. Their head movement has a large amplitude, but it's not changing direction or showing any kind of variability. That's a bad dancer. Or someone who is just twisting and turning left and right? That's a bad dancer too."

While features such as body shape and facial symmetry are well known indicators of healthy development, a person's dance moves may send out more subtle clues about their potential as a mate, Neave said.

Neave's team recruited 19 male volunteers aged between 18 and 35 and asked them to dance to a simple drum beat in front of a video camera for 30 seconds. To capture the dance moves, 38 infra-red reflectors were attached to their clothing. These produce bright spots that allow the movement of every limb and joint to be tracked and studied in detail.

The researchers used software to transfer each man's dance routine to an avatar on a computer screen. This ensured that the judges ranked the dancers according to their moves and not their height, looks or other physical features.

The dancers were judged by 37 straight women, also aged 18 to 35, who watched the avatar perform 15 seconds of each man's routine before ranking them on a scale of one to seven, where one was very bad dancing.

"The head, neck and upper body come out as the key features that are important for good dancing and that surprised us," said Neave, whose study is published in the journal Biology Letters. "When you see brilliant dancers, you'll see their bodies, heads and necks are all doing ever so slightly different things in time to the music."

Will Brown, a psychologist at the University of East London, said more work was needed to disentangle why dancing is attractive and its biological significance.

"When you have so much movement data from a relatively small sample of dancers, you might get chance associations between certain moves and dance attractiveness," he said.

"Flexing the trunk while dancing may be attractive, but we need to show it is indicative of a better quality male using an independent measure of biological quality."

Neave said his group is working through the results of blood tests on the men, which appear to show that the better dancers are healthier.

Ian Sample @'The Guardian'

Mothership/Land

This Sucks

Meet Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center, the 50-member church in Gainesville, Florida. Gainesville is where I live. This hate monger has turned our wonderful community into a lightning rod for hate and ignorance. Saying his church has 50 members is a stretch as he's lost some in the past weeks. On top of that, he has 9 kids so his family actually makes up 20% or more of the congregation. There happens to be a home football game of 90K fans this Saturday, 9/11/10. The FBI, Homeland Security are in town, and all local law enforcement are on super high alert. We have been informed by Homeland Security that we will not be reimbursed for the exorbitant costs of all this extra security, so our already overstretched local resources will be put over the limit all in the name of his selfish hatred for Islam. On top of all that, the image of our wonderful community will be forever tarnished.
Since the start of this, I've heard people say, "He should be ignored." However, stories like this are like crack for the media, and sure enough, the story is now international. The media satellite trucks outside this church now outnumber the vehicles of its congregation. It sucks to say Gainesville has fallen victim to fear and loathing.

@'The Gainesville Sun'

William Gibson Talks Zero History, Paranoia and the Awesome Power of Twitter

The Great Dismal

Mark Stewart on The Pop Group reunion

Mark’s a giant of a man. He’s one of those guys who has to stoop to get in rooms. He looks - to borrow his favourite word - like a clash of a 50s matinee idol, Reg Presley of The Troggs and an Easter Island Statue come angrily to life. His head’s velocity is too fast for anyone currently trapped in his orbit. I see Jim Sclavunous (Bad Seeds/Grinderman/occasional Quietus writer) afterwards and say that ideally I’d like to interview Stewart again because even though I liked him, maybe I'd caught him on a particularly manic day. Spending two hours with him was a bit like spending 20 hours trapped on a passenger jet that's full of children and constantly threatening to fall out of the sky. Jim smiles indulgently and says that he's always out there: "I've known Mark for years and he's always been far out on some distant cosmic plain that makes him hard to reach sometimes."

During the interview in The Griffin on Leonard Street, I feel like his brain is skimming on far ahead like a stone across a pond surface. I ask one thing and he answers some other question that I’ve not even dreamed up yet. He's like a chess grandmaster who has malfunctioned and found himself suddenly only able to play the moves that are the furthest ahead - ten steps into the future. These moves may make sense to him but don't always to those round him. There is much bright and probably brilliant talk occluded into partial uselessness by this. He reacts to everything around him. His face darts about changing expression constantly. He isn’t pulling focus and he’s omni-intent on the interview, my beard, the barwoman, his friends Andy Fraser of Some Friendly and Paul Smith of Blast First sat at the bar, the cold wave compilation being played on the stereo, his notes that he has written onto a sheet of paper in front of him, something else that he can see over my shoulder. He sneers loudly at nearly everything I say in about an hour and a half which can, and does, get slightly grating. Even if I had turned up totally unprepared, which I haven't, I still would have hit the mark with at least a third of the questions. He’s a nice guy though and an energizing presence. It’s sad he comes into this naturally presuming I’m on the opposite side to him. Part of him still acts as if it’s 1980 and the guy from the NME is here to stitch him up. In fact he constantly refers to me as being from the weekly (which I do write for) but he doesn’t hear when I tell him that the piece is for a more humble institution.

He admits himself that he's frozen in time in some ways: "I haven't changed since I was 14."...

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John Doran @'The Quietus'

A virtual counter-revolution

The first internet boom, a decade and a half ago, resembled a religious movement. Omnipresent cyber-gurus, often framed by colourful PowerPoint presentations reminiscent of stained glass, prophesied a digital paradise in which not only would commerce be frictionless and growth exponential, but democracy would be direct and the nation-state would no longer exist. One, John-Perry Barlow, even penned “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”.

Even though all this sounded Utopian when it was preached, it reflected online reality pretty accurately. The internet was a wide-open space, a new frontier. For the first time, anyone could communicate electronically with anyone else—globally and essentially free of charge. Anyone was able to create a website or an online shop, which could be reached from anywhere in the world using a simple piece of software called a browser, without asking anyone else for permission. The control of information, opinion and commerce by governments—or big companies, for that matter—indeed appeared to be a thing of the past. “You have no sovereignty where we gather,” Mr Barlow wrote.

The lofty discourse on “cyberspace” has long changed. Even the term now sounds passé. Today another overused celestial metaphor holds sway: the “cloud” is code for all kinds of digital services generated in warehouses packed with computers, called data centres, and distributed over the internet. Most of the talk, though, concerns more earthly matters: privacy, antitrust, Google’s woes in China, mobile applications, green information technology (IT). Only Apple’s latest iSomethings seem to inspire religious fervour, as they did again this week.

Again, this is a fair reflection of what is happening on the internet. Fifteen years after its first manifestation as a global, unifying network, it has entered its second phase: it appears to be balkanising, torn apart by three separate, but related forces...

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@'The Economist'