Posts tagged “digital media”

Amazon MP3 gets my full endorsement: no DRM, 256kbps quality, seamless downloading, and genuinely fair pricing. Albums at 50 cents a song finally feel like what music is actually worth. I'm already impulse-buying. Go get 'em.

I tried Amazon Unbox for Battlestar Galactica season 3 and it works fine, but $2 an episode adds up fast. This is the "law of small numbers": people tolerate huge margins when the dollar amounts seem small. Combined with Amazon's predatory DRM terms, I'm going elsewhere.

I steal music and I know it's wrong. But record companies are technological dinosaurs charging 10x what music is worth, crippling their products with DRM, and offering a terrible experience compared to piracy. I'd pay a fair price for a convenient, unrestricted product. Nobody's offering me one.

Tried buying physical CDs for the first time in ages. Total disaster: wrong section, missing albums, no recommendations, one lonely listening station. How did people ever shop for music this way? I am deeply grateful to live in the age of the internet.

I spent an afternoon advising BBC managers on how young people actually consume media. We don't watch broadcast TV; we download what we want, when we want it. Broadcasting is dying. The BBC's real job is producing quality content, not running channels. They seemed surprised. They shouldn't be.

Pleix.net is a trove of arty, satirical, and unsettling video art. My favourite is the sarky Pig Corp piece.

Surprising news: the major labels are offering legal downloads at reasonable prices. Meanwhile they're also poisoning file-sharing networks with fake songs. Plus a roundup of cool links: credit-card cameras, a Unix Rosetta Stone, mind-blowing nanotech storage and more.