収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Echoed from Crime and the Blog of Evil

I’ve been thinking more about Google/YouTube’s new music streaming service terms – the ones that require your whole library, that require 320bps source, that require five year terms, and so on. I wrote about it last week, talking about how Google is letting the old labels dictate away crowdfunding rewards and the like.

But I’ve been doing more thinking since that. It’s been churning in my brain. And I’ve realised the five-year term, the 320bps requirement, and whole library thing have a combined intent.

And that intent is to take away literally every last music sale you might make. As in, every last music sale.

It’s not presented as such, of course. I think they want artists to think of it as radio that pays. But two of the big streaming service problems have been 1. quality (smaller concern) and 2. stability of material (huge concern). All the television streaming services, for example, have been plagued by shows getting yanked on and off and moving around. Customers find that annoying.

Meanwhile, you have the label involvement, discussed before. They were, from all reports, pretty tightly into this new set of terms. And one of the big problems for the labels the last several years has been the rise of indie artists. The crowdfunding/long-tail model has given indie artists something more to live on, ways to make money outside of the label ecosystem.

This solves both sets of “problems.” Think about it:

Google will have everything you do for five years, listen-anytime, at functionally CD quality. They’ll have everything, and they’ll have it first, at optimal quality. What’s that mean?

It means Google/YouTube Music service members will have no reason to buy any goddamn thing from any artist which is on the service. No more early-access advantages to entice crowdfunding backers. No more deep tracks on albums to discover. No more alt-takes, no more remixes, no more mailing-list exclusives – Google will have it all. Not exclusively, of course! But they’ll have it.

If I’m reading this right, then even if you hold out on them – you don’t upload some tracks, in violation of the agreement – if and when somebody else does, and they identify it as yours, they’ll add it to the service automatically. Tell me I’m wrong (even though I’m not) because that’s what this sounds like:

So even if you don’t explicitly deliver us every single song in your catalog if we have assets and they are fingerprinted by content ID to contain that music then it will be included to the subscription service…
        — Zoë Keating’s Google rep., in conversation with Zoë

Which means there’s no more reason to buy anything from you. No reason for anyone to deal with you at all.

Five years is a long time. There will be no long tail – at least, not for you. It’s all going to them. Five years is also plenty long enough to keep you locked in once you figure all this out. And five years is more than long enough to try to make this the new standard.

That’s the point of this whole contract. To take everything else away, and thereby, to reinstate a kind of 1971, one managed by making both unlimited internet distribution and piracy completely irrelevant.

I have to say – it’s brilliant. It end-runs around the post-scarcity environment entirely, by co-opting it. The pirates and illegal uploaders will make sure your entire catalogue is up there, even if you hold out, and it’ll be included whether you like it or not – it’s genius!

Meanwhile, they’re “giving the music away” so you can’t make any money on it, stopping you from being able to reward patrons and backers so you can’t make any money there either, and tossing you a sharecropper’s pittance in ad revenue as a reward. And even that is a pittance you can never hope to make on your own. You don’t – and can’t – have the numbers.

It’s a plan that takes away the entire internet/indie route as they understand it. It’s to make them – both the old labels and Google, in alliance – the only viable path. It’s a plan to make it so that once again, you have to go through them.

And we all know what that has always meant, don’t we?

Run. Run like hell.
 
 

Additional Reading:

• We Believe the Cellist: Google’s Smear Campaign against Zoë Keating and All Independent Artists
• Zoë Keating Fights YouTube to Control Her Music and Reputation

&nbsp

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

To celebrate Bone Walker‘s release to mastering and manufacturing today (preorder here), we’re posting some of the many creative things our friends and fans have told us about. These are things they do; check out this list of awesome. That’s an order.

JEWELLERY:

• Jenny comments first, so gets to be first here, and reports that she makes wire elf ears. These are the current favourite with her fandom: Custom Royal Fairy Ear Cuffs on Etsy.
• Jarandhel Dreamsinger hand-builds a whole bunch of types of pendants, mostly along a Tree-of-Life theme. And look – there’s also a tutorial! Participatory culture, fuck yeah!
• Gwendolyn Kestrel makes chainmail jewellery, showing mostly at gaming events and craft shows. But she has the Mythic Treasure shop on etsy as well.

MUSIC AND WRITING:

• Irfon-Kim Ahmad is the electronic madness behind RAMP Music, and he’s all about the trance and electronica. He also has a big Tumblr fandom, I’ve seen it. I suspect him of being a Cylon, but don’t tell him I said that.
• Maria-Katriina Lehtinen really needs two entries in this list. First, she composes neo-baroque music and performs on the organ. She’s endlessly frustrated that the people at the cathedral in Vancouver won’t let her re-tune their organ to better frequencies. On top of that, she writes and makes stained-glass windows! But she doesn’t provide links. Take that, commercialism!
• Angela Highland also writes as Angela Korra’ti, and writes books. Under the Highland name, she’s behind the high fantasy trilogy Rebels of Adalonia for Carina Press. Under the Korra’ti name, of course, the Free Court of Seattle. “Urban fantasy for the geekily and musically inclined, and I can guarantee you that you won’t find another urban fantasy series anywhere that features a Newfoundlander bouzouki-playing hero as the main lead, an Unseelie Elvis impersonator, and most importantly, a violin-playing heroine who’s a girl of color.” Find out everything at her professional website.
• Elizabeth Barrette is a poet, and a working poet at that! She also writes books, of course. Penultimate Productions is the top of the fold, but a list of her books currently in print is here, and she provides writing and editing services. She actively posts on Livejournal, where she also posts scrapbooked poems.
• Skellington is on the album! She’s lead fiddle on Kitsune at War. But her main band is Pinniped, a trad band who have a good bit of local traction. You should listen to her stuff!

PERSONAL ITEMS AND CRAFTS:

• JC Brazil is a maker of Glatta Papa body butters, lip balms, and moisturisers. “The hair pomade was created when I went through hospital hell and began losing my hair. It worked! Huzzah! When I met my boyfriend who is biracial, and now my husband, he couldn’t find anything natural to help him style his hair and didn’t smell like gummy bears. I offered him my pomade and he’s been using it ever since.”
• Paula Milburn makes a huge range of items, and makes them available two different places – one place for fannish audiences, one for general audiences. The general-audience work lives at KraftyKatz Unique Handmade and Personalised Cards and Gifts, while the fannish-friendly projects live at 4K Kollections.

CLOTHING AND ACCESSORIES:

• Sunnyjim makes All The Things, and seriously, she does, I’ve seen it. “The current obsession is Women’s High Heel Shoes. That’s right, I’m a cordwainer – a person who makes shoes. I also do art quilts, mosaics, stained glass, spinning and weaving, costuming, calligraphy, and the occasional oil painting. As they say at Weta Workshop: Be Creative, and Make Cool Stuff. (Yes, I have the t-shirt.)”

FANAC AND CONVENTIONS:

• Jen Kilmer helps make Conflikt, the Pacific Northwest Filk Music Convention – she’s chair and head of publications! Go buy a membership and attend, particularly since somebody cough will be having a big CD and book release show there.
• Linda Wyatt does things with vintage Star Wars memorabilia, Topps cards, and other hockey cards from the 1960s and 1970s. Sadly she did not include a link where I could point you at samples.

And, finally, of course, we make with the musics. I also have a history of illustration and other arty designy stuff and fandoms and houses and a fair bit of science!, but mostly these days it’s about the music.

All of these creative people wrote up all this in their own words in comments. So go check out their arts! Maybe you’ll get inspired too.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

We have a joint show this weekend! It’s at The Dreaming in Seattle, two sets, some Supervillain music, some Leannan Sidhe music, a few covers, it’ll be fun and awesome. Here’s the Facebook event page for the show.

Print resolution version of the poster (which is jointly by Shanti and me) here, if you want to, oh, print things and post them places and stuff. That would be awesome.

I may have stolen the circles in the poster design from another music graphic of the past. One hint: the reddish one should be blue if you want a more obvious match. You get a zillion music geek points if you can figure out the source. :D

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

Just back from the first movie I’ve seen in months, Maleficent. I wanted to see this before it fell out of theatres, mostly because of the trailers with her wings, because yeah.

Let’s talk about the good parts, first: Angelina Jolie is wonderful. It looks great. The green fire which is signatory to this version of the character was lovingly rendered and just felt right. The christening scene, reinterpreted here? Perfection. The later interactions of Aurora and Maleficent, ages, oh, 13ish to the end of the story resonated well, and just worked.

But… while so many things are right, I can’t get past “pretty good” as a response. Not great. Merely pretty good. That’s because I just can’t get past the fact that in this film, too many things are too easy. I don’t mean physically easy, tho’ there is some of that; those parts are not so important. No, I mean emotionally easy.

And from here on out, we’ll be heading deep into spoiler territory, so you have now been warned.

Let’s start with our antagonist, King Steffan.

Sharlto Copley plays Doctor then King Steffan well, given what he has to work with. But there isn’t enough meat in the part. There should be; all the bones are there. But Steffan’s arc is missing too many important, difficult notes.

His needed to be both a more political story – it’s a very political tale, after all – and a story about ruined love. Okay, sure, there was never “one true love,” as the film fairly points out – but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a kind of love there, and I think there was. And, well, betrayal of such things is a staple of royal histories. It’s entirely in theme.

And so Steffan commits a great treachery, setting events in motion, becoming King Henry’s heir. But that sort of treachery – so personal a treachery – needs confronting. In the film, all we really get is a big fight scene.

That’s letting him and the audience off easy, and it’s a failing. We in the audience need to know his self-justifications – how it was right for him to cut off and steal her wings, how it was right for him to seize the throne from a dying King Henry, how everything since then – the economic hardships, the battles – have proven how he and King Henry both were right to hate and desire the faerie lands.

How it’s all self-defense. How it’s all her fault. Not his. Not King Henry’s. Her fault.

Never his.

We shouldn’t buy it, of course. We don’t need to believe it. We just need to believe he believes it – even if only by lying to himself so strenuously for so long. We needed Maleficent to confront his justifications, and deny them, laying the lies bare.

We needed to see that, and we didn’t. Steffan’s descent into paranoia – see also, “uneasy rests the head that wears the crown” – played out well, but that’s not enough. We needed to get into his brain, and find him lacking.

It also would’ve been nice to see some of this from Princess and then Queen Leah’s view. It’s clear that King Steffan’s isolation grows throughout the film; it would’ve been nice if we’d known some of that has come from Queen Leah’s knowing that something happened between him and Maleficent. Sure, she knows about the wings; that’s why he’s king. But there was more to it, more that he’s lying about, something both more and rotten. Something that makes her suspicious, then untrusting, then isolating.

In short, his betrayal should ruin two potential loves. Ruined love already underlies the text; it should be a stronger undertheme, since it’s what unlocks his character. Love doesn’t have to be “one true love” to still be love; Steffan ruins it through betrayal for the sake of power, every time he acts.

It would make a nice parallel to the the other easiness problem in the film: the too-easy relationship of Maleficent and Aurora.

Maleficent’s affection for Aurora comes too quickly and too trivially, in film-time. Less so in story-time; it spans many years in character. But that’s not communicated well, and even in story-time, Maleficent’s saving Aurora’s life from the inept fairy trio’s overwhelming incompetence^* mere days after cursing her to die.

And it doesn’t resonate; it doesn’t work. Maleficent’s complex and multistage arc should be awesome – from young love, to betrayal and ruined love, to justified hate, to claiming her revenge… and then turning back from that, working through to regret, and to building an adult, parental love, and reclaiming her life for her own, from the wreckage wrought by Steffan.

Most of the pieces are there, but… it’s hollow in the middle. We needed a better arc of her hate. The arc is set up nicely. The betrayal is agonising. And so, she cursed an innocent baby to “sleep like death” tragically on the cusp of adulthood, as per her symbolic death with the rending and theft of her wings, and we’re kind of on board with that. We can see how she gets there.

So she can’t just step in and save Aurora over and over again without a good emotional reason, even if only to tell herself. Yes, it’s the turning point in her arc. Yes, from her own curse (irony!) she’s fated to love Princess Aurora in some form, as everyone who interacts with Aurora will come to love her, though not “true love” her. Maleficent is hoisted by her own petard here, and that’s fine.

But as with Steffan, there are always rationalisations for things done. Steffan needs to rationalise his evil; Maleficent needs to rationalise her goodness, in symmetry.

It could be simple – Aurora has to live to 16 so that Maleficent can see the curse she laid down become true, and watch King Steffan’s agony and failure to stop it. That’s a bit stock – a bit, heh, easy, really – but it’s a starting point.

Saving infant Aurora is a critical change at a critical moment. We needed some emotional support for that, and we didn’t get it. I’m not looking for All! The! Angst! – I’m looking for more emotional struggle to sell me the progression of character. Maleficent initially needs to save Aurora out of hate and revenge, not out of “well, guess so.” “Might as well” is just too damned easy.

Which is a damned shame.

Still, pretty good. Not what it should’ve been, though. That always hurts; good and great are awesome, terrible is terrible, hilariously terrible is even better. They are what they are and could be. But the near-misses like this one… they hurt. Maleficent could’ve been brilliant. Instead, by letting characters and the audience off too easy, it was merely… pretty good.

Not great. Pretty good.

And that’s a damned shame.

*: The three fairies were well too incompetent. It felt as though they were made even more spectacularly incompetent simply to provide more opportunities for Maleficent to step in and save Aurora. And again, that’s another case of letting things be Too Easy.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

It looks like a part number, but it’s actually a Burning Man art project my friend Fish is putting together. As in literally putting together, as in, he’s building it.

You might remember Fishy and Attoparsec from the Harmonic Fire Pendula and other such fire-based endeavours. This time, it’s “what happens if you take a little handheld BB maze game and scale it up for bowling balls?”

I’d say something like this.

The Kickstarter project is just enough to fund the steel and a couple of other things. The rest, he’s paying for out of pocket.

I can’t go to Burning Man ever, really, because reasons. Secret reasons. But I like backing strange art projects, particularly kinetic ones. Occasionally I get to see them in person even if I can’t go to their primary display point, and there are videos, which never hurts.

He also has videos at the project page, of course.

He’s not doing the ‘flexible funding’ thing, so he actually has to make goal, which means your individual support actually actively matters. So go give the project a look, and if you can, toss him a few bucks. I think it’ll probably be worth it for the tremendous racket it’ll make alone. CLANG clangaclangaclangaity CLANG clanga CLANG

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby