The Entroporium

It’s the world’s biggest entertainment focus group as well as a harkening back to DeToqueville’s vision of Democracy In America.

It could well be that I’ve missed this analysis – goodness knows there are a few newsies and bloggers that follow Apple – but the main point of the Lala acquisition may have gone over their heads for one key reason: the folks initially reporting the story haven’t actually tried to use Lala. One of the [...]

I’m a music obsessive with over 200GBs of MP3s in my iTunes library.  I use a 16GB iPhone and had been loading it principally with my ‘New’ finds and stuck with a few ‘No Deletes,’ leading to a selection of music that rarely suited my moods and provided very few safe old favorites.  All too [...]

Originally released in 1967, The Who Sell Out received the Deluxe Edition reissue treatment earlier this year –  and it could not have come at a more prescient moment.  As the music industry’s revenue continues to fall and fall and fall, some of the cleverer music marketers are seeking new ways to promote their artists and [...]

Several weeks after casting my dutiful homer “Vote For Pablo” to make the NL All-Star Team, I received an E-mail invitation from Major League Baseball inviting me to subscribe to MLB Insiders Club.  Baseball has always had backwards-looking marketing overly reliant on its heritage, but debuting a dubiously Official Magazine in the era of social networking and [...]

Yesterday The New York Times reported on book publishers’ discomfort with releasing books simultaneously as E-books and through traditional channels.  One idea, not supported universally, is to release E-books later than hardcover editions in the same manner that paperbacks are held back for at least a year.  The reason proffered is to preserve the initial $20-35 [...]

First in a series of posts about adapting to life with a Kindle 2 One of the things I most looked forward to in my Kindle was the magazine store.� For a fraction of the cover price in most cases, the full text of a magazine is quickly and seamlessly downloaded to your Kindle.� If [...]

When is it OK to unfriend the dead?

A recent Clay Shirky post, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” says that the newspaper as a business model is dead, killed by its reliance on industrial printing technology. The future, he tells us, will be based on experiments in journalistic form and not any particular form of media, new or old. Meanwhile, as I talked [...]