It isn’t just basement dwellers, hyper productive CEOs, and information age hipsters who are creating online projects these days. Famous people from traditional media are also trying their hand at creating something new and different. Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy and Firefly, is turning his hand to the online world, with his newest effort: Doctor Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog. Here’s what we know so far:
It’s the story of a low-rent supervillain (Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible), the hero who keeps beating him up (Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer), and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to (Felicia Day as Penny).
Did I mention it’s a musical?
This isn’t the first time Joss has delved into the waters of genre musicals. The Buffy episode “Once More With Feeling” was an amazing mix of plot and song. More than that, the sudden outburst of singing is actually explained in the context of the show.
It’s also the last truly great episode of the series; the perfect shark:
The same need for portability and flexibility that made music one of the first “victims” of the digital age, also make it the perfect candidate for the kind of comeback success story that we all love.
Virtual rockers downloaded roughly 2.5 million songs in the eight weeks since the game launched on the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 systems.
Rock Band, developed by Harmonix, which also created Guitar Hero, comes with 58 playable songs including the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter and Metallica’s Enter Sandman. But many more tunes can be downloaded over the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live for prices varying from 99 cents to $2.99.
After Sony decided to throw in the towel last week and put their music up on Amazon without DRM it seems like a lot of people have decided it might be a good idea to start thinking about what a world looks like where you sell things to people that aren’t placed under lock and key.
It’s insightful, forward thinking, and has more than a few good ideas. More than that, it’s designed to speak to a different audience than the converted army of open source junkies who usually read this stuff. It’s a cogent argument about why changing the model is going to be a good model for business going forward.
There is more opportunity in leveraging the scale of the Web than trying to create scarcity. We’ve all been engaged in many attempts at creating scarcity in digital music and none of them have worked. Meanwhile, others have been leveraging the scale of the Web with great success. We should learn from this pattern and apply our energy appropriately.
We will do this together by creating a loosely-coupled value chain including users as value creators. The value chain is not owned by a single entity (LimeWire, Apple, or Universal). There are many participants in a healthy ecosystem. Furthermore, users are no longer just consumers, they’re active participants adding value and any successful solution will leverage this user-contributed value.
We need to work together to create the Media Web. Here I’ll step off into nerd-ness for a minute, but I’ll try to tie it to a concrete example so you see what it is I’m getting at clearly.
While the music industry may currently see itself as the greatest victim of the Internet it’s starting to be clear that their role as the canary in the coal mine may mean that they come out of this stronger and better suited for the next generation than other industries that are just starting to feel the sting.
And that success is already happening, although they don’t want to admit it. Look at how licensed music has invaded the video game market over the few years. Licensing popular songs is an integral part of movies, television, and even commercials more now than ever before. It may not be the same business it was, but it is something.
What’s most exciting about this presentation is that it argues that the industry should be in the lead for opening up standards, not dragging behind. And now that the panic is starting to subside maybe there’s some room for good ideas on how to push formats forward in a way that will allow media to become a more integrated part of the web experience.
Think back two years ago, the Web worked fine on your PC, your Mac, even your cell phone to some degree, but as soon as you wanted to watch a video you were faced with the “which proprietary technology owns your ass?” question. Quicktime? Real? Windows Media Player? What happened was “The Web” stopped and proprietary technologies took over. Flash has made this feel a little less painful but now the entire online video industry is in the hands of one technology company (Adobe), being delivered the features they see fit on their timeline? That’s never a good thing. And who is challenging their monopoly with a technology called Silverlight? Microsoft? Doh. This is not exactly a recipe for openness.
We need the same force that created The Web to create The Media Web. What was that force? Open standards solving universal user needs and enabling a level publishing platform. While this may seem outside of your job description, let me first give you a sense of the kind of standards I’m talking about, and then a specific example that will likely hit pretty close to home.
It’s well worth reading the whole thing, and it’s forcing me to go back and rethink some of the ideas I was planning on putting up here in the next few weeks. They’ll still get up here, they just may be a little different.
Four months after Radiohead released their latest album, In Rainbows, to the Internet, changing everything forever, it has hit the retail stores in the standard CD format.
“We didn’t want it to be a big announcement about ‘everything’s over except the internet, the internet’s the future’, ’cause that’s utter rubbish.
“And it’s really important to have an artifact as well, as they call it, an object,” the musician added.
Well no, of course not. Or yes, of course! Or something.
Yorke rubbished reports that the album was downloaded 1.2 million times in its first week alone - but refused to confirm any figures.
“It’s total nonsense. Thanks very much - we’re the only people who know, and it feels wrong to say exactly what happened. But it’s been a really nice surprise and we’ve done really well out of it.”
Either way, it’s got a beat, and you can dance to it.
Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.
Back when I was a kid learning how to swim at the YMCA, they’d teach us lifesaving techniques. They’d remind us that a desperate drowning person can take you down with them without even realizing they’re doing it.
I think that may be what the music companies end up doing to copyright law.
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