'Online And New Media' Archive
Hoover’s is lucky to call Austin, Texas home and we are happy to share our fine city with some of the most talented, witty, and entertaining musicians in the country.
Leave it to long-time local folkies The Austin Lounge Lizards to perform a new song that lampoons the current economic mess we seem to have gotten ourselves into. (You see, The Lizards have made fun of everything from hillbillies to immigration reform since the group was founded in 1980). The band’s latest musical dig, Too Big to Fail, carries on the tradition of timely teasing to proclaim, “I wanna get what rich guys get/I wanna chef and a corporate jet/and a house in the Hamptons if it doesn’t upset Ben Bernanke.”
I couldn’t help but giggle when I first heard the track being played on a local radio station. Come to find out the song also has its own video featuring the band wearing nothing but wooden barrels. The track also will be available beginning July 1 as an iTunes download.
“The Lizards’ songs and their take on the human condition has given me new insight on how important it is to laugh at ourselves and life’s absurdities,” the group’s newest member and fiddle player, Darcie Deaville, explained on the band’s Web site.
The Austin Lounge Lizards probably aren’t the first and surely won’t be the last act to capitalize on or make fun of the state our economy. We all need a nice reprieve from all of the horrible news of late, so why not sing about how horrible things are. And at 99 cents per download The Lizards may have just found their latest cash cow. At least there is still a market for humor.
It’s only been a relatively few decades since credit has become ubiquitous and necessary to modern life. I know people who have abandoned cash in much the same way they have given up their landlines — with nary a thought. That annoying commercial about how people who write checks stop the flow of happy commerce? Yeah, that’s how we live now.
But it’s not just about the convenience anymore. Try to book an airline flight without a credit card. Try to order anything online. Yeah, there’s PayPal, but just try to order something from Lands’ End using PayPal. Heck, try to get decent insurance rates without your credit score being taken into consideration.
So the fact that credit card companies are cutting people off, scaling back on perks like miles, raising interest rates, and reducing lines of credit isn’t just inconvenient, it’s putting consumers between a rock and a hard place. We like to think that using credit is about prudence and we scorn people who can’t handle their credit responsibly, but because credit has become so intertwined in the way we live, credit is a necessity, not a choice. Even good credit card customers, the ones who always pay their bills on time, are being penalized by credit card companies. (It’s hard to make money on people who are prudent about debt.)
The new credit card laws will help, but gone are the days of easy credit. I don’t know if that means a cash economy is going to come back. Will paying with folding money take on a sort of retro cool? I just think that before we throw out the baby with the bathwater we take a look at how commerce has organized itself around the ubiquity of credit cards and dust off the old systems of payment — do you know where your checkbook is? — before the whole thing grinds to a halt.
One last note — a local coffee house gives you a discount if you pay in cash. It’s like they are living in the past! It’s refreshing. And it makes me feel just a little bit virtuous when I pull out a few battered ones for my coffee and scone. That’s the kind of happy commerce I like, and it doesn’t stop the flow at all.
The anecdotal consensus that blogs and social networking sites can give traditional news outlets serious competition was undeniably proven yesterday during coverage of Michael Jackson’s death. TMZ, the fairly trashy celebrity gossip site, was the first outlet to report that Jackson had died — many hours before old school media like the LA Times, CBS, and CNN had confirmed the King of Pop was gone. Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites were filled with news of his death throughout the early afternoon, forcing so many people onto the Internet that it slowed to a crawl.
I think my own steps toward learning of Jackson’s death displays the incredible speed with which our wired world moves.
- I saw a crawl on CNBC late in the afternoon that Jackson had been rushed to the hospital. People go to the hospital all the time and I’m not a Jackson fan or anything, so I didn’t think much of it.
- Right before I left work, I checked my Facebook page and saw many status updates from contacts along the lines of, “Is it true? Can he really be gone.” I thought, “Uh oh. Must be bad.”
- I headed over to CNN.com to see what was up, but all they had was the “Jackson rushed to the hospital after cardiac arrest” headline. No word on if he had died. I checked around to the other main news sites and they all had the same version of “Stay Tuned.”
- I pointed my browser at TMZ and they claimed, “Michael Jackson Dies.” I was shocked by this. Either TMZ had just scooped the big boys, or they were seriously jumping the gun. Either way, that’s huge from a journalistic standpoint.
- I then embarked on a bit of a morbidly curious experiment to see which news outlet would be the first to report that he was dead. I kept refreshing all the news pages to no avail before I had to leave work to pick up my kids.
- On my way home I listened to CNN on SIRIUS to see how much longer it would take before his death was reported. Unfortunately this meant listening to Wolf Blitzer — not to be confused with a reporter, he’s more an on-camera CNN promoter/cheerleader — bring on doctors to describe cardiac arrest and reporters who had covered Jackson in the past to talk about him, all while giving somewhat of a ghoulish play-by-play. “CNN has learned that he is in cardiac arrest. Now we’ve learned he’s in a coma. Now we’ve learned that the LA Times and CBS is reporting he has died, but CNN has not confirmed that.” (Presumably meaning it hasn’t happened.)
After about an hour of this, it was finally widespread knowledge that he had died. It was a strange journey through this new information age, with TMZ of all things at the head of the pack.
A weird end to a weird day.
$1.92 million. That’s what a Minnesota court decided last week in the case of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) versus Jammie Thomas-Rasset.
The RIAA originally sued Thomas-Rasset in 2007 for sharing 24 digital songs over the Kazaa peer-to-peer network, one of thousands of suits aimed at curbing illegal downloading. Unlike the vast majority of defendants, however, Thomas-Rasset refused to settle out of court, believing there was insufficient evidence that any of the songs she posted was ever downloaded by users.
The jury disagreed, to the tune of $80,000 per song. The verdict seems like a slam dunk for the RIAA, but whether it actually persuades consumers to stop illegally sharing music remains to be seen.
Fact is, digital piracy is as rampant as ever. An estimated 95 percent of all global music downloads are made illegally, according to the IFPI Digital Music Report. Add that to the fact that CD revenues are tanking (down 20% in May compared to the same month in 2008), and you have a pretty dismal industry outlook.
One bright spot may be poised to emerge, however. Major labels are finally bowing to the idea of stripping digital rights management (DRM) from digital content. Until recently, DRM has made it difficult — nigh impossible — to play digital song files across a variety of electronic players. Sony Music recently agreed to supply DRM-free music via eMusic in a move that some industry observers hope becomes the trend.
Is DRM-free media the answer to digital piracy? It’s early days yet, but I suspect ridiculous fines might become a thing of the past (and pirates less inclined to steal digital content) when labels finally stop restricting how consumers choose to play their music.
Bing.
Bing?
Bing!
Q: What’s Bing?
A: The new Microsoft search engine. (Bing bing bing!)
Yes, that’s right. What was MSN Search became Live Search, and now Live Search is being rebranded as Bing. As in the cherries and Crosby. It’s Microsoft’s latest run at Google, the search champ.
The software giant unveiled the brand identity this week. The site isn’t quite live yet, so you’ll still have to resort to using Live Search if you don’t want to use Google, Yahoo!, or any other search engine.
Meanwhile, the “G” company that is not Gatorade rolled out Google Wave, a Web-based tool for collaboration and communication. It’s also not quite live, but it’s coming later this year, Google promises.
Bing. Bing Bing. Bing Bing Bing! Bing.