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Hum110 wake tech week 9c entertainment new tools3
- 1. Who is Carlton Ridenhour?
- 2. The War of the Words
- 3. New Tools, New Tastes
Editor's Notes
- Who is Carlton Ridenhour? That’sthe given name of Chuck D of Public Enemy. (Gove,Alex. “ F ight the Power. ” Red Herring. December, 1999, 256-260.) Chuck D of Public Enemy infuriated the music labels when he released cuts from B ring the Noise in 2000. He was angry over the production company’s refusal to renegotiate his contract, so he gave the music away to his fans. The production company sued him, of course. P roduction companies make 300% profit on CDs. But Ridenhour had a new plan. He would retain the copyright on his future releases and market directly through the internet. He reasoned that telephone companies sent bills to everyone. He’d get them to handle his biling. Production companies share about eight cents on the dollar with the artist. Chuck D thought he deserved more money and more artistic control. Riddenhour planned to charge a flat rate of $8-12 per month. Subscribers to his service could then download all the music they wanted. He believed he could attract new talent to publish their music on his servers too. Ultimately, the planned failed. The most immediate reason was that conservative telephone companies were not prepared to bill for a rapper. There were other reasons too. Production companies own enough cataloged materials to maintain profits for some time. They could afford to compete against the new service for a long time before they would really suffer. Production had also increased advertising to 10 to 15 times more than during the previous decade. They targeted advertising to maintain the new market. There was also plenty of new music on the market to compete with Chuck D’s new artists. Democratization of the industry meant there were 500,000 labels and a million artists producing their own music in home studios. If Chuck D is the technological prince of rap, DJ Kool Herc (nee Clive Campbell) is the wizard of anti-technology. Herc, now known as the Father of Hip-Hop, rode his bike around Brooklyn. As he rode he heard music on the corners from the steps, original music that came from all the flavors that are that borough. He started to record and collect the music. Soon people requested that he DJ block parties and other affairs. So far, there is nothing of social or technological note. But Herc noticed something. There were riffs in the music that people loved. When they danced, they stopped to wait for these riffs. Then they would “bust their moves.” So Herc started to use a turntable to play his music-- a turntable he customized so that he could retrace the track to the “sweet spot” in the music. He disables technology to create a new musical opportunity.
- Let’s consider a few key events in the progression of Radio in the 20th Century On Halloween evening 1938 ,Orson Welles produced the first reality broadcast. It was a radio broadcast of H G Wells’ War of The Worlds. The audience became involved when Welles elected to announce that the broadcast was a radio drama at the beginning of the program but not again until 40 minutes into the program. By that time, people were heading for high ground because they believed the Martians had invaded. In the 1950s, the transistor radio created the teen culture and an accompanying target market.These were cell-phone sized radios that had to be held to the ear and assisted with an antennae to be heard. AM radio stations focused on the teen and the babysitting dollar. Radio stations and advertised accordingly. The stations were called top forty because they played only the top forty rated songs. In fact, they could make a song part of the top forty by playing it. Payola was the term for the cash that radio stations received under the table to make songs hits. Payola flowed from record producers to disk jockeys on top forty stations. XM/ Sirius, Random Play and individualized programming are the modern developments that may lead us into a new technological epoch for better and worse.
- Although the 1950s gave us a quite unsatisfactory venture into personal entertainment, by the 1970s personal entertainment media were still limited to albums made of vinyl and cassette tapes. Tapes might be seen as an incremental improvement over vinyl but suffered from a delicacy and the need for equipment- lots of big, heavy space-grabbing equipment. In 1979, Sony revolutionized entertainment by introducing a durable portable personal cassette player. The device was called The Walkman, the Soundabout or Stowaway in some countries. Beginning in 1982, CDs became the entertainment of choice. Not yet easily transferable to PCs, the major advantage of the CD over the cassette was that the new media didn’t need to be rewound and that it allowed direct access to the track that the listener wanted to hear. Random play reflects a significant change in our society. A new generation is less interested in following the rules laid out by production companies. This generation listens to not an entire album but only the “cuts” that have personal appeal. Niche markets are created in music too. They feed the fragmented modern tastes. Sony, enchanted by the success of The Walkman, continues to produce, market and implement strategies that reflect old musical attitudes and embrace old musical technical technologies. Sony’s way of leveraging the new technology was to introduce the Discman. This was simply a Walkman that played CDs. This was incremental change while a revolution was raging all around. In 1999, a Northeastern University student named “Napster” Fanning began to market file sharing software that circumvented responsibility for the copyright laws. The threat of downloads woke the music production companies. They shut down the Napster site and generated piles of lawsuits against individual down-loaders. More importantly, there came the realization that the old guard could no longer ignore new forces in the marketplace. Steve Jobs, originator or the Apple Computer, extended the reach of his personal computing platform into the realm of entertainment with the iPod. Integrating the computer and the player made the download accessible to users who lacked technical sophistication. Jobs laid the groundwork for widespread acceptance. He legitimizing downloads by negotiating licensing agreements with the now desperate production companies. The ability to purchase and play individual tracks and to change the sequence of play fosters entertainment individualism. Users may elect to randomize play or specify a play sequence. As more artist revenue comes from downloads and less from “albums,” artists are now returning to the mindset that the “single” hit is the most desirable artistic property. Podcasts for news and information have also contributed to the transformation. Here too the passing of the old order (in this case newspapers) is assisted by technology. Amazon’s Kindle is now doing the same in publishing. CEO Steve Bezos reports that one of every four books sold by Amazon is now in the electronic format. (“The Evolution of Amazon,” Fast Company, 66-74). Budd, Joel. “Changing the Channel” The Economist. 29 Apr 2010 online. Gove,Alex. “ F ight the Power. ” Red Herring. December 1999, 256-260. “ The Evolution of Amazon,” Fast Company, 66-74. Knopper, Steve. An Appetite for Self-Destruction. New York: Simon& Schuster, 2009. LaFranco, Robert.” T he New Face of Hollywood ” Red Herring. April 2000, 100-110. Rose, Charlie , Interview with Michael Eisner and George Clooney, PBS 31 March 2006.