Interesting Googling...

At music recording and production website, Gearslutz.com, there is usually a ban in the Music Computers forum on Mac v. PC discussions. It's been in place as long as I've been going there, and, by and large, I've come to the conclusion that it's a good idea.

But, as a sort of seasonal present to the scrappy and contentious among Gearslutz denizens, the powers that be there started what they titled: the ultimate Mac vs. PC slam death fest.

It's overall been great fun. Loads of humor, most of it more or less good-natured. But, after over 400 separate posts, and like all wonderful, but ephemeral things...  it's winding down.  A few straggling arguments have drifted somewhat lazily across the last page or two, including some sort of contention about market share that has seen both sides, with refreshing sheepishness, citing Google ranking/listings as admittedly speculative evidence.

That got me to thinking it was time for me to hall out the Sucks Index.

In the simplest form of the Sucks Index, one Googles mac sucks and windows Sucks and draws whatever conclusions one might try to gin up. Ludicrous mathematical constructions involving market share are allowed. Since it's meaningless, anyway. (But for those counting nonetheless: about 1,190,000 for mac sucks.; about 2,000,000 for windows sucks. Make of that what you will. BTW, it's the same with or without capitalization.)

But, unsatisfied with the limited knowledge that raw data provided -- you don't even know who is saying what, maybe it's Windows supremacists accounting for the much higher than marketshare-warranted numbers for mac sucks -- I decided to both drill in a little -- and to make things more interesting.

Check out these Google search results (about an hour or so old as I write this), testing on exact  phrases (quotation-mark-delimited):

about 659,000 for "I hate my mac"

about 504,000 for "I hate windows"

about 188,000 for "I hate my PC"

I was blown away. Clearly, anyone saying I hate my Mac is a Mac owner (or possibly some sort of lying agent-provocateur --no doubt there are some folks who falsely claim to own a given this or that in order to diss it with greater implied authority).

And, just as clearly, someone saying "I hate Windows" could be a Windows user or former user or a Mac partisan. (The PC thing is trickier still, I just threw it in to see what would happen.)

Thought provoking, huh?

When did music stop evolving...?

Musical paradigm burn-out can be a serious issue. Styles get explored. Every nook and cranny gets poked and prodded -- especially over the course of two or three decades...

We're used to the oft-expressed idea that styles and fashions change quickly these days --but I think that's more fantasy than reality in today's world of hyper fine-tuned marketing and market sector exploitation.

In decades past, styles really did come and go quickly. Now, they seem to stick around forever, long past the point of ongoing returns in terms of fresh creativity and vitality.

I think the reality of this hits home pretty hard when we look at some of the "newer" styles like rap/hip hop, punk, and electronica.

Anyone doing a 2009 survey of those fields will find things distressingly similar to the scene in 1999. And, in many ways, and particularly for hip hop and punk but still for electornica and dance, it's not really much different than what was going down in '89... throw in a little heavy handed Auto-Tune, change a few superficial stylistic tics, and it's pretty much there.

And it virtually goes without saying that the same, in spades, can be said of various forms of rock, which it seems to me, has clearly joined the classic moribund forms of country, folk, blues, bluegrass, mainstream jazz, and so on. Nothing wrong with that -- it's a natural progression. It just seems folks don't want to acknowledge that there haven't been two new ideas in any of these fields to rub together in years if not decades.

Maybe it's just that having seen the tail end of the big band swing era in my early years, the explosion of R&B and then R&R, the big folk revival of the early 60s, the Brit invasion, Motown, the rise of folk rock, and then the evolution of folk rock and blues rock into acid and hippie rock, the ascendance of funk and re-emergence of R&B, the first wave of early 70s disco, the rise of the singer songwriters, the emergence of whitebread disco targeted to mainstream audiences in the late 70s, the emergence of punk, no wave, and proto hip hop in the mid and late 70s -- all before I was even thirty years old -- and, I'll admit it, musical change is something that's all but worked its way into my musical DNA...

Hiding in plain site...

Someone in a songwriting forum I'm involved with asked if he should be worried about sending his unpublished songs to friends via unencrypted email and went on to ask about the difficulty of filing a proper copyright and the likelihood of theft...

The copyright process is not too bad. You can now do it online. That said it is not free. (How about an advertising supported US Copyright Office? Can I take out a patent on that? With the clueless crop of bozos in the USPTO, the answer may sadly be yes.)

You can save money by collecting a (potentially large) group of songs together and copyrighting them as a collective work. But make sure you file an individual addendum listing each song individually or, I'm told, the CO cannot search on the individual titles in a collective work otherwise and that supposedly hurts your chances in court. Like you're going to court. Trust me, you can't afford to go to court (if you're like most of us).


Anyhow... with regard to folks stealing stuff...

In my long experience hearing musician horror stories -- and I've heard thousands -- I've only heard of a tiny handful of folks who've had their non-hit, unpublished songs appropriated. And that was almost always by folks in the songwriter's ex-band or former musical/writing partners.

OTOH, I've heard scores of folks who got screwed over on their songs/publishing by their own erstwhile publishers, managers, and agents -- to be sure. But in those cases, the crucial paper involved was typically in the form of contracts and legal agreements that the artist had signed or otherwise entered into with those entities (usually knowingly).


The thing with the generally unimaginative dorks who feel driven to steal songs is that they don't usually have enough imagination to steal an unknown song but often, instead, steal something that's already had some sort of success (maybe something on what they think is a lesser known older record).

But, you know, humans always proceed to amaze at the depths they can stoop to, so there's no saying for sure.

Me, I decided after watching for quite some time to not drive myself crazy. I hide my songs in plain sight. Or plain site, maybe. I post each new song on my songwriting blog, with the lyrics on the blog and the media file going to the Internet Archive. (www.archive.org)

I mean, most folks -- and I mean 99.999+% -- make music that will almost certainly go almost entirely unheard. Why add to the likelihood?

more discussion

MySpace plunders dregs of Snocap/Imeem. Musicians the losers... Imagine.

This killed me...

From Wired:

MySpace/Imeem Deal Leaves Thousands of Artists Unpaid

Independent artists who sold their music through imeem’s Snocap music storefronts on MySpace and other sites won’t be paid what’s owed even after MySpace Music’s acquisition of some — but not all — of imeem, Wired.com has learned.

MySpace Music bought “certain assets” from imeem, and they do not include imeem’s liability to more than 110,000 independent artists with Snocap storefronts, according to a source with inside knowledge of the deal. Those artists’ contracts mandate they be paid each month if they’re owed more than $20. Some artists have been owed money for more than a year, and the chance of them seeing any money now is, for all intents and purposes, zero, the source says.

[Read about the whole sorry mess at Wired.]

Despite the fact that MySpace has always been heavily involved in promoting Snocap and pushed them as the only way to sell music through MySpace.

When it looked like Imeem and Snocap were circling the drain, MySpace rushed to buy what few assets their fairy godchild had left -- apparently intent on making sure that the bankruptcy courts would have little chance to convert those assets into payment for some of the bundle owed musicians for MySpace related sales.

Nice, huh?

More discussion at Gearslutz.

Magic wires...

Back to hardware... for about two seconds.

The subject of "designer cables" costing sometimes hundreds or even thousands of dollars (instead of five or ten dollars) came up, as it has over the years, in a forum I was recently participating in...


The audiophile victimization industry has got a lot of mileage out of the basic human trait of cognitive bias, which can lead people to incorrect interpretations of their own experience and presumed preference.

Behavioral scientists have found -- and recent brain scan studies have given sometimes dramatic support to the idea -- that humans allow a number of non-objective modes of thinking to color what they believe are uncolored perceptions. Humans want to believe in what they've previously believed. Uncertainty produces elevated anxiety in most people (backed by brain scan studies) and the human drive is to come to a conclusion, any conclusion -- and it is much more comforting if that conclusion is consistent with prior beliefs and belief frameworks.

IOW, most humans do not like their personal paradigms shifted.


Problems with the interference of personal belief and perceptual cognition pushed the scientists who specialize in the study of perception, beginning more than 100 years ago, to realize that simple blind testing was not enough.

In simple blind audio testing, the subject does not know what he's listening to, but the test giver does. Over and over, it was found that the test giver could contaminate the findings by giving subtle, typically unconscious cues about the source material. Eventually, the practice of double blind perceptual testing was established as absolutely necessary in much perceptual testing.

By keeping the test giver and taker in the dark over which of two sounds was which, more reliable, less biased results could be derived.