Digital Motion dot net

[via wired]

Music Tax Details From Source: “Pay Us Not To Sue You” (TechCrunch)

We learned yesterday that Warner Music, the third largest music label, is gunning for a $5/month music tax on U.S. residents.

The death throes of an industry that hasn’t figured out how to adapt. One thing that I never figured out about the music industry was it’s inability to be innovative around it’s business models. At the independent level, sure. But at the top-end, they are working on nearly the same model since the day the industry originated. For an industry that is all about “cool,” this is surprising. Their current set of challenges aren’t new. They are dating back twenty years! Remember “Home Taping is Killing Music?” The technology has been evolving for decades and rather than embrace it and figure out how to work with it, the music industry has fought it every step of the way until we reach this point: “Pay us in case you might want to pirate music.”

This is extortion and the ISPs need to band together to fight it.

As one of many artists who has made more money over the years from live performance than from selling records, the argument that we might be moving to a system where music would be free in order to draw people to live performances has resonated with me. I just came across the Stretta blog today and saw this:
The Stretta Procedure

The fact of the matter is Recorded Music and Live Music are separate art forms. Theyre lumped together in our minds for many reasons, but for people who push the idea that recorded music should be free, it is convenient to exclude all other types of musical expression that dont fit into their new world order business model, which, incidentally, benefits them the most Will we soon justify torrenting movies for free because theyre simply promotional material to drive awareness of actors, who should derive all their income from performing in stage plays?

I just really liked that…

electro-music.com :: View topic – Nomad 0.3 pre-release available for DL

The Nord Modular was the first major synth hardware with required software for programming it. It was extremely powerful. I own two! It was also the gear that soured me on the whole idea. Why?  Because, Clavia never upgraded the editor to work with OS X. There was a beta release, but it didn’t work that well. So now, that very expensive hardware is mostly worthless.

Luckily, some bright hackers decided not to let it lie: Nomad is nord editing software written in Java for OS X, PC and Linux.

What would have been better would have been if Clavia had released their software as open source, so that folks didn’t have to reverse engineer it.

This is why I won’t ever buy a Nord Modular G2, by the way.

Conveying data that spans more than 2 dimensions is classically difficult. In fact, successful representations like the map of Napoleon’s march from CJ Minard are celebrated. I saw this Flash thing from the New York Times representing box office returns from Hollywood films and I was really impressed how nice a job it did showing some disparate things in a cohesive way. Worth taking a look at if you think about this kind of stuff.

After his previous experiment with Saul Williams was not quite a rousing success, I figured that Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor was done toying with the music business model. Turns out that he was just getting started. The new Nine Inch Nails album is now available in multiple forms. The first part is available for free in high quality on bit torrent sites. The whole thing is available for download for $5 off the Nine Inch Nails site with a killer booklet in PDF. You can buy the 2 CDs for $10, and then there are two limited edition packages for $75 and $300.

I think this is just brilliant. Basically, he gives his fans choices at reasonable price points and makes it hard for them to not do the right thing.

As other high-profile artists emerge from their traditional contracts, I expect that we’ll see a lot more movement towards self-distribution. Especially, with artists like NIN and Radiohead who have a large percentage of their audience on-line already and can do better without the overhead of a large record label.

via Mashable

[Via Slashdot: Apple QuickTime DRM Disables Video Editing Apps]

According to numerous posts on Apples discussion forums several threads of which have been deleted by Apple, as well as a number of popular video editing blogs, Apples recent QT 7.4 update does more than just enable iTunes video rentals — it also disables Adobes professional After Effects video editing software. Attempting to render video files after the update results in a DRM permissions error. Unfortunately, it is not possible to roll back to a previous version of QT without doing a full OSX reinstall. Previous QT updates have also been known to have severe issues with pro video editing apps.

Of course, you knew never to install any software or OS update (mac or windows) without first waiting to see if there were any reports of problems, right?

[via Stu Maschwitz]

The Mac Pro line has been ignored for a while, but today Apple has announced the new towers features dual quad-core penryn chips and new high-end graphics cards including the ATI 2600 and NVidia 8800 GT. I’m wondering why not the 8800 GTX or Ultra, but they are certainly long overdue upgrades.

For the creative pro market, this is a very exciting day. The timing is a bit odd though. Given that MacWorld is next week, one might wonder why this upgrades wouldn’t be announced in the keynote. It may mean that there will be some even more exciting things in the keynote.

FT.com / Home UK / UK – Paramount in HD DVD blow

Paramount is poised to drop its support of HD DVD after Warner Brothers’ recent backing of Sony’s Blu-ray technology, in a move that will sound the death knell of HD DVD and bring the home entertainment format war to a definitive end.

Paramount and DreamWorks Animation, which makes the Shrek films, came out in support of HD DVD last summer, joining General Electric’s Universal Studios as the main backers of the Toshiba format.

However, Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, is understood to have a clause in its contract with the HD DVD camp that would allow it to switch sides in the event of Warner Bros backing Blu-ray, according to people familiar with the situation.