Geek wageslave-turned-geek minstrel, Jonathan Coulton created a song for game developer Valve (recently covered at BoingBoing), which is used in The Best Game Ending Ever for their highly original game, Portal. If an internet-based, Creative Commons-friendly singer songwriter just isn’t futurismic enough for you, how about hearing said song as covered by a Japanese virtual idol in nearly unintelligible, katakana-accented English?
Tag Archives: music
October 10 – a big day for virtual releases
Yesterday was quite a big day for virtual goods. In addition to Valve releasing the Half Life 2 Orange Box online (which Jeremy blogged about earlier), Radiohead released their new album ‘In Rainbows’ via their website. Both mark a considerable move away from the traditional business model in video games and music, offering their content directly to the user at a lower price than would be available in brick and mortar stores.
Happily as well as being delivered in new formats, both products are very very good. Radiohead’s album sparkles and is more accessible than anything I’ve heard since ‘Kid A’. It feels less jagged than previous work and easier without losing that challenging nature that requires 40 listens before you get it. I still feel like I need to listen more but the alienation I felt listening to some of ‘Hail To The Thief’ is not there – I can enjoy listening to ‘In Rainbows’ even when not concentrating on it. I decided to pay £6 for the album, which charges a 47p transaction fee but otherwise lets you pay whatever you want. When it’s as good as this I can imagine most people paying more than expected.
Valve’s Orange Box was also out yesterday on their ‘Steam’ delivery service. the pack contains Half Life 2 and it’s two additional chapters, Episode 1 and the new Episode 2, as well as multiplayer shooter Team Fortress 2 and the incredible Portal. The real trick of Valve’s single player work is how it tells a story without cutscenes by creating events that make the gamer want to look in that direction – a very real rendition of ‘Show Don’t Tell’, as many writers are instructed early in their careers. The sheer joy of messing around with momentum using the portal gun in Portal is worth the entry price by itself.
Radiohead change the face of music
I’ve been saying for a few years now that as soon as a major band started selling their own records on their own website, the music companies were doomed. Today it looks like the revolution has started. Radiohead, the superstar band that finished their contract with EMI following their last album ‘Hail To The Thief’ have announced that their new album ‘In Rainbows’ will be released on October 10th, purely through their website. In a move that’s going to send ripples through the music industry, the album download has no set price. The website literally says ‘Pay what you want’. With Nine Inch Nails pledging to sell all their records direct to fans after their contract ends, it’s looking like the future of music is going to be very different.
Radiohead’s move is a very smart one – bands make the majority of their money by touring under the current economic model. Even if large numbers of people download the album for free, aside from the small cost of recording and the bandwidth for their website, the album has virtually no overheads as a digital download. That means that any money donated by downloaders goes straight into the band’s pockets without going through ten different middle-managers first, exactly as I said in my post about amazon’s DRM free model last week. Even if the average payment for a download is £3, Radiohead will perversely still get a fair bit more money than the 5% -odd royalty cut of a £10 CD sold in HMV or Virgin. It’s reassuring that the move has been made by a band that in my opinion is one of the best in the world.
[via boing boing and music 2.0, picture from Radiohead’s new album site]
Amazon creates new DRM-free music site – the beginning of a new economic model?
There are a lot of things in this world being changed by the internet. News is more immediate, more available and more impartial with the vast amount of sites and blogs reporting in a host of different ways. People sell their old stuff on ebay, or advertise rooms on craigslist. More and more the internet is bringing the service closer to the customer, cutting a lot of the middlemen out of the equation. After Amazon.com released its new DRM-free music download site to rival Apple Itunes, we could start seeing the beginning of a new purely-digital economy for some people.
The music industry is an interesting example of a business model rapidly changed by the internet’s influence. Just ten years ago, music was far more rigid – managers and scouts discovered talent, put an album out and promoted it. With Myspace pages, music blogs, internet radio and the 21st century digitalized version of word of mouth, it’s becoming easier for people to get their material out there themselves. Now, with music download sites becoming more and more accessible it’s easier for artists to skip the whole major label, CD store approach. Selling mp3s has far less overheads than red-brick stores that need to pay for manufacturing and transport of the CDs, the salaries of the managers, shop assistants and factory workers and all the many levels of bureaucracy that all take a cut of the profit, leaving the original artist with barely a few percent of the money spent on their work.
In the future, even in the near future, we could see artists that produce, promote and sell their work entirely online, making a greater percentage of the profits and passing that down to the consumer. If an artist gets 80% of the money for a song instead of 5%, they can afford to sell the mp3 for 30c instead of 99c and still make more money. The internet may give us the strange future of a place where we pay less for our products and end up giving the artist more. The advantages to such a lifestyle are numerous, especially in a society trying to cut down on its emissions.
[via guardian technology, image by Lord Cuauhtli]
The Brain from Planet X
In my initial post, did I not threaten you with promise you the occasional post combining my love of SF and musical theatre?
Behold (and listen to excerpts from) The Brain from Planet X. It is, indeed, an SF (well, sci-fi) musical! It invaded Los Angeles last year, and now it’s invading New York.
Read about the creator’s, um, brainwave, here.
(Via BroadwayWorld.)
UPDATE: Also playing at the New York Musical Theatre Festival: a musical version of the 1980s SF flick The Last Starfighter!
[tags]science fiction, music, musical theatre[/tags]