My cognitive apparatus is designed to digest language quickly, and so when I stumble into some mutated corporate phraseology it's like eating a meal which suddenly transforms into to washers, bolts, and strands of oily bike-chain. I have to disassemble my entire prefrontal cortex and put it back together.

Given the unusual nature of some of my entry titles, it’s always entertaining what the AI for these bots comes up with to say – often things like “Interesting post about the revolution will be mashed up. I recommended it to all my friends who are interested in Corrugated Media.”

I can see where the machine gathered this information and the construct “Interesting post about %x. I recommended it to all of my friends who are interested in %y” would probably make a lot of sense of a lot of blogs, and might get by the radar. It’s hilarious when it fails though, as it did spectactularly today:

“I read similar article also named evolution will be mashed up at  Corrugated Media, and it was completely different. Personally, I agree with you more, because this article makes a little bit more sense for me”

Bear in mind this AI is intelligent enough to somewhat pattern match titles of articles but NOT smart enough to pattern math the blog titles to see that he is agreeing with me more than myself. Apparently this article makes a little bit more sense than an IDENTICAL VERSION AT THE SAME LOCATION.

Aaaanyway, anyone who would like to DDOS 64.22.110.2, enjoy. These people won’t stop until there’s some blowback, but I found this very amusing.

If you’ve lived under a rock for the past few years, or wonder why you don’t see as much Vinyl in the record shops these days, or why the Dead hasn’t come by on tour lately, you may be unaware of the supposed scourge of the music industry – online file sharing.

In short, file sharing can allow people to steal anything that is not physical. Whether it’s video, audio, text – if it can be reduced to 1s and 0s, it can be stolen wholesale and instantly copied in perfect clarity as many times as the world’s magnetic, optical and flash media can store. With 8 gigabyte microSD cards and terabyte hard drives readily available in big box consumer stores, this is a hell of a lot of copies. Consumer broadband is now providing the plumbing to allow these copies to reach these storage devices at breakneck speed.

The actual means of online file sharing is irrelevant to this particular article. As it is possible to steal copyrighted material via the Internet, those who hold lucrative copyrights have been actively pursuing those who do so, making file sharing even of legal materials a game of cat and mouse. The struggle for the water to continue to find the cracks has created many innovations in the way the typical person uses the Internet, but again, this is for once not the point of this article. The simple fact is, it’s possible, and it will continue to be possible as long as the copyright holders fight an engineering and philosophy battle using lawyers, who in addition to not being engineers or philosophers, are outnumbered by a ratio of several thousand to one. And these people employ a lot of lawyers.

So, if we accept that it’s possible to steal intellectual property, and it’s not particularly likely that that will change, what do we do? Sue anyone who transmits an mp3 via a network? Tried it. Implement punishing copy protection that cripples product and leaves consumers thirsty for blood? Tried it. Leave the world of the “useful arts” to anarchy? Give up on trying to sell anything that can be stolen so easily and quickly? That’s crazy!

Or is it?

I was directed to an article by Kevin Kelly saying perhaps not, by the oft-praised-on-this-blog Jonathan Coulton. You should go read it. It posits a simple and elegant set of conclusions to take from all of the premises above:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

This is a more refined idea than the much-ballyhooed experiment by famed musicians Radiohead, when they allowed the unwashed masses of the internet to download their work, without copy protection, for whatever they wanted to pay, down to and including a big fat nothing. While I applauded this initiative, it was too simplistic for my taste. It cut out middlemen, yes, but it it was still essentially just adding a degree of granularity to the shiny-rocks-for-property system. There was a premium package announced, wherein one received nice physical copies of the album as well, but this made the digital release appear more of a leak-prevention preemptive strike than a bona fide rethinking of the artist-consumer relationship. There was no license granted to share, no “free sample” to try out (aside from just paying nothing, which many did not want to do out of fear that those watching this experiment would point and say “See! The cheapskates don’t want to pay!”) and most importantly, still no embracing of the above concept: sell what can’t be copied. Kelly’s “8 Generatives Better than Free” are a tremendous read, but one that Radiohead would have had to wait several months for.

Nonetheless, Radiohead inspired many artists, many pundits, and many fans to reevaluate the system. One of those artists was Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who shortly afterward announced NIN was going label-free. NIN had previously flirted with viral marketing that gave away tracks without copy protection, but sites that picked up on this and promoted the tracks were shut down by the RIAA. It seemed Trent’s solution was to tell the RIAA their services were no longer needed.

Fast forward to this week. Trent reveals his take on direct-to-consumer sales, building on Radiohead’s deluxe physical collection concept, and embodying many of Kelly’s qualities. The collection is all Creative Commons licensed, so fans are free to destruct and share and generally play with the material as long as they give credit and don’t try to cash in on it. There’s a 9 track free taste that is lighting up torrent trackers worldwide, as well as 4 very logically designed tiers of paid patronage, all building on the prior tier – the basic download, for those who are happy with slapping stuff on their portable device, the physical disc package, the deluxe physical package, and a 300 dollar package with lithographs and DVDs and a limited, signed run. Of course, no one would buy the crazy package, but it was nice the option was available, right?

Or perhaps it could sell out in one day, grabbing a tasty 750,000 dollar revenue stream from run of 2500. The linked article, and many others, pretend as if Trent will be taking a giant novelty check for 3/4 of a million dollars down to the bank this week. Obviously, he had to eat and power his equipment for the 10 weeks it took to create Ghosts I-IV, he had to fund the commerce engine on the site that sells the material, there are materials and manufacturing costs involved in this ultra deluxe package. These things will take a huge bite out of the 750 grand, but it makes for a more dramatic headline. However, this is still a pretty amazing chunk of cash coming his way, and it is far more likely that when all is said and done, the digital copies at 5 bucks a pop, and the 10 and 75 dollar editions will sell enough to be far larger in profits than the novelty check from the 300 dollar edition would have been. Why do I think that? Because I plopped down 10 bucks for something I won’t get until April, and this:

There’s a clear argument to be made here that this story is only applicable to those who already have massive audiences and fanbases. This is certainly the case for the more exotic packages NIN is offering, but I can think of several acts doing fairly well off free samples and direct paid downloads, while making physical discs available to those like me who like to see album art and have a tangible result of a transaction. Allowing free copies to be made under the license the music is published under doesn’t seem to have killed them, and in fact has inspired a sense of goodwill and word of mouth advertising that is vital to their success.

On top of this, Wil Harris posts a story about a method acts of any size can use:

After the show, the band sells a gift back for £10 – a blank CD, sleeve liner and a PIN code. The next day, you can use the PIN code to download the whole performance from the night before in high quality, DRM free MP3 – then burn it to the blank CD you bought.

[...]
With 25,000 people at a large gig like the O2, and just 10% of those buying the CD, that’s an extra $50,000 a night the band is making in CD sales. Who said paid-for music couldn’t prosper?

Certainly not that crazy ass Kevin Kelly. You just have to sell something that can’t be copied, whether it’s a philosophy of goodwill, a set of lithographs, or a memory of a great show.

Without further ado:

It’s happening.

Let me step back a moment so that you have the faintest idea what “it” is.

When the WGA strike became a reality last year, I had a lengthy and involved discussion with Christie about it. We discussed the ethics of royalties for content, the difficulties of negotiating in such a competitive industry, the impending Rise of the Hacks, etc.

At the time, it was my fervent hope that this experience would show quality content producers that they no longer need the entertainment distribution machine that has milked them so vigorously over the years. This is a belief I have had since I set up a video web site in about 2003. To me, this trumped writers getting a fair shake of online distribution revenue – sure, I wanted them to get paid, and get back to making my shows, but in the grander scheme of things, I wanted them to realize that the world has changed since their last, crappy contract negotiation. They don’t have to play hardball, because they don’t have to play ball at all. As such, I’m sure I appeared against the writers to a degree during this time; this could not be further from the truth. I simply wanted them to reach higher.

My argument not being a pipe dream leaned heavily on The A Daily Show site, and the videos their writers made on strike. Clearly, this wasn’t a tech-savvy media geek like me simply seeing all the pieces there. They were getting it.

I’ve been a fan of The Daily Show since about 1997, when it was hosted by Craig Kilborn. I saw a live taping of the show in 98, before Stewart even came into the picture. I remember watching Colbert’s first correspondent segment when it aired, and thinking “This guy will be amazing. I hope A. Whitney Brown mentors him in some fashion.” If you had told me during this time that they would eventually have an online storehouse of ~8 years worth of shows, browsable via a ubiquitous video streaming technology, all of which was feasible due to the widespread adoption of high-speed consumer broadband, advances in video compression technology, and cheap storage, I’d have hungrily bought whatever bridge or swamp land you were selling as well.

In anticipation of the strike, Viacom was able to put together this amazing digital storehouse not only for The Daily, but for Colbert’s solo masterpiece as well. Simultaneously, the striking writers were able to put up a video criticizing their corporate parent and deftly explain their stance, to the tune of half a million views plus. This is a step toward democratic media that warms the deepest cockles of my heart.

My hope was that upon receiving the audience they have with both their back catalog and their protests, they would realize that they had the tools they needed to circumvent the industry that was treating them in a way they weren’t happy with. This was the brass ring for me. To hell with DVD royalties, make the DVDs yourself. Broadcast the shows on the web. The technology is now there. The audience is now there. The ad revenue is now there. Instead of getting a better cut, I wanted them to bake their own pie.

Enter http://www.ucbcomedy.com/

During a follow-up trip to NYC in 1999, I visited a little place called the UCB Theatre. I’d become a huge fan of their Comedy Central sketch show, and was in fact favorably comparing them to The Kids in the Hall and other far more well-known sketch groups – I loved their humor, I loved their style. When I heard they had an improv theatre, I demanded many, many stops there during my visit. It was amazing to see these people I had idolized on television playing a tiny ex-burlesque stage shut down during Guiliani’s crusade against hedonism. To sit 4 feet from someone you thought was one of the most talented people on television and have them ask you questions directly, be able to chat with them after the show – it was positively amazing in ’99, and I’m glad to say it’s more possible but still as electrifying in 2008. For the record, I got an email back from JoCo about the last entry. Electrifying.

So, the UCB has continued their history of making me feel engaged with their work, as well as providing a handy example for me to use in dancing a jig and thinking that my dream may be coming true. They’ve got a setup that’s part Viacom’s Daily Show archive, and part Funnyordie.com – but all awesome. This is the future of quality content. This is how you do things on your own – and they’ve got a pedigree.

These people came from the Improv olympics, got a shortlived TV show, opened a live theatre, and today have theatres on both coasts and a video sharing site with a roster of contributers that makes comedy geeks like me positively tingle.

Even though I was arguing for it last November, I was skeptical that this would actually happen. Seeing it happen, and at the hands of one of my favorite groups of content creators ever, makes me happier than I can convey in this kind of blog.

Now if only the striking writers would stick a UCB-created Poo Stick in Hollywood’s face, and bellow “Say I’m your momma!,” I’d be positively ecstatic.

I was all set to write about it, but then I had this issue with my blogging software. That caused a huge delay, as did moving my entire blagoweb over to WordPress. In so doing, though, I’ve created this new media blog, and hosted it at CorrugatedMedia.com. I live in an era where I can do so in a weekend. I think this is unbelievably cool, which is why this blog exists.

Readers of this post should:

• Have a basic understanding of the gist of the game Guitar Hero
• Be aware that through hacking the original game files, and rebuilding the game to be played on a modded system, one can add songs to Guitar Hero
• Be aware of pro-public-domain pro-fair-use copyright reform organization Creative Commons
• Ideally have some knowledge of the existence of zombie-fighting troubadour slash internet sensation Jonathan Coulton

So, to summarize for the technically uninitiated or lazy, through the use of modded Playstation2s and some rather clever applications, one can insert whatever song they wish into playable builds of Guitar Hero I and II. Most of these custom tracks are simply an mp3 of the song, with a pretty sloppy guess at tablature thrown in to make it seem interactive…a hack, at best, but it’s still nice to have Back in Black as a playable track. While the Back in Black custom linked there actually has some good tabs (or “note chart” if you want to use the lingo of the custom makers,) many do not, and almost all suffer from a distinct audio challenge: sound separation.

One of the hallmarks of Guitar Hero’s gameplay is the fact that the music stops when you play it incorrectly. The vocals, drums, and sometimes other backing tracks keep going, but the guitar drops out entirely. This is crucial to the sensation that makes the game so addictive – that you’re really playing. That the show is all on you. If you screw up, the song doesn’t just keep humming along and dock you with a score penalty – the song dies, and you’re punished with harsh, dissonant squawks of shame for every misplaced note. It puts it all on you to perform well, and once you screw up for the first time, the long stretches where the song plays perfectly become a source of pride – even though they are ridiculously dumbed down from an actual guitar, and the controller only has one “string.”

This nod toward realism is a very difficult effect to achieve – it basically requires separate sound tracks, so the game can cut the guitar out, and overlay the squawks, while keeping the rest of the audio going. This is why many tracks in the Guitar Hero series were actually performed by an in-house cover band, as they could not obtain the master recordings, with the requisite separate audio channels. While by and large I have been astounded with the tolerability of these covers, here and there there are some absolute crimes – few worse than the vocals on Nirvana’s Heart Shaped Box in GH2, which we have perfection in both title and description for, courtesy Tycho at Penny Arcade:

Their Kurt Fauxbain is monstrous, and sounds like a mongoose being crucified. I don’t actually know what that sounds like, but I bet I’m close.

This is a technical challenge that is going by the wayside for the official releases – as the series has gained popularity and credibility, they have found themselves able to gain access to more and more original recordings, but even in the newly-minted Guitar Hero 3, there are a lot of the dreaded “As made famous by…” tracks.

However, AC/DC’s Back in Black and Boston’s Hooked on a Feeling were the first two songs that leapt to my mind when I heard of Guitar Hero’s gameplay. I wanted them desperately. A cover version of Hooked on a Feeling was included in the first game, which woefully lacked the co-op lead/bass mode that this track truly deserved. Back in Black has yet to appear in any of the official releases, so a Custom track is the only way to go. But because the custom makers don’t have access to AC/DC’s master tracks, if you screw up, the song just keeps chugging along.

It’s still nice to have the song, but the hook of the game – the illusion of truly playing – is missing.

And this is simply the way it is for custom tracks…most of the time.

This brings us most of the way back to the inimitable Mr. Coulton’s post, but not quite yet.

Seems last year, he willfully put one of his brilliant Thing a Week songs, Code Monkey, up on the autopsy table in a remix contest over at Quick Stop Entertainment. As they note in the contest guidelines, the Creative Commons license terms require no one make any money off it, that they attribute derivative works to Coulton, and that they retain the same license on their work, so someone else can chop it up. This is a very important fact.

Coulton provided a very well labeled set of separated master tracks to the contest organizers, secure in the knowledge that this license would not cause people to reassemble these tracks and pirate them across the interwebs – a futile gesture anyway, as he has them available to listen to for free on his site. This is also a very important fact.

Now, finally, back to the article that got me tumbling down this rabbit hole. Months after this remix contest, a guy took these same separated master tracks, and created a custom Guitar Hero track with them. I found out about this off Coulton’s own page, and immediately went to the Youtube video, prepared to be disappointed.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/QcQe9IpfAa8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Watch it. Look especially for the part at about 1:46. He’s edited out the squawks, but the guitar part drops, just like it should.

I managed to track down the creator of this custom track, Andy Sage, who gets lots of points from me not only for his selection in music, but for how he went about this process. He secured permission from Coulton before posting the track, despite the source materials being freely available in a remix contest, and all of Coulton’s music being under a license he was not breaking. Sage was under no legal obligation to contact Coulton and make sure he was cool with this, but he did so anyway, and that is the kind of attitude that makes this sort of license and culture really work. Tying this back to why I think this story is so cool is the fact that he was ABLE to contact Jonathan to do so. Try doing that with Bono.

Sage has obtained master tracks from a couple other artists, and translated them into the kind of Custom tracks that really shine – with preview audio, custom loading screen text, and accurate performer information in the playlist and venue flyby. You can see another example in this video, again, with not only the artist’s permission, but them supplying the needed audio, which he retouched for a better GH experience. He says he intends to go around to various smaller bands’ Myspace or other pages and see if he can secure more.

Not taking their work, and modifying it without their consent, but coming to them and saying, “Hey, would it be okay if I changed your work, and made it usable in a completely different way?” This, from someone who, to these artists, would just be some guy on the internet.

But I’ll bet he gets a bunch to go along with it, because he is producing something of quality, and putting it out there for the internet audience, without the primary aim being profit for himself – which, frankly, more artists could aspire to, and is part of the recipe of Coulton’s success.

So, let’s recap this.

• Artist gains popularity through word of mouth and open, casual internet distribution, made easy by ubiquitous broadband and emerging social aspect of web surfing.
• Artist lends art to his newfound global audience without giving up the farm – still keeping people from profiting off his art, requiring credit where it is fairly due, and requiring everything that evolves from this art to maintain this philosophy, but not retaining an iron fist on the material’s use
• Audience member directly contacts artist for permission to use this art in a completely different medium, which he receives.
• Audience member creates an entirely new mutation on the art – converting it into an interactive form, using tools developed by the audience for another product.
• Audience member / modder posts video of this modified work to ubiquitous video sharing site.
• Artist links this video on his site, encouraging the rest of his audience to check out the derivative work, with thoughts about what this new form showed him about his art.

Holy crap. Would you ever have dreamed, even 5 years ago? Holy crap.

There’s a circle of art there that has never existed in recorded history. Less draconian licensing attitudes and tools like YouTube and one-click blogging are allowing artists to find one another and comment on their work like never before.

To quote Andy:

“I really can’t stress enough how much I feel that Internet distribution is the future of the music industry; artists like JoCo are the perfect example of how successful someone can be without any aid from the now-almost-defunct “big names” in the industry.”

Jonathan himself chimed in on this a little while ago on his blog:

These days I’ve got a booking agent, a manager, a PR firm, a talent agent. Granted, they all came after I had generated a good bit of success on my own, but how far along this curve do I get to go and still say I’m an “independent musician?” Do I just mean “not signed to a label?” If I ever did sign with a label (I could still be convinced there were good reasons to do such a thing), surely they’d want me to keep doing all this fan interaction and internet stuff – but does all that then become completely corrupt? And I’m not fishing for reassurances here, it’s just that sometimes it’s hard not to see success as a kind of creeping inauthenticity.

Despite being talented and visionary enough to get where he is via authentic, grassroots internet buzz, license his creative output in a way that allows fantastic derivative works, and then – instead of trying to lock down control on those works, or cease-and-desist them – gleefully direct fans to those derivative works, the man has a conscience about his success. Wow. Just wow.

Pretentious as it may sound, these are the people who will define a new era of media – based on almost instantaneous sharing of information, respect for one another’s work, and civility.

Pretty soon some band on MySpace will meet some director they like on YouTube and some…I’m not even sure what word to use for Andy…and there will be a song with a video and an interactive version, produced by a group of people who’ve never met, and probably never would have found each other without the internet.

Just wow. Welcome to the new media world, powered by blogs, forums, search engines, social networks, and the ubiquitous bandwidth and socially-minded engineering that allows them to exist and thrive. Welcome to the new culture, powered by people believing they have something to contribute, licenses that allow them to do so without being taken advantage of, and people simply not being jerks.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go try Sage’s custom of Code Monkey on Amazing in Frets on Fire – because it just takes a couple file renames to get a GH2 custom track working in FoF – a free Windows/Mac/Linux Guitar Hero clone, written by another random person on the internet.

Just wow.

It’s a new media commentary blog, but don’t expect me to use terms like Media 2.0 or Web 2.0 or Semantic Data Co-located Intertextualization.

I’m just going to be talking about the cool stuff that we can do with media now via the internet that would have been a complete pipe dream as little as 10 years ago.

On that note, I’d like to present one of my favorite videos on the subject:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/NLlGopyXT_g" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]