Mp3 Blogs are all around us
“Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.”
- Chris Anderson ( Wired magazine boy, currently authoring The Long Tail about the above phenomenon ).
Mp3 Blogs live in virtually every ecosystem on earth including the most extreme hot springs, freezing cold ice, deep beneath the earth’s surface, and at altitudes only reachable by aircraft. Mp3 Blogs even live in such hostile environments as pure salt, petroleum, and gas. These creatures vary greatly in size. The smallest Mp3 Blogs are smaller than some single-celled protozoa. Others are as large as small species of mammals. They are gifted with strength far greater than one would expect given their size. Some are capable of shifting units 50 to 300 times their weight.
The success of the Mp3 Blogs as a whole is due to their having many major assets in the endless struggle for survival. Here are just a few:
1) High mobility- allowing them to actively seek favorable environments, food, mates as well as to escape from their enemies.
2) Adaptability- the ability to survive extreme living conditions, and to get nourishment from a wide variety of sources.
3) Durability- an external skeleton, the strongest possible construction for so small an amount of material.
4) Small size- their demands of on given environment are meager, and they occupy many niches deemed unusable by other creatures of the earth.
5) Metamorphosis- this allows immature Mp3 Blogs to exploit completely different food supplies than the adults as well as to develop a multitude of other adaptations for survival.
6) Proliferation- by producing huge numbers of offspring more will survive to breed, thus ensuring the future of the species.
Small wonder then, that the flocks of oversized flapping flesh-beasts want a piece of this action. Alas, those mountains of record-company meat won’t last for long in the heat of the 21C, but there are already swarms of the tiny winged zapping ahead. And before we dance – sink your teeth into a piece of recent research by Chris Anderson, into the top 100 best-selling albums of all-time. Turns out 30 of them came from 1976-85, more than 20 came from 91-95, 20 came from 96-2000, and less than 5 came from 2001-05. Oh No~! Less mega-mega-mega rich musicians in the world. Does that mean David Hasselhoff won’t be coming back to sing Carols By Candlelight to Australia again in 2006? Swoon..
tags: mp3blogs, mp3, podcast, longtail, p2p
One thing not mentioned here, but I think it’s an interesting point, and it applies to me for instance…
mp3 blogs give power to the end user to make unique playlists or listen to songs in any order. podcasts are annoying in this regard…much too “analog”. pretty soon of course someones going to publish a way to segment podcasts to allow for “track skipping”. does webjay do this already?
JJ
Yeah as far I’ve played with it, http://webjay.org/ seems to allow jumping to a track on a setlist – within some sets, other sets have triggered streams…
The quicktime architecture allows reference points to be made, so it’s feasible someone could build something that allowed easy jumping between the start of tracks…
I’ve been listening to lots of longer mixes online lately, and once the mixes have downloaded within your browser, i tended to jump around in the timeline to bits i liked… but yeah I can see how a nicely implemented ‘next track’ button within an interface would be useful…
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oh and just noticed this related thread at Tech Crunch >>
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=546
In Cambodia we have much lower bandwidth, and much higher cost for it. Think 128k connection, dawn of the internet. (Especially in the provinces.)
http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/blog/2006/01/11/out-of-gas/
Here I really have to pick and choose my MP3s because I’m going to have to wait to download them. And hope there isn’t a blackout when I’m doing it. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/2006/01/19/cambodia-on-the-scene/
I generally zap referrals to my MP3 blog and download when I have access to a fast connection. http://www.qdcomic.com/music
Bodgy connections notwithstanding, am experimenting in Khmer poetry Podcasting. The tricky part is uploading big files. So far OurMedia.org’s proved handy.
http://www.archive.org/download/NouHachLiteraryJournal01/01Track01.mp3
[...] And don’t you just know these places are going to be crawling with Mp3 Bloggers? [...]