dsandler.org

I think you all know that when I blog, these days I seem able to do little more than drool incoherent links and silly pictures. When @erinmak hits the “publish†button, however, you know you’re in for something…tasty.

Tonight’s entry: Supermodels and the mortgage crisis.

Related: Don’t buy stuff you cannot afford.

So, In Rainbows comes out tonight. You might have heard or read about it.

This release will clearly be watched closely by those interested in the moribund business of music and how it just might become evolved instead of exctinct. In this particular experiment, the hypothesis under test is this: can bagel-man economics really work in the mass market? (Indeed, Levitt and Dubner are curious too.) Very, very exciting times.

But that’s not what I want to discuss at the moment. I’d like to proffer the following: This will be the most simultaneously-experienced music release in history.

Assuming their server holds up, millions (seriously, millions) of listeners—comprising diehard fans as well as the merely curious—will be experiencing In Rainbows at the same time. This shared-experience aspect to a major album release is nothing new, and I’ve bought a handful of albums on opening day (or at midnight the night before, in a couple of cases) myself. What makes this different is the scale, along three axes:

I get the impression that, more than anything, bands are looking to connect more directly with their (current and future) fans, and to do so, they are seeking ways to become label-independent. There may or may not be a financial motive; it’s impossible to say whether, absent a middleman, artists will see more or less revenue from album sales, especially if you’re just holding out the donation box. But because the real money is in touring, and only fans go to shows, any investment—even a loss-leader, such as simply giving an album away (e.g., Prince)—in eventual ticket sales is a smart one.

But here I am getting back into economics (a favorite armchair science of many). I think the real reason to open a new socket to listeners—and the reason this cheap-as-free download phenomenon (see also: news from NIN) isn’t just a gimmick or a fad—is that they will start listening again.

All at once, in this case.

I swear, I’m still here. Give me a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, Anil Dash breaks down the whole lolcats thing (2 3).

Or as I call them, when I am unafraid of being the dorkiest person on the entire internet: “meowlogisms.”

NYT: Out of College, but Now Living in Urban Dorms.

How is this different from a 19th-century London boarding house?

The following (somewhat incoherent) blog entry is best justified using the following formula:

B = a × p(t) × E^-1 + h

a = Attempt to clear out excess beer from previous parties
p = probability that beer has gone bad since time t
t = time of previous parties
E = rationalizing force usually in effect around the house
E^-1 = lack of said force
h = HBO film schedule for summer
B = sappy blog entry

This entry is thusly subtitled:

“Star Trek: The Motion Picture” — One Of The Greatest Movies Ever Made, Or The Very Greatest?

(continued…)

(End of the World + Mario Twins) × Energy BBDO = coolbreathpower.com. Another Internet meme co-opted by advertisers. Suggestions for also-ran ad firms not yet on the bandwagon: be sure to hire Group X for your v.o.

The purpose of Trackback and Pingback is simple: Find out when people are talking about you without a lot of heavy lifting (e.g. manually posting a comment or dropping an email) on either side. And yet here’s John Gruber, discovering the comments of venerable Web designer and personality Derek Powazek, by skimming Derek’s del.icio.us bookmarks. (Actually, JG was probably skimming all del.icio.us bookmarks for his own story.) This is a pretty fragile thread to try to follow. How many places do I need to look to see if someone’s commenting on something I wrote? Will Technorati be enough? Do I have to go back to obsessing over my referrer logs?