9 posts tagged “music”
This article about networks retooling TV shows reminded me of a great sequence in a recent How I Met Your Mother. Robin, one of the main characters, is a TV news anchor. She also happens to be Canadian. The entire episode centered around a secret tape that she wanted no one to ever see, which the other characters assume to be something dirty. At the end of the episode the secret gets revealed: she was a Canadian pop star in high school. Her one hit: "Let's Go to the Mall."
I got three or four songs into an on-the-go playlist today before realizing that all the songs I’d picked out had been featured on TV shows I’d seen recently. Deciding to roll with the inadvertent theme, I was surprised at how many songs I could find that had been used, to great effect, in shows I like. Here is, more or less, the playlist I built, along with some notes and handy links to iTunes for the songs and Amazon for the albums and video links where I could find them.
Time After Time
She’s So Unusual
Cyndi Lauper
My Name is Earl last week featured an amazing montage with Randy singing this song solo while showing all of his failed relationships. Here it is on YouTube.
Waiting for My Real Life to Begin
Going Somewhere
Colin Hay
Scrubs makes the list three times. In the second season episode My Philosophy, J.D.’s monologue begins the episode by saying that the hard part about hospitals is that for every good thing happening there’s always a bad one to balance it out. He has a patient named Elaine (Jill Tracy), with whom he discusses death. She says that she hopes it’s like a big Broadway musical
and that you go out with a real flourish
. When J.D. sees that another of his patients just pulled through her surgery, he knows that something bad had to happen to balance it out. He runs into Elaine’s room to find her standing by herself in a spotlight.
Surrender
The Greatest Hits
Cheap Trick
The season one episode of Scrubs, My Old Man has J.D. dealing with father issues while Elliot has family troubles of her own. This song plays over the closing scenes.
A Little Respect
POP! — 20 Hits
Erasure
I think the point of using this in this Scrubs episode was just to play a trick on the audience and get this song stuck in our heads. Throughout the entire episode characters are catching themselves singing it, which continued after it ends and I was forced to buy it from iTunes. Still, the opening scene is great.
Make Your Own Kind of Music
The Best of the Mamas & The Papas
Cass Elliot
The premier of Lost’s second season started with a bang. Make Your Own Kind of Music plays while a character, whose face you don’t see, works out, makes breakfast, injects some medicine, and overall goes through some strange routine. Using an older song means you have no idea where or when the scene is happening until it’s over.
Only You
Best of Yaz
Yaz
This song plays at the end of the The Office Special in a tear-jerking scene. Our love of The Office combined with Only You’s nice prom-like sound caused Katherine and I to use this for our first dance.
Don’t Stand So Close to Me
The Very Best of Sting & The Police
The Police
In a season one episode of Veronica Mars, a student claims she had an affair with a teacher. In the courtyard during lunch, a group of cheerleaders start taunting her by singing the opening lyrics of this song in jeering a capella.
If We Used to Be Friends weren’t a perfect theme song for Veronica Mars, this should have been it. In Rashod and Wallace Go to Whitecastle, Veronica winds up in a karoake bar where a guy sings this song to her.
Under the Milky Way
Starfish
The Church
A few times now Grey’s Anatomy has featured really bad covers of really good songs. This one was a few weeks ago.
Sloop John B
Pet Sounds
Beach Boys
In the Sports Night episode The Sword of Orion, after Jeremy has a bad weekend and spends a whole day obsessing about a boat race from years before, Natalie gets him to break down and tell her what happened. Sloop John B comes in at the end, setting the formula that Scrubs would later master of using a montage of all the characters at the end of an episode to remind you how well constructed the plot was.
Brothers in Arms
Brothers in Arms
Dire Straits
The Two Cathedrals, the season two finale of The West Wing, may be one of the best hours in all of television. At the end, when the storm blows in and Bartlett has to face the funeral of Mrs. Langingham and the public revelation that he had concealed having MS, Dire Straits rise up and capture the mood perfectly.
Hallelujah
Grace
Jeff Buckley
While the show never lived up to its second season height, West Wing’s third season finale again makes great use of music, here Jeff Buckley’s version of Hallelujah.
Apple, in a rare pre-announcement of a product, said today that they’re working on a little box that lets you stream video, photos, and music from your networked computers to your TV. This is not a DVR. It doesn’t record TV, because that’s not how Apple sees the future of media working. Broadcast media doesn’t fit into their model.
Think about how you use a TiVo. You go through a menu, pick a show you want to watch, and watch it. Pretty simple.
Now think about how a TiVo works. It has a set schedule. When a show you like comes on, it switches to the right channel, sits there for the appropriate amount of time recording the show, then switches to the next show on its schedule.
The user interface of TiVo makes it seem like shows are discrete files that your TiVo has access to, but you’re really just watching slices of time from earlier in the week. This becomes jarringly apparent when a TV show flashes a weather advisory for a storm from last Tuesday, or when you sit down to watch a program only to discover that the cable went out while it was being recorded, or when a football game ran over time. You’re not actually watching TV shows. You’re watching what TiVo was watching while the show was supposed to be on. TiVo is a very well-designed halfway point between broadcast television and à la cart television. It turns broadcast into à la cart, but it’s still a recording of the broadcast.
Apple’s model is entirely à la cart. It has strongly defended this model against the desires of the suits in the record industry for years now. You buy a song at a certain price, and you own that song. Now, with TV and movies, they’re doing the same thing. The reason that the iTV doesn’t have a TV-in port is that Apple doesn’t care about broadcast TV (and, well, they don’t get any money for broadcast TV, only when you buy shows from them). The Apple model is that you’ll pay them to subscribe to a TV show, and they’ll give you the download whenever a new show is up (think paid podcasts). The iTV is a box that lets you watch it all as if it were normal TV. In other words, it’s a TiVo without the clunky need to record the show on a channel first.
There are some problems with this. First and foremost, there’s no capability to watch live TV. As an assimilated TiVo user, I rarely watch live TV, but having it there is very, very important for coverage of live events (and sports, if I cared), weather reports, disasters, and breaking news. Second, Apple doesn’t offer the season pass option on all of its iTunes shows. And even if it did, the present model requires pre-paying for a season of a show, which means that if I were to buy all my shows from iTunes, I’d be shelling out a very large sum of money all at once in September when all the new seasons debut. I’d prefer a discounted weekly bill to a pre-pay model.
So what is the iTV (or what will it be when it comes out)? It’s the hunk of plastic that actually makes all of Apple’s work in the digital media field useful. It’s great that I can download movies to my computer, but when they’re stuck on my computer, what good do they do me? Being able to watch them on my TV means that they’re actually something I’d watch at all.
I’ve written before of what I think the future of media is going to look like, and with iTV it’s pretty apparent what Apple thinks it will be. You won’t subscribe to broadcast TV and you won’t buy DVDs or CDs. Everything will be on your computer, but you’ll be able to watch it on your TV, on another computer, or on your iPod. Plus, you’ll own it, so if you want to go back and watch a re-run of a TV show, you’ll just pull it up from a menu.
As expected, Microsoft announced today at CES a new music download service in partnership with MTV, called “Urge”. From the CNN coverage: The offering will include exclusive material from MTV, though it will not be compatible with iPods, which are currently the most popular MP3 player.
Not that non-compatibility is a shock to anyone, anywhere, but I’ll ask the expected question anyway. Why? Why not make a service that peddles MP3s that will play on any player, including iPods? Why not set your goals on making the best download service there is that plays on every music player out there? (Of course, I’m no evil financial genius. I’m sure it makes perfect sense to Bill Gates’s people.)
Microsoft doesn’t ever want to win its customers by selling them the best, most reliable, most compatible product there is. They want to create the something and lock you into it. They want to be the HMO for the digital world, where if you want service you have to use theirs. (Of course, Apple’s guilty of this, too. You can’t play music you buy from iTunes on non-iPods, but at least they have the advantage of iPod compatibility.)
So why do I get so worked up about all this? I guess it’s because at the moment there’s still a chance that the bad guys won’t win. Given the choice between buying a song that only allows me to make x copies and one that has no restriction, I’ll take the one without the limits. No one wants DRM, but we’re paying for it anyway, and many people don’t even know it. It’s clearly to our advantage as consumers for Microsoft to release a music service that offers music that plays on all devices (as it would for Apple to release an iPod that plays all the music, for that matter), but Microsoft thinks it has the power to throw it in, anyway, and force us into it. It’s not like many other companies have the resources to strike up deals with record companies and produce competing products, so in the end we’ll be stuck with whatever we let them stick us with.
Also, “Urge” is a terrible name.
Hurray for NBC for doing something really right. Last week, they aired an hilarious rap video called Lazy Sunday by a comedy group called The Lonely Island, which spread across the internet like wildfire within 48 hours of its original broadcast. Mid-week, a streaming copy appeared on the Saturday Night Live website. And now today you can download the video for free from iTunes. NBC could have easily had its lawyers throw around take-down notices to all the websites sharing the clip, but it wouldh’t have actually stopped the sharing, and it would have made the network look like a stupid bully. Instead, NBC did the right thing and gave it out for free. After all, people just share these sorts of things because they think they’re funny and want other people to enjoy them. It’s free advertising coming from your own fan base, at a time when the general impression about SNL for years has been that it’s not funny anymore. In other words, advertising their marketing department could never generate themselves, using the actual product to be sold to show how good it is. Bravo.
I ran across this link today, featuring a PHP script that lets you download music videos from the iTunes Music Store. Cool. Apple’s put a lot of music videos up, and now I can download them onto my machine and watch them whenever I want.
But wait? Why the hell do I need to hack together a script to do this? It’s always bothered me with their Quicktime Movie Trailer repository. Here’s a page full of ads I’m willing to watch voluntarily, yet they1 don’t let me download them. Letting me download movie previews would let me watch them whenever I want, and do so without using up Apple’s bandwidch, near-infinite though it may be. The same goes for music videos. They don’t really sell them, unless you count the occasional collection of a band’s entire videography. Are record labels worried that free, high-quality downloads of videos will put MTV out of business (as if they showed more than four hours of videos a day anyway)? It’s rare that people are willing to watch your ads on purpose. Music videos and movie trailers are lucky exceptions that the entertainment industry has somehow achieved. Seems that among the very long list of things that entertainment executives are too stupid2 to understand, this is another.
- I’m conflating Apple and the entertainment industry here a little bit. Either could be the culprit for not giving you the option to download the files. I’d be willing to bet that some idiot executive(s) and/or lawyer(s) stipulated that Apple would only be allowed to provide the content if they locked out downloading, but it’s also possible that Apple did it on purpose to promote their idiotic Quicktime Pro strategy. “Hey look, if you spend $30, we’ll unlock features that our product should have for free! Then you can download these files that are already cached on your machine!” ↩
- Note that when I say “stupid” and “idiotic”, I mean that they’re being idiots to treat their customers like idiots. I’m sure it’s making them some money, but I think in the long run is the reason most people don’t have any moral qualms bootlegging CDs and DVDs. If the entertainment industry showed more thanks for our business, we might care a little bit more. ↩
Green Day’s video for Wake Me Up When September Ends is pretty damn powerful. It gives an honest look at how hard the real, actual big decisions and consequences in life can be. It's not trying to say that the war is right or wrong, or really anything about the war, but about the people in all wars and one slice of what they go through. My feelings about where this country should be fighting its wars are one thing, but my feelings of respect and sorrow for the people who do the fighting while I’m playing video games are profoundly stronger. In another wold I can easily see myself in that role, and though I wouldn’t say that regret is the right word for my feelings about not ever serving, it does put lots of things that I do into perspective.
daveXtreme.com is was gray today. Here’s why. I’m of course not saying whether or not I have a copy of The Grey Album shared somewhere, or that I’ll burn you a copy, but leave a comment or email me and maybe I’ll whisper about it. If you haven’t heard the record, it really is great. Or if you don’t want to tread into the murkier waters of music piracy, you could always try putting Jay-Z’s Black Album and The Beatles’s White Album into the microwave and see if it comes out like DangerMouse’s version. I’m sure you’ll see some pretty colors if nothing else.
I’m not so sure I’m totally behind this right to sample thing. I do feel that remixing is a great art form, and I think a compulsory licensing scheme would be great. Still, I can certainly see that an artist might not want other people sampling his work. But early sample-heavy hip-hop was good though.
Update: Good discussion on the topic:
- Waxy.org: Danger Mouse's The Grey Album MP3s
- Lawrence Lessig: The Black and White about Grey Tuesday
- Wired: Copyright Enters a Gray Area
- Komlenic: "Grey Tuesday" Getting Interesting
- Downhill Battle: Downhill Battle’s response to EMI
- IPTAblog: White, Black and Grey
Musicians afraid of boobies. Corporations owning music. Whatever happend to rock and roll?
A discussion rippled across the web today regarding the upcoming Apple vs. Microsoft music war. Scoble’s A challenge for webloggers: handling organizational difficulties argues for Microsoft’s music format over Apple’s. File formats? A terrible déjà vu chills my spine. Haven’t we played this game before and lost when it came to writing documents (Word), spreadsheets (Excel), editing graphics (Photoshop), and creating presentations (PowerPoint)? After each of these battles, one program came out on top. Each program has two things in common. One, they each occupy a monopoly in their genre. Two, they won their monopoly by locking users into file formats for compatibility’s sake. Another war is brewing, and again it will be one over file format dominance — this time Microsoft’s WMA versus Apple’s AAC. And again the real casualties will not be the application developers but the consumers.
Market competition is good for everyone. When developers compete, consumers benefit from cheaper prices and better products. When people were choosing between Word and WordPerfect, they were making their decisions based on which application they liked better, not on how those programs saved files to a disk. Now, people use Microsoft Word because they need to be able to send the documents it creates to each other, not because it’s a better product. (Yes, other applications are now compatible with it, but that’s now — now that the war has been won.)
Consumers don’t care about file formats. They care about compatibility, and they care about features. They want software to do what they want it to do, but they don’t care about file formats. People want their music to play through their speakers and they want it to sound good. They want their jukebox software to make it easy to find and play their music. Very few care, or even know, which period and three letters follow the name of the song, whether it’s .aac, .wma, .mp3, or .ogg. While some formats offer smaller file sizes or better sound quality, the capacity of hard drive-based players is already well above the size of the average music collection, and the ears of most listeners don’t hear the flatness of lossy compression. To the overwhelming majority of the population, the differences in music brands are imperceptible.
Before Apple released iTunes for Windows, most Windows users ran WinAmp. Now most of them use iTunes. Why? Not because they prefer the sound of AAC to MP3, but because iTunes is a better program and provides access to the iTunes Music Store. It smoothly imported their MP3 collections into its library. Each could be set each one up side-by-side and users could decide which was better. But of course once they start throwing money into the iTMS and building a collection of AAC files they won’t be able to try out any new, potentially better, software.
Scoble’s argument that people should choose WMA over AAC because more devices support the former than the latter misses the point. People shouldn’t have to care if their device will play their music or not. Scoble says:
Let’s say it’s 2006. You have 500 songs you’ve bought on iTunes for your iPod. But, you are about to buy a car with a digital music player built into it. Oh, but wait, Apple doesn’t make a system that plays its AAC format in a car stereo. So, now you can’t buy a real digital music player in your car. Why’s that? Because if you buy songs off of Apple’s iTunes system, they are protected by the AAC/Fairtunes DRM system, and can’t be moved to other devices that don’t recognize AAC/Fairtunes.
In arguing for open formats over proprietary ones, Cory Doctorow has the solution, but it isn’t one that the consumer, who doesn’t know the difference, is going to make. Tom Coates nails it:
It should be obvious to car audio manufacturers that they should be able to play AAC tracks — that there are hundreds of thousands of people across America (and soon Europe) who are going to want to be able to do more things with their bought songs.
Manufacturers of stereo equipment should be making products that play everything. Why should they care that Apple or Microsoft would rather your home stereo only play their format? Their customers just want to be able to play music, and in the digital age there’s no reason why devices shouldn’t play both. Coates says:
The examples that people cite about competing formats no longer hold true for music. It’s not like VHS and Betamax — we’re not talking about hardware with different sized slots that you can only fit one kind of music delivery system into.
The dirty secret is that Apple and Microsoft are happy to pretend they’re caught in a prisoner’s dilemma where the only outcome is war. But that game only applies when the two parties can’t communicate with each other. They could get together and work out a cross-platform DRM, but that would mean that they’d be competing on the same field. What’s really true is that neither company wants to go head-to-head with the other. And because each can lock the other out with proprietary formats, they never have to. With the newly instated number portability, mobile phone companies are being forced to do things like price competitively and offer better service. Why? Because now cell phone providers are now in actual open competition, and the invisible hand can sort out the rest.
To see how all of this could play out let’s say that Microsoft launches a new version of Windows Media Player that connects to its own music store. Say that this new store and the iTMS are basically comparable in price and selection, such that any given individual if choosing one or the other for the first time could choose either service based on their preference for the user experience alone. They buy a few hundred songs from one service, and then the other service releases a new version that’s better in some way or offers some new feature. This individual would like to change to the other service, but can’t because of his sunk cost in music and a portable player. Now he’s stuck using a service he doesn’t like because of a file format he has no reason to care about. Who wins? The software company. Who loses? The consumer. Next Apple and Microsoft get lazy. Since everyone with large music collections can’t switch to a new service with their incompatible music, the companies only court new blood, and have no reason to provide help or better products to current users.
Here’s another way it could go: one company wins because its product is better and its accompanying format/DRM-schema attains the monopoly. Innovation stagnates. Eventually another company wants in and has to pay royalties to use the format. Or maybe someone invents a new, better one, but the old company never supports it properly. (This happened with image files, and five years later Internet Explorer still doesn’t properly render PNG images.) Who loses? The consumer.
Or, both companies could use compatible formats. Both could compete in the open market, using superior products to get ahead. Once equilibrium has been reached, one or the other would be forced to innovate to tip the scales. Maybe a third company would come along and both have to scramble or risk obsolescence. Who wins? The company that makes the best product. Who wins? The consumer.
Further reading:
- The Scobleizer: A challenge for webloggers: handling organizational difficulties
- Boing Boing: Protect your investment: buy open
- Plasticbag: On the benefits of competing audio formats…
Imported comments:
Okay, repeat after me:
[1] YOU CAN CONVERT AAC TO MP3 DIRECTLY WITHIN iTUNES
[2] YOU CAN BURN AAC TRACKS TO A CD
[3] The DRM mechanism is called FairPlay, not FairTunes or Fairtunes
You are NOT bound to iTunes! You can do a lot more with your iTunes collection than you can within WMP.
The FUD and outright misinformation in these discussions is ridiculous.
Alex Reynolds on January 28, 2004In responce to the above comment… You can’t convert AAC files bought on ITMS to mp3 without burning it to a CD and then re-ripping it. Which is fine but its more than most consumers are willing to do, or are likely to think of. Additionally, I dont’ know if you realized this but you can burn WMA files to CD as well, my friend does it all the time. Really more than anything I want a player that will simply play everything, AAC, WMA, MP3, Ogg, or whatever else. I hate the fact that if my friend who mostly uses WMA wants to send me a file, I have to play it in a seperate program, and visa versa if I send him AAC files. Granted I have slightly more flexibility with my AAC files but its still a pain in the ass to have to wait the time to convert it to MP3 just so I can send it to people who don’t have iTunes. While you are technically right on the details of the points you are making, I dont’ think they seriously change any of the main point of the argument Dave was putting forth. I think he’s still absolutly right.
Steve on January 29, 2004It is true that that there shouldn’t be any format war here since all player should (and hopefully eventually will) support alll files. One thing though that I am getting tired of is this idea that nothing else can play AAC but iTUnes. The new WinAmp 5 does support AAC and Real Player 10 even will play protected AAC files. THis isn’t closed and anyone that wants to make a player compatible with iTunes can, and in the case of desktop apps, it can be done for free. Now I don’t know if third parties would have to pay for FairPlay on portable devices or not but it is avalable. FWIW the iPod already suports WMA in the firmware, but it is turned off. Should the need ever arise, they could turn it right on. Since there are fees to be paid to use WMA, Apple doens’t want to raise the cost of the iPod, however a paid upgrade to allow WMA would be great so that those that care would have the option without anyone having to pay that doens’t.
Dale on February 28, 2004
