Pirate Music, Buy Music

Big record labels like to draw a false dichotomy between pirating music and supporting artists. You can, in fact, do both! Here's how and why I do.

I listen to a lot of music. A Lot. There's no way I could afford it all right now. Buying an album can also be a risky investment - even if you liked the sound of an album preview you heard, you don't know for sure how great it is until you really spend some time with it! My model is to pirate, then reward the albums that earn it over time:

1. Determine how much money you can and should spend on music, and make a time period for doing so. For instance, ~$10/month at the end of a month.
   
2. Pirate and listen to everything you might enjoy.
   
3. Log it all, using last.fm for instance.
4. At the end of your time period, decide which artist(s) you want to support. Consider how much you enjoyed them, whether they're already rich vs. the runner-up, or even still alive, whether they are on an RIAA label, etc.
   
5. Give money to the artist, as directly as possible.

It's heartening to see some artists take up a distribution model which supports this approach. You're probably all familiar with Radiohead's "In Rainbows", which anyone could purchase for a price of their own choice (including $0) for a limited time. Other artists are trying this model. For instance, my most recent purchase is the most recent Kilowatts album Six Silicates, which has song samples, a full download, and a donation box next to the download button.

Another model is to allow users to determine the price, with a relatively low floor price that remains until the costs of production are covered. If it's cheap, more people will buy it, and big fans will pay more.

If you are a musician, I strongly encourage you to think about why you distribute your music the way you do. Big labels give stingy cuts, the RIAA is consumed by cartoonishly evil greed, and you don't need a big label for advertising anymore. The iTunes store gives a 9% cut to artists. If your music is any good, people are going to pirate it no matter what, and if your music is any good, people will discover it 1) through shows as always, and 2) through new web services like Pandora and last.fm, online reviews and blog posts. You need a manager to book shows, a label that can produce CDs and records for those who buy them, and a distributor and advertising. If that work is 91% of everything that went into all the music you created and shared, then 9% is fair. Downloading however takes very few resources, it's exploding, and you can probably make a better profit bypassing an online distributor altogether and making the money directly.

Pirates buy music, and it's time listeners and artists move to support a more modern music economy. No one needs a cut if they aren't helping artists or listeners.

Futurism, History and Science at Burning Man

If you're considering going to Burning Man this year, but can't imaging going a whole week without thinking about things like AI, physics, alchemy or the Enlightenment, here are a couple of good reasons to go this year.

1. This year, the the art theme at Burning Man is Evolution. The creativity and genius of burners is boundless, and you're sure to see and experience some thought-provoking stuff!
2. Click this, and refresh a dozen times.
3. The Time Colony will be at Burning Man, and we welcome your temporally displaced brain with open arms!

The Time Colony is a place where Victorian-aged gentiles may drink along side space robots, etc., and time travelers of any era are welcome to relax and enjoy the moment. We host a few activities that anyone who reads this blog might enjoy:

• Future Salon. This is a place for intelligent discussion on emerging technologies, social change, and all that may yet come to pass. The conversation is very lightly moderated and not restricted to any one topic.
• The Historical Preenactment. This is a performance of an important historical event yet to happen! Last year we had a cyborg intervention of a robot lynching. This year we're having a posthuman wedding.
• Science and Big Ideas Lectures. We're providing an open space for anyone to talk and share neat concepts, from the science of spacetime to theories of mind, the lessons of the ancients and ideas about the future.
• Fun and Games. This year, we will have several ancient boardgames for anyone to play at any time. Additionally, we will have a Time Machine. On the outside, it looks like a giant geodesic dome. The inside however glistens and resonates with sights and sounds from across eons.

If any of this sounds good, look us up in the directory when you get there and stop by! Our camp will be easily spotted - it will consist mostly of a few Very Shiny (reflective mylar) Domes. If you want to camp with us, visit our little website and fill out the form - we'd love to have some more good folks join us this year.

BIL Conference July 2009 - Help Needed!

BIL is "an ad-hoc conference for people changing the world in big ways. It's a place for passionate people to come together to energize, brainstorm, and take action." It started a year and a half ago as the free and open analog to the successful TED conference, and has since morphed into a unique and flexible independent event. And we're having one here in July.

At BIL SC, anyone can speak - you will sign up on our wiki (there are of course guidelines). We are also inviting a number of top-notch thinkers, doers, movers and shakers. So far, Christine Peterson from the Foresight Institute will probably speak. There will be three encouraged themes for talks - one will be Tomorrow's Problems, Today's Solutions, and the other two have yet to be decided. (This being Santa Cruz, I expect we'll see the themes of environmentalism and social justice make an appearance). More than talks though, BIL will be a place for conversation. We will host a number of open discussions on talks and other topics. There will probably be three rooms for speakers and one for discussions, all running simultaneously. It will be hosted on the UCSC Campus around the Baskin Engineering Courtyard.

When in July? I'm not sure. Who's going to be there? I don't know yet. Who is this "we" organizing the event anyhow? Well, dear reader, that might be you. BIL is a a "Do-It-Yourself" conference - everyone who attends is encouraged to contribute in some little way - this could be helping with logistics, moderating talks, spreading the word, managing the website, finding sponsors and speakers, bringing snacks, just being conversational, or even giving a talk!

If you want to help organize, please contact me immediately. If you are in Santa Cruz, the Bay Area or the San Jose area, we will be having a meeting in the next week in Santa Cruz. (I was thinking we would meet either this weekend downtown, or early next week on campus. If you can make it, let me know what works best for you.) You can still help organize even if you can't meet in the next week. Let me know.

If you don't want to help organize but want to participate, there will be more information available at the impending website, which I will announce next month. You can also help by suggesting speakers to invite - anyone can speak at BIL, but we'd like to invite a few of our favorite speakers sooner than later.

For more information on the BIL event in general, check out the website - be sure to look at the media coverage and the last event's schedule.

[EDIT] The conference will be happening in October, 2009.

New 3D Printer Material Dirt Cheap

3D Printers are almost affordable, but the commercial materials are still prohibitively expensive - $30 - $50 a pound. Now researchers at the University of Washington have made a cheap substitute from artist's ceramic powder and maltodextrin, bringing the cost to about $1 per pound. They are distributing their recipes freely on the internet.

News Updates: Spies, Riots and AI

In an effort to get back into posting, here are some news updates.

The US Power Grid has been compromised by hackers. In some cases malware has been installed on the computers. This wasn't one big attack, but the result of years of infiltration efforts and negligent security practices. How serious is the threat? NetworkWorld interviews present a few different views.

In the meanwhile, deliberate destruction of fiber optic cables have crippled communication in Santa Cruz County. With the previous news, you might be getting the uneasy feeling that our infrastructure is pretty fragile.

Meanwhile in a warrantless wiretapping case, the DoJ gave an extremely disturbing ruling. They essentially argued that the US Government cannot be held accountable for illigal surveillance, period.

Micheal Anissimov links to a number of news articles reporting on two AI breakthroughs. These are two AI which have arguably done science with minimal human intervention.

Another phrase circulating around the internet is the Twitter Revolution, or Twitter Riots. Anti-communist protests in Moldova were organized using Twitter and Facebook. Take a look, these social networking tools are being used for a serious social revolt.

Google, NASA Launch Singularity University

"Singularity University will open its doors in June 2009 on the NASA Research park campus with a nine-week graduate-level interdisciplinary curriculum designed to facilitate understanding, collaboration, and innovation across a broad range of carefully chosen scientific and technological disciplines whose developments are exponentially accelerating."

Ray Kurzweil will be named Chancellor. via The Register, KurzweilAI. The University's website is disabled right now, presumably because of bandwidth or some attack, but when it's back get more information at singularityu.org

Article: "Computer Network Structure Alone Can Affect Outcomes, Relationships And Behavior"

Science Daily posted a very interesting article on a series of experiments on social networks and persuasion. In summary, individuals were placed in a controlled social network, with a variable percent of the network they could see, and a decision to make: Red or Blue. They were given monetary incentive to make a decision, and some were given incentive to prefer one to the other. The objective: Build a global consensus. From the article:

The study revealed that not only could minority groups override the majority but could in fact facilitate global unity easier than a network that was evenly divided among red or blue. Kearns also found that the wealthiest players at the end of the experiments were those stubborn or stable players whose reluctance to change set the tone for the experiment.

In addition, the more aware participants were of the opposing preferences held by their neighbors, the more likely they were to reach a global consensus.

I was positing earlier tonight to a friend of mine in Indonesia that citizen journalism and social networks change the big picture of how people learn, decide and act. It's good to see research that supports these tools for a global community as valuable. The full article is here.