This semester for my Computer-Mediated Communication class I had the opportunity to work with a couple of guys on a project aimed at solving a problem that we have in our society. While perhaps not the greatest problem, the one we identified was how to choose music in a public location that maximally pleases the maximum number of people, and further, how to encourage real-world interaction among and between those people. In other words, how to choose good music, and how to get people to talk to each other rather than bury their nose in their computer.

To long-term readers of this blog, this may sound familiar, as I proposed the idea of a democratic music jukebox a while ago.

All in all, the project went quite well. It was a great team, and we were able to write several papers explaining how such a system would work, and what kinds of problems it would solve. We weren't able to really make the system, however we were able to create a wireframe mockup which should give you some idea of what we had in mind.

For those interested in the idea, I've attached our final paper and poster presentation to this blog entry. The poster itself is a bit cut up so it could be pasted together on poster board. Apologies for that.

According to Title 17, Chapter 5, section 504c2 of the US copyright law, if you get caught with music that you have downloaded illegally from the Internet, you can get charged up to $150,000 per infringement. I thought I would do a little experiment to see how much I would be in for if my entire collection were to be found to be illegal.

Let's do some math. I have 3,876 tracks, at $150,000 each. So if my entire collection were to be found illegal, that means it would cost me $581.4 million dollars — about .6 billion dollars.

OK, let's assume that I can live with that reality. It just seems odd that I could have bought those songs for $3,876 on amazon.com, or iTunes.

Something isn't quite right here. Also, did I mention that all US digital music sales are estimated to total $2.9B in 2007? That makes my music worth about 20% of the 2007 revenue.

It's important to have perspective these days. Times are changing, you know, and it can be hard to keep track of how things used to be. In that vein, I found an interesting quote from 1978:

Children who begin school today have probably listened to more music than their great grandparents heard in their entire lives.

It's pretty hard to imagine music as such a treat, since I listen to it pretty much every day.

This also reminds me of the Stravinky's Rite of Spring, which was so raucous that it caused riots. These days people get offended by rap, punk and video games (oh my!), and claim that they make children into little ne'er-do-wells.

Riots though? I can't imagine music causing riots ever again.

I have this problem when I am listening to music that I almost never choose artists whose name starts with anything after the letter D. When I am browsing for music, I just never get that far in the list. For some time, I've wondered if this is my fault, or if I just have more music in the front of my collection.

The time came to do a little stats work and figure out why this is. Here are the results.

While there is a strong predominance of the letters A-E, there is also one in the P-T range. This leads me to believe that I should hunt for music in that area more often.

While I expected A-E to come out ahead, who would have thought that B would have more than 80 artists, almost twice the second most common letter?

So, what conclusions does this lead to? One: That I need to look at my music beyond the letter D. Two: That B is a very popular letter.

For those wondering about their own music collection, if you browse to your music folder and run the following, it will tell you how many artists starting with that letter you have. For the example below, it tells me I have 30 artists with the letter 'A'.

ls Music | grep -i ^a | wc -l

A Cautionary Song

There's a place your mother goes when everybody else is soundly sleeping.
Through the lights of beacon street and if you listen you can hear her weeping, she's weeping,
Cause the gentlemen are calling and the snow is softly falling on her petticoats,
And she's standing in the harbor and she's waiting for the sailors in the jolly boat. See how they approach.

With dirty hands and trousers torn they grapple 'til she's safe within their keeping.
A gag is placed between her lips to keep her sorry tongue from any speaking, or screaming.
And they row her out to packets where the sailor's sorry racket calls for maidenhead.
And she's scarce above the gunnels when her clothes fall to a bundle and she's laid in bed on the upper deck.

And so she goes from ship to ship, her ankles clasped her arms so rudely pinioned
'till at last she's satisfied the lot of the marina's teeming minions, in their opinions.

And they tell her not to say a thing to cousin, kindred, kith or kin or she'll end up dead.
And they throw her thirty dollars and return her to the harbor where she goes to bed.
And this is how you're fed.

So be kind to your mother, though she may seem an awful bother, and the next time she tries to feed you collard greens, remember what she does when you're asleep.

I was curious which artists of mine had the most songs, so I ran:

du Music/ | sort -nr | head -11

Now we know that my top ten artists are:

% du Music/ | sort -nr | head -11
17582796        Music/
490928  Music/Radiohead
378148  Music/Daft Punk
315856  Music/Red Hot Chili Peppers
313032  Music/Massive Attack
306228  Music/Kanye West
305796  Music/Outkast
289288  Music/Nirvana
276416  Music/Beck
258544  Music/Nine Inch Nails
248608  Music/Beatles, The

It made some headlines, and is about to make more during superbowl. Amazon has started selling mp3's from all four of the major record labels. It's a pretty cool revelation, so I went ahead and checked it out.

Guess what? Linux users, you are screwed. In order to download albums from Amazon, you must "Get the Amazon mp3 downloader"...which is not available for Linux. Excuse me? Say what? I have downloaded literally hundreds upon hundreds of files from the Internet, and never have I needed a special tool other than Firefox. Why now?

Amazon, if you're going to do something great like this, do it whole hog. Don't make me install junkware. After all, I'm choosing to give you money, right?

The problem with Internet cafés as I see it is that they can never make everybody happy when it comes to music. They can quite easily please one crowd, but they can never please everybody. Back in the good old days, they tried to solve this in restaurants and bars by having a jukebox with a bunch of music stored physically inside it. Now we have jukeboxes that can download music, but that's where the technology seems to have stopped.

So here's my concept on the theme. You create a website that can only be accessed by those on the Internet café's wireless router, and you post the address somewhere conspicuous in the café. Next, you allow the people in the café to stream their music through their laptops into a queue where it eventually gets played over the loudspeakers. This way, the people in the café can actually play their own music when they go to the café, share it with others, etc. The café servers would have an override button and volume control and the like, so they can control the masters on the whole ordeal (this would be to prevent the Kenny G lovers of the world). This permission could also be given to certain café members who had proven their good music taste. Actually, giving this permission to all café patrons might work too.

I think this idea could work with a little manipulation, but the question of copyrights will probably come up. My argument would be that the music is being shared non-commercially by the laptop owners, not the café, and that thus no infringements are being made by the café; that this would be no different than a laptop owner bringing speakers into the café and simply sharing their music. This would in turn shield the café's of the world, leaving the music sharers liable.

Of course, the counter argument could be made that on a grander scale, what if the speakers brought in were huge, and what if the audience was that of the Superbowl, and not the café? In other words, how is this model different than a Superbowl host playing music during the Superbowl? To this I would respond that the Superbowl is doing it for money, whereas the cafe could arguably say they were doing it just to have good music.

The final idea behind this would be that the café could keep a database of the music their customers wanted to play, and that they could then know which single songs to actually buy, and to actually own the copyrights for.

It could almost work.

Revolution in their minds
The children start to march
Against the world in which they have to live
And the hate that's in their hearts
They're tired of being pushed around and told just what to do
They'll fight the world until they've won and love comes flowing through

Children of tomorrow live in the tears that fall today
Will the sun rise up tomorrow bringing peace in any way?
Must the world live in the shadow of atomic fear?
Can they win the fight for peace or will they disappear? Yeah!

So you children of the world listen to what I say
If you want a better place to live in spread the word today
Show the world that love is still alive you must be brave
Or you children of today are children of the grave yeah!

For a while, I've been reading that mashups between various website technologies would soon be really easy to work with and play with and such. I didn't believe it until I noticed my website today.

Today, I added the last.fm feed you all should be seeing on the left that lists the last five tracks I listened to on my home computer. With it's addition, on my homepage I now have a post about the San Diego fires that includes a java-based Google Map, a picture gallery that uses code from menalto.com, and a nifty widget that ties in with my home computer.

I think mashups, in my opinion, are officially a reality. Pretty cool.