Thanks for the recommendation, Devin.
I really enjoyed this, but while I agreed with the author more than I disagreed, I thought his scorched earth policy was a little excessive. For example, he keeps making a big deal about "remixing" and sampling songs, when the idea of taking bits of songs to create new art has been in practice for over 20 years, and to be against that discounts everything from Paul's Boutique to Girl Talk. That seems silly.
The book also runs into the problem of trying to make you feel bad for corporations, which isn't bad in and of itself, but anyone who's read about the music industry knows that the relative collapse of the record industry wasn't due just to pirating alone. It played a big part, and that's worth discussing, but so are album prices and an inability to adapt. I did like his point about iTunes basically killing the album; a good solution to this might be to allow an artist to only make the full album available for download, rather than the single.
I was surprised he chose to focus so much on the record industry, because the death of the mom & pop video store through things like Netflix and Blockbuster is just as sad as the death of Tower Records. The big thing in film, it seems, is the "any monkey with a camera can make Clerks" as pointed out in Devin's editorial and the death of criticism.
And the coda to the book regarding the 2008 election is dated, if only because the rise of Sarah Palin is the rise of the "amateur expert." I'd really like to read a second edition of this, because I bet he's got more than a few things to say about Twitter.
It's a fast read. Check it out.
I really enjoyed this, but while I agreed with the author more than I disagreed, I thought his scorched earth policy was a little excessive. For example, he keeps making a big deal about "remixing" and sampling songs, when the idea of taking bits of songs to create new art has been in practice for over 20 years, and to be against that discounts everything from Paul's Boutique to Girl Talk. That seems silly.
The book also runs into the problem of trying to make you feel bad for corporations, which isn't bad in and of itself, but anyone who's read about the music industry knows that the relative collapse of the record industry wasn't due just to pirating alone. It played a big part, and that's worth discussing, but so are album prices and an inability to adapt. I did like his point about iTunes basically killing the album; a good solution to this might be to allow an artist to only make the full album available for download, rather than the single.
I was surprised he chose to focus so much on the record industry, because the death of the mom & pop video store through things like Netflix and Blockbuster is just as sad as the death of Tower Records. The big thing in film, it seems, is the "any monkey with a camera can make Clerks" as pointed out in Devin's editorial and the death of criticism.
And the coda to the book regarding the 2008 election is dated, if only because the rise of Sarah Palin is the rise of the "amateur expert." I'd really like to read a second edition of this, because I bet he's got more than a few things to say about Twitter.
It's a fast read. Check it out.
