What follows is my reaction to a post by David Kusek entitled Searching for Salvation on the subject of the future of recorded music, and the problems the music industry faces today. He’s running a contest for new business models..   I wrote this in the comment section of his blog, and realized I should probably post it on my blog to.. cause I have this crazy habit of writing comments like this.

I don’t know entirely if I agree that recorded music is dead.. I think what’s dead is the old business models. I also think there’s a lot gong on in the evolution of the kind of technological ecology.. of like.. how people find new music, filters, financing, and whatever.. that needs to happen.. and once it does, the picture will shift a bit more.

I remember many years ago.. social media.. particularly bloggers and podcasters.. there was this whole conversation about “how do we monetize this stuff” and while its still an issue for many, a lot of people have kind of worked it out.. I think the issue for recorded music might be the same kind of deal.

A lot of it seems sorta obvious to me.. “a band” is a brand.. the brand must make some sorta product or service.. you must be able to make more money then it costs to operate.. you must work on building your brand, and making great products and services.

I’m not sure about the specialization.. well, maybe I’m not arguing.. but I think musicians, producers, engineers, label folks.. have to rethink what there specialization is.. I think they key is being open to a lot of experimentation.. try lots of stuff and measure your success.. see what works, or works in what way, what doesn’t.. drop what doesn’t, do more of what works.. but keep experimenting.

I think music has to be made for cheap, unless its a loss leader for some other area where you make more.

In any event there’s a kind of 101 of what I think you need to do that I don’t see being done well.

The design of artist’s websites is a good example.. the thinking through of what the business objectives ought to be for those websites.. I think a Flash branding experience is great, but that’s no excuse to forget about the rest of the strategic concerns or not have something that works on iPhone’s when people are out and about and are thinking they might want to go to a show and can’t see if you’re playing wherever cause your Flash site doesn’t employ progressive enhancement… and it doesn’t help if it doesn’t have the SEO so no one can find you.. and you might have wanted to think about those sales funnels.. and your news letter stuff ought to have other ability to do fine grained segmentation and get stats on what was opened and what wasn’t.. so you can fine tune that..

What I think is obvious is that any artist needs to build a team around him.. you need people who understand the online channels.. the social media blah blah blah.. as well as traditional media publicity and marketing and whatever.. you need people who understand the music business.. etc

The reality is that promotion on the internet can be cheap, as can the production of music..

Innovation comes from synthesizing disparate stuff.. so I think a couple things.. #1 It maybe that business models.. what works for one person might not work for the next.. You really need to triangulate your passions, skills, and the market.. to work out where you need to be. #2 You need to look out side of the music business for idea about business models.. take from whatever, synthesize whatever.. You just can’t expect the off the shelf ideas to work.

A lot of stuff needs to be rethought.. and I think the music industry’s resistance to change is a big part of the problem, but that it is one of the industries suffering the most.. when we get through this.. we maybe ahead of everyone else.

Finally, we are living in revolutionary times.. and there are incredible opportunities to be made and found.. but you kinda need to think like a revolutionary to make that work.

I’ve been sitting on this name for a good.. I don’t know, maybe 7 years? And so haven’t really mentioned it to anyone.. or not much anyway… and finally I’ve bought the URL, and posted a trailer to the site.. or the site is now a trailer for the future of the site.. or better yet, its a work in progress version of the trailer of the site..  and by work in progress what I really mean is that it’s like.. I’m sitting on my computer in the studio.. working on it, and you come over, peer over my shoulder, and see what’s going on.. and now I’m asking you for feed back.. and I really want it!

So, the site is… drum roll please Bad Sphincter Oedipus. It may take you a moment to decode.. so I’ll help you out.. Bad Sphincter Oedipus, of course, translates to Bad Ass Mother Fucker.. It is somewhat of an homage to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.. The mother’s used to be called just mothers.. for mother fucker, but the label made them change it.. It’s an old term you’ll find in blues meaning someone who can really play “like a mother fucker”.. 

The basic idea of the trailer is that the real site I want to put together will be a lot of work, and its not clear to me exactly when I’ll get through it.. particular as my attention is often on other things.. I wanted to post some content around the Bad Sphincter Oedipus project.. and I felt like I needed to put up the site before I could start posting content.. and then the content would link back to the site.

Ok, lets talk about Matt’s Self Criticism / where I think it needs to go.

1. The Flash movie just loops.. and um.. plays sound, and the user doesn’t really have control over the sound.. this is bad.. though less bad for a band / music site then a conventional site.. but still not good. I’m not quite sure what to do about this.. should I give you youtube like controls where it plays  through once, pauses, and you can replay if you like? Should you have to press a button to make it start?
2. The design really isn’t thought out well. If you don’t watch the Flash movie, you wouldn’t know what the site was, or anything. To this I should add that I think the only way you’d come to this site is from a profile link on ether twitter or Youtube, or from a facebook fan page.. (once they let me set up such a thing, seems like they don’t like the name Sphincter) or whatever it is I set up.. you could see it in other ways, but that’s really what its  there for.
3. It is REALLY just thrown together, not really well designed at all.. as I say, its just a place holder for a site.. but depending on how long I keep it up there, before I get onto replacing it with an actual site… it might not be a bad idea to design it well.

And so, I’m looking for your feed back

What do you think? Do you think it’s bad to throw up a site like this as an interim solution? If I were to make an effort to not just finish this work in progress, but bother to design it right, what do you think I should be thinking about as I design it? Any other thoughts or feedback? Would love and appreciate any feedback anyone might have. 

Adobe has announced new versions of there Creative Suits…  You can see video presentations of all there new software at tv.adobe.com. What I’ll be talking about in this post is stuff relating to what I’m sorta evaluating.. which is the Web Premium Bundle.. and After Effects CS4. On that note, lets start with some of the videos…

Adobe Web Premium CS4: 

As you might expect from adobe.. the video lies.. (I say this due to my past bad experience with Adobe… ) The video lies in that it suggests that Indesign is a part of the Web Premium Bundle.. and it is not!

My bad Adobe Experience

I thought I had posted on this.. but haven’t been able to find the post so.. here’s the deal:

I went to buy the web bundle.. but um.. the adobe site wasn’t real clear.. bad usability, and all that.. which is sorta ironic for a company building design tools! So I bought the wrong bundle by accident…  I was on the phone with Adobe on 4 ceperate occasions trying to streighten it all out.. each conversation had me moving between various people to talk to.. each seemed to take upwards of an hour.. an it seemed that nearly everyone was giving me a different story…  the long and the short of it was.. I don’t know if I’ve been refunded yet for the wrong bundle! And if you ask me it’s all about what’s bad with Adobe…. and this video being misleading is just more of the same!

On the Subject of the Bundle 

I wrote this post around the time I bought the bundle.. and provides some reasonably good background on the subject.

Web Standards

The problem with the bundle.. well it feels a little bit like Adobe “doesn’t get it.” One of the biggest revolutions in the world of web design has been Web Standards.. we design sites in such a way to separate out content, presentation, and behavior..  and introduce graceful degradation..  If this is done right.. then whatever you’re using to view the site.. be it IE, FireFox.. your PDA, iPhone.. if you have accessibility issues so there’s a voice synth speaking out the page.. whatever..  it will work on your platform in the most ideal-ish sorta way.

The trouble with the Adobe software has been that it does not enable this sorta industry standard development practices…. The learning curve nessisary to doing this kind of development is great.. and you’d like tools to help with that.. Not only that but.. “designers” tend to think visually.. and so you’d like tools that allow you to think visually.. as a pose to think code.. in terms of working out a design.. from a process perspective.. and blah blah blah.

Adobe has been… about 6 years late to the standards party? And you know.. on the internet things move really really fast.. so I don’t think there’s any reasonable excuse for this.. In any event.. Fireworks.. which is a web graphics orientated program.. will now spit out standards compliant code.. which is a groovy thing.. and Dreamweaver looks like.. they’ve done a number of thing to help with a standards based work flow.. so I am digging that.

Dreamweaver.. as of CS3, introduce the AJAX Spry framework.. This allows you to, via WYWYG, put together AJAX stuff. AJAX is.. how web applications are made, basically.. It’s kind of a way of using XHTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML, and server stuff.. to do certain kinds of stuff.. lets say. AJAX is a groovy technology and all.. but it is not without problems.. though it should be said that, as with most technologies, the problem is not so much the technology as how the technology is used…  and um… the problem with the Spry framework.. is it is much less then best practices… in how it does its things.. 

My feeling is.. I’d like to see the software get better at standards out of the box.. but at least its headed in that direction.. if at an unforgivably slow pace…. and I really need to get my hands on the software before I can really judge these things too well. 

Flash CS4

Flash CS4 is the most compelling part, at least for me personally, to the Web Premium bundle upgrade:

Flash has ALWAYS been the best tool for web based animation.. trouble is.. not a hell of a lot has happened to Flash, as far as animation is concerned.. since like.. Flash 5… we are talking the last tech bubble here! Most of the excitement in the Flash platform, since version 5.. and including version 5… has been all about the developer side of Flash.. and since FLEX is were a serious Flash developer would turn.. you’d hope you’d see better design and animation tools in Flash.. and indeed, we are now seeing them.

The new feature of being able to modify different parameters individually.. be it transparency, scale, its location on the screen.. being able to modify motion curves…  in a rather After Effects-esk way. This will revolutionize how I work with Flash.. and it’ll do this, really, on a process level.. which is a very deep thing. 

But Adobe didn’t stop there! They finally gave us IK (Inverse Kinematics.) Basically we are talking about Bones here.. which is a core feature of character animation in 3D graphics. This is also a very big thing for animation.

If all this isn’t enough.. we get some kind of a new 3D tool..  It didn’t look all that impressive from the presentation.. though I didn’t think the any of the Flash stuff looked all that impressive in the presentations.. unless you kinda knew what was going on…  I mean they were using a very boring project for there examples.. but this could be a very cool thing to.

PhotoShop CS4

There’s a lot of new stuff in Photoshop that looks interesting.. New ways of dealing with camera RAW.. the ability to bring 3D objects into PhotoShop and paint directly on them..  There’s bad news that Photoshop will not be 64-bit on the Mac.. which is a big downer.. but Adobe claims there new way of using your graphics card will more then make up for that.. This, as we say in the biz, is spin…  

Sound Booth CS4

Sound Booth is new to the Web Premium bundle. I do a lot of music production.. and for a lot of what Sound booth does.. I have better apps.. However.. it does have some spectral editing abilities.. which I would really love to play with.. and Sound Booth is more geared to working inside of this kind of media production environment.. as a pose to music production more generally.

I think it’s nice they put Sound Booth in.. for anyone who’s doing Flash.. I think sound in Flash isn’t really good enough.. I mean Flash projects don’t have enough attention paid to sound.. and this ought to help that a little bit.

After Effects CS4

Here’s the After Effects video:

So what do you think of that? Let me take you through it…

Mobile Us 

First we have a tool for creating content for multiple mobile platforms. My first impression was “Why are you putting this into after effects?” I mean.. After Effects isn’t a video editing tool.. it’s a special effects, motion graphics, animation, compositing type tool….  If I’m creating stuff in After Effects… that stuff’s next stop is a video editing program… before it’s final output.

Now ok.. this is a little complicated but..  what are you creating content for? What percentage of content is purely for mobile platforms? What I mean is.. that same content, don’t you probably want to stick it on youtube, or some other online distribution platform? If that’s the case.. you want to render stuff out of After Effects at the resolution of.. well the highest resolution you’re making your stuff for. As a result.. when you render stuff out of After Effects.. you’re not going to be saving on render times.. by aiming at smaller resolution platforms..  

The only thing I will say on behalf of this new feature is.. having guides that tell you when and where stuff in your frame is going to be cut out of on a target platform.. is very important.

Search

This is a very interesting part of the Adobe Suites… Basically.. there’s meta data that follows media through out the system.. and this is a fairly central part of the search. This is quite revolutionary stuff.. but.. if After Effects is you’re only Adobe Video / Production sorta program..  of what use is it to you anyway?

In my studio Final Cut Studio is where I work with video. When it comes to music production, that might have something to do with a scoring video… that’s taking place in Digital Performer, Ableton Live, Reason.. etc. None of this stuff will carry that meta data…  So for folks in this position.. you’re basically waiting a few years to see if Adobe’s stuff.. gets adopted by a wider echo system of developers.

I’m basically working on.. . lets call it the pro side of the DIY spectrum… what this means is I don’t often have an actual production team… and the process of inputting the meta data into this system..  will likely be neglected in most cases.. particularly if the pay off is lost as soon as I start working in one of those non Adobe products! Though apparently some of the Adobe stuff will turn audio speaking into text for the meta data… 

Matt’s Choice

Price 

The Web Premium bundle will now set you back $1700… and the upgrade (which is what I’d be buying) goes for $600. After Effects $1000 for the full, and $300 for the upgrade. That, at least in my world, is not chicken feed.

Economic Considerations 

You know.. there’s a couple things here..

1. The economy is slowing down. What does this mean to the budding entrepreneur / whomever? It means its time to stop spending money on stuff!!! I mean if the great depression 2.0 is just around the corner? Things will hopefully not be that dyer.. but whatever you think about this sorta thing.. one wants to be careful about the choices one makes.
2. On a Personal Level… I have a limited amount of cash to live off of.. until I sell the house.. and I’d like to not sell the house till the housing market / economy is in a better position then what we find today.. So again, I gotta be careful about spending money.

CS4 Bundles thangs

A lot of people you talk to are saying “There’s a new CS4 already?” These are complex tools and its hard to keep up with it all. My situation is even worse.. cause in addition to that bundle.. I’m doing video, music production, and 3D graphics..  photography.. etc..   At $600, am I going to get my money’s worth out of the new versions?  That’s my big question mark.. I mean.. If Firework’s standards support is actually pretty good.. the Dreaweaver stuff turns out to make a difference.. Of course we expect Flash to be all that.. Having sound booth has its advantages…  The photoshop stuff could really mean something..   You know I’m just on the fence about it.

After Effects 

After Effects is another matter. I own After Effects 4.0.. which is like.. pre Mac OSX… and will not run on an Intel Mac.. So I need to drop the money on After Effects just to have an After Effects! If I was getting on After Effects CS3, I think I might be passing on this upgrade.. but as of now, there’s no question that I’m upgrading. 

Other Expenses? 

So here’s some other things I’m thinking of spend money on.. in the relatively short term

1. RAM, probably a couple hundred dollars worth
2. HD Camera, probably around $700
3. Cantor Vocal Synth $400
4. Breverb reverb: $280
5. Binarual microphone set up thing.. I think we are talking about $200
6. Laptop..  more then a grand
7. If I go with such a laptop.. add $500 for time capsule 

 Out side of this.. There’s the possibility of other software upgrades…  and can I afford those?

Day’s latter:

 Hmm.. I think I should just post this as is.

Well its an exciting moment, I’ll tell you folks! Adobe CS3 Web Premium includes Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, and Acrobat Professional, among other assorted odds and ends. Most of this software I’ve been using for years, some legitimately.. some on the down low…  I generally have ethical problems with using software illegally.. and some of this software… well I haven’t been able to afford upgrades to.. some I’ve been using OS9 versions of for years.. some of it I’ve never even used.. So to go legit.. to full versions.. on a new Mac Pro.. OMG, its just awesome…  So lets talk a little bit about this suite, and what its all about.

Dreamweaver 

In the design and development world, opinions probably very.. as far as what’s the right tools for what job.. Dreamweaver was, for quite a long time, the only WYWYG (what you see is what you get) web design tool to.. to be taken seriously… well there was a little battle between Dreamweaver and GoLive.. but Dreamweaver would eventually win the day.

Today, however, the story is a little bit different. Today, good web design is done via web standards.. which involves things like CSS, DOM Scripting, and Unobtrusive JavaScript…   And the truth is that Dreamweaver doesn’t really do all these things, the right way, right out of the box.. If you want to use these kind of technologies.. you’re probably not going to be using Dreamweaver as a WYWYG editor.. but as a code editor and site management tool. Still, its not quite fair to say these tools aren’t pushing in the right direction… It’s just they’re not quite moving fast enough..

Fireworks

It’s been a long time since I was up to date on Photoshop.. in fact, for a number of years I became a kind of Fireworks guys. Fireworks is a funny kind of app.. one of the interesting cool features of Fireworks is that it does both bit map and vector art.. I shant explain this here.. but there will be some explanation coming. 

Fireworks is a graphics app for the web.. and includes things like.. well means of adding code.. and what have you.. It’s not a bad tool.. but as with Dreamweaver.. it’s had a little bit of a problem when it’s come to web standards design.. which, again, is not to say you can’t use it for web standards design… but you need that extra level of understanding to make it happen.

The new version of Fireworks, however.. is a little bit of a different tool.. See Fireworks was a tool from Macromedia.. and Fireworks’s closest competitor was probably Image Ready, which was bundled with Photoshop back in the day… Fireworks was the better tool.. but everybody needs Photoshop.. so to get it free with Photoshop.. aww, well you see the war that was being waged! Then, Adobe bought Macromedia, and Adobe CS3 Web Standard and Web Premium.. are the first post acquisition offering.. Which means, obviously enough, that the niches these programs occupy had to change a little. And so it is that we see Fireworks moving in a “rapid prototyping direction.”

I’m very interested to figure out what the hell this means in practice.. But basically it means you could layout an entire web site inside of Fireworks.. as a part of the early design phase.. and it will model out interactivity for you.. and shows you what’s up.. prior to going into actually coding stuff.  So.. that’s a pretty cool thing… We’ll, no doubt, be see how well this works in future blog entries.

Photoshop Extended

Seems like Photoshop has been the industry standard graphics app since the early 90s. Photoshop rocks! That’s my long held position. My view has always been that photoshop is a great tool to just kind of jump in and play with.. learn it that way my friend..

Again.. this is one of those programs that I haven’t used a new version since the OS9 days.. some folks will argue that nothing much has changed in all that time.. the real reason for upgrading is just to get it so it’ll run on the your current OS with your current processor. Seeing as I haven’t dipped in too far yet, I couldn’t really dispute that too much.. Though I can say that.. I, the once Photoshop Master of Disaster.. feel a little disorientated.. and I’m no longer so sure of myself.. so sure that the way I’m approaching a problem is the fastest / bestest (bestest being a technical term) way of doing something…  So I’m feeling like I have a whole lot of catching up to do / skill set atrophy to take care of.

On the positive side.. the extended version of Photoshop.. which is the one that’ll run you a hell of a lot of money.. is a tool that now goes into the world of video.. has special tools and abilities for this space.. which is rather exciting.. and for me, with my upcoming video projects.. a very very good thing.

Illustrator

Illustrator is what we call in “the biz” a “drawing tool.” How “drawing tool” got to be a technical term, I shall never know.. particularly as one can “draw” with photoshop, flash, fireworks, or even painter for that matter.. But any who.. Illustrator is a “vector” drawing tool.

Vectors are all about “resolution independent” graphics. Another words, you could make a graphic that is 1″ by 1″ and scale that sucker up to cover the empire state building if you wanted to..  This has certain advantages over bit map graphics.. that would look like a bunch of squares at that point.. While Illustrator’s history has been to cater to print designers.. the resolution independent nature of vectors has always played a large roll in Flash, as vectors also have the advantage of having a very small file size..  generally.. and so now Illustrator’s integration with Flash is supposed to be better then ever.

The biggest draw back to Illustrator is its learning curve.. it’s a little tricky to wrap your head around.. once you do, you realize the advantages of the Illustrator process. Further.. I think the way you really want to be using Illustrator.. most of the time at least.. is by integrating it into a larger work flow.. which would likely include photoshop, among other things.

Flash

Flash is, arguably, a strange bird. It started off as the best tool for web based animation.. but has since evolved into a full fledged web application development environment. The hard core Flash developer uses Flex.. not Flash.. but those of us on the design side of things.. we use Flash.

The biggest update to Flash is ActionScript 3. AS3, as we say, is way more powerful then past versions.. for animation based on AS3, it runs a hell of a lot faster.. and now has a more native support for XML.. for working with things like RSS.. and web services.. which is to say “the web 2.0 shtick.” 

The only problem, of course, is AS3 is a very complex sort of universe to try and explore.. you really have to learn to think like a developer.. and the real developer skill set is not one easily acquired ..

Acrobat Professional

Acrobat, as you may know, is a great way of distributing web documents, other wise known as PDFs.. and Acrobat is the authoring tool for this. Much of the significants of this is the E-Book.. which is still an evolving space.. what has be excited about Acrobat is that there is, apparently, now a way of integrating a kind of Google adsense into Acrobat.. so you could create free E-Books, with integrated adds.. with the opportunity to make money via the adds.. which is a very very cool thing… and is something I’m planning on exploring as I move forward…  

Also.. I’m planning on using Acrobat as a means of creating my resume.. 

There’s much more to this story… which we will be going into in future posts.. one assumes.. but for now.. this is a big event in my life.. and it is now time to orientate myself to this exciting new world..