Hypebot’s ‘10 commandments of music 2.0’

1. Thou Shalt Not Worship False Prophets - Neither a record deal or auto-tune are your saviors.
2. Thou Shalt Worship Only One God - He (or she) is called The Fan.
3. Thou Shalt Giveaway [sic] Free Music - Like Jesus and the loaf of bread, give your flock a gift that multiplies as they pass it around.
4. Thou Shalt Not Steal - Borrowing a beat is one thing, but stealing...
5. Thou Shalt Blog - Your flock wants to know what you’re doing.
6. Thou Shalt Create Profiles - Wherever your flock may go, you must be there.
7. Thou Shalt Upload Photos - Staged, unstaged, backstage, from the stage and at every stage of a project.
8. Thou Shalt Upload Videos - Longs Ones. Shorts Ones. Tall ones...you get the idea.
9. Thou Shalt Share Thy Bounty. Share gigs. Share ideas. Share with your fans.
10. Do Unto Others As You Would Have Others Do Unto You - You meet the same people on the way down that you did on the way up.

He asks for an 11th. My suggestions:

• Thou shalt not make sudden and outrageous price hikes.
• Thou shalt not foist weird formats and technologies upon thine customers. For it will be harder to pass Clive Davis through the eye of a needle than to get people to embrace slotMusic.
• Thou shalt keep ticket fees down. And when thou sayest “no fees,” thou shalt mean it.
• Thou shalt not exploit fans’ loyalty by reissuing the same product again and again with minor permutations.
• Thou shalt have good radio stations, and not flip them unless really necessary.
• Thou shalt have music videos on TV.
• Thou shalt not leak thine own music while also waging crusades against piracy.
• Thou shalt maintaineth good record stores. For even though people download music, they also liketh to browse thine physical product.
• Thou shalt not foist poorly designed, ad-supported online services upon thine customers. SpiralFrog and QTrax, we are talking to thee.
• Thou shalt get thine Grammy categories under control. Considereth a maximum of 30 or so awards, including technical. The reason that thine Hollywood neighbors coveteth one another’s Oscars is that scarcity createth competition.
• Thou shalt openly debate the fairness of “dynamic pricing” in all of its forms, including the so-called Radiohead model. For the best idea that anybody hath had about the value of music was Steve Jobs, who said that everything should costeth 99 cents. Why he caved on that, only the Lord thy God knows.

Monster-about-to-chomp-babe poster of the day, pre-‘Jaws’ special: ‘Creature From the Black Lagoon’ (1954)

Monster-about-to-chomp-babe poster of the day: ‘Cujo’ (1983)

Monster-about-to-chomp-babe poster of the day: ‘Spawn of the Slithis’ (1978)

Radio-controlled turbo Southern belles

(Via Topless Robot.)

Monster-about-to-chomp-babe poster of the day: ‘Blood Beach’ (1981)

Presumably there’s a monster down there somewhere.

Monster-about-to-chomp-babe poster of the day: ‘Piranha 2’ (1981)

Directed by James Cameron!

Monster-about-to-chomp-babe poster of the day: ‘Killer Fish’ (1979)

Monster-about-to-chomp-babe poster of the day: ‘Oceans 3D: Into the Deep’ (2009)

One of them has got to be a wee babe, right?

Monster-about-to-chomp-babe poster of the day: ‘Eye of the Beast’ (2007)

One eMusic (ex-?) customer’s opinion

eMusic made a pretty significant announcement today. In a few months it will add some 200,000 tracks from Sony for download by subscribers. After years of being shunned by the major labels — who didn’t like eMusic’s lack of DRM, as well as its low prices — it has now snagged the second-biggest one. (It’s a catalog deal: it includes only songs more than two years old.)

DRM is a thing of the past. But what’s more important about this deal is what it tells us about the majors: (1) that they hungrily pursue every source of revenue, including those they once ignored; (2) that they have devalued their catalog (a couple of months ago, remember, they cut the price of most older songs on iTunes by 30 percent); and (3) that they are still trying to reduce iTunes’ market share by giving favorable deals to other retailers.

So now you’ll be able to download Michael Jackson songs for less than anywhere else. Which is good! The catch, though, is that the deal now is not nearly as good as it used to be. Sony muscled a big price increase out of eMusic, which sprung it on its customers in a most confusing way. For example, my plan used to be 600 downloads a year (50 per month) at $143.90, or 24 cents per song. On Monday I was told that this would be changing to “the new eMusic Bi-Annual 210 plan, which gives you 210 downloads for $95.90 every 180 days.” What? Do the math and you’ll see that it means 420 downloads a year (35 per month) at $191.80, or 46 cents per song — almost double the price!

I’m not thrilled about this, and need to figure out whether I’ll renew. But I’m not the only one who feels this way. A friend of mine, let’s call him Peter W. — no, let’s say P. Waisnor — has been a longtime eMusic subscriber, and he wrote a heartfelt note about his disappointment. This is the kind of customer no business wants to lose. And eMusic, you just blew it:

As a subscriber for nine years, I have weathered my share of policy and pricing changes from eMusic, but I have always continued my membership. I have to say that this new change is a hard one to accept. The price increase is far more than I would have ever expected given (what I thought was) the underlying focus of eMusic, their catalog and their membership... I work in sales and marketing, so I understand how improvements can raise the price of a product, but I also know that if I raised the price of my product by almost 50% overnight that my customers would say unpleasant things to me before switching to one of my competitors.

Even if I continue my membership, I will now be forced to treat eMusic no differently than I treat iTunes or Amazon, and this — more than anything — is what’s incredibly sad to me. iTunes and Amazon are fine, but I think of them like I think of a grocery store or an appliance warehouse — impersonal, utilitarian, get in and get out, know what you need before you go in. I have always thought of eMusic like my local record store, or like a friend’s basement in high school where I would just sit and discover new music for hours...

I was disappointed when unlimited downloads went away (which was probably eight years ago or something), but I learned to love my subscription and my 90 downloads per month. I bought booster packs until I was told that I went over my limit for the month and would have to wait until the beginning of my next billing cycle. I set up a second account just to get more music. I even changed one account from a grandfathered 90 downloads to a connoisseur plan because it was cheaper than maintaining my booster pack habit.

I have been mainlining music through eMusic for nine amazing years and I am sad to see that relationship change. eMusic has outlasted relationships, jobs, cars, apartments, laptops, and countless hard drives of ever increasing size. I have not decided whether to keep my membership yet, but I won’t let the unfortunate changes affect all the great music I have downloaded and the time I have enjoyed on the site. I just feel betrayed by what I perceive as an enormous amount of greed, and a wildly inappropriate price increase.

UPDATE: I hadn’t known, but Peter — I mean P. — posted his comment to eMusic’s official announcement. He's comment No. 335 out of 549 (and counting).

Monster-about-to-chomp-babe poster of the day: ‘Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep’ (2006)