Tasty Morsels

I've been really busy. So busy there has been little time to do any meaningful reasearch for posting. However, there are a couple of groovie links I've been enjoying alot over the last few days, so you should check 'em out, as they are good in the first degree. As I have just seen, a couple are duplicates from an earlier post, but they are worth mentioning again.

Bogrollben Ace flash actionscript site, with free flas, and great sound and design. Excellent.
5inch Fabulously inventive site for getting CD's with real original design presentation. Really top.
Cypheraudio I think these are the dudes that do 2advanced soundtracks, and also the Lost Humans site. Brilliant ambient cuts.
Lost Humans Great flash design and use, clever tech interface, really what we all want.
Cool Hunting This is the site I saw 5inch.com, it's full of fantastic stuf you can get. All sorts of shit. Very cool.
Dr Melvin Morse This site is FAR OUT. Very weird near death experiences from children. Crazy, really.

Quick Links for Weird Entertainment.....

I've been very busy inventing brilliant new websites for grateful customers, so that's why I haven't been able to post much lately. I'm also doing a bit more work on the BoSh book, which is getting a new home, as the old home at freewebs is proving rather small [seven pages max...what's that about?] Have a peak and tell me what you think....
Other new links to definately investigate with a curious attitude and open mind are:

The Lifeboat Foundation - an incredible site, fantastic graphic content and very sci fi whilst being for real.
Numberwatch/Grey Goo - A thought provoking article on the impossiblility of Grey Goo, the baddy nanobots. The rest of this site has a lot of other provocative content, including a contention that Global Warming isn't happening.
Plugnpray - a very apt site extoling the virtues of the new techy religious world we live in...click to immediately laugh out loud.
The fat kid blog - this should be checked often, and makes a nice blog pair with the excellent :
Veiled4Allah - a very informative techy blog, believe it or not, made by a super mod muslim woman of brains. Good jokes too.

Death of a Salesman

Yes I've been watching and cheering as the death knell of the music industry draws nearer, and now this little bit of news confirming what Ive been seeing for the last two years in the States and UK, the death of the Record Store. High Street record stores have never made huge profits, operating at the margins of making money, they would often offset profit from a bigger seller by stocking more obscure or rare stuff to add to the kudos of their store, and help the choice of the customer. Nowadays the chances of being able to do that are next to zero. Since the beginning of the new year, I have heard of 2 stores, one in Michigan, the other in Mass, are going to close by summer. Over a longer period [the past year], I know of at least ten stores that have closed or are in the process of closing, all across America. I have witnessed the killing/mutating of the cd warehouse franchise by filing chapter 11, and the blame put on everything from 9/11 to mp3 downloading. My own job dried up as a result of the ongoing changes in the USA music retail business. The article below, from the Washington Post, checks Newbury Comics, a well known and successful music and comic outlet with several stores, as well as Manifest, another small independent music chain, tell it like everyone has known for a while now. No more independent music stores. Wal-Mart and Best Buy have been allowed to kill the little stores outright, with no thought for the little guys. No mercy in the land of the free eh? They can blame who they like, but by doing this, all they will achieve is a shrinking industry, with shrinking demographic and shrinking interest. Another one bites the dust?

Death of the Music Retail Store

Exert:
Requiem for the Record Store
Sat Feb 7,10:08 AM ET Add Technology - washingtonpost.com to My Yahoo!


By David Segal, Washington Post Staff Writer

With a total stock of more than 85,000 albums, Manifest Discs & Tapes was a music lover's mecca in the North and South Carolina towns where it operated. And despite an industry-wide downturn in CD sales in recent years, all five Manifest stores were turning a decent profit right up until the end of 2003.


So there was shock all around when chain owner Carl Singmaster announced in late December that Manifest would close all locations and lay off all 100 of its employees. There were still plenty of consumers eager to browse the bins, Singmaster explained, but his company's prospects looked bleak and were getting bleaker.........more

Flash Sites - Pro's and Con's

[ Refresh the page to see this flash intro again, or get the free .fla here ]

I'm pleased to announce I will not starve to death as I have found some new clients! Always good, but as anyone who builds sites for people will know, always new problems and decisions to make. When I'm talking to a new client, I'm always aware that it's usually my responsibility to educate them a bit as to what may be best for them in a website. It's not only a matter of price, content or taste, but a mixture of all three. For the arty client, nothing seems to beat flash sites. They like the animation, the flow, the custom imagery and the nice fonts! Of course it has to be said that flash isn't really very good with search engines, but you can always stick your keywords on your index page, and use a pop up for the flash, allowing for other stuff on your 'mother' page.

As I've been doing a bit of surfing recently, here's a few new finds on the flash site front, with different approaches to design and layout:

Romiglia.com - MX Essential Components
BogrollBen - blogging with flash, an open source flash resource site
Lost Humans 2004 - Flash design site with good examples of corporate design. Also, check out Lost Humans 2003 - the old site link, it's really worth a look.
Der Bauer - state of the art flash design, for those who arn't familiar with derbauer
Half Project - Busy and versatile ideas, utilizing flash and still images to great effect
Jaques Tati's site - fantastic flash graphics and europhile design
DB-DB - the incredible dbdb 'design together' flash site, with lots of free stuf and good ideas

And MP3/P2P Again

Heres some more from the Midem music fair in Cannes about mp3 and p2p technology. It's actually a very interesting article about different models being put forward to try and embrace the p2p system. I don't think it will ever work though, as the premise seems to be to bribe the user off with commission fees for recommending other people to the track. We all know that won't work really. Labels like Beggars's Banquet appear to be involved, so maybe it could turn out ok, if they think about it enough. It looks like some more interesting people have started going to Midem, so good luck to them. I don't think any of them know what they are doing though, otherwise they would have thought about this a lot sooner.

Internet Companies Legitimize File Sharing

Then I find this. Some poor sod getting caught because he was too clever for his own good, hacking into the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago to store a load of mp3 and dvd rips etc. The company does nuclear research amongst other things, and has huge systems, so the rogue files remained hidden, at least for a while.And while the record companies in the above article whine on about how to charge people for single downloads, eighteen year old's can store huge amounts of data, hidden, in nuclear company databanks. I bet they're planning career moves, those middleman music types, cos if they arn't, they should be.

UK Teenager Sentenced for Hacking U.S. Research Lab

Truth or Dare - the Lies of the Record Industry

You know what really gets me? It's the continuous bilge peddled by the record industry that mp3 downloads account for the current slump in record sales. It sounds plausable doesn't it? Until you realise people have been 'taping' music for twenty years, but the statistics weren't available to manipulate then. Not like now. Apparently 800 million downloads of music tracks were done last year, equating to what, exactly? Does the music business seriously believe themselves when they say that they lost 800 million extra sales? It's ridiculous. I went down my local high street at the weekend, where now, sadly, only one music retail store is left. Even more sadly it's an HMV store. Yuck. Well, there were quite a few kids in there, and you could just make out some music was playing inside. That was it. You'd like to think music was still alive and kicking, but there used to be at least three other independent stores, all packed, all busy. The sad truth is, as the characterful indy stores have been edged out, only the most coventional kids are still into music. Everyone else has moved on. The chart kids, usually under sixteen, still buy the top ten, and everyone else has been left 'out in the cold'.
My partner recenty aquired a nice mp3 player. Now he doesnt like chart music, being in his early forties, so he had to record some of his beloved Led Zeppelin albums, convert the wave format into mp3, and then input to his new toy. Is he now a criminal? Or should he really be confining his listening to the new Atomic Bollocks cd? This should be of serious consideration to the music industry. The Led Zep did sound ace, though. I am now in the process of converting my new Magnet discs to mp3, so I've got some tracks to listen to aswell.
The link to the news article below is hysterical, as it seems to imply we'll all be really glad when the music industry saves its lost sales, and we can all return to paying top dollar for average product. They really have lost it........

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Digital music revolution changing the tune
Sun Feb 1, 4:46 PM ET Add Technology - AFP to My Yahoo!



CANNES, France (AFP) - 2004 will be the year of a new generation of mobile jukeboxes and telephones that will revolutionise how the world listens to music.

If the latest technological breakthroughs showcased at the MIDEM international music fair over the past week fulfill their potential, people worldwide will soon be tuning into their favourite songs and compiling albums via their cellphones and video-game consoles, or downloading music onto mobile jukeboxes.

A host of new digital music devices and services will be launched on the market this year. But there are still snags on the horizon. Europe's copyright red tape notably is slowing the flow of music tracks onto the new digital services, and not all new gadgets are compatible with each other.

The MIDEM fair saw movers and shakers in the music industry get down to serious talk with the giants of the cellphone, telephone service providers, Internet and electronic worlds about how they can make the new technology work for them as well as for music lovers.

MIDEM, the international music industry's most influential annual gathering in this Mediterranean resort town, was the venue for this first major get together between the music and hi-tech worlds. There was also a sense of urgency that industries need to move more quickly as technology as well as consumers' tastes can change rapidly.

On the piracy front, the music industry recognised it was too slow in reacting to the onslaught of illegal music Internet downloads. These fell to 800 million at the end of 2003 but were still the main reason for last year's 10 percent slump in album sales worldwide.

Luckily for the record business and musicians, the tide is starting to turn, mostly thanks to the runaway success of the first paying online music stores and digital jukeboxes. more.....

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