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I was too young and uncool to attend the first three groundbreaking years of the Lollapalooza tour, but I went to a couple, the last of which being the excellent 1995 tour. It is tough to beat main stage with Sonic Youth, Pavement, Beck and the Jesus Lizard (it may have been David Yow’s first exposure to sunlight and the out-of-doors). Plus I got to hang around the second stage enough to see my first Yo La Tengo performance ever, catch an acoustic second set by Beck, and have Coolio assault me with a water pistol. It is a pleasant nine-year-old memory. By the next year the show was being headlined by the strangely-classified-as-altrock Metallica, which prevented me from making it and seeing a set by the legendary Capsize 7.

Like I said, nice memories. But I never figured I would go back, because I don’t like big outdoor concerts and was getting older and the lineups were getting more conventional. So it was nice that 1995 was the last really cool year. Until 2004, that is.

Apparently this year’s show features the headliner from 1995 and Aaron’s favorite live band, the one and only Sonic Youth. It also includes PJ Harvey, who is an amazing performer, particularly when she doesn’t outsource the guitar-playing duties. I have always admired the music of the Flaming Lips and the Polyphonic Spree, and they are both supposed to have fabulous and inventive shows. And back-from-the-dead Modest Mouse is one of my favorite bands, although I tend to be moderately underwhelmed by their performances. (But the first few listens indicates that their new record is great.) It would be the tour of the summer if the Pixies weren’t getting back together. And that is probably enough to get me to spend too much money to stand in the heat around lots of teenagers.

I don’t know why I like writing about the music industry so much. I wanted to write a quick response to Marisa’s post, but my response got long so I figured I would post it here and trackback to Marisa, but she doesn’t seem to support trackback, so I guess I’ll just post it here.

I think that Marisa is correct to phrase the question in terms of purchasing habits. Online music may not dissuade her from buying CDs when that is already her habit. She are not the problem. I think the greater concern of the music companies relates to young people who from an early age may have a lot of internet access and not a lot of money to spend on CDs. Many of them have gotten in the habit of simply downloading music and have never bought a CD in their life. In my opinion, that is what the labels are worried about, this idea that music will become something people no longer expect to pay for. And for some reasons, CD sales have been down dramatically over the past few years. Maybe this is because the CDs aren’t very good, but that has never stopped people from buying music in the past. Maybe it is because people are spending times watching DVDs and playing videogames, instead of listening to music. But those trends have been happening for years, and it is unlikely that they would contribute to such a precipitous decline in sales. It is hard to ignore the strong correlation of declining CD sales and the rise of internet music. (In fact, I was in a record store in Durham recently that decided to stop carrying Rock, Pop and Hip-Hop CDs, because they only customers that were reliably buying music any more were the older Jazz and Classical consumers.)

The interesting thing is that over the years labels have been much more interested in letting users sample music online, whether that is in the form of letting them download selected tracks, stream an entire album, or listen to 30-second samples on iTunes. Of course, these are all types of sampling that they can control enough to make sure it is not a substitute for the album. But given that the industry was afraid of anything digital a few years ago; it does represent progress.

Yes, the draconian restrictions on internet radio were a poor idea. This probably represented the intense fear of labels that internet radio stations would be a backdoor for piracy (like tuning into a station that constantly plays ‘Dark Side of the Moon’), as well as record companies need not to undermine the traditional radio they know how to control. This, or course, indicates that the political clout belongs to the major labels selling Backstreet Boys CDs, but that is hardly surprising.

The sampling argument is actually an interesting one. A frequent claim that you hear is that “File sharing is good, because I can sample an entire album and only buy it if I really know I am going to like it, so I don’t end up with a shelf full of CDs that I never listen to”. While this seems logical, it has some interesting economic implications. Suppose that in the pre-Napster days people would buy a CD based on a strong single or review in Spin, and only really love a third of the CDs they acquired. Today they can use sampling to focus in on those good CDs. Even though the consumer will be just as happy, they will spend two-thirds less on CDs, and the record companies costs will only decline by a marginal amount. Record companies are already merging and cutting jobs to control their losses over declining sales, so they could not ignore this continued change in behavior. One could imagine a few possible responses.

• They can increase the prices of CDs to compensate for the decline in sales. This is probably the most logical option. Consumers once has partial knowledge of the contents of a CD, and record companies were forced to decrease their price to compensate for this information asymmetry. (For example, if I spent $15 on a CD that I had a one-in-three chance of liking, then I should be willing to spend $45 on a CD that I already know I love.) But this would undermine the incentive of consumers to buy CDs after sampling them online, as well as drive away consumers who do not engage in file-trading. So it is probably impractical.

• They could invest in far fewer new artists, recognizing that in order to recoup their investment they will need the number of people who love a CD today to equal the number who had passing interest in it ten years ago. This seems logical but undesirable, as the ability to sample music results in there being less music to choose form.
• They could get McSweeny’s to lay out the liner notes, which would be so cool that people wouldn’t mind buying CDs they don’t like. This would be really cool, but somehow I can’t see Universal music putting their fate in the hands of a man named Eggers.

None of these seem very palatable. Maybe the ability to sample will lead people to buy the same number of CDs and just pick better ones, but that doesn’t really alleviate the situation. First of all, people aren’t going to have more time to listen to music, so it seems unlikely that they will need that much. Secondly, in order to compete for such selective consumers, record companies will still need to provide a wider selection of material, which is expensive to produce. (As much as I would love to believe that the world will learn to share my taste for amateurish bands recording of 4-tracks, that seems unlikely.)

The record companies are certainly reacting to music downloading out of fear, which is not unusual when an industry is threatened by technological change. However, this may be more rational than it seems, because in this case the threat of the technology is not to radically improve the industry, but rather to destroy it.

I upgraded to Office 2003 yesterday, which is covered by the University’s site license, so it only costs me $25. I am quite pleased; it is definitely worth that price, but maybe not the $270 Amazon charges. Interesting features include:

• A fascinating revamp to Outlook’s mail-reading interface. By using three parallel vertical panes to let you navigate email messages, Microsoft makes it much easier to scan a number of messages and actually read the one that is selected. In doing so they have abandoned the traditional one-row/many-column table used for navigating amongst messages. Changing the conventions of a UI is always hard, and I hated this approach for about half an hour, but now I think it is fantastic. I also predict that it will be much imitated in no time. (I should say that Outlook is not generally my mail client of choice, but we have to use an Exchange server at school, so it is what I use.)
• Also, using Outlook/Exchange is much less sluggish, particularly over a VPN. (I think they decided to cache everything possible.) This is more of a correction to a past problem than an innovative new feature, but I am still thankful for it.
  Word added a feature I have wanted for years. When you open a word document to read it, it gives you a view like Adobe Acrobat (no insertion point, easy to navigate around, etc.), as opposed to making you try to read a document in an editing mode. That might make me less likely to resent people who put Word documents on websites.

• I haven’t played with Excel and PowerPoint much, but they look to be pretty much the same. In fact, excluding the shading on the buttons, little that is fundamental about the apps has changed. Which is good for Office users who are used to their applications, or open-source projects that are trying to catch up with Office.

Updated:
Paul wanted a clearer picture of the three-paned view, so rather than try to explain it I’ll just attach a screenshot:
As you can see, instead of folders on the left, a message list on the top and message body on the bottom, they have all three next to each other in vertical panes. In my opinion, this is a flat-out better design choice. First of all, it is more logical; as you read left to right you go from a list of folders to a list of messages to a message body. Secondly, both message lists and message bodies benefit from being tall rather than wide. It lets you scroll through the messages more easily, it gives the message body the same general proportions as a paper document, and it causes you to be able to read more text because you have more lines to give up to carriage returns. The major disadvantage is that you get less information about messages displayed in the list, but I have found that manageable. It is also irritating that the message body no longer displays recipient information at the top of it, although that is a decision that is independent of this design.

While I am on the subject, I should mention two other niceties. This Outlook has a pleasant view mode that is driven by a conversation, so it is easy to refer back to related old emails. Also, you will note on the screenshot that some messages have a red flag next to them. All you have to do is click on that flag, and the message will show up in your list of follow-up messages to be written. Older outlooks had a feature like that, but it was much harder to access.

While on the topic of mail clients, I should mention that Opera’s M2 is a cool program. It is much more of a revolutionary shift in how one interacts with email, and I think it is probably a precursor to what GMail will look like. I didn’t like it enough to change my habits, but it certainly made me think about how email could be improved.

Update 2:
The good news is that I figured out how to make the header information I wanted show up in the email browsing pane. The bad news is that I did it my inadvertently right-clicking on the small gray border around the message.

Also, after looking at the new Outlook more, I think that its ‘Search Folders’ could be used a lot like M2, where you never file away old email, you just make it easy to search. However it would be a much nicer solution if system administrators were less stingy with their mailbox quotas. Fifty megabytes? Amazon is offering me 80 GB for $95, and at that price the school is investing a whopping 4.2 cents in my mailbox. I wonder if I could go to IT with a quarter, get my mailbox quadrupled and get some change. And most ISP’s I have had are just as bad.

This is feeling familiar. Watching an amazing film, where the director blends a wide range of literary and cinematic sources into something unique and powerful. Having to wait for the release of the sequel which is supped to be even better. Immersing yourself in the cliffhanging drama, even though the end of the story is preordained. Hearing tell of an animated prequel, either archaic or forthcoming. Kill Bill is a miniature Lord Of The Rings.

A combination of school, vacation and illness has kept me from writing for a while. That hasn’t kept the readership here from growing considerably (as measured by people who mention it to me); we may hit the double-digits soon.

I have always liked the idea of an RSS reader. These things are supposed to go to websites you frequent and pull down new stories, making it easier for you to thumb through and find ones you care about and haven’t read. In other words, you spend less time clicking on random websites looking for new stories, because you know where you are going to go and what is going to be there. Kind of like TV Guide for the web.

However, I have never regularly used an RSS reader. Every times I tried one I seemed to dislike the experience. The readers tended to have many features that caused irritating animated things to appear on my screen at inopportune times, but they still did not make it easy to quickly browse the sites I was interested in. Also, at one point few sites were equipped to be read by these kinds of readers. So I never used them for long. (NetNewsWire on the Mac looked like a nice alternative, but that was just one in a long list of reasons to justify buying a TiBook.)

A couple of days ago I decided to revisit the world of RSS readers. I finally found one that (when properly configured) does what I want it to do well, and little else. I have settled on SharpReader, which is a solid product if not a stellar one. The trick is to fix the program’s bad default settings. You can do this by highlighting ‘Subscribed Feeds’ on the top of the left pane, and adjusting the settings on the bottom of that pane. I recommend setting AlertNewItems to ‘No’ so nothing obtrusive pops up on your desktop, setting AutoOpenLinks to ‘Always’ so you won’t waste time reading excerpts of articles, and choosing a low RefreshRate so you always no when new news is coming in.

I then decided to find RSS feeds for every site I frequent on the internet. Most weblogs come with them (for this one it is behind the ‘Syndicate This Site’ link), so they were easy to cover. A number of news organizations provide them too, and there are unofficial ones for many of those that don’t. The best site I can find for locating these is Bloglines. When my list of feeds stabilizes I will post it. Each site is placed into a group involving how regularly I want to read it. Some I want to make sure to read every article on. Some I want to scan all the headlines but only read selected articles. Some I want to glance at, but I don’t mind at all if I miss an article. Then I can cover all the websites I would have surfed just by clicking on each group and scanning the new headlines. It lets me cover a lot more of the web in far less time.

SharpReader supports these curious new Atom feeds that show up on some websites. Instead of giving you a headline which helps you to navigate to a site, they give you all the information so you never have to visit the site. This gives you the option of setting SharpReader not to visit the site, and doing all of your reading without whatever color or graphics of other adornments personalize the site you are reading from. This is interesting, and there are definitely some sites for which I could do without much of their clutter. However, these inevitably never have Atom feeds.

There are definitely a few annoyances. The tool is based on the IE engine, and while it blocks popups, there are all sorts of other IE-specific types of advertising that I am used to living without which show up in it. Some of the feeds fail to work some of the time. SharpReader fails to refresh web pages when it needs to.

But the biggest annoyance is that it works too well. There is no surprise in going to a website when you know whether there will be something new there. And I surf the web to procrastinate and kill time, so making it too efficient is counterproductive. I am now following ten times as many websites as I used to, and it only takes me a few minutes to see if anything new is worth reading. Still, I won’t give it up. In fact, now the prospect of checking websites one at a time seems positively primitive. I’ll just have to find another way to procrastinate. Maybe less than a month will go by between site update spurts. I have a number of things to write about, including new movies by the Coen Brothers and Charlie Kaufman, digital music and the new David Byrne CD my vacation and a piece on drug prices I have been thinking about for six months.