I’m ****ing Up The Music Industry. Music Label Executives Can’t Sleep At Night Because of Me.
Hello. I'm 23 and I really like music. I listen to a lot of music.
And, I'm ****ing up the music industry.
Music label executives are popping Ambiens at night because of me. Their relationship with their spouse and children is strained because of me. The water in their traditional distribution pipes is drying up fast because of me.
Why?
I haven't bought a CD in over 1.5 years.
I've only purchased a handful of albums and singles off iTunes over the years and only because family and friends gifted me iTunes gift cards.
I stream and download pre-release material on music blogs and than never pay money for the material when it is released.
And, you know what's going to give music label executives an even bigger headache?
I'm losing passion and zest for the digital download.
More than ever, I actually prefer streaming my music online than "owning" a track in digital form on my hard drive.
Why are music label execs getting hemorrhoids right now?
Because if one of their platinum-selling artists is dropping an album this month they sure as hell better figure out a way to make money while streaming full-length songs on the platinum-selling artists' Imeem page because I won't be driving to record store to buy the CD and I won't be buying the album on iTunes.
See my video question for readers in the comments.
Three Reasons Your Friends Aren’t on FriendFeed and You’re Stuck Following Louis Gray
Three reasons why your friends aren't on FriendFeed:
1. FriendFeed is just one more service for your friends to signup and remember a password and username. No one likes one more password and username to remember.
2. Your friends like to use social services that all their other friends use, not just people like Louis Gray, Fred Wilson and Sacca.
They don't want to go through the hassle of Reason #1 until 25, 50 or 75 of their friends also use the site.
For instance, all of your friends use email and YouTube. Almost all of your friends use MySpace and/or Facebook. Most of your friends use a chat client. After that the use of social services amongst friends drops off considerably to sites like Flickr and Blogger. And, after that it drops off even more to a few friends on Twitter, del.icio.us and Digg. None of your friends use FriendFeed.
3. FriendFeed doesn't provide a solution to your friends' problem.
If they use only a few, or none, of the services that feed into FriendFeed than they might not have a social fragmentation problem. It's easy to check Facebook, Flickr and your email and call it a day.
It starts turning into a time-consuming problem when you regularly use like 8 or more social sites (which I'm guilty of). So, as more and more cool social sites like Twitter start popping up I'm sure more of my friends will run into this fragmentation problem.
Fragmentation problem, you ask? For instance, instead of sending your friends hopping around the web leaving comments on A) your blog, B) your newest Flickr photo and C) your YouTube channel you can do D) All of the above by sending them to your FriendFeed page.
You can find me on FriendFeed here.
What's FriendFeed? Here's how they describe their service:
FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.
Update: Find more discussion of this post on Louis Gray's FriendFeed here.
Mint Makes My Personal Budgeting Hands Free, Happy
I'm a personal budget nerd.
I regularly check my online Bank of America account, keep Excel spreadsheets tracking all kinds of various things and use personal budget software to track and record all my receipts, payments and expenses.
Pre-September 2007 I used Quicken as my go-to personal budget software. Using Quicken was painful and tedious but I did it.
During mid-September 2007, Mint launched at TC40 (which I attended since I was as a TC intern at the time) and I immediately signed up for an account after seeing their demo.
What's Mint? In a nutshell, it's an online money management service that lets you plugin your bank accounts, credits cards and investment accounts and than automatically tracks, categorizes and trends your spending.
Above: Screenshot grabbed from Crunchbase's Mint profile.
The great thing about Mint is that its almost completely hands-free outside of minimal re-categorizing of expenses like changing an item from the "Grocery" category to the "Restaurant" category.
I also have my Mint account set-up to send me weekly spending reports via email. And, if Mint finds any weird banks fees or low balances they'll send me an email, too.
If you hate spending time and effort on your personal budget, or if you don't have a personal budget (yet) but would like to start one, you should definitely give Mint a holler.
Inevitable privacy and security concerns can be answered here.
Oh yeah, see my video question for readers in the comments.
I Just Googled “Landline Reasons To Have”
Me and everyone I know has a cell phone. I don't have a landline in my apartment. This afternoon I was pondering the reasons why someone might want a landline in their home.
In the workplace I understand. But, for the home I'm had a hard time coming up with reasons.
So, I turned to Google and entered "landline reasons to have".
The most obvious reason that Google spit back at me was something to the effect of 9-1-1 and kids. Most small children don't have cell phones, so if an emergency were to happen in the home its a good idea to have a landline around for them to dial 9-1-1.
Outside of 9-1-1 and kids can you give me a good reason for having a landline in the home? Do you have a landline under your roof?
See my video question in the comments?
Update: Here are some more reasons why landlines are still useful: Uptime during power outages, don't need daily battery re-charging and they provide your location to emergency services faster on average (This is more an issue with emergency dispatcher technology).
