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See if you can tell the difference based on photos in this quiz. I got 8/10.

Neil Strauss rounds up the recent developments in the music download arena in today’s New York Times. He comes to the same conclusion I did: subscription-based services are preferable to a la carte services, and Rhapsody is the best currently available subscription service.

Bubblegeneration has a really good piece applying principal-agent principles to music consumption. The point (though stated slightly differently) is that music consumption suffers from an information problem. You can’t know if you’ll like the music until you have it, but if you can have it before you pay for it, you’ll never pay for it. (That’s moral hazard #1.) But since you don’t know if the music is any good until you buy it, you have to buy whatever the record companies put out. They act as your agent, going out and finding music you might like then selling it to you. But since you’ll buy whatever they come up with, they may as well shirk and put out mediocre music. (That’s moral hazard #2.)

The solutions proposed in the article focus on the traditional economic response to such uncertainties, which is to purchase insurance. But a better solution, though one with its own agency costs, is subscriptions. Rather than taking a risk on each album, I can pay a fixed fee for access to all albums. In fact, I do. The agency cost here is that the subscription service has a limited incentive to spend money on growing the pool of available albums. The only reason they’d do so is to win customers away from competing subscription services. Happily, now that there’s competition in the subscription market, both subscription services are likely to maintain large and growing catalogs.

So I’ve had a chance to check out the selection on Napster 2.0. If you purchase tracks a la carte, this is a great choice. If you prefer a monthly-fee-for-all-you-can-stream environment (as I do), Rhapsody is still the best choice by far. Some observations on selection:

• Most disappointingly, most of the Matador catalog on Napster is “purchase only”; you can stream it on Rhapsody.
• Recent releases seem to be burn-only on Napster, but are stream-only on Rhapsody. For example, the new Shins album can be streamed but not burned on Rhapsody, but can be burned but not streamed on Napster. This is silly.
• The classical selection is better on Rhapsody, though only because Rhapsody has the Naxos catalog.

Overall, Rhapsody’s streaming selection seems to be larger than Napster’s, but Napster’s burning selection seems to be larger than Rhapsody’s.

So, I tried out Napster 2.0, which is now open to those who pre-registered. The interface is very good. The selection is great. But it has a fatal flaw.

Songs stream as 96kbps Windows Media Audio. They sound OK, but only OK. Not good enough to listen to on a day-to-day basis. This is only three-quarters the bitrate of the streaming provided on Rhapsody (128kbps WMA), using the same codec. It sounds a little better than a 96kbps MP3 (since WMA is a better codec), but not much. The annoying compression artifacts you can hear in the stream make the bitrate the fatal flaw.

I want FLACs. At any lower quality, $1 a track is too much.

UPDATE: It looks like unlimited 128kbps WMA tethered downloads are available to “premium” subscribers. So, the end result is the same as Rhapsody, but there’s an extra step involved. I’ll try it out.

There have been a number of reports that Jack Valenti, chief lobbyist for the movie industry, is to step down from the post he has held since 1966. This New York Post article indicates that Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-LA) may replace him.

In 1982, during a hearing on possible legislative responses to the Betamax decision, Valenti uttered his most famous of many soundbites:

I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.

The film industry survived. It was not killed by the VCR. In fact, the new technology turned out to be a boon, once the studios figured out how to use it to their advantage. The studios now make more money from home video than they do from theatrical exhibition. The music industry needs to see digital distribution as an opportunity, not a threat. With luck, in twenty years, today’s overheated P2P rhetoric will look as silly as Valenti’s famous sound bite.

Minneapolis Mob #5 took place yesterday. It was part of Global Flash Mob #1 — flash mobs in cities around the world at 2:15 local time. Accordingly, the script went like this:

• Assemble on the appointed corner in Dinkytown. At the first blow of the whistle, face east and shout, “Thank you, Eastern cities! Now it is our turn to mob.”
• Fly like airplanes around the block, stopping at each corner to pick up “passengers,” yelling the name of a major city and “All Aboard!”
• When you reach the starting spot, face west and say, “Central time zone is now done! West, you’re it!”
• Dissolve.

The turnout was lackluster (probably about 25 people), mostly due, I think, to the cold. Parking was unusually difficult and expensive due to a nearby event, so that may have had something to do with it as well. However, in some respects, we were part of the largest flash mob yet — there were hundreds of mobbers in Sydney, and reports of thousands in Taiwan.

During the filming of The Passion of Christ, lightning struck the star once and an assistant director twice. Admittedly, the chances of being struck by lightning when standing on a hill and holding up a metal umbrella are higher than normal. But still … might there be some smiting going on here?

Incidentally, reading that article got me to look at the trailer for the movie. The only dialogue in it is Pilate’s “ecce homo” — pronounced “ET-chay OH-moe” in the trailer, which is modern Church Latin pronounciation, not the way Pilate would have pronounced it in the First Century. That is, if he didn’t say it Greek instead, since he was addressing non-Romans. Ah, well.

(Via Nick.)

I just received a spam advertising a site to help me “find a girl that wishes a discrete encounter.”

Why not bring some friends and study combinatorics?

Andrew O’Hagan writes about Eminem in the New York Review of Books.

I’m tempted to make pigs-flying, seventh-seal-opening, hell-freezing-over jokes. But it’s a really good article.

(More Eminem coverage here.)

UPDATE: Jon Mandle has these comments on the article over at Crooked Timber.

Kelefa Sanneh writes about The Shins’ “stealth celebrity” in today’s New York Times. The new album is out now, and it’s great.

Todd Rundgren has this Op-Ed today in The Hollywood Reporter. Ten years ago, Rundgren was telling the labels what they’re just starting to realize now: the future of music is computer distribution. (I have Wired issue 1.03 to prove it. Yes, I was reading Wired from issue 1.01. Yes, I was 12. Yes, that’s why I ended up like this.)

A choice bit:

The reason why the RIAA comes off as a gang of ignorant thugs is because, well, how do I put this — they are. I came into this business in an age of entrepreneurial integrity. The legends of the golden age of recorded music were still at the helm of most labels — the Ertegun’s, the Ostins, the Alperts and Mosses by the dozens. Now we have four monolithic (in every sense of the word) entities and a front organization that crows about the fact that they have solved their problems by leaning on a 12-year-old. Thank God that mystical fascination with the world of music has been stubbed out — hopefully everyone will get the message and get over the idea that the musician actually meant for you to hear this.

The RIAA protects musicians like the musicians union protects musicians: They reward hacks and penalize those outside the system. The labels are not making this stink out of principle. They are not interested in the rights of musicians who don’t sell any records for them. That myth was exploded when Warners dropped Van Morrison for “lackluster sales.”

This stink is about a bunch of dumb-asses blaming the public for doing what the labels could have — and should have — done 10 years ago. I know because I told them so, each and every one individually and relentlessly: Put the music on a server so you can deliver on-demand services to people’s homes. Seems so stupidly simple now.

Elliott Smith, a brilliant singer-songwriter, committed suicide yesterday. He was 34. This is a great loss to music. I’m sad.

Two memories.

First, the night I first heard his music. I was in high school. I was one of the arty kids. We hung around in Aquene’s basement and fingerpainted murals and listened to Either/Or, which had just come out. I was hooked.

Second, the first (and last) time I saw him live. It was last year, about this time. A rumor flew around one Friday afternoon — Chris told me that he was playing at 400 Bar. I was excited, but incredulous. He had apparently been in Minneapolis on personal business, been hanging around in the 400 Bar on Thursday, and decided to play a show in Sunday night as a benefit for the children’s charity he had recently founded. The story checked out. We were going to get to see Elliott Smith in a tiny little club two blocks from our apartment.

When we got there, half an hour before the doors opened, there was a line half a block long. But we got in. I went with Chris, Julian, and Aaron, who had been friends with Elliott’s little sister in grade school. A bad blues band opened. Elliott played. He was nervous and wrecked and reclusive and shy and amazing. I think that show got us through the rest of the semester.

I have just received the invitation to Minneapolis Mob #5 (more on flash mobs here). Click below to see the invitation.

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In this opinion, Macomb County, Michigan Circuit Court Judge Deborah A. Servitto granted Eminem’s motion for summary disposition of a suit arising from the lyrics to “Brain Damage,” track 4 on The Slim Shady LP. They describe a beating administered in junior high school by “this fat kid named D’Angelo Bailey.” Said fat kid filed suit, alleging defamation. He lost. But that’s not the amusing part.

The judge in the case penned the following “to convey the Court’s opinion to fans of rap.” It has a sort of old-school Grandmaster Flash feel to it. If Grandmaster Flash had (1) a law degree and (2) less talent. Anyway, here’s the text of Footnote 11 (sure to surpass Footnote Four from Carolene Products as the most famous and oft-cited footnote in a judicial opinion, no?):

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Leaked internal memos from Diebold, a maker of electronic voting machines, reveal a troubling disregard for certification requirements imposed by their customers. They show that in a number of cases over the past four years, Diebold machines running uncertified software have been used in real elections in the United States. Further, the audit trail for these machines — the tamper-evident records that allow for recounts and other ex post investigations — is easily modified. You just open it up in Microsoft Access and make whatever modifications you want.

The text of the memos can be found here. The book in which they were first published, Black Box Voting, can be found in PDF form here. If these links go down (as they probably will — Diebold has been sending out C&Ds by the score to any site who so much as links to the memos), links to additional mirrors can be found here.

This is very troubling.

I just purchased a Nokia 6610 from T-Mobile very cheaply through a customer-retention program in anticipation of the upcoming number-portability-induced Cingularity.

It makes my Motorola v60g look huge and klunky. How perverse.

I had planned to eBay the 6610 immediately upon arrival; the phone sells for $170 on eBay, and T-Mobile gave it to me for $35. But it’s so cool. It’s in color. The interface is good-looking and by far the best-designed I’ve ever encountered on a cell phone.

So I’m thinking about keeping it. And I’m ruing the day I learned what opportunity cost was.