I think the biggest lesson of 2012 is that the people are much better connected now than they ever have been. That means that bold manipulative lies don't work, because they can be exposed, quickly, by networks of people that voters trust. In the past, politics was totally centralized. Like everything else, it is not centralized anymore. We have fact-checkers, we can listen to them, and now apparently enough people do that we can enforce a certain discipline on our candidates.
Would we even know about Romney's 47% comments if Twitter, YouTube and Facebook weren't as prevalent as they are today? It's a new world. And the people who hate it are going to come gunning for it, hard.
People love to gripe about how there's just too much stuff going on all the time. Too much tweeting, too much music, too many choices. There's too much noise. So how is it that I haven't heard a single song by Mumford & Sons or watched a single episode of Modern Family or The Big Bang Theory? It's never been easier to ignore things than now. Thank God.
I'm not sure why Apple would want to get into the streaming music game. It's expensive, and it would pretty much obliterate a chunk of their download business, so I hope they've done the math.
Lot of musician-types I know personally are hoping that Apple will offer to pay more in royalties than Spotify, Rdio and other competitors. It could happen, and it wouldn't be the first time Apple has offered more favorable terms to "content creators" in order to put the screws to their competition.
I don't think they'd have to, though. I suspect a streaming iTunes would be an instant success, so why pay a bigger bill if you don't have to? Guess we'll see.
We've put all of Explone's Telescope & Satellite EP up as a YouTube playlist, so feel free to check it out with no obligation. Although we'll be more than happy to take your money! iTunes and Amazon are hot these days, so I hear. Our CD release show at the Sunset Tavern here in Seattle was pretty fantastic and I wish we'd gotten a recording off the board.
Meanwhile, Kirby Krackle is going into album-writing mode for the remainder of the year, and Kin to Stars is spinning back up after having most of September off. We're trying to finish off a new Bandcamp single while gearing up for a special live show in December. More on that soon.
They're saying the sad-rains are returning to Seattle this weekend, bringing to an end one of the driest, precipitation-free summers we've seen in a long time. I'm personally looking forward to some serious cozy-pants videogame time this season.
It's been fun but I'm itching to move to something with finer-grained control over jump cuts. iMovie's 0.1s minimum clip size is actually way short. Who'd have thought I'd be considering an upgrade to Final Cut before Logic Express?
