There is no formula

I recently watched the documentary Before the Music Dies. The documentary had many insightful comments about the record industry. In particular it focused on how the quarter-by-quarter profit mongering corporations sucked the life from music by caring only about the bottom-line.

With companies like clear channel focusing more on playing music that the masses "won't dislike rather than music the masses might like", music has become stagnate, at least popular music. But welcome the internet and music post-Napster.

Musicians now can produce a high quality album with only a few thousand dollars. They can market their music on myspace and youtube, spread their fame through Facebook, and reap profits on iTunes. This method works well for smaller artists whose music cannot be found on torrents for the most part. And even for the big names whose music is spread across the torrent cloud, they make reasonable profits from legitimate sales on iTunes or rhapsody or amazon.

I'm curious if record labels have decided to raise concert ticket prices to make up for the income they have lost from selling multi-platinum records. It would make sense to try although it might just annoy consumers who will relive their live experiences on youtube.

This documentary shed some light on what's broken with the music industry, or rather what has changed. Record labels can no longer force consumers to listen to what they deem is cool in order to sell more pepsi products. There now exists a meritocracy within music where only the most talented, or by today's terms, most viral musicians survive, e.g., 'Chocolate Rain'. But 'Chocolate Rain' is crap as is most viral music which is why we still need record labels to help consumers filter. But I argue that this is all a record label should do. Filter for talented artists and potentially great music and provide for them a nurturing environment rather than exploiting musicians for the sake of selling an ad.

On the other end, musicians need to write music that matters to them, that they connect with and not worry about catering to the masses in the hopes of making it rich. If by writing for themselves, they are able to connect with 1 or 1 million other persons then they have achieved their goal. Music comes form their heart, as in many of life's passions. You can not calculate it. There is no formula.

LaTeX + Evernote = better math notes

Evernote is a great way to push your notes to the cloud. And the content you create is indexed for later searching. LaTeX is the standard document markup language used in scientific research papers, or any other document that requires some math. However taking notes in LaTeX is not really feasible since it is not very easy to type documents on the fly. Even editors that provide buttons to insert symbols are hard to use and slow down note taking speed. The ideal solution is to simply be able to write notes like with a tablet. However the notes you take should use some sort of recognition to convert the notes into LaTex. From there, the documents should be uploaded to evernote and indexed.

Hulu + Tokbox

I thought of the idea of being able to watch Hulu and tokbox at the same time. The key idea is that both people can control the video just like you already can with youtube. I'm not sure how to do this though. A simple idea is that at the least a web application can be created where hulu videos are embedded and tokbox parties are also embedded. That's the simplest mashup I can think of. But both people will have to start their video separately.

The way I think tokbox is able to synchronize youtube watching is that they buffer it on a separate server first. This is based on the different control one sees/uses when watching within a Tokbox party. So perhaps a more functional solution would be to have a server that routes the traffic to those in the party. Still not sure how to handle the video routing.

iPhone Developer Tips

Out of curiosity and the desire to expand my resume, I am trying to develop an iphone application. After watching some tutorial videos, I was able to open dashboard and run a simple application with a basic pane. Before getting knee deep in objective-c code I've decided to take a lesson from my past experiences of learning new programming languages. Rather than simply going straight at the code, I want to learn all the quirks of the language first. I have found iphone developer tips. Hopefully after reading a few of these tips, developing an application will be less difficult. My first application, a simple web app based control system for my ECE135 project.