Rate This, Quantify That: Last.Fm and Cyclocomputers

Some of you may be familiar with Last.Fm, the music tracking portal that keeps a record of your musical tastes and recommends you new music. It also offers a downloadable program that plugs into your iTunes and allows you to see, in detail, the breakdown of your music listening habits. This data can be shared, so your friends can know what you have been listening to as of late. Tracking listening habits? Sharing data? I realize that this has all the making of a follow-up article to this post critiquing iTunes, but it is not. This one has to do with quantifying experience, and how that quantification is commonly seen as an end rather then a means.

I used Last.Fm regularly until this summer, generating just short of two years’ worth of data. The top thirty or so of my most reguarly-played artists are in the following chart. If I never told you before that I liked David Bowie, well, now you know.

(click to enlarge)

Everything I played on my iTunes and iPod was tracked, which I thought was going to be exciting, until I realized that tracking what I listened to became more important than actually listening to it. I had some music on both my G4 and my Quicksilver G4, yet I rarely ever used those machines as jukeboxes because they were not online. If the music I listened to wasn’t recorded (pardon the pun) somehow, I effectively perceived it as having never been listened to. What mattered was what was in the dataset. This is significant because we as a society tend to worship data.

Excessive quantification, meaning the quantification of things that cannot or should not be quantified, is a sign of over-reliance on technology. What Last.Fm did for me was not just keep track of what I listened to, but rather provided a way for me to, quantifiably, show that I loved certain artists more than others. That I like Joe Satriani’s music more than Steve Vai’s is obvious, not just because I have eight of Satch’s CDs to Vai’s three, but because Vai is trailing Satch by 288 “points.”

The thing is, I don’t need a computer to tell me that I listen to more Satch than Vai. I already know! I was the one listening! Moreover, the computer can be misleading by showing that I “like” Yngwie Malmsteen more than I do Jason Becker, which is undeniably false. Malmsteen only has more “points” because I’ve been listening to the four CDs (pared down from like eight or nine) I have of his since right out of high school. I bought Becker’s Perpetual Burn a year-and-a-half ago, and it’s brilliant. (The same can be said of my enjoyment of Jean-Michel Jarre, whose 125 plays all came from the only album of his I have; Oxygène.)

But I am straying from my main point, which is that data is something to be used. I recently started budgeting. I have a spreadsheet with a bunch of numbers on it that tells me how much money I have spent and how much I have saved and how much I will likely use next month. To keep a budget simply because you enjoy entering and manipulating numbers would be a strange hobby indeed. I collect data for something else, not just for the sake of collecting it.

One of my hobbies, cycling, is rife with the quantification of performance. Maximum output, generated wattage, drag coefficient, gear ratio, cadence, distance travelled: these are all data points that help a cyclist measure how well his or her body is performing. So many recreational cyclists get all caught up in measuring this stuff, but for what? For whom is this data important? For professionals, who need to get the most out of their body and bike. As a recreational cyclist, I ask myself, Is this important? Does distance matter if I enjoy my ride? If I am miserable, yet in my moments of extreme discomfort happen to generate the most power, will that be good for my psyche? What really matters? What matters is that I get exercise and have fun at the same time - otherwise I risk ending up like this guy.

PUSH PULL from Landis Fields on Vimeo.

The omnipotency of data is so prevalent is our society that we seldom question it. After all, data and information make things efficient, and who doesn’t want to be efficient? That depends on who you ask. Ask Socrates, and you’ll hear that efficiency is a problem for the common man, for the peasants and slaves. Trimming things down so that they require less thought is not a pursuit for the philosopher. Ask a man riding the Giro d’Italia, and he’ll tell you that it is everything.

Pro cyclists aside, we must ask, Does efficiency make us more human? Does reducing performance to numbers, eliminating uncertainty, and quantifying experience lead to more caring, sensitive human beings? Does the ability to direct your friends inquiry to a Last.fm list make for more conversation, or less.

And what’s result in comparing music lists? Do we not start to judge who is the “better” music fan, or who is the most avid listener of a preferred band? Are we more content afterwards, or less? Quantification leads to comparison, and comparison breeds resentment. After all, machines are made equal. Humans are not.

I want to listen to music to hear Klaus Schulze’s (at #2) brilliance, and I want to cycle because the wind feels good as it rushes by. I want to bask in custom synth textures and make wild guesses at my speed as I go downhill. What I don’t need, or want, is a sheet to keep track of playcounts or a fancy-schmancy cyclocomputer. Humanity, I feel, is better off without them.

_DZ

#21

(click for larger image)

_DZ

Shaping How We Listen to Control What We Buy

MP3s are nothing new in 2009. In fact, they’re boring. Most of us have probably been using them since middle school, ripping CDs to our computers and creating a digital music collection that allowed us to listen to our music anywhere, any time, and in any order. We smiled with joy as we looked over our iTunes libraries; no more weighty CD collections to lug around and have stolen!

But what if we missed something? What if we overlooked the peculiarity of being able to listen to multiple tracks by multiple artists out of sequence from their original album format? Maybe we lost something when we all went digital.

Of course, mixing songs into a playlist is not new. Radio stations have been doing it for close to a century, DJs have been creating personal mixtapes for some decades now, and compilation albums have been sold by the millions. All of these examples, however, work under some sort of restriction - radio has but a small sample of radio singles to choose from, and compilation CDs and mixtapes, at least good ones, were arranged and mastered to make a pleasurable holistic listening experience. The tracks were mixed and matched, yes, but usually by a professional with a greater theme in mind.


The mass marketing of CD burners brought to us the ability to create a personal mixtape, and we as a society entered a transitional period where we still conscious of our partaking in the deconstruction on the musical “album,” but, excited by the newfound ability to share custom mixes with friends, staved off thinking about potential consequences.

We often think that new technology can only bring good things, when in fact the introduction of any new technology results in a dynamic give-and-take process. As author Neil Postman writes in his book Technopoly,

“Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological...One significant change generates total change. If you remove caterpillars from a given habitat, you're not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions for survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that had none.” (p.18)

MP3s weren’t just a new player in the music environment for which CDs had to make room. They weren’t a new form of the CD. They not only allowed you to pick and choose which songs off your CDs you wanted to listen to, but they redefined how music is made, marketed, and consumed. MP3s made possible online music download stores like Napster, iTunes, and AmazonMP3. For the first time, buying just the single off an album was available to the masses.

This had a profound impact on the whole music market, but in particular on the pop, rap, and rock genres. It pushed them away from making a solid cohesive album and towards focusing more on producing a catchy hit single. In more and more cases now, the album is just used to market the single. Overall quality can suffer, because a successful single will sell a mediocre album. Consider a hypothetical example of Lady Gaga:

Suppose her latest single, “Bad Romance,” was released on the Internet and reached the ears of 50 million fans (about twice the population of Texas) who sent a link to nine friends each, exposing 500 million to a really catchy hit single. Now, if a mere 20% of those people bought the single, Lady Gaga would make $100 million. If just 1% of those who bought the single went on to buy the (mediocre) supporting record, The Fame Monster, it would go platinum. This is simple math, and online music distributors like Apple want to get as big a piece of market pie as they can. The more copies of “Bad Romance” that iTunes sells, the more money Apple makes. It is Apple’s best interest, then, as music marketers, to shape the listener’s consumption habits in a way that will make them more accepting of singles. The sale of the album would just be a bonus. The seamless integration of iTunes with the iTunes Store (introduced in version 4) fosters this acceptance. (That iTunes is marketed as music management software is a telling sign. Managing a few hundred CDs? Not that hard. Managing a couple thousand singles? Well, for that you need a computer program.)

Starting in version 4.5, iTunes had a feature called Party Shuffle (now renamed iTunes DJ), an option that let you to listen to your entire music library in random order. This feature was not new per se, as the hundred-disc changers of the 90’s often included such features, but it did take that idea into the realm of the virtual music library.

In iTunes 8, however, a whole new feature called Genius was added. The idea behind Genius was to take the wisdom of crowds, the collective listening preferences of all iTunes users, and harness it to make recommendations, in the form of playlists, to individual users. One could pick any track in his or her library, hit the “Genius” button, and iTunes would compile a playlist culled from the entire music library based on the listening habits of users with similar tastes. It’s an interesting idea, but only useful if you want to listen to music without context or continuous narrative; in other words, a collection of singles. But not all music, obviously, is singles.

If I’m listening to the first movement of Beethoven’s Eighth, the odds are astronomically higher that I would want to finish the whole symphony rather than skip to Mozart to Handel to Haydn to Liszt. The same can be said about any track off of Radiohead’s OK Computer, Steely Dan’s Aja, Devin Townsend’s Infinity, or any other album that provides a seamless listening experience from start to finish.

The iTunes Genius in itself is not a bad thing, but it is important to realize that not all music falls under it’s umbrella. Apple is out to make money, and selling more singles results in more money. Cultivating a userbase who is accepting of these singles, then, is the raison d'être of Genius. From this viewpoint, that iTunes is pushed as a music jukebox for everyone, when in reality it has several features (iTunes DJ, Genius, the Store) that, at least in my view, clearly promote the consumption of commercial-radio-friendly music, is disconcerting.

We are no longer in an environment with caterpillar MP3s; we now have mature, elegant, butterfly music distribution systems. For those who enjoy the endless parade of pop singles, this is a welcome paradigm shift. For others, like me, the marriage of music marketing to the shaping of consumption habits is a reason to be wary. If continuous exposure breeds familiarity, then using iTunes could result in a decline in demand for holistic album experiences. If diversity in music is to be preserved, it is important that we be aware of technology’s subtle influence on artistic expression.

(Image from paradigmshiftstudio.com)

Thankfully, there are those who are aware and involved in a movement to keep the album experience alive. My friend Dan has extensive experience with the underground metal community, and writes,

“[T]here has been a big push in the underground communities (both in metal and alternative/indie music) to refuse to allow their albums to be released on iTunes, with many bands choosing even to release albums on vinyl (Bon Iver and The Raconteurs come to mind at the moment for good examples of this). I also know that many underground punk bands have been doing this for years, with some of them at the dawn of the 90's even resisting the rise of the CD by using vinyl. Examples of this are The Circle Jerks, Lars Fredrikson and the Bastards, as well as Helmet.”

The Raconteurs, of course, are one of Jack White’s - the man notorious for still recording on reel-to-reel machines - side projects. I still can’t tell if he uses those machines for legitimate musical reasons or just to separate himself from the pack by generating a faux-nostalgia over archaic equipment. Regardless, he is indeed known as a staunch proponent of vinyl. I wrote an article a while back about the resurrection of vinyl, and, judging by Amazon’s vinyl Hot Releases page, it seems that vinyl is still doing pretty well. It’s worth noting that the irony of Lady Gaga’s album being available on vinyl is not lost on me.

Vinyl or no vinyl, the countermeasures taken by bands against the MP3 takeover succeed only because of the Internet, the very device that exacerbates the problem. This is the ecosystem which must be balanced. One one side we have singles dominating popular music, and on the other we have bands who resist and sell their albums to dedicated fans via a website. The masses who want the singles are appeased, and the fans, equally, have a place to gather. It is these fans, with their chant of “A new delivery method doesn’t render an old one invalid!”, who are crucial in maintaining that the two live in harmony. For just like Huxley warned in A Brave New World, the danger lies not in our old system being dominated and forcibly repressed, but in it being appraised and portrayed as useless and thus discarded.

So keep your MP3s, iPods, and iTunes. And keep your CDs and LPs. Find the unique contributions of each one and maximize them. For they are not only important as storage mediums, but as representations of a consumer mindset. Make room in your musical ecosystem for both, and enjoy the fullness that each brings to the diversity and taste of the music market.




_DZ

Life Lessons From The Car Business

If you’ve read some of my other posts on this site, you know that I spent some time, eleven months, to be exact, working in the car business. I learned a lot of lessons during my time there, some more valuable then others, but none more meaningful than how wrong it is to judge others. Not only are you usually wildly inaccurate in your preconceptions, but in constructing them you also build yourself up to be someone you are not. This is a lesson I still haven’t fully learned yet, though perhaps I will never fully get over being judgmental.

In America, where who you are is so often tied to what you drive, what you drive is seemingly of paramount importance. Nowhere is this mentality more evident than among car salesman. The minute you drive onto a car lot, the salesman busy themselves with evaluating who you are and what kind of car you might buy, as if they’ve known you for years. Are you driving a beaten ‘93 Taurus? You’re buying a Hyundai or a Ford Focus. Do you have a notebook in your hand in which you compare prices and features? You’re looking for something Japanese, probably a Subaru. Old and driving a Cadillac? You plan to keep buying American, and what model of car isn’t really important as long it looks nice and has enough trunk space for two or three golf bags.

It’s been two years since I held that job, and I can still rattle off stereotypes like that so fast I scare myself. And this kind of stuff goes on all the time. There was a simple rule that I used to go by when appraising what people bought: If their new car had fog lights, the buyer was competent and well-off. Fog lights usually only come on the top-end models of cars; hence, whatever the car, if it had fog lights, I could assume that the person knew why they wanted that specific car, and that they wanted the most car for their money. Unless their new car was already a base-model subcompact, I judged the customer could do better by downgrading to a smaller car with more options (like fog lights). Quality tends to be higher. Oh, and always buy Japanese.

It was with this mentality that one day I found myself preparing a Dodge Caravan for a customer I had not met. (My job was of the cashier-checkout sort. I made sure the customer’s car was good to go and walked them through their final paperwork.) This Caravan had zero options. Nothing. Not even automatic windows, And it was a Dodge Caravan, which tend to be at the bottom of the minivan genre in terms of quality. I could not have been less impressed with this customer’s choice and available cash.

All that changed, though, once I sat down with the customer. Instead of a overweight, lower-class white mom with unruly children, as I had expected, I was met by a smart, competent, father of five. Throughout the course of the paperwork I learned that he was a minister of a small rural church, and that this was his first new car in over ten years. I tried to concentrate on being prompt and courteous, but inside I could not have been more ashamed of myself. I identified with more characteristics in this man’s life then perhaps any other customer I had encountered, yet a half-hour before I had been joking with one of the detailers about how cleaning this car was barely worth our time. I was a horrible human being.

In an earlier post I talked about how missionaries always drove vans, and how as kids we always bragged about them. At that moment, sitting at that desk, I looked at the man sitting across from me and felt like I had practically grown up in his family. He wasn’t looking for a fancy car, because he had more important things to care about, like serving God. In all likelihood he was more concerned about being grateful to God for providing for his needs, just like my parents were and still are, than about impressing others. And there I was, judging a person’s worth by what they owned.

I drove home that night a different person from when I had woken up. Before, it was easy to play the labeling game with the salesmen. Now I didn’t care. Before, I put stock in what I drove. Now it was a car that got me from A to B, a gift God had given me that I didn’t deserve. I drove slowly, the realization washing over me that nothing I owned was a credit to my own success. Everything around me was put there to show me God - to teach me lessons.


_DZ

Thanksgiving Thanks

Things I am thankful for this year.

-Parents who call me.
-Books for learning from
-Money for food
-My job, in this economy
-Working bicycles
-People to bicycle with
-Enough insulin
-A warm apartment
-Ample clothing
-Good health
-My church
-Music

All these things may seem may seem rather ordinary and boring, and I might agree, if you were only looking at them separately. But for all of these things to converge on one person? God is clearly blessing me.

Happy Thanksgiving!


_DZ

The Fleeting Value of Professional Sports When Viewed Through The Lens of a Traveller

As a kid, I was a huge sports fan. I watched sports whenever possible, played sports, and talked sports to whoever would listen. During my kindergarten and early elementary years I liked Japanese baseball, and followed teams like the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants, Orix Bluewave, Seibu Lions, and Kintetsu Buffaloes with enthusiasm. Unlike in American sports, where a city or state owns a team, Japanese sports are sponsored by companies - the Yomiuri is a major newspaper, Orix is a financial firm, and Kintetsu and Seibu are both railway conglomerates. Sumo was another favorite sport, and for the first two weeks of every other month my family and I would crowd around the TV during the 5-6pm hour to watch the great wrestlers duke it out with one another. Participation in soccer during my later elementary years paved the way for interest in the Japanese soccer league, or J.League for short. Favorite teams included the Yokohama Marinos, Kawasaki Verdy, and Kashima Antlers. Sometimes my private soccer club would play the elementary prep teams of these clubs, who were always formidable opponents.

During this time I also followed American basketball with a passion, the Chicago Bulls being my favorite team to follow. Every morning I would tear through the newspaper to find the sports section and read up on the happenings in the NBA, halfway across the world. If the paper happened to run a picture of MJ, it was a glorious day for my scrapbook.

Card-collecting was another way I was in-touch with sports. I collected baseball, basketball, and occasionally football cards throughout elementary, but only basketball card collection continued throughout middle school. Basketball cards were a way for me to stay close to my American roots, and I took great pride in my collection. A far as I knew, the Japanese card-trading scene was non-existent, and I saw trading cards as a uniquely American thing.

Interest in following sports slowly waned beginning in high school. I still played sports, but just didn’t care about sports as a whole as much. I had other interests, I guess, like music, cars, and computer games. I went to see the occasional game, but as far as memorizing stats and removing newspaper articles, that had ceased.

I had a brief love affair with European football (Arsenal woo!) in the past few years, but for the most part I have avoided following sports too closely. This year I tried to follow the international Formula-1 racing circuit, but lost interest half-way through June.

All this to say, really, that the more I think about it the more I can’t help but opine that following sports with enthusiasm is merely a construct of increased proximity - a mild form of nationalism, as it were. Right now I live in Minnesota, whose Vikings are 9-1. I don’t really care about the Vikings, yet find myself caught up in all the excitement over their new-found success. Come Monday I inevitably wander over to NFL.com to see how they fared the previous weekend. ‘They’re in MY city, and them doing well reflects well on me,’ I poorly rationalize. Why should I care?

If passionately following sports is indeed a mild form of nationalism, then it all seems very silly to me, a third-culture kid. I’ve seen kids crazy about J.League, teens going nuts over the NBA, college kids raving about their favorite English footy team, and adults getting uproariously drunk and high-fiving over a touchdown against those worthless Packers. It’s all the same everywhere. And what difference does caring about sports make, if indeed you’re only excited about the sport because of it’s proximity to your residence? When you move a lot, like I have, it becomes rather tiring to have to start all over again with a new sport or team to match each new city. Teams win, teams lose, and over the long run it seems pretty pointless and of fugitive disposition to get excited over the present state of a team. Equally useless is reminiscing over how good your football team was ‘back in the day’ (pre-2000 for Detroit. Zing.) Are there not better things to spend time on?

Obsessing over a sports team is revealed to be the hollow joy that it is when you confront it a set of eyes that have spent time examining it’s evanescent qualities regardless of the home culture. The only logical choice to make is to either follow sports passionately wherever you are, which quickly becomes exhausting, or to disregard sports almost entirely, by which you risk potential alienation at the water cooler. This is not to say that following sports is bad; sports, all sports, are exciting, electrifying, and, hopefully, God-honoring. But you don't need to follow any kind of team to enjoy it. I simply think that knowing beyond the simple “Yeah the Vikes played Seattle last weekend and won” is not worth it. It is simply too broad a world out there to narrowly focus on one little corner .



_DZ

Jump Rope 2: Jump Harder with a Vengeance

If you were at any time a Japanese elementary school student, it’s practically a given that you can jump rope at a professional level. I am not even joking. Japanese kids can jump rope like it’s their job. The public school system, subsidized by both the government and the jump rope industry, is largely to thank for this, as they make jumping rope a three-month-long mandatory P.E. staple. Prizes are given out to those who can jump rope the longest, resulting in kids jumping in class, starving during lunch, and wetting themselves on a regular basis. Learning to run while jumping rope is an important skill to learn at this stage in development. The highlight (or, for me, the lowlight) of the year is the school-wide competition that marks the end of the jumping season. This is where kids break out their Nike Shox, trash-talk dictionaries, and carbon fiber jump ropes and proceed to double-jump until their arms almost fall off. This routine is repeated ever year, so that the average elementary school graduate has (roughly) over 13,000 hours of jump-roping experience and no rotator cuffs.

Double-jumping, passing the rope beneath your feet twice in one jump, is not an easy task for a foreigner like me to accomplish. I never was able to do it, and this relegated me to 45th string on any and every jump rope team and exposed me to repeated kickings of sand in my face. You see, Japanese kids have refined jumping rope to a surprisingly deep level, complete with many different jumping styles, such as Aya Jumping, alternately crisscrossing your arms with each jump, and Kousa Jumping, in which you keep your arms permanently crossed while you jump. At the higher levels both of these techniques are combined with double-jumping, resulting in a whirr of activity that turns a cord of nylon into carbon-hardened steel and a mere elementary school child into its martial arts master, no doubt employable at a thousand different sushi restaurants nation wide. I, meanwhile, was off in the corner, spitting out sand and trying to synchronize my body so that both feet lifted off the ground at the same time.

For those less inclined to individual competition, jumping rope could be turned into a group exercise through utilization of the O-nawa, or large rope. This rope, held by one person on each end, was rotated slowly, the goal being to see how many kids could hop in and synchronously jump. I, of course, was still working on my coordination so I usually was relegated to be a holder, since I was tall for my age and could move my arm in a more or less consistent circular motion.



Japan, however, wastes this potentially profitable natural resource, as once the Japanese student graduates elementary, jumping rope is never spoken of again. It is treated as a stage in life that one must go through and then move on, much like soccer is considered in the US. It’s something that, regardless of how good you get at it, you must discard it and grow up. This means that now is the prime time in my life to get good at it, so I can reclaim some lost dignity from my youth. So if you’ll excuse me, I have some Shox to buy and some sand to kick.




Dann writes from his home in Minnesota where, unfortunately, his mediocre rope-jumping skills are his main way of keeping warm.

Nike, Iggy Pop, Shock Advertising, and Cleaning Up Public Space

If you follow my posts much, you know that I enjoy a good round of Guitar Hero. While Guitar Hero has been a source of new music for me from time to time, it has also helped me look at advertising habits at a deeper level, albeit indirectly. It was from playing Guitar Hero that I recognized this song (Iggy Pop’s “Search and Destroy”), and that allowed me to subsequently find the following Nike advertisement on YouTube.



That ad showed on NBC in 1996, during Game 6 of the NBA Finals. I was nine at the time, and was in the throes of Michael Jordan idolization. A family friend had taped Games 5 and 6 and mailed them to my family in Japan. The Nike ad only played once, but I watched the whole game so many times that the ad is permanently branded in my memory.

The content of the ad no doubt contributed to its "stickiness". Below is a haunting shot of a camera smashing at second thirty-one. That scene stuck with me more than any other.

The guy barfing is pretty dramatic, too.

The overall impression that I got from this advert was that sports was painful, hard, and punishing. There was very little glory depicted, and I certainly didn’t get the impression that Nike was the brand of winners. All the athletes involved wore Nike clothing, from Carl Lewis completing a successful jump to the guy on the ground trying not to be trampled.


Throughout the length of the video the two-second gratuity-shot of Scottie Pippen’s sneakers is all that really tells you that you’re watching a Nike ad. I remember those shoes well, though I never owned a pair because I thought they were ugly.


All this to say that this was the first instance of watching TV that made me uncomfortable. As I saw it, Nike had put together montage of people failing at sports and getting hurt in the process, all to sell a product. It was the first piece of video that I was fascinated by, because of the fast editing and pounding rock song, but didn’t actually like. The whole clip kinda made me nauseous, actually. Maybe the flying blood and the aforeinserted barfing guy had something to do with it.


This feeling, the feeling of “Why am I excited by this when it disgusts me?”, I think, is good to retain. So often we see things that annoy or shock us, but we are too jaded by a lifetime of media exposure to really care. There are biological ways we react to things, ways we don’t know about but advertisers do, that can catch us off-guard. A recent example might be this vile divorce ad.


It catches you off-guard just enough so that you might consider the possibility. We don’t need this kind of advertising here, there, or anywhere. These are the things we should search for and destroy.




_DZ