Back in June, I read a review of the new Ash album “Twilight of the Innocents” on the Guardian Unlimited website where it was mentioned that the band, a personal favorite, was about to end its recording career. Their traditional recording career that is. From this point forward the band members would be “dedicating ourselves wholly to the art of the single for the digital age.” For this I applaud them as, presumably, one won’t have to buy expensive imports and will just be able to download new Ash songs from the website or an online retailer like iTunes.

For those not familiar with Ash, you may remember the wonderful single “A Life Less Ordinary,” from a terrible movie of the same name. Always a bit of an indie underdog, Ash’s last album, a pop-rock meisterwerk called “Meltdown,” went virtually unnoticed in this country. I thought then that something might give, like a breakup or a total sell out. Instead, they’ve taken matters into their own hands. With the latest album not even released in this country, the internet could be the band’s savior, as long as there are no international or crazy DRM restrictions involved. I wish them luck in their future. But what I really like is this newfound artistic freedom that bands like Ash are planning, and how it is actually starting to take shape with other bands.
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The headlines scream: “Universal Music Takes on iTunes,” and all I can think is “what, again?” Don’t they do that, like, every other week?

This time, I am told, it will be different. This time, Universal Music Chief Doug Morris is talking about launching a subscription model — reportedly called “Total Music” — that will essentially be FREE to the consumers. Which doesn’t at all sound like a combination of Napster 2.0 and Spiral Frog. Nope.

I will admit, there is what seems to be a twist:

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I had every reason to believe that my iPhone experience would be the same as any of the other Apple experiences I’ve ever had. The process has repeated itself through several laptop purchases, and a couple of iPod purchases. Hit the Apple store in Pasadena, buy a product, take it home and use it. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

Unfortunately, as I discovered, buying an iPhone isn’t a typical Apple experience. I spent the better part of this past weekend trying to activate the phone. The worst part is that my activation problems weren’t entirely AT&T’s fault. Apple is at least partially responsible for the torment I experienced trying to activate the iPhone.

The first part of my adventure went pretty much as planned. The Apple store employee ringing up my purchase started to explain that I would need iTunes and an Internet connection to activate the phone, then he stopped, looked at my t-shirt and said, “Never mind. I don’t have to explain the system requirements to you, you’re wearing a Firefox shirt”.

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I admit it — I’m still way excited about the new iPods. Not only for the usual selfish reasons but also because I see them as the dawning of a new age. Specifically, the age of free, ubiquitous WiFi and — yes — better short-form video.

Let’s start with the first. There has a been an ongoing struggle when it comes to wireless. On one side, there are those who want WiFi to be free. Or, if not free, extremely low cost. Some cities, for example, are trying to blanket their communities in wireless, treating it as a low-fee utility. Think of it like electricity, only, well, better.
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It’s pretty much Apple week here at Medialoper, and why not? So I figured that I’d add my perspective on the new iPods, as well as the Universal’s wholesale abandonment of iTunes for Amazon’s Unbox.

Everybody I know seemed to be keeping at one browser tab open on the press conference yesterday, and until the drastic price drop of the iPhone, it pretty much went the way that most people had predicted beforehand. Without going into any deep analysis of What It All Means, here are some of my thoughts.

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By now you’ve already heard the big news everyone is talking about. That’s right, Microsoft just lowered the price of the Zune. Pretty exciting, huh?

Apple’s response to this earth shattering news? A revamped lineup of iPods, including the all new iPod Touch. The Touch is essentially an iPhone without the phone (or the two year AT&T contract for that matter). It’s pretty much exactly the device I speculated about in July. The iPod Touch is also everything Microsoft’s Zune should have been when it was launched late last year.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Microsoft partisans were crowing about how the Zune would ultimately beat the iPod, because of it’s larger screen and built-in WiFi. The WiFi, in particular, was going to be a killer app. In retrospect, the Zune’s WiFi was a killer app alright — it was the manner in which Microsoft chose to implement the WiFi that ultimately killed the Zune.

When they write the story of how Microsoft let Apple win the digital media war they’ll devote a whole volume to the failure of the Zune. In theory, the Zune could have done nearly everything the iPod Touch does. Aside from the iPod Touch’s touch screen, the Zune had all of the other major features in place: larger screen, built-in WiFi, slick user interface.

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Will all due apologies to the Fresh Prince, networks executives just don’t understand. Or, rather, NBC executive just don’t understand. This past week, we learned that negotiations between Apple and NBC broke down because NBC wants to charge $5.00 an episode for television shows sold via iTunes while Apple, understandably, wants to charge less.

Rather than lure consumers in with a partial-season offering of NBC programming, Apple will not sell any NBC shows this fall (the deal was set to end in December anyway). First, a little bit of math. Assuming a 24-episode season, regular viewers will be paying approximately $50 for the season at $1.99; NBC wants those viewers to pay in the neighborhood of $120 for that same programming. You know, that’s a lot of money, especially considering that the cost of production is largely subsidized by commercial advertisers during the first broadcast run.
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I don’t have the juice to go in-depth about anything this week, so I thought that I’d take a few swipes at some things:

Download Service Explosion — With Nokia’s recent announcement announcement of their download service on the heels of CD Baby and Wal-Mart’s services, it looks like we are in another round of download service offerings. Add these to the DRM-free service that Universal announced last month, and the long-rumoured Amazon download stores, and consumers will have every type of choice.

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One of the biggest pieces of news about digital music last week was that Universal Music was going to deign to sell their music without DRM. This is, of course, a good thing for consumers, especially in a week where Google Video’s wholesale abandonment of their service showed just how fracked-up DRM schemes actually are.

The other big news in Universal’s announcement is, of course, that they aren’t going through iTunes to sell the DRM-free music, despite the reported success of EMI’s non-DRM’d tunes. This is widely seen as the latest dick-wave in an ongoing pissing contest between Universal and Ap–

Quick, name three Universal Music artists!!

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My iPhone crashed yesterday. Just before lunch, I woke it up, but the unlock slider was acting all funky. When it finally unlocked, my phone was frozen. Dead. Solid.

There have been a couple of times before where it has acted weird — the most major one being Safari spontaneously shutting down and returning the phone to the home screen. In those cases, and in this case, I’ve done what we’ve done to computers since time immemorial: I reset it.

And that’s when I got The Yellow Triangle Of Death.

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