On Friday the other shoe finally dropped on the Tower Records franchise.
Tower’s assets were officially sold to a liquidation company as part of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding. The Tower Records retail chain that so many people know and love is officially dead. Strangely, I won’t miss it.

As a music geek back in the early 80’s I practically grew up at Tower Records. I’d spend hours scouring Tower’s import bins looking for obscure gems to add to the KFSR playlist. These days people talk about building systems to enhance music discovery. Back in the day, Tower Records was the system for music discovery.

Tower maintains what is commonly referred to as a deep catalog. Through the years music geeks have gravitated to Tower because they knew the store stocked even the most obscure recordings. Now, of course, those very same music geeks have numerous alternatives to choose from. The very concept of deep catalog has morphed into the Long Tail and Tower Records has become a victim of the very retail concept that it helped create.

Read the entire entry …

Some day in the near future you will purchase a digital audio or video recording and find that it doesn’t work exactly as you expect it to. Maybe it will simply stop playing after a few days, or perhaps you won’t be able to convert it for use on your portable media player, or maybe you won’t be able to skip past the annoying promos at the start of the program. When this happens you can blame Digital Rights Management (DRM) for your dissatisfaction.

While we talk a lot about DRM here on Medialoper, it’s not at all clear that everyone understands what we’re talking about. In fact, a 2005 survey of European digital music consumers (PDF file) revealed that 63% had never even heard of DRM, while 23% had heard of DRM but weren’t sure what it was. There’s no reason to believe that American consumers are any more well informed on the issue.

Read the entire entry …

The Boy Scouts of Hong Kong are at it again. Last year they began awarding merit badges for copyright proficiency, and now they’ve enlisted their entire membership to scour the web for signs of piracy. Nothing says summer fun for kids like firing up the laptop and searching the internet for intellectual property violations.

It’s not just the Boy Scouts either. According to the New York Times 200,000 children Youth Ambassadors, will be actively involved in the program.

Read the entire entry …

Is there anyone or anything more universally despised throughout the blogosphere than the RIAA? Seriously, when was the last time you read something positive about the RIAA? My guess is never. Chances are you’ve read dozens of stories about the RIAA’s heavy-handed anti-piracy maneuvers, and even more that portray the organization’s leadership as hopelessly out of touch with reality.

The interesting thing about this is that the RIAA doesn’t seem to be aware that the blogosphere exists. If they are, they certainly aren’t taking it seriously. The RIAA comes across as being completely dismissive of its critics. It’s almost as if they think that acknowledging their critics might be seen as a sign of weakness. In my darkest nightmares I fear Karl Rove might be secretly running the RIAA.

Read the entire entry …

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Michael Eisner’s outlandish new investment, Team Baby, a video production company that produces and manufactures college sports videos for infants and toddlers ages 6 months to 5 years. The videos are designed to indoctrinate extremely young children into the cult of college sports. While the idea sounded insane at the time, it’s actually gotten worse. Team Baby has just signed deals with the NBA, Major League Baseball, and NASCAR.

Read the entire entry …

When we last left Michael Eisner he was giving his personal Mickey Mouse tie to Robert Iger and noting that all he had left was his Mickey Mouse underwear.

It must be rough being a former entertainment mogul and part-time talk show host. Which is probably why Eisner continues to look for just the right post-Disney venture in hopes that he will one day return to his former glory. Lately he’s pinning his hopes on a company called Team Baby Entertainment. With a name like that it has to be good.

According to the LA Times, Team Baby is a start-up company that makes college-sports booster videos aimed at children ages 6 months to 5 years. Think teletubbies with football helmets.

Believe me when I say that it’s not my long running aversion to all college sports that causes me to say that this is wrong on so many levels.

Read the entire entry …

In the latest indication that the entertainment industry has completely lost its grasp on reality, a coalition of forces lead by the MPAA has enlisted a pair of well trained dogs to help fight the war on piracy.

The program, which began testing this week, was announced by a press release that can only be described as surreal.

Read the entire entry …

Just when you think the RIAA’s war on common sense can’t possibly get any more absurd they somehow manage to top themselves. The trade organization’s latest battle with the 21st century comes in the case of Elektra vs. Barker where the RIAA’s attorneys have been arguing that the defendant violated copyright laws by storing music files in a shared folder on her computer.

According to the RIAA, it doesn’t matter if the digital music files were obtained legally, the fact that they were stored in a shared folder that might allow others to access them constitutes “distribution” and is therefore in violation of copyright laws.

Since the RIAA seems to be waging a war on shared folders shouldn’t they really be suing Microsoft for making shared folders possible?

Read the entire entry …

You’d be hard pressed to find a more digital savvy group of people than the ones who attend SXSW Interactive. The vast majority of conference attendees are armed with laptops and logged onto the ubiquitous wireless available throughout the City of Austin. Most of the attendees have at least one blog that they post to on a regular basis (I think the average is actually 2.32 blogs per attendee, but I’m having trouble fact checking that number). It’s like an army of field reporters have descended on a conference to provide coverage from every possible angle.

Don’t believe me? Check out:

• Stories on this year’s SXSW on Technorati
• Photos from this year’s SXSW on Flickr

All of this just makes the fact that there is still a SXSW Press Room seem that much more archaic. What the hell happens in that room? Seriously, what sort of special accommodations could “real” reporters need that aren’t already available to every attendee?
I’ve racked my brain on this one and the only things I can come up with are:

• Comfortable chairs
• Fax Machines
• D Cell Batteries

On the last day of the 2005 conference renowned CSS Guru Eric Meyer was called to task for daring to take photos of his friends without proper press credentials. I guess security hadn’t notice the 9,000+ session photos uploaded to flicker over the previous four days. Meyer played along and was ultimately granted a press pass for his camera. Apparently media credentials are now just a bureaucratic formality.

Meanwhile, the SXSW Press Room lives on, like some kind of vestigial organ completely out of place in the 21st century.

Technorati Tags: SXSW, SXSWi, SXSW2006, Media, Press, Newspapers, Journalism, Eric Meyer,