My Star Wars DVDs just arrived in the mail. This isn’t likely to help me with my studying…

From the NY Times: eMusic is launching a revamped music download service that carries only music from independent labels.

A Music Download Site for Artists Less Known
By LAURIE J. FLYNN
Published: September 20, 2004

The Internet has long carried the promise of being an outlet for new writers, artists and independent musicians. But to David Pakman, chief operating officer of eMusic, an online music service, that promise has not yet panned out.

Indeed, for many musicians not affiliated with one of the major record labels, Mr. Pakman says, it has become increasingly hard to get noticed on online music stores, which tend to sell the same music as the megastores.

EMusic hopes to change that. On Wednesday, it plans to start an online music service that will give independent musicians a place of their own.

The site will sell only music from 3,700 independent labels, a total of a half-million tracks. The aim is to help fans locate the small, the obscure and the eccentric; help musicians find their fans; and grab a chunk of the more than $2 billion in revenues generated annually by independent music labels.

“What has been missing for indie music, until now, is a service completely devoted to the discovery of new or established independent artists,” Mr. Pakman said. He added that while “many indie labels and artists feel strongly that the Web, in general, has provided many advantages in communication, marketing, promotion, and even sales,” it has not leveled the playing field.

Still, with the demise of independent radio stations, many musicians have had to depend on word-of-mouth on the Internet to gain an audience.

In 1999, the eMusic site began charging for each song downloaded, but it switched to a subscription plan the next year. In 2001, Robert Kohn and Gene Hoffman, the founders, sold eMusic to Vivendi Universal, which sold it last year to Dimensional Associates, the private equity arm of JDS Capital Management. Danny Stein, chief executive of Dimensional Associates, also is chief executive of eMusic.

Mr. Pakman, who is Dimensional Associates’ managing director and chief operating officer of eMusic, said that eMusic was losing money when his company bought it, even though it had a strong following among independent music fans.

When the new service starts this week, eMusic will look as much like a magazine as an online music service, Mr. Pakman said, with an assortment of reviews, recommendations and columns.

A new editorial staff led by Michael Azerrad, a rock writer and leading advocate of independent music, will cover all niches, including jazz, folk and rap.

The emphasis will be on helping users find music they like, and connecting them with other fans who like the same thing. On other sites, Mr. Pakman said, “you can only finding it if you’re looking for it.”

The site has 70,000 paying subscribers, a number Mr. Pakman said he hopes to expand. Rather than charging per song, eMusic charges monthly subscription fees ranging from $10 to $20, for 40 to 90 downloads. Most major sites, including iTunes from Apple and the new music service from Microsoft, charge 99 cents a song; eMusic customers end up paying about 25 cents a song.

Because eMusic’s audience tends to include very active collectors of independent artists, the subscription model makes sense, Mr. Pakman said.

“Our users consume a disproportionately larger number of downloads,” he said. “They’re die-hards.”

A major difference between eMusic’s service and other online music stores is that the tracks are delivered in the unprotected MP3 format, which means the number of copies that can be made after a song is downloaded is not restricted. For many new bands, the exposure they gain by allowing their music to be shared makes up for the fact that they may not get paid for every copy of their songs.

The unprotected format also means that the songs will play on all portable music players, including the Apple’s iPod. To enhance its appeal, eMusic also records live performances around the country, making the tracks available immediate after a show.

The subscription model for music services is small but growing, and many industry analysts predict that most online music will eventually be sold this way.

RealNetworks already has 550,000 subscribers to its music services; America Online has 260,000 subscribers to MusicNet; and Musicmatch, which was just acquired by Yahoo, has about 225,000 paying subscribers.

As it is, eMusic faces stiff competition. All the major online services offer catalogs of independent music, with their more mainstream fare. For example, iTunes offers songs from more than 600 independent labels, and RealNetworks says that more than half the tracks on its site are from independent labels. But in nearly all cases, the bulk of the songs customers actually buy come from the major labels, and it is the big names that are promoted most heavily.

On the eMusic site, however, the independent labels do not have to fight the major labels for the attention of consumers. “If you’re an independent band, it’s more likely you’ll get exposure than you would otherwise,” said Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research, a market research company.

Weird things pop into my head sometimes. For some reason this morning, while getting ready for work, I started thinking about this guy in Texas I used to work with. I was a senior analyst for a company that was outsourcing our work to Arlington-based developers, of which he was one. His name was Chuck Kirby, and he may well have been the funniest man I’ve ever met.

I remember that whenever he had a question he’d call me into his office, and I’d try to explain how our product worked, or how integration should go, or whatever he was asking. As I’d reach point in the explanation where he’d begin to understand what the hell I was talking about, he’d start leaning to one side. Within a few seconds his head would be touching the desk and he’d shout, “Check out the big brain on Dan!!” (a line he stole from Pulp Fiction), and then pretend to struggle lifting his head off the desk as if it weighed a ton. I could never stop laughing long enough to finish my answer.

Funny what pops into my head sometimes.

Watched two movies from Zip yesterday; the first I got from a “most overlooked movies of the 90s” list, the second won acclaim at last year’s TIFF.

• State Of Grace starred Sean Penn, Ed Harris, Gary Oldman, John Turturro, John C. Reilly & Robin Wright…quite a cast. Oldman was a little over the top, and missed the accent entirely, but Penn and Wright were great. The story’s been done to death, there were no surprising twists — except maybe that Wright’s character didn’t become a cliche — and I didn’t buy Ed Harris as the chief badass, but it was a good movie. Overlooked, certainly.
• Love, Sex and Eating The Bones got a lot of attention at the festival last year, and it starred Hill Harper (who we’d grown to like from his role on The Handler). It was funny, it was realistic…I love movies like this. It was just a love story, but funny & silly & just dumb enough to be like real life.

Hotel Rwanda, a film about a courageous Rwandan hotel manager who saved more than 1,000 people from being massacred by Hutu extremists in 1994, took the AGF People’s Choice Award at the 29th Toronto International Film Festival.

Hotel Rwanda, directed by Northern Irish director Terry George (Some Mother’s Son), stars American actor Don Cheadle as real-life hotelier Paul Rusesabagina, who attended the premiere in Toronto on Sept. 11. At yesterday’s awards brunch, held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto, festival director Piers Handling (this year sharing the duties for the first time with co-director Noah Cowan) read a message from filmmaker George, who said he would pass the award on to Rusesabagina, “who told me after the audience reception that we received in Toronto that it was the best night of his life.”

from The Globe & Mail (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040920.wxtiffaw20/BNStory/Entertainment/)
By LIAM LACEY

It shall be called the “Pepsi Indicent”.

This afternoon my wife bought a bottle of Pepsi and put it in the freezer to let it cool down. She forgot about it, as we all do from time to time, and when she remembered it was some 7 hours later by which time the entire bottle had frozen into slush.

Now, this would not have been remarkable except for the fact that she tried to open the bottle and take out some of the Pepsi slush. Even if she’d been sober, I don’t think it would have dawned on her (or me) not to do this, but…kaboom.

I was in the bathroom when this happened, and heard only faint cursing from the kitchen. When I came into the kitchen there was frozen Pepsi everywhere. Over the near wall, the far wall (about 9 feet away), the ceiling, the cabinets, the counter…everywhere. We just spent 15 minutes wiping down the cabinets and mopping the ceiling.

At least we didn’t try to freeze gasoline…

We’re sad it’s over. Last weekend, when we saw 7 movies in just over 48 hours, seems forever ago. The last 3 weren’t as impactful as the first 7, but we were fortunate to have avoided any bombs. My favourites, in order:

1. Hotel Rwanda
2. Saving Face
3. Les Revenants
4. The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
5. The Merchant Of Venice
6. Creep
7. Trauma
8. Undertow
9. Mondovino
10. The Libertine

We’re on the fence now about what to do next year; do we see more films or fewer? I’ll let you know in about a year.

Fare thee well, film festival.

Trauma – 7 out of 10
Some thoughts on tonight’s movie:

• Colin Firth was in attendance tonight. I swear to god that, when he walked in, every woman in the audience shared a common orgasm.
• This was not a typical Colin Firth role. Some women in the audience seemed confused.
• The movie was weird. Not Mulholland Drive weird, but almost pi weird. Good, though. It reminded me of Vanilla Sky at times.

It’s the final lineup.

“Doodle-oo doo, doodle-oo doo doooo…”

The Libertine – 6 out of 10
Much like Undertow, The Libertine seemed like two different films. The first half was funny, authentic, bawdy, witty and amusing. The second half was slow, over-dramatic, ponderous and generally lacking all the things that made the first half so good. Johnny Depp was spectacular (when isn’t he?) as was Samantha Morton; John Malkovich was underused, but what can you do? The sets were certainly more gritty and authentic than I’m used to seeing in London period-pieces, and the dialogue — especially in the first half — was excellent, but the film just got lost in the melodrama toward the final 1/3. Too bad; it had a ton of promise in the first hour.

Oh, and no stars in sight. I thought Depp was in town?