The former CEO of eMusic thinks the price of music is too high. David Pakman has some stats on his side, and it's worth checking them out. The numbers make an almost convincing case, but the conclusion he draws reads as “We'll make it up in volume.” That scares me as a music fan. The cost of streaming services is a huge problem. After my screed against streaming music, I've decided to give music streaming one more chance to impress me. While it's early days in the experiment yet, I can't say any of the services I've tried give me a compelling value proposition for $10 a month. Half of that might sway me. It's a fraction of the $60 to $100 I spend per month on music in one form or another. ¹

There are three things that worry me. First is that streaming royalties, and streaming profits are borderline non-existent. While digital distribution of music as download is almost free for labels and indies, alike, streaming has serious overhead costs, and the more people who use it, the more it will cost unless they can pony up for a sweetheart deal à la Netflix and Comcast. If they can barely afford to keep the music playing, and barely afford to pay the artists, cutting the price in half isn't going to help, even if the labels allow it.

Second, it's the people on the technology side, not the creative side, who are leading the charge about music being overpriced. I'm reminded of ex-Indie Rocker Tim Quirk, now with Google Music, who claimed “[Y]ou can't devalue music”. He's out of the music-making game, not recording, performing, or worrying about whether he'll be ever see a royalty check because his album hasn't made back the advance. The technology people make money when the company they work for makes money. They make money when more people give them money to use the service, or at least to buy ads. The last person to see the last of the money is the artist.

This isn't new. The artist typically got a pittance even when music was sold on Big Black Discs. Unless they became a Top 40 sensation, multiple times running, or at least managed to build a large enough fan base to sustain them, most music acts keep the money coming in through performance or licensing deals. And the label will take a cut of that, too. David Pakman talks a lot about consumers, but the word “artist” or “band” does not appear a single time in his piece. The supply of music is taken as a given, and unfortunately, he really can get away with that line of thinking. People aren't going to stop making music if the money dries up. It still comes off as callous.

What worries me most is that the streaming services and the download services alike are competing against free. Free is very dangerous to compete with. YouTube is an insanely popular way to listen to music, and while it does do revenue sharing for ads, it's not everywhere and for all artists. Unless you're Psy, you're probably not getting anything more than the price of a cup of coffee. Naturally, YouTube is popular among the teenage demographic, the ones who typically don't have much money to spend on music anyway. Even the ad-supported free tiers on the various music streaming services are competition to the paid version, and I don't even think that stopping users from skipping songs, and inserting one minute ads after each track would drive paid growth.

Music, like every other form of art, is an inelastic good. The demand is perpetual, and constant. It's just that music consumers have so many ways to get what they want, and many of those ways are a lot cheaper than $9.99 a month. Because of this, it behaves in an elastic manner, but an artist who is willing to play the game can still find a way to make money. That's the foundation of the relationship between labels and artists—if the independent hustle is too much, a label can take over some, or all, of the business aspects for a price. Part of why labels set streaming rights prices so high is to cover their expenses and provide their end of the bargain with their artists. (Though a lot of it is, yes, gratuitous pocket-lining.)

Something will have to break before we see things level out again, and it looks like streaming music might be it, if it can't start making money. Downloads may be losing ground to streams, but only because of price. Somewhere a balance is tipping, and I don't know what it will take to right it again. I worry that when it finally tips, it's going to take a lot of the artists I admire with it. That's why I'm doing what I can to support them with my money, directly when possible. Unfortunately, most people don't have that much of a connection to the music they listen to. If whatever way people opt to get their music in the future can forge that connection, we may be in business.

And that is a tough row to hoe.

Back in November, I started keeping a notebook with the Bullet Journal technique. It’s been a slow process acclimating myself to writing things down when it occurs to me, instead of counting on my memory, or reaching for my iPhone. The earliest entries are a mishmash of things, from important ideas and notes on books, to stuff I could—and should—track elsewhere like my daily steps from my pedometer. Under one day’s entry, I have the line “Nap” for some reason. I guess Past Me took a nap that day. Good to know.

I’ve learned that a notebook isn’t good for how I do work with a larger scope and time frame, but it’s great for figuring out my day-to-day. We keep an editorial schedule at my job, and I’ve taken to writing the day’s items in my notebook each morning. That day’s entry becomes my own form of Patrick Rhone’s “Today Card,” only in a longer-lasting form. When the particular item for that day is done, a quick check in the box lets me know. If there’s any changes from the schedule, or important notes for that day’s projects, I have a way to remind myself.

I could do all of this with OmniFocus, but to capture the daily projects I do at work would be more of a pain to type them in on my iPhone or iPad than to just write the darn thing down. ¹ Plus, as nice as it is to go into the “Completed” Perspective in OmniFocus and see all the things I’ve done, having a physical archive just feels better. This is for me, not for anyone else. While it might be nice to imagine scholars or archeologists pouring over the notebooks of some 30-year old Web Producer in the mid-2010s, the benefits of an annotated life are worth it just for me. Future Me will be interested in what Past Me was doing.

Future Me, however, also needs to have things in a trusted system, ready to be viewed when he needs them, pre-broken up into little discrete nuggets of work and time. Future Me needs this so he knows what to do at 10:48 AM, when the creatives for the items on the schedule aren’t in yet. That’s where OmniFocus comes in, and where apps like Daily Routine come in. They give Future Me, who isn’t going to think to flip back a few pages in his notebook just to find the task due by 5PM today that he got two weeks ago, or the right information he needs. Because, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about Future Me: he’s just as forgetful as Past Me.

I recently discovered Sean Korzdorfer’s Open Notebook, and it’s provided me with some interesting reading, and thinking about the various workflows in my life. Sean puts a lot of thought into the systems he uses to make his life go, far more than I usually do. Of the nuggets of wisdom I’ve pulled from the Open Notebook are ways to better incorporate the awesome reminders tool Due.app into my day, using Daily Routine to add structure to my days, and given me a lot to think about journaling.

There’s something wonderfully old-school about the Open Notebook. It reminds me of the early days of the web, when a personal site was typically a huge mish-mash of stuff. In those wild days, your typical “home page” could as easily contain a proto-blog, links to useful freeware, recipes, and shrines to your favorite television programs. You don’t see that too often any more, and while Sean Korzdorfer’s Open Notebook is (slightly) more focused, it feels as deeply personal as those old personal pages from the 1990s—though better looking.

A while back, I commented on Frank Chimero’s post about what a personal website means in 2014. I wondered, like Frank, “How do you bring all of those silos and streams under one banner, one roof, and make it work?”. Frank’s taken a very old school, 90s personal-site approach in the intervening months, with links to different sections, putting everything under the same roof, but organized and coherent—and with 2014 calibre web design.

What makes Sean Korzdorfer’s Open Notebook different is that it’s as much a resource as it is a personal statement. He’s sharing his knowledge of what works for him, in a way that allows strangers like to me build on what he has done. It’s the same openness and share-alike philosophy that made the early web so interesting. When the web was a frontier and not yet a catalog or a bunch of social apps, people built off of each other’s knowledge and experience. How many web designers and developers got their start from using “View Source” in Netscape 3.04?

None of this has gone away, but it’s not as common or visible as it used was. It’s probably time that changed.

Yiren Lu, a CS grad student at Columbia, and startup intern, published an interesting piece on the cultural and age divide between the startup scene and established tech world. It's long, but worth reading. It describes some of the problems with the current crop of new companies dominating discussion in the tech world—but not all of them.

The first thing I found interesting about Yiren's piece is how little money factors in. Sure, there's the usual, appropriate, digs at over-inflated valuations for companies that haven't made any money, or have a revenue model. However, there's no discussion of the financial motivation behind people going into the startup world, either as employees or founders. Like high finance in the years leading up to the Great Recession, hedge funds in particular, technology startups are attracting smart, money hungry youth. If you can get $10,000,000 for your startup with a minimum of effort, why work for the man? Or, if you're not the entrepreneurial type, but you can sling code, why not take a six-figure salary and live in San Francisco?

Money isn't everyone's motivation, but it's one motivating the number of copycat startups out there. Ev Williams strategy for creating a successful company is to find a need, and make it easier for someone to get it. It's a recipe so simple, it can be copied with only minimal changes to make something that'll get a decent investment. Just take a compatible business model, and shoehorn in your niche audience: professional social networking, virtual rewards for watching cartoons, one-on-one hookups for My Little Pony fans. If you can get an L-curve in user growth, you don't even need to make money before someone offers to buy you out. Boom, you're rich overnight.

Okay, it's not as simple as I'm making it sound, nor is it guaranteed to succeed. Hedge funds might be a more secure place to strike it rich if you're a well-networked college grad with a CS degree, but they're not cool anymore. Cool factor is as important as money, sometimes even moreso. Even if I didn't get a six-figure salary and a ton of perks, saying that I worked at a startup was a point of personal pride for a while. When you combine the the two, it's going to be a dangerous cocktail.

All that money and cool chasing comes at a cost, and here is where Yiren and I agree. The money and talent being frittered away on goofy, copycat startups that prioritize growth over revenue, and exist to be bought out by someone bigger. It becomes a dangerous cycle: the more companies that fit that profile and succeed, the more money and young talent they get to trap in their web. The companies that are trying to do longer-term, less exciting, but more important work to improve the technology everyone relies on are left to fend for scraps. If you could get a six-figure signing bonus to work for Facebook, or just “market rate” at a company doing less glamorous, but more important work, what would you take?

And, what would you take if you were a college graduate in your early 20s, with a pile of student loans?

Unlike an increasing number of people, I don’t subscribe to any streaming music services. I’ve tried them from time to time, but the idea of paying for music I don’t get to keep does not appeal to me in the slightest. If I wanted to be a freeloader and listen to ads between songs, I’d just tune in to any streaming terrestrial radio station I can get online. It’s going to sound better than turning on any of the crappy AM/FM radios around me. Still, so many people I know, passionate music lovers, are streaming for most of their music listening. Buying albums (even digital albums) is feeling somewhat anacronistic.

Talk of shitty streaming royalties aside, it’s that streaming doesn’t fit with my music consumption habits. I’m the sort of music fan who, nine times out of ten, would prefer to listen to an album in full, rather than just disparate songs. While you can listen to full albums with many streaming services, it’s clear that they’re geared more for a casual, radio-like method of music consumption. I’d rather spend time in iTunes, making sure I have the right albums on my phone than burn through a data plan, or hog the wifi at the office. Besides, streaming doesn’t help me when I’m on the subway and can’t get a signal anyway. Sure, you could download stuff if you think to do it ahead of time, but it’s a kludge.

Ownership of my music library, is important to me. It gives me control. Even the digital files that comprise the vast, and growing, majority of my music collection are my files. Apple can’t take away all the music I’ve bought, at least not since dropping DRM for music in 2009. I could still lose my files in a hard drive crash, fire, or other disaster, but they’re no more fragile than LPs or CDs. They’re certainly less fragile than cassette tapes. And I back up my digital music library religiously. I’d probably save money, since I’ve been known to buy anywhere from $20 to $50 worth of iTunes music per month, but I feel like I’d get less for my money.

What are people seeing that I’m not? I’ve discussed the issue with Andrew Marvin on multiple episodes of Crush On Radio. For him, streaming is convenient and a great way to discover new music. I’ve already outlined how the convenience of streaming is inconvenient for me, but discovery is an interesting problem. I tend to find new music through either seeing bands open at shows, browsing music review sites, or hearing about it directly from friends. Streaming might make life easier.

Problem is, when I last experimented with streaming music, I wasn’t terribly impressed with the discovery aspect. This was because discovering new music relied on using streaming like a radio station or jukebox, and not in the album-oriented way I listen to music. A streaming service could be a good backup for when I’m bored of what’s on my phone, or interested in dipping my toe into a new artist without putting out the cost of an album. I just don’t see that happening terribly often, and if I was going to stream with this use case in mind, iTunes Radio would be all I need.

I’m certain that I’m an outlier in how I get my music. Streaming music services fit the consumption patterns of the majority. That’s their strength, but their weaknesses overlap neatly with how I choose to listen to music. I’ll stick with paying $9.99 or so for albums of digital files, scrounging through the stacks at used record stores, and spending hours rebuilding the playlists on my iPhone so I have a regular selection of fresh music and evergreen favorites to choose from when I need something to listen to. So be it. The kids can have their streams, just keep them off my lawn.