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…and more.
The line to try Mailbox, the new iPhone app for managing your inbox, is long. Really, really long.
I signed up the day it went live in the App Store, on February 7, and finally made it to the front of the line this morning after two weeks of patient line-waiting.
While I was waiting, I’d occasionally open the app to see my place in the queue, and think — what if the line was real?
Imagine an ever-growing line of weary people fiddling with their phones, sprawling off into the distance. How long would the line be?
If you signed up right now, you’d find yourself at the end of a line with 807,896 people ahead of you.
They’re letting people in at a near-constant rate of 800 per hour, or just over 13 people per minute.
Let’s assume that people standing in line take up an average of two feet of space, from back to back with room for personal space.
The line stretches over 300 miles into the distance. To put it in perspective, that’s further than London to the outskirts of Paris. It’s 30 miles longer than Hollywood to Las Vegas. It spans from the Bronx to Portland, Maine.
But it’s moving! Slowly. At about 0.3 miles per hour. You’re shuffling along at just over five inches per second.
At the current rate, you’ll make it to the front of the line in about 42 days.
I hope you brought a charger.
After four weeks topping the Billboard Hot 100, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s “Thrift Shop” was replaced this week by Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” the song that inspired the Internet meme.
As I wrote last month, Macklemore is only the second unsigned artist in Billboard history to reach the #1 slot, the first in two decades.
And now, with a new #1, another record’s broken: Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” is the first song from a largely unknown artist to debut at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Since 1958, only 21 songs have ever debuted at #1. Of those 21 songs, only four were from artists appearing on the Hot 100 for the first time, all from artists with extensive mainstream media exposure — three American Idol contestants (Clay Aiken, Fantasia and Carrie Underwood) and a popular artist going solo (Lauryn Hill). Source: Billboard.
I’d wager this is another first: “Harlem Shake” is the only song to ever debut at #1 on the Hot 100 without significant radio or TV airplay. This is solely an Internet phenomenon, gone deeply mainstream.
This is in no small part because of major changes incorporating YouTube views into the Billboard Hot 100 formula, introduced this week in response to the viral success of “Gangnam Style.”
This week, a report surfaced that Nielsen will start tracking YouTube and other digital plays too.
Billboard and Nielsen are just acknowledging a long-overdue reality. Radio and cable aren’t the future, and if you’re focused on tracking them, you’re looking at an ever-shrinking window of behavior.
But seriously, who cares what Billboard and Nielsen think anyway? Aren’t the charts irrelevant? For most purposes, probably.
But like winning an award, chart success is a symbol of reputation. Recognition from a reputable source tracking sales or viewership opens doors for artists, especially important if you’re independent.
It’s one thing for Amanda Palmer to raise a million dollars from Kickstarter, but having her album debut in the Billboard top ten shows that there’s demand beyond her most hardcore early supporters. This gives her team the power to negotiate everything from distributors to concert venue contracts.
And when other artists see that indie artists can find legitimate mainstream success on their own, others will follow. This is already happening on a small scale, but it’s only going to get accelerate.
A couple weeks ago, I went to see Ben Folds Five’s reunion tour here in Portland:
Just saw an unsigned indie trio from North Carolina that crowdfunded their new album. These boys are going places! twitter.com/waxpancake/sta…
— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) February 6, 2013
I joked about it on Twitter, but I’m not sure many knew I was serious. The reformed Ben Folds Five is unsigned.
After releasing their first three albums on Sony, Ben Folds Five decided to fund their album on Pledge Music and release it independently.
They easily could’ve released it through a label — Ben Folds is still signed to Sony/Epic for his solo work and Darren Jesse through Bar/None. Why do it all on their own?
Playfic, my little interactive-fiction platform, turned one year old on Friday. I rounded up some recent news about it just last month, so I’m not going to retread that territory.
But I was starting to feel guilty about ignoring it, so I added some new tools for exploring the archive of 650+ games, sketches, and silly experiments.
You can now see the most popular games, all the games I’ve featured, the most recently published games, and my personal favorite, the games with the longest source code.
This surfaced a whole bunch of interesting games I hadn’t seen, so I freshened up the featured section with some new picks.
Playfic was always intended to be an experiment, yet another tool of creative expression and a quick way for people to experiment with Inform 7. I really wasn’t expecting much out of it, but I’ve been happy to see people slowly discover the community and find new uses for it.
Update: Releasing any platform for creative expression often comes with unintended consequences. For Playfic, one of the biggest surprises was seeing it used by educators, something I never intended.
Most recently, I just discovered this high school teacher using Playfic to teach interactive fiction in the classroom. I was a little stunned to see a room full of high school students playing interactive fiction for the first time on iPads, starting with Cooper’s first game:
Games being created by high-school students and played by high-school students. How awesome is that?
The undiscovered young talent gets their big break and a record deal, and soon realizes they were swindled by corrupt management and a major label.
It’s an old story, and a common theme that pops up in rock songs, often from well-established bands. (Though it seems especially common the ’70s.)
After writing about Macklemore’s “Jimmy Iovine” for my Indiepocalypse post yesterday, I stumbled on several more great angry songs about record labels. They didn’t fit into the post, but I still wanted to share them.
Graham Parker and the Rumour – Mercury Poisoning (1979)
I got a dinosaur for a representative,
It’s got a small brain and refuses to learn
Their promotion’s so lame,They could never ever take me to the real ball game
Listen, I ain’t a pet, I ain’t a token hipster in your Monopoly set.
I’ve got Mercury poisoning.
It’s fatal and it don’t get better!
The Clash – Complete Control (1977)
They said we’d be artistically free when we signed that bit of paper
They meant let’s make a lotsa money and worry about it later
I’ll never understand
Complete control, lemme see your other hand
I don’t trust you, so why should you trust me?
Nick Lowe – I Love My Label (1977)
Deeply sarcastic, Lowe tossed off this track to get out of his major label deal with United Artists.
Oh I’m so proud of them up here, we’re one big happy family
I guess you could say I’m the poor relation of the parent company
They always ask for lots of songs,
but no more than 2:50 long so I write ’em some
They never talk behind my back,
and they’re always playing my new tracks when I come along
Lynyrd Skynyrd – Workin’ For MCA (1974)
MCA signed the young band for a seven year deal for $9,000.
Oh, nine thousand dollars just to sow to the wind.
Come to smile at the yankee slicker with a big old southern grin.
They’re gonna take me out to California, gonna make me a superstar.
Just pay me all my money, maybe you won’t get a scar.
Want you to sign the contract,
want you to sign the date.
Gonna give you lots of money
Workin’ for MCA.
Sex Pistols – E.M.I. (1977)
In October 1978, EMI signed the Sex Pistols to a two-year contract, but dropped them only three months later. They were quickly picked up by A&M, and dropped less than a week later. Virgin finally released their debut in May 1977, their third label in six months.
Don’t judge a book just by the cover
Unless you cover just another
And blind acceptance is a sign
Of stupid fools who stand in line
Like E.M.I.
The Smiths – Paint A Vulgar Picture (1987)
World tour, media whore,
please the press in Belgium.
This was your life.
And when it fails to recoup?
Well, maybe you just haven’t earned it yet, baby.
In one sense, this is the ultimate first-world problem — successful musicians complaining about bad business deals. Then again, for decades, signing with a major label was the only game in town if you wanted to find success in the music industry, and the labels exploited that monopoly.
But overall, I tend to agree with Trent Reznor, who said, “I don’t set out to write songs about record labels. Nothing could be more boring—with the possible exception of writing about tour buses.”