My article under the title Musical Battleground is in the arts section of the Christmas issue of The Spectator, out today. It covers the remixing potential of digital media, using the BBC Creative Archive and The Grey Album as examples. Here’s an excerpt: But are the products of this ‘remix culture’ any good? Though technology […]
Ideas and Essays
Bigmouth Strikes Again — Five Eight article
My article on word-of-mouth recommendations among music fans and playlist sharing is the cover feature in the August issue of Five Eight music business magazine. Here’s the introduction (written by Five Eight editor, Eamonn Forde): Word of mouth is a term passed around the marketing playground everyday. But in a culture where the marketplace is […]
Full article on the economics of consumer attention now available
Originally I published only a couple of paragraphs of my article on the The Economics of Consumer Attention on this site, as a ‘teaser’ for the full print article (published under the title One Recommendation Under a Groove). Since it’s now six months old, the editor of Five Eight, where it was published, has agreed […]
Teaching as performance
Doug Brent has written an interesting paper in last month’s First Monday on how historical trends are being played out in online education. He draws a distinction between “knowledge [or, more strictly, teaching] as performance and knowledge as thing” (emphasis in the original). Loosely speaking you could map this onto my process-versus-product distinction in e-learning. […]
Old singers, old songs
Yesterday I went to see the first of Linda Thompson’s three-night series of music-hall revue shows, which cited the Cole Porter quote, “strange how potent cheap music is”. Not just potent, but — at least in some cases — much more persistent than the disposable, ephemeral stuff it was thought to be. This comes at […]
What does On-Demand Media really mean?
This week Arbitron and Edison Media Research published a report of their research survey on Internet and multimedia usage, The On-demand Media Consumer. The headline result being quoted is that “One in ten Americans show a heavy preference to control their media and entertainment“. Reading the summary report, however, suggests that this conclusion is not […]
New learning styles for digital environments
Chris Dede has an interesting article in a recent issue of EDUCAUSE on how new generations are approaching learning in new ways as they take for granted web, email, instant messaging and mobile communications, distributed knowledge and associational webs of representations. He uses the term ‘neomillennial learning styles‘ though he is not using ‘learning styles’ […]
E-learning for music technology
Failures are interesting. It’s often said that we would learn more if we spoke more about our failures. But no-one really wants to look bad in public so they just publish their ‘little’ failures. Like this one, which didn’t crash and burn, it wasn’t aborted, or even stillborn, because it never got ‘fertilised’ and never […]
What’s wrong with e-learning: product and process
My posting yesterday turned into a bit of a rant in places, particularly on the subject of educational games. Today’s is part spill-over of that rant, and part explanation of it. Leaving aside the disingenuous and diffident aspects of smuggling learning under the cloak of ‘fun’, what I really want to say is that e-learning […]
Musical youth and middle-age spread
Is the cultural role of pop music maturing, or is it stuck in perpetual puberty? Has it usurped and squandered the ‘shop window’ profile that used to be reserved for more deserving artforms? Or is it just that, as it has moved into mainstream acceptance, it has lost its bite, its ability to express difference […]