It wasn’t too long ago that I found myself standing in the Las Cruces, New Mexico desert. It’s the second largest city in New Mexico, though you’d never really guess that from the largely deserted landscape (no pun intended). It’s not exactly a ghost town, but it has a serene old-school western feel to it that I haven’t really seen duplicated by many cities, especially those claiming to be large. To its credit, the city has a few Starbucks, a Wal-Mart, a Home Depot, a university – all the things you’d expect in any fair sized city. But standing out there on the airfield at the Las Cruces International Airport watching experimental rockets float on the horizon, I couldn’t help but think I was on some other planet.

I left that world behind a few months ago to pursue my music passion, but over the past few days I’ve had a chance to revisit that excitement and fervor, watching the 2009 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge webcasts. I’m not going to toot my own horn too much here, I know what I accomplished while I was at X PRIZE and I’m proud of it. But more than that, I’m proud of the efforts of the entire team that has pulled this off for yet another great year. The buzz, energy, and rabid fan behavior is something that is rarely seen for such an event. Such fanaticism is typically reserved for significantly more popular events, like sports or concerts or the Oscars.

Anyone who has ever watched a rocket fly (light that candle!) will tell you that there is nothing that can possibly prepare you for its brilliance. Sure, we watch planes take off daily. There’s a helicopter floating over my neighborhood on a nightly basis. But a rocket… now that’s a horse of a different color. What sets a rocket apart from an airplane takeoff is the frequency at which it happens, and the regularity with with we view these things.

What I think we’re seeing here, for perhaps the first time, is the rapid adoption of interest in an otherwise unpopular scientific endeavor, based solely on its accessibility. NASA TV deserves some credit for giving it a good go. The channel has been available through cable for an awful long time. I admit I’ve been victim to countless hours of slowly beeping nearly static shots of spacecraft orbiting the Earth. But the general public never really got excited about it. This has all changed, very, very rapidly.

The launches of Armadillo Aerospace, Masten Space Systems, and Unreasonable Rocket are not only a true testament to the ability of man to overcome the limitations of this planet, but a testament to the ability of the web to tap an otherwise underinformed and undermotivated public. A generation of couch potatoes in front of a television never really caught on to the wonders of aerospace engineering, but I can watch as hundreds and thousands of people gather to see a couple of guys launch a rocket they built in their garage with just a little elbow grease and a dream. It may not be the audience of a space shuttle launch, but it warms my heart to know that we’ll have something to cheer for when those finally end.

Although very few things can compare to seeing a rocket take off in person, I’m happy to enjoy it from the comfort of my own home. I’m happy to follow the Twitter updates directly from the teams launching. And I’m happy to see the countless people chattering in rapt anticipation, white knucled with nails chewed clean. I wish everyone involved the best of luck. And to all those watching at home, from a former evangelist, keep fighting the good fight. Your interest makes all the difference.

[Note: this is cross-posted from another blog I write on. I've made a few changes here to make it audience-relevant]

I’ve made a lot of fuss lately about vinyl, mostly because I’ve been buying a lot of it, but also because the format is showing new life.  Vinyl sales in 2008 were up 147% over the previous year according to the RIAA, the only physical format to show any positive growth at all.  My reasons for buying vinyl are numerous, and I’m going to attempt to list them here.

1. I stopped buying CDs in 2002. I am not going to lie, I haven’t bought a new CD in 7 years. I won’t go too in-depth on the reasons for this, since it’s enough material for an entire book. The gist of it is that I became disillusioned and upset around that time, and just stopped. I’ve bought some used CDs, and I will sometimes by a CD directly from the artist, but I haven’t bought a new CD at retail in a long time.  And so I turned to vinyl.

2. I download a lot of music. I do this through a number of different channels. The options are many – from Amazon to iTunes to Lala to a variety of less legal methods. For the most part, this is still my preferred method of listening to music due to its accessibility, portability, and searchability.  Most, if not all, of the new music I discover is through digital channels and recommendation systems.  Because I download a lot of music, CDs have become less and less important to me, and vinyl has filled that void.

3. There is a lot of used vinyl out there. I’m lucky enough to live in a gigantic city with a few outstanding record stores, almost all of which sell used vinyl for cheap. There’s Amoeba Music, the undisputed heavyweight champion of independently owned stores. But there’s also The Record Surplus, a great little westside spot that has an incredible selection of classic vinyl. Typical used vinyl prices are less than 5 bucks a record, with many only a dollar or less. Rare vinyl is typically pricey, though I just snagged a couple of double-disc Prince original pressings in excellent condition for less than 10 bucks each.

4. It just sounds better. I’m not going to debate this. It’s not worth arguing, it’s a matter of taste. And I like the sound of vinyl better.

5. Vinyl is beautiful. It’s really hard to argue with the fact that album artwork looks better in a bigger format. I’ve yet to buy a record that I didn’t want to just stare at. And with vinyl packages starting to rival the CD deluxe boxes, you can get cool shit like colored/clear vinyl, crazy box sets, poster inserts, sleeve art, etc.

6. Some record companies are getting it right. I’m proud to work at a record company that ships more vinyl than any of the other major labels. But we screw a couple things up: no digital versions included with most of our records. There’s a subsidiary of my label, though, that gets it very, very right: Nonesuch is a former avant-garde label that has branched out significantly into jazz, rock, and world music, and gets vinyl absolutely 100% right. How? The majority of vinyl releases come with a CD, and all for just slightly higher than the retail price of the CD alone. Typical releases are 17 dollars. The beauty of this: I can do anything I want with this music. I don’t have to record the vinyl to MP3, don’t have to download 320kbps if I really want V0 or FLAC, and I can put it in my car or on my iPod. It’s really the best of all worlds for a pretty reasonable price. I’ll settle for a download card, but the CD is a really nice touch. Some other labels, like Anti, do a really cool thing: the download card that comes with the album can be shared with up to 5 other people. Record labels take note: these are major incentives for me to buy your album on vinyl.

7. There’s something really fun about vinyl. Maybe it’s the engagement factor: you have to care about that music enough to flip it over when the first side is done. You have to carefully place the needle if you want to hear a specific song. You can’t put it on shuffle. You have to cock your head sideways while staring at your shelf to find what you’re looking for. All of this goes contrary to what I said in point 2 above, but I always like to have a bit of balance. It’s not so much nostalgia (I may be young, but I still had vinyl before cassettes and before CDs), and it’s not so much about snobbery (though I admit I am one). It’s about the fetishistic physicality of vinyl that can’t be duplicated by 1s and 0s on a hard drive. And don’t get me started on how much I enjoy digging through crates at record stores…

8. I don’t buy all of it. I started working at a record company three months ago, and have instantly amassed a plethora of new vinyl releases. It is, far and away, the single best thing about working at a record label.

9. The vinyl community is undeniably awesome and simultaneously completely nuts. Don’t believe me? Go to a record fair sometime. It’s as if the comic book guy from The Simpsons got a Rush record from his brother when he was in high school and decided his path to obscurity would be much more fun with a little rock and roll.

10. I inherited my parents’ vinyl collection. Forty five years worth of great recordings, mostly 60s and 70s rock bands, but with some serious gems. I’ve got nearly all the Zappa albums, every single Beatles album, and my dad was even kind enough to buy a couple of Captain Beefheart records in his glory days. Digging through these stacks has not only given me a completely new appreciation for my parents, but a glimpse into the record collecting of years past.

From the Sunday New York Times, which I read on my Kindle this week, and am thoroughly enjoying:

Puzzle-solving may be unproductive “in that Calvinist, get-in-the-crops sort of way,” but that’s part of the appeal. “There is, I think, something decadent about flaunting our mortality that way; about saying, by implication, look at me, I believe I have so much time on earth that I’m going to spend the next hour doing the acrostic in the Sunday Times Magazine. But what would be the point of a pleasure that wasn’t a little bit decadent?”

via Up Front – Michael Cunningham – NYTimes.com.

I don’t work in e-commerce. Well, not exactly. For all intents and purposes, I work in promotion. And I guess in some ways that means I sell stuff, so in a sense, yes, I work in e-commerce. Anyway, there’s this thing that’s been bugging me for a long long time, and now that I’m working at a record label, it bugs me even more – mostly because I still don’t have the slightest inkling of an answer.

How in the hell are music prices determined?

Let’s look at a little case study here: the new album by Bill Frisell, Disfarmer (I won’t review it here, but this album is pretty sweet). The album came out just a couple weeks ago, and was released in both CD and a few digital formats (read on).

Now first, let me point out something before we go on: this is not a mainstream album. It’s jazz, it’s a little on the avant garde side, and frankly will never hope to compete with the Jonas Brothers. Because of this, one would expect that the album may be priced differently than your typical Walmart 10 dollar albums. Actually, I’m sort of surprised that Walmart carries it at all, but that’s really another article altogether. I digress.

Anyhow, let’s take a look at all the different ways you can buy the album, and then I’ll discuss how absolutely bizarre these pricings are.

Straight from the label
Disfarmer was released on Nonesuch Records, a part of Warner Bros. Records, and is available directly through the Nonesuch store. I should point out that the Nonesuch store is really an incredibly resource for anyone interested in modern jazz or classical recordings from the last 50 years or so. Nonesuch has always been one of my favorite labels, and I’m really excited to be working alongside them.

The Nonesuch store sells Disfarmer in the following formats:
$14 – 320kbps MP3
$16 – 320kbps MP3 + CD

Amazon.com
The album is available in both CD and MP3 from the respective parts of the Amazon site, at the following prices:
$11.99 – 256kbps MP3
$12.99 – CD

iTunes Music Store
Available in the proprietary Apple AAC format, DRM free
$13.99 – 256kbps AAC

Brick and Mortar Stores on CD
The album is available on CD in a variety of stores. Here are some of the prices I’ve found:
Walmart – $14.88
Best Buy – $13.99
Target – $12.99

Why the pricing differences? Well, for starters, price fixing is not legal. List price for the CD is $18.98, but in order to remain competitive, these gigantic retailers buy huge volumes, for a lower unit price. Giant retailers also have the ability to retain a stock of these discs for quite some time at very low marginal cost.

But that doesn’t explain the oddities in digital pricing. I can buy a 320kbps MP3 version – the “highest quality” MP3s available, in quotes because it is almost the data contains redundant or extraneous information, and for the average listener is indistinguishable from V0 or even 256kbps formats – directly from the label that released the album for 14 dollars, the highest price for a digital format among the three retailers offering. iTunes’ price is only one cent lower, comes in a lower bitrate, and is encoded using Apple’s proprietary AAC format (although it is DRM free). Meanwhile Amazon offers the lowest price, just 12 bucks, in 256kbps MP3 format.

We seem to be forgetting one very very important detail here: if you buy the CD, you can make your own digital files, in any format/bitrate you want. The pricing here would suggest that the album is being pushed in its physical format before the digital format. After all, I can get the album for just a couple bucks more, and even download the digital files instantly so I can listen while I’m waiting for the CD to arrive in the mail.

I’m all for choice, and I believe that retailers should be allowed to sell products as they wish, so long as they aren’t doing anything unfair or unethical. But something seems extremely counterintuitive here. Logic would suggest that if I buy the music directly from the label that created it, the overhead on that purchase would be less, and the artist would get paid more (in reality, it’s a lot more complicated than that, but let’s assume this to be true). Why, then, is the label’s price the highest of any retailer, in both physical and digital formats? Most likely it is due to volume of sales. Yep, the sheer number of transactions made by third parties (aka middlemen) makes the price lower, and therefore the vast majority of sales result in lower payouts to the label and artists (at least this is what logic tells us).

This complicates what I believe to be the cardinal rule dictating the sale of music today:

Fans want to support the artists they love, but will almost always opt for convenience and competitive pricing.

In many cases, of course, the convenience/price factor leads fans to pirate the music. But those who choose to legally purchase the music have only a couple of choices: they can pay more to support the artist, or opt for the convenience of online music stores and their lower prices.

There’s something very important at play here: the public fundamentally distrusts the middleman, whoever that may be. Given an option, I’d bet most fans would buy the CD at a show rather than buy it from Walmart. And I’d bet fans want to buy digital direct from the artist, and not iTunes.

I think there are about a hundred and one other factors that go into this pricing, but I, like most music fans, remain absolutely baffled by it. And as a savvy consumer, I always want to explore my options before I buy anything. Personally, I’ll still take this on a case-by-case basis, depending on price, availability, and a few other factors (I’ve recently been on a vinyl kick, and love the vinyl+MP3 options on many new releases).

How do you feel about this? Would you rather buy the physical copy and make your own digital versions? Do you opt for the lower priced MP3 options? Would you prefer to order directly from the label rather than Amazon or iTunes? Leave your thoughts in the comments.