The only things that I am excited about is the music…
Directed by David Fincher, music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. I loved what they did for The Social Network; get the soundtrack or the free 5 track sampler EP. If you agree with my musical inclination you should check out How to Destroy Angles.

To my mind Joe Anderson‘s performance in Across the Universe is a resume submitted for the roll of Kurt. He has the look, the proper age, and the voice—see for yourself.

So, do you agree?

The term “managing expectations” may be familiar to some but is probably not generally known. It is a common marketing term that refers to the practice of making sure the clients expectations for a product meet the reality of what can be provided so that there isn’t wide spread disappointment. As an example let’s take a group of people attending a conference. The conference provides several events that people can participate in which run the gamut from boring to extremely fun. Unfortunately not everyone can attend the fun event since there are not enough slots, in fact let’s say only around ten percent will be able to attend. The conference must now manage the expectations of the people by only hyping the average events so that only the people in boring events will complain rather than everyone not in the fun event.

For years the recording industry had brought in record breaking sales every year. The popularity of physical media was so high that it allowed them to go through two standards changes without losing ground; from records to tapes and from tapes to CDs. If the recording industry tried another change at this point it would almost be guaranteed an abysmal failure. The introduction of CDs was an incredible success due to their low cost production and high initial price point they made a great deal more profit per sale than ever before. Over the years the price per CD really hasn’t gone down and the profit expectations of the industry have become wildly inflated. Some would call the pricing collusion and extortion by the RIAA but the argument doesn’t really matter any more. Today the demand for physical media has severely declined leading to a sharp drop in profits. Everyone agrees that the reason is the Internet but very few people agree on the specifics whether piracy, iTunes, radio, etc.

It is not surprising, given the hit that profits have taken, that the RIAA is striking out to try to increase revenue from other aspects of its business. Recently they pushed for a extremely large increase in the royalties that Internet radio stations need to pay to play music. Unfortunately the planned increase is based on greed and is more likely to have an opposite effect on royalty profits. Most radio stations will immediately close their doors since they could not hope to be able to pay without going bankrupt. In protest, Internet radio stations went dark today showing solidarity on the issue. Given the power the RIAA has in the American political system the protest will likely fall on deaf ears but here is hoping.

I learned something about business when I was younger that I will never forget. “In a finite universe an economic model based on constant growth doesn’t make sense”. Yes it is a quote — by who you ask? David Suzuki. All business can only grow finitely before slowing and eventually contracting. There are of course various reasons for this but it is absolutely true; no exceptions. In the last few years the recording industry has seen its core business contract and the trend will continue. It is time for them to realize that physical media will only generate less and less profit and adapt by managing their expectations. The only problem is that it is almost impossible to manage your own expectations, especially for a corporation. I foresee a crash in their future and I can only hope that music as a whole will not suffer.

First off I only recognize Sebastian Foucan who plays Molaka in the new movie Casino Royale (my review), if you can help identify more post a comment. Foucan has been working with Madonna quite a bit on this last album. I have seen videos of him on stage with her during the tour and he is also in another previous music video called Hung Up. He is taking Free-Running to the masses using multiple media.

As far as Parkour is concerned the video starts off pretty well. We see several young men in a city environment. The camera takes in the sweeping urban vistas which of course include 5-15 story roofs on which the guys are jumping; pretty standard in the media treatment of Parkour. The guys start jumping and the video kicks off to the beat of Madonna’s “dance”. The first major event of note is a rather large Tic-Tac-Drop at 0:20s. “Nice!” I verbalized upon first watching it, I was hooked, “I wonder other Parkour they will include?”.

The beat picks up and we see Foucan do an underbar on an Asian archway followed by a jump over a rail and then a drop down stairs. The scenes are all disconnected with widely varying camera positions so it doesn’t really flow that well. I think they actually wanted your focus on the Karate Kid head band instead. We then hit a pointless pole climb/dismount by a guy wearing very anime ninja styled pants and footwear. The chorus then comes in and we move through a few more jumps from height and almost miss a crazy underbar along the ground at 0:55s that I have now watched about 15 times. I can’t imagine he made it back to his feet afterwards. After this it is pretty much downhill into the Free-Running zone. Some of the notable things include: ariel drops, pointless tic-tacs, break-dancing on a car, back-flips, a front-flip, etc.

By the half way point of the video my knees started to twinge in sympathy. Check out 1:36s, 1:45s and especially 1:49s, ouch. Essentially Madonna is capitalizing on the cool factor of the guys jumping as most scenes are only quick clips of the first half of a jump. Even given all of this I can vouch for the effectiveness of video. I immediately wanted to get out and run. Music and exercise are becoming tighter and tighter as hardware vendors and marketing firms turn their full attention to pair. The Nike+ system I mention previously is a good indication of that. I think I am going to add this track to my MP3 player.

Here in Waterloo, for some unknown reason, there is a huge amount of interference with the weaker Toronto radio signals. I drive around the city and on some days everything comes in crystal clear and its great. Other days I drive around and at all times there is a hint of static and certain points in the city cause either the entire channel to cut out or to become inaudible. As you can probably imagine this is very frustrating, especially when I am listening to my favourite program and its to a very interesting point in the story. Today the section of the show that had me very interested was regarding the early days of Nirvana when they had a drummer who wasn’t Dave Grohl or that other guy. I’ve always really liked Nirvana partially because of the music which is great and partially because of Kurt Cobain who was a true musician.

I’ve always lived at arms length from Toronto: Muskoka, Waterloo, Ottawa and St. Catharines. In all of those places except Ottawa I listened to the Edge and wished that they would crank up the signal so it would come in clearer. In the case of Waterloo I don’t really actually believe increasing the signal would overcome the interference. I’m just out of luck until I move on to another location or buy myself a satellite radio receiver (although I think I’m too cheap for that).