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Music + Technology + Random Nonsense from the Music Industry by Ethan Kaplan, VP Product, Live Nation

1

Perspective

Last night at the R.E.M. Tribute after party, I met a cardiovascular surgeon and a med student who were sitting near where I was, super excited to have met Michael Stipe and seen R.E.M. and others perform that evening. We talked about what I do for a living.

They said they were envious of me, as I get to do “these things” often (I don’t).

…

Come on now Dr. Cardiologist. YOU DO OPEN HEART SURGERY.

I am responsible in my tenure in music for keeping Paris Hilton’s site online, among other things.

You win.

3

Things that shouldn’t happen…

Life seems to prepare you for certain things just in the practice of living. Included of course are events happy, sad and most often somewhere in between, the bittersweet. Life does not prepare you for tragedy however. I don’t think anything does.

Last week our family was effected by something tragic. Something that shouldn’t have happened, but something that did. Its now left for our family to pull together and figure out how to process it, deal with it and hopefully find the strength with each other and within us as a group to move on.

We often exaggerate small concerns into big issues. Hyperbole applied to work, social structures, economic issues, politics, gossip and the small issues of life in general. Some things push our reset button and make us reevaluate what is of consequence.

Life in the end is how we deal with all aspects that define it. Birth, growing up, moving on and ultimately leaving.

This week geeks converge on Austin to talk about how special everything we do is. I’m among them.

Before we do this though, I hope everyone appreciates what they have, even in the absence of it maybe being exactly what they expected. Nothing resets your perspective faster than things not going as they should.

But in the end we’re only as strong as our will to keep living forward.

6

My Thoughts on the Kindle 2

I have always been a voracious reader, since I was a child. If you go to my parents house, my mom recently organized all the books and there are at least two copies of nearly every one. Hard back and paperback, or multiple paperbacks. Why? I destroyed the originals, or often we lost them and had to rebuy them.

Books to me was a sure way of staving off boredom. I’d read during classes, on trains, in the car with my parents, on airplanes, wherever.

And books are a huge pain in the ass.

They weigh a lot, they fall apart, dogs chew on them, they take up space and they are in general not attractive to have around a house. We in fact, have no book shelves in our house for this reason. Dusty, chew toys and ugly.

Enter the Kindle 2.

The Kindle 1 was an embarrassment, I felt. I knew quite a lot of people with them, but they didn’t show them off. They hid them. They apologized for its very being: “Yes, it’s ugly, but I get a lot of reading done. It wasn’t a device you displayed proudly. It was like lugging a Commodore 64 around with you and explaining why you need to play Commander Keen in its original glory.

I got the Kindle 2 however, and it is one amazing device. It looks good, feels intuitive, is easy enough for my dad to use and “Just works.” And not only that, it has me reading a lot more. A few notes on it:

  1. The device fits into an average computer bag very nicely. It takes up as much room as a bigger moleskin, the charger is nice and small and it you don’t notice it’s weight. With the leather case, it is durable.
  2. I read faster on the device. True: without the overhead of turning pages, keeping the book open, ink and hard covers, I can blaze through a book at about 1.5x the speed I used to.
  3. It works really well on airplanes. United Airlines, in their infinite stupidity don’t have three prong power on most of their planes, except PS flights. This limits me to about 1.5 to 2.5 hours on the MBP, but a whole flight + some on the Kindle.
  4. It is the ultimate boredom machine. Hospital waiting rooms, meetings, whatever. My iPhone is still the go-to for this, but the NY Times and KindleFeeder + some books on the Kindle also works really well.
  5. I’m rediscovering discover of books again. I have a habit of rereading books ad infinitum because I don’t like the time, space and money investment of having to buy something that might not be good. Now I only have time and money to be concerned with, which for me is easy to deal with.

Now what can be improved? The screen could be better, benefitting from more contrast. It is also prone to having hotspots in certain types of direct lighting (ie, on an airplane). A color screen would be amazing provided the resolution and contrast where high enough. The thumb controller is a bit too imprecise for my liking, and often I will press up instead of inwards to select. The overall speed of the device is sometimes wanting, but it is fine for the most part.

I also really wish Amazon had an “upgrade” program of sorts for books, so that I could get books I already bought on the Kindle for a small fee even.

And one more thing. What can the Kindle teach the music business?

The fundamental thing I think it teaches us is that the user-experience matters just as much as the user’s desire for the content. If the Amazon store and method of getting content to the device wasn’t as good as it is, there would be an MP3 problem. I also think that for the most part, people will put user-experience for themselves as high as a commodity as the device itself.