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Two things happening

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this weekend.

  • I’m doing the bulk of my move. I’m doing the furniture and stuff with some friends next week, but this weekend I’m going to behave like a drone and shuttle all my books and the other contents of my apartment that can fit in my car over to the new place.
  • The St-Laurent Street Festival is on. In my neighbourhood, this is a big highlight. We marvel and feel superior that, twice each summer, they close down the main North-South street for about 10 blocks. For 4 days straight. So people can have fun. Really, it’s just a bunch of the local businesses selling junk off folding tables, and every bar and resto sets up on the street. Very much fun, and very “Montreal”. Today I bought socks (the street sale is also known as the socks and underwear sale) and two classic CDs – the Jayhawks first and Sloan’s first, Smeared. A classic of Canadian east coast pop that somehow I’d lost along the way. Oh, and I had a beer with a couple friends I bumped into and an oyster and a shot with some other friends I met.

Special report on dead trees and plastic:

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Wired reports today on publishers who are beginning to put whole books online. Finally. It’s taking a while, but these folks should get it eventually. What magazine or newspaper doesn’t put most if not all of its content online at the moment? Magazine sales are at an all time high. Newspaper ad revenues are rising. I have experience with this – a book I worked on was entirely published on the net before we compiled it, designed it, and put it on paper to sell in stores through St. Martin’s Press.

New Media don’t replace or even really threaten old media – they complement it. Maybe the RIAA and the big music companies will figure this out. Where they see a threat, they should see an opportunity.

But the RIAA is like OPEC just before the end of the oil shocks in the 70s. Eventually someone will defect like some giant game theory test case. They’ll figure out that McLuhan was right – the medium is the message… and the medium of a CD publisher isn’t little plastic disks, it’s the music itself, and the idea of the music. And that day they’ll license like crazy to value-added resellers and make money from the brand, not some bulky clear plastic thing in a jewel case.

They’ll be the only recognizable survivors.

Michael Boyle Blog