Category Archives: music

Made to Stick

First things first, this really is a great book. I’m not done with it yet, so my review will be for sometime soon. This is more about a curiosity, as the book reminded me of a classic Stones album.

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Was it the ‘stickiness factor’ of both products? Well, it wasn’t actually. ‘Made to Stick’ reminded me of ‘Sticky Fingers’ because of the 3D effect on both. You probably have to be thirtysomething (or older) to know this so as a reminder for the others, the ‘Sticky Fingers’ vinyl album actually had a real zipper on the front (designed by Warhol). The duct tape on ‘Made to Stick’ is not real (nor is the cover designed by Warhol) but the effect is definitely there.

It’s just a curiosity as I told before, most important, both the album & the book are rocking! Seems like Boing Boing likes the cover of the book as well by the way.

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Zunely in Belgium

Together with my new PC, I’m finally on the Vista RTM and not on RC1 anymore. This meant that I could install my Zune after it had been lying here for almost a month apart from the occasional FM radio usage. Now I got all my music (ripped CD’s), images and movies on there and I quite like it. One thing is a petty, and that won’t change that soon here in Belgium, that is that there’s not too much music sharing going on… or as Gizmodo called it: I’m so Zunely.

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Welcome to the social!

Yesterday I got an early Xmas present: a Zune. I had the intention to get one anyway to find out how it compares to the iPod, I wanted to know how Microsoft (my employer) is going to compete in this space and you can’t do that only by reading the reviews (at least that’s what I think).

First of all, it compares in no way to the ‘what if Microsoft designed the iPod package‘ opening up the Zune package. It’s quite funky. Something that sort of surprised me as well is that the Zune has some battery power already when you open up the package so you can turn in on right away. It’s no big deal, but if you’re like me you like to start playing with your gadgets right out of the box so I liked that.

One issue I knew I was going to have was the lack of Vista support for the moment. Luckily just yesterday Microsoft pushed out a new firmware update for the Zune that new supports Vista as well. Well that feeling lasted for about 5 minutes, until I found out it only supports the Vista RTM and I’m still on Beta 2. A new pc with the Vista RTM is on it’s way so I guess that I’ll just have to wait a little bit longer then.

Anyway, My iPod is empty since yesterday evening and I can’t upload it here so I’m playing with the Zune radio features to get some music while on the Eurostar and I must say that works quite well. Hopefully my new pc arrives soon so I can discover all of the Zune’s functionalities. I’ll let you know what I think of it ;-)

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Mad World

Gears of War seems to be scoring incredibly good on all fronts. It started with the reviews that gave very high ratings, like the 9.4 on IGN for instance. Then GoW became the fastest selling Xbox 360 title with 1 million copies sold in 2 weeks. And yesterday Joystiq reported that “Mad World”, the song used in the GoW commercial hit the n°1 spot in the iTunes charts.

This is definitely one of those examples where all elements are in place. Great game, great advertising, great buzz, … Meet you in this mad world, my gamertag is krizmaiaz.

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Get more out of Pandora

Lifehacker has a good article with 15 tweaks to Pandora, the music discovery engine. Ever since I first discovered Pandora about a year ago or so, I enjoyed what the service had to offer and found out about some cool new artists I had never heard of before.

One thing I would add to the list is that I think you best keep your ‘channels’ a bit in the same genre. This way the songs you explore aren’t just mix of all the music out there.

If you want to experience the channels I’ve created and listen to, here they are:

If you haven’t tested Pandora yet, now’s the time. Sit back and relax.

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Radio is dead. Movie theatres are next.

At least that’s what I read at Digg today. I couldn’t disagree more. First of all I’m not sure if radio is dead at all. It sure has got a serious hit, but webradio, FM build into MP3 players and stuff, it looks like radio is still very much alive… although especially with webradio, not in it’s original form. At least food for discussion.

But enough a radio. The comment about movie theatres is worse, that is just not true, no discussion about it. The thing with music – buying cd’s versus downloading the songs from iTunes or any of it’s legal and illegal competitors – is that the experience in the end is the same: you can listen to songs at home, on the road, etc. With movies, it’s definitely not like you will go less to the cinema because you can watch a full movie on your little iPod screen. Even watching on your pc screen doesn’t compare with a +200m2 THX experience.

I’ve worked in cinema for 7 years on the marketing departement and we saw a decline when DVD and home cinema came around. Bringing a little bit of the cinema experience to your home clearly had a bigger impact than VHS ever had. And I don’t think downloading movies from iTunes will come close to that. I love what they did to music, but you can’t compare that easy with movies I think.

Last but not least, and this also became clear when I worked for Kinepolis, most people downloading movies from the internet (using whatever legal/illegal service) are not going to the movies in cinema anyway. So not a big loss either as you can see.

Movie theatres are next? Think again.

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