Tuesday News: Spotify’s musical networks, Nielsen takes on video, romancing the motorcycle club, and Superman’s new look
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Other People’s Playlists: Spotify’s secret social network – Although I have the Spotify app on my phone, I never use it. But after reading this piece on the way Spotify “relates” songs and artists based on how people listen to them, I’m curious to get to know the service better. It struck me while reading this article that perhaps Spotify has tapped into one of the magical aspects of music – namely the way it’s both meant to be shared and can bring together people from completely different backgrounds and life experiences in a shared experience.
So their big cost isn’t maintaining an archive of music. So what does Spotify, which is valued at nearly $6 billion, actually do? Well, it organizes those songs, backs them up, and then deals with the frustrations of making them available over the Internet to 60 million human beings. Obviously one copy of the whole database can’t serve all those people, but it doesn’t make sense to keep 60 million copies, either. Finding the middle ground is an ongoing engineering challenge. And they need to account for bandwidth: Sending data over the Internet is still one of the more expensive things a digital business can do. Which leads to another back-of-napkin estimate: If compressed audio weighs in at between 2.4 and three megabytes per minute, and you have 60 million users listen to ten hours of music a month, that’s around 86 petabytes of data per month. Using Amazon Web Services’ calculator to estimate the costs, that might run you $4.5 million a month. –New Republic
Nielsen Explains How It’s Adapting to the Rise of Online Video – As the whole idea of television watching evolves, so must services like Nielsen, which both support and are supported by video content. Ironically, Nielsen is apparently selling even more to television networks these days, even though it does not have locked down the variety of ways in which people view rate-able content. Which may reveal the extent to which networks are scrambling to negotiate a changing landscape, as well.
There has been some Nielsen bashing at this season’s upfront, and there may well be more before we’re all done. Just to be clear, what is it that you can measure right now, what can you not measure, and what is a work in progress, in terms of video content?
We can measure live and time-shifted TV. We can measure ad-supported VOD and we can measure mobile viewing of video ads. The pieces that we are in the process of adding are, firstly, over-the-top viewing, which will be accelerated so that by the end of the year we will be able to include over-the-top viewing in ways that our clients demand. The second is the launch in September of the Digital Content Ratings, in partnership with Adobe. That will measure not only ad viewership, but viewership of the program. Media companies will be able represent the total audience of a particular program, no matter how it is viewed, by whom or on what platform or device. –Wall Street Journal
How a drunk guy on a motorcycle helped create the modern biker gang – When I saw this article I was reminded of a question on Twitter I saw recently about the origin of the romanticized motorcycle club. This piece traces the phenomenon to a 1947 article in Life Magazine about the still-famous motorcycle rally in Hollister, California, and some violence that erupted during the event. That article wound its way into the imagination of Hollywood producer Stanley Kramer, who made the Marlon Brando movie, The Wild One, in 1953, and on to this assessment:
The writer Hunter S. Thompson, in his book “Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga,” later blamed “The Wild One” for creating a new breed of American outlaws inspired by the good-guy, bad-guy characters in the film.
“The truth is that ‘The Wild One’ — despite an admittedly fictional treatment — was an inspired piece of film journalism. Instead of institutionalizing common knowledge, in the style of Time, it told a story that was only beginning to happen and which was inevitably influenced by the film. It gave the outlaws a lasting, romance-glazed image of themselves, a coherent reflection that only a very few had been able to find in a mirror,” Thompson wrote. –Mashable
DC COMICS DITCHES SUPERMAN’S COSTUME – On June 3rd, a new Superman will emerge in Action Comics #41 – if you want a sneak peek of his new look, check out the preview pages posted by Cosmic Book News. –Cosmic Book News
