iTunes Match - Day X: 25.000 songs limit

Yesterday I bought a very nice REM Greatest Hits compilation from Amazon. 40 songs. After a while I noticed on iTunes in my "Recently Added" Playlist under the iCloud status column the new label "Maximum numbers of songs reached".
A brief google confirmed it: I was over the 25.000 song limit of iTunes and no more iTunes Matching for me.
I cleaned up my collection and brought it down to 24.500 songs. iTunes simply reread the songs and now matched also the REM songs into the cloud.
Anyone knows when this limit will fall?

eBay User Interface - Short short short

My continuing experiences selling on eBay.

After my disappointing experience with the mobile app, I went back to the Mac and tried to sell from there. 

The "Sell" form greeted me with the possibility to enter the EAN Barcode to identify the product. I located it and entered it. Next page brought me to the login. Entered that. After that I got a sales form. But the EAN article information was lost. Bad flow. 

Super bad flow: I am not able to enter the EAN number again. Now I needed to enter all the product information myself. 

Super super bad flow: After trying some more, I was able to switch from quick sale to normal sales form. Now I had the EAN number entry option again. Typed it in again. eBay proposed a category, selected that. Now the information was gone again and I had AGAIN to enter the EAN number for the third time. Completely unacceptable. 

Luckily the rest of the form was - as usual - straightforward and easy. 

eBay mobile app - long live the web browser!

Is eBay past its prime?

Had various disappointing experiences with eBay user interface today. As a market for everyone, I think the user interface is the business card for eBay. I hadn't had used the service for half a year or so and in the past had no problem with anything selling off surplus household stuff for 1 EUR starting price (toys, electronics, computer parts...).

Today, I tried to sell a DVB-T terrestial digital TV antennna. 

As I had my iPhone with me, I thought to sell it right off the cellar shelve, directly on the iPhone. Took a snapshot of the item. Started the eBay App. Walked through the first screens:

- Navigation nightmare: you never know where you are. You are entering data by tapping, but then have to manually go steps back until you are on the main "sales form" screen and then select the next topical item. The web experience is much better and straightforward (well, read my second article for some corrections)

- Photo nightmare: on the webpage I can simply take a photo and upload it. Not so on the iPhone. The app forces me to crop the photo to a square format, cutting off parts of the photo. Had I known this in advance, I would have taken a better composition of the picture. 2:0 for Web Selling

- Shipping costs: the selection of the shipping services was as on the web. However, on the web it let's me select the real price (which I know is 4,30 EURO). In the mobile app it presets to 2,00 EURO with no obvious way around this. And this then was the killer for me. I gave up and booted up the PC.

3:0 for Web Selling. Game over.

Hotspots Woe

My mobile phone contract offers a well meant but inaccessible T Mobile hotspot option. Problem: without pen and paper ready, it is impossible to copy and past the login details from the SMS with the credentials into the iPhone WLAN login screen:
Login and Password are too cryptic to memorize, so copy paste or writing down.
I cannot copy directly from a SMS so I have to copy the whole SMS into a text editor like Mail or Evernote.
I copy the login name into the WLAN screen. I change back to Evernote, copy the password, too late, the login screen is gone again.

I gave up and surfed through 3G.

The 11.000 song debate

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/19/npr-intern-gets-an-earful-after-blogging-about-11000-songs-almost-none-paid-for/  (with links to all original posts of the discussion)

There is an interesting push&shove going on (a mix of serious discussion and flame war) around  blogger Emily White who mentioned in a widely publized blog of US National Public Radio that she had around 11K of songs but only bought 15 CDs in her lifetime.
Probably most arguments have been exchanged by now and I have nothing to add but my own observations:


She is me -  my personal metrics are probably different from Emily's, all in all I have bought fairly more LPs and CDs, but I am from a different age and time. If you love music, you like to open up to music. So whether it is Emily's prom date giving her gigabytes of music or myself copying an Alice Cooper album from my school mate Stefan: both of us take what we get to widen our horizon and expand our listening experience.


It's the experience, not the industry - both, the music industry and the artists, are NOT getting it. We do not buy your LPs, CDs or MP3s because we want to ensure that your shareholders get their penny's worth or that you have dinner on the table at the end of the day. I repeat: we do not. We simply want to listen to good music that tickles our feelings and make us long for more. Maybe, when we were younger and more impressible, we bought the music because the singer wore fantastic dresses or really could make crazy dance moves. But in the end, the difference between Vanilla Ice Ice Baby and Madonna (to take a 1980ies example) was that we still like to listen to Madonna - good music always wins - and were able to sell our Vanilla Ice maxi single on the fleamarket for 50 cents. Of course we understand that there are economics involved but it is a non-deciding factor. We buy a car to get from A to B. The wellbeing of Detroit or Sindelfingen is a tertiary concern to us (maybe even lower).


Us music lovers were always doing what we are doing 
We are collecting music to the extreme.  Even when I only had a monthly allowance of 30 Deutschmark, I went to fleamarkets and bough 10 LPs at 3 DM each. Industry and artists never saw a cent of that and I was a 120 songs richer. I spend afternoons and nights with friends and we copied LPs on our cassettes - at the height of the analog collectors age the ratio of new retail LP purchase and fleamarket/radio recording and cassette copies in my teenage room was maybe one to three.  Dear Sir Paul McCartney, the only Wings album I ever bought retail was "Wings over America" and even that as a 15 DM cut-out. All the other works came through the fleamarkets of Hamburg. One of my best findings was a five-record "Chicago Live" LP set for 2 DM (admittedly the quality of the music was around 0,50 DM, but hey, it is about the experience).


11.000 songs is 110.000 songs is 1.100.000 songs 
My personal collection has close to 70 days of non-stop music. Just today my wife asked me: "What is this song you are listening to?" When I couldn't answer her, the comeback was "I thought this is your collection?". She has chosen the word that described my stack of LPs and CDs in the 90ies: a collection. With 11.000 songs or 25.000 songs and a prom date giving you gigabytes of music, you no longer have a collection - you have a heap of music! It becomes a different listening experience. It is no longer the album or the artist that counts. When you have 20+ Genesis albums in your possession from one day to another, you maybe get one song every week in your random music data stream, half of which you don't feel like listening to anyway - "next song". You no longer have the intimate relationship to the disc itself, it is the overall streaming experience.


It's the stream - not the song 
Any of the 11.000 songs in Emily's collection is available on Spotify. Even if she ruefully deletes all the shadily acquired 11.000 songs from her disk, she will be able to listen to the complete set on Spotify or their likes for free! For free! For free! What economics is behind that!


Hypocrites all around 
While we are at it: let's do some economics: Emily has 11.000 songs and paid 300 USD for it (I am generous here at 20 USD per CD). That comes down to about 3 cents per song. Dear Music Industry, let us take a look at your own contracts you made in the name of your artists:
http://www.metalsucks.net/2012/06/06/how-much-money-music-streaming-services-actually-pay-records-labels/
Not a single service pays more than Emily paid for her music!!!  Emily should be put on a pedestral for supporting artists so generously! She pays them six! times as much as our friends at Spotify. Remember this, when you look at your dinner tonight, David Lowery!

Both industry and artists should realize that the economics have changed for good - and if I look at the megadeals of Live Nation and other outfits, many artists have realized this.
QED - and with that, I rest my case.

 (I am a little bit polemic here, so do spare me any detail plucking apart of my arguments. I know I am right.)

Firework in the shape of your face

http://techland.time.com/2012/04/30/fireworks-of-your-own-face-never-has-81-29-gone-to-such-good-use/

Well, apart from the fact that this one is totally out of the weirdo-ballpark, I wonder how they came up with the idea? Did the pyroeffect company hire McKinsey & Company to come up with new ideas? They organised a brainstorm with management and common workers to find monetisation and marketing ideas.
Well, at least it brought them into time magazine.
Where I feel let down by Time Magazine is that they simply print this and publish online without a picture to prove it how it looks like.

Memory lane 1999: could I have become a dot.com millionaire after all?

Recently I cleaned out old brokerage records from the boomtimes of the late 90ies/early 2000. Like probably all of us around that time, I had traded in the in-stocks like Amazon, AOL, Dell, Cisco, Intel and CNET that showed infinite promise and riches (Apple at that time was of course a complete no-go as the most unexciting stock right after Philip Morris).

While I was looking at the sheets of buy and sell, I thought to myself: what if I had not traded but had done a simply invest-and-forget strategy. Could I have been a millionaire by now?

So let's take a look where I would stand today with a typical investment of 10.000 USD in each of those stocks from let's party 'til it's October 5th, 1999 (Stock splits already factored in, all before taxes, amounts rounded for simplification)

What do you think? Gain or Pain after 13 years? The answer after the break.



Amazon: Gain of around 19800 USD - the clear winner, the only solid company after 13 years with good returns.
Dell: Loss of around 6400 USD - well, WTF is Dell after the return of Apple and the resurgence of HP and Lenovo.
Cisco: Loss of around 5000 USD - Interestingly Cisco is still a major player in the Enterprise market, but clearly not from an investors perspective.
Intel: Loss of around 2100 USD - A company as strong as Intel, still around to kick butt, but could never make up the bubble burst.
AOL: Loss of around 7000 USD - Clearly the loser of our little game. The Time Warner debacle and failure to reinvent into whatever brought the medium of the masses into nothingness.
CNET: Loss of around 6500 USD - Close second. CNET had started out in the portal game with interesting subdivisions like Buy.com and Download.com but metamorphed into blogger and consumer advice platform in the first decade of the 2Ks before being snatched by CBS in 2008 (I factored that trade into the calculation). Hadn't CBS brought CNET, they would have come first loser in our little game. Saved by the old media bell!


You do the math. On the good side, I didn't need to have worried about the final outcome. Not a chance to become a millionaire, au contraire.  Bubble remains bubble, even after 13 years and the trench is still deep. Overall from an investment of then 60.000 USD, my today cash value would have been around 53.000 USD. When I factor-in inflation over that period my cash value would be even more meagre: 41.000 USD.

But interesting times, altogether. I remember sitting in a mid-town east Manhattan Steak restaurant for lunch, discusssing the heating of the market in April 1998, watching the ticker on the business channel and Pointcast (anyone remember that?).