Every so often a hue and cry goes up because some TV channel (usually HBO) doesn’t release their shows on iTunes or Amazon or somewhere they can be purchased digitally. There are arguments about the media companies leaving money on the table or “forcing” consumers to get the show illegally. There has been enough written about those arguments as is.

One thing I haven’t heard is not how much money the companies are losing now, but how much they may be losing in the future. The longer popular shows are not available for easy purchasing shortly after airing, the more people will learn how to acquire them illegally (torrents, usenet, etc.). One of the innovations of Apple’s iTunes music store and why it worked so damn well was that it hit a balance of ease of access and price. Songs were 99¢, albums were $9.99 and you could find almost anything on there (with some glaring omissions, any of which have been remedied). How much was that balance influenced by how easy it had become for people to illegally acquire music? How much more could they have charged if less people knew how to fire up LimeWire or Napster or what-have-you and just start downloading music?

I wonder if, by not having popular shows quickly and easily available, if some media companies (such as HBO) are crippling their industry as a whole by dropping the price that will be considered acceptable by customers as more and more of them learn how and where to illegally acquire the shows they want to watch. The price people pay for media is dependent on how irritating it is for them to find and acquire it illegally. The easier illegal downloading becomes and the more widespread the knowledge how to do it becomes, the cheaper legal channels will have to sell those shows to compete. That may not affect the withholding companies immediately, but may affect those who are trying to sell their shows digitally (including the withholders when they decide to do so in the future) by forcing down the acceptable market price for digitally distributed shows.

Right now iTunes and Amazon sell TV shows (what shows are available) for around $3 for HD and $2 for SD and offer an easy way to buy those shows. Netflix has a smaller catalogue but its buffet-style consumption strategy is another approach. What they are selling is ease of access - not shows themselves. The shows are free if you are willing to go through the hassle to torrent them. Paid competes with free by providing a better experience. Not having the popular shows available is the epitome of poor experience¹. If customers have to go to non-legal channels to get the shows they want because they aren’t for sale through legal channels² and find all of the other shows they could buy there as well, why should they go back to the legal store and buy those shows? All of a sudden, the ease of access starts to swing more towards the illegal channels, so the legal channels will have to reduce their prices (or maintain existing prices longer) to compete.

That makes a less profitable environment for all the media companies, both those selling digitally now and those who will have to eventually.

I like Bandcamp.

I hunt for music on there all the time. I’ll somtimes spend evenings just wanding through their discover muscic feature and either bookmark bands to look at later or just buy some new music to listen to. I enjoy supporting independant artists and Bandcamp makes it easy to listen and buy from them.

This morning I was doing just such an exploration after having found Metal Bandcamp and going through their archives. I ended up with 14 different Bandcamp tabs open alone, not counting the half-dozen other tabs I had open for other reading. I was listening to music from one of the tabs in the background (specifically Temple - Steps of the Temple) and after finishing reading on another tab wanted to go back to it. I wasn’t sure which tab/band I was listening to and started to skim through my tabs when I noticed this:

When you start playing music Bandcamp edits the webpage’s title to add a little playing icon to it so you can easily find it later. That is a great little UI touch and the kind of polish in an application that reinforces the feeling of quality.

Over on Heavy Blog is Heavy they had a thread on Top 50 albums and encouraged their community to create their own Top 50 listing using a creative little site. I figured I would share what I put together for my own list.

So I’ve been having a problem with external drives continually ejecting over and over again immediately after mounting. After replacing a drive and still having the same damn problem I’ve finally figured out the problem.

Spotlight.

The problems were being caused by Spotlight’s indexing of the external drives. I don’t know why spotlight is causing the issue, but after excluding the external drive from Spotlight’s index, the problem stopped occurring.

You can exclude the drive from Spotlight’s index by going to System Preferences → Spotlight → Privacy and click the + sign at the bottom and add your external drive (assuming it stays connected long enough for you to do so - it can be a timing game).

Then I disconnected the drive for a few days and Spotlight forgot that I told it to not index the drive and restarted ejecting it again. I had to go back into the Spotlight preference pane and exclude the drive again.

Caveat

If you tell Spotlight not to index a Time Machine drive, it will politely tell you to go screw yourself. I ran across this because my external drive is split between an archive drive and my Time Machine backup, so the drive kept ejecting for a while.

In my case, I let it run when I left for work and eventually (I guess) Spotlight finally indexed whatever was causing it to eject and the problem went away. Since doing this, I haven’t had any problems.

Here are links to a bunch of the stuff I recommend with the iPad. Most of it costs money, I don’t use a lot of free stuff (I’d rather pay for no ads and higher quality).