On Rating Music

When set up properly, Smart Playlists in iTunes can be very powerful. Up until recently, I used them sparingly (a playlist just for Music Videos, for example). After reading up on what can be done with Smart Playlists, I decided to set some cool ones up in my library. There was a catch – rating music played a huge part in populating those smart playlists. I haven’t rated very much of my music over the years, so I had to make an effort to catch up. Once I started rating my music, I figured out why I hadn’t done it until now – I didn’t have a rating system.

Sure, there are 5 arbitrary stars, but what do they mean? What do I compare songs to, what context do I rate them in?  If I rate songs in my library by comparing them to all of the music out there, my music will come out with uber-high ratings. Everything in my library is better than the latest Rhianna or Britney Spears single, so if I rate my songs against those, my ratings are inflated – all of my songs will have a rating of 4 or 5 stars. This leads to a lack of variety in ratings and a non-natural distribution of ratings from 1 to 5. Because of this, I decided to rethink my scale. Consider this – for a song to be on my computer in the first place, it probably has to be a pretty good song. That’s why someone has songs in their library – they want to listen to them. Wanting to listen to a song makes them inherently “good”, so by that definition, every song in my iTunes library is “good”. With this in mind, I came up with a definite solution – I rate songs by context, not content. What do I mean by that? Well, here’s an outline of my system, with examples.

1 Star – This probably shouldn’t be in my library. I probably included it for completion’s sake (to have all of the tracks on an album, for example). Examples: Mötley Crüe – Glitter, Metallica – Escape.

2 Stars – I only really enjoy listening to this song when I’m in a certain mood. Example: The Smiths – Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want, Echo & the Bunnymen – Rescue.

3 Stars – Pretty good whenever I listen to it. Example: The Ben Folds Five – Kate, Led Zeppelin – Immigrant Song.

4 Stars – Great song; Probably one of the best on the album, or a cool single I bought from iTunes. Example: Death Cab For Cutie – Pictures In An Exhibition, Depeche Mode – Just Can’t Get Enough.

5 Stars – Classic. Transcendent, awesome, rad. Example: Arcade Fire – Keep The Car Running, Weezer – Island In The Sun, Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band – Thunder Road (or anything off Born To Run, actually).

Basically, a song’s rating is dependent on how often I will think it is good when I listen to it. In addition, my songs are only rated against each other, not all music. This way, my ratings aren’t inflated, and I have a relatively predictable spread of ratings between 1 to 5 stars. Now I just have to apply this system to rating the rest of my library. The fun begins…

Blu-ray Digital Copy

For a little while now, Blu-ray discs have occasionally come with what’s called a Digital Copy. This is basically a way for consumers to have a digital copy of the movie that they can use for watching on devices other than Blu-ray players (PCs with just a DVD drive, Macs, iPods, etc). The way the service works is that when you buy the Blu-ray you’ll either get a separate DVD-ROM along with it containing the video file itself, or a special authentication code that allows you to download the video file from the internet.

This sounds like a pretty good idea on paper, right? You can have another copy of the movie that makes it super-convenient to watch your movie on multiple devices. If only it were so simple… Once you get into the nitty gritty details of Digital Copy, it doesn’t seem that great:

The quality of the video is DVD (480i/p) at best.
The audio is only stereo (2.0).
Downloading an entire movie’s worth of video can be pricey for people with data caps (everyone in Australia, for instance).
No bonus features (directors’ commentaries, deleted scenes, documentaries, etc).
The video file will be DRM’d to hell (especially if you’re using a service like iTunes to download the video file).

Not so great any more, huh. In my opinion, the ideal situation is – well, the ideal situation is no DRM, no data caps, no physical discs, 100% uptime for downloads and rock-solid streaming of HD video over the internet to whatever device you want. In the meantime, Blu-ray is here to stay and by far the majority of consumers only have DVD players/drives in their computers. A good fix could be for studios to ship an actual DVD with the Blu-ray. By “actual DVD”, I mean exactly the same disc as you would get if you just bought the DVD release on its own. This way, the consumer can deal with ripping, encoding and converting the video themselves and tailor the digital copy that they make to their needs – users need to deal with streaming to different devices and creating different-sized files for different devices (a lower-resolution version of the video file for an iPhone, for example). This way, the consumer has control over things like that. If consumers aren’t hip to how to rip DVDs, then there can just be a free, simple application online that rips a DVD straight to a handy-dandy MP4 file that’s compatible with a lot of devices. Chances are if the consumer isn’t tech-savvy enough already to know how to rip DVDs, they won’t mind that much about what resolution/codec/audio format the movie is encoded in. The point is that we need a system that gives control of how the digital copy is made to the consumers.

This just in: pirating the movie is still the easiest way to get it. In some cases, it’s the only way to get it. If the film industry wants to kill piracy, they should make buying the movie the easiest way to get it – services like the iTunes Music Store and Amazon MP3 have shown us that people will pay for music if that’s the easiest way to obtain it. If Hollywood would just realise this, we wouldn’t have a need for crazy hacks to get around archaic Draconian DRM, or complex solutions to simple problems like watching a movie that we already own on an iPhone.

Biz Stone is Bill O’Reilly?

One of the most common approaches to building an application in recent times is a combination of Agile Design and Extreme Programming. The basic premise is this:

- get a prototype out as soon as possible

- iterate constantly to keep up with changes in design

In other words, get a product out, worry about other stuff later. Twitter was developed like this – it started out as a side project, but then became a big deal. Because of this, the amount of time the Twitter team spends on stuff other than iterating through designs of Twitter is almost nil. This is the kind of time that could be spent putting together a business model. When you look at it like this, Twitter’s approach to development (with respect to a business model) is reminiscent of Bill O’Reilly:

F**k it! We’ll do it live!

People are criticising Twitter for not having a business model, but I think it’s fine. Biz Stone said something in his Stephen Colbert interview last week that I thought was really telling of how Twitter works on the inside at the moment:

We’re recognising a difference right now… between profit and value, and we’re building on value right now.

This totally connects with me and with how I feel about designing and developing applications – worry about having a good product, and the rest will (hopefully) take care of itself. After all, isn’t it better to have a popular application that doesn’t currently have a way of making money than an unpopular application that you’re sure you can monetise if you just get a big-enough user base? It is, because you have control over how you can monetise something – you have no control over whether or not your audience thinks your application is cool. I’d rather take the popular application, because it’s probably easier to make money from something than make that same thing popular.

Of course, then the question becomes one of how you stay afloat while developing the product and not making any money – well, that’s outside the area of my expertise, but I know it’s probably a little bit easier when you’ve got $15M up your sleeve, a group of patient investors and a gargantuan user base.

Why Watchmen Won’t Do Well*

*At least, not as well as people expect it to. For now.

Currently, Watchmen has made $171, 988, 644 (USD) worldwide. That number doesn’t mean much in and of itself, especially if (like me) you don’t really follow how much each individual movie makes in the box office. From that number alone, it’s hard to tell if Watchmen is doing well, so, let’s do some comparing. It also seems unfair to pit Watchmen’s earnings against a movie that has already gone through a full box-office cycle, so let’s just compare opening weekend sales. I think Spider-Man 3 is a good movie to compare Watchmen to: to the general public (by far the majority of movie-goers), Watchmen is just another superhero and/or comic book movie like Spider-Man 3.

Watchmen’s Opening Weekend: $55, 214, 334

Spider-Man 3’s Opening Weekend: $151, 116, 516

So now we have a fair comparison, and we can say that Watchmen isn’t really doing that well. It’s a shame, since I think Watchmen is an awesome movie. The difference in sales figures between Watchmen and Spider-Man 3 (a worse movie in my opinion, and Rotten Tomatoes agrees with me) opens up an interesting question: why did Spider-Man 3 do better than Watchmen? That’s what I’m going to be talking about.

First of all: Watchmen has no bankable stars. Don’t get me wrong – I thought that Patrick Wilson, Malin Akerman, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jackie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup and Matthew Goode all gave phenomenal performances, but not a lot of people (myself included, pre-Watchmen PR announcements) have heard of them. My dad sees Nicholas Cage movies because Nicholas Cage is in them, and so do most of the movie-going world (insert your favourite A-grade box-office-smash actor). No Nicholas Cage in Watchmen means my dad (and the rest of the majority of the public) won’t see Watchmen.

Argument number 2 supporting my theory that Watchmen won’t make a lot of money: the trailers don’t give anything away. Most of the time, I would consider this to be a good thing – sometimes, trailers spoil for me the excitement of experiencing a movie wholly from start to finish. In this case, I think that more details were needed. We’re talking about a movie starring a team of superheroes that “no-one” (we’re still talking about the general public here) has ever heard of! How do you publicise a movie featuring characters no-one has heard of? Really push the plot, and make it really appealing. Again, I thought the movie rawked, but the trailer doesn’t really make a lot of people want to see the film. It’s just not a “this summer” trailer, which is what a lot of people see movies based on, unfortunately. However, I do really like the second trailer for the film, and wish that it had been the one that was pushed.

So Watchmen is a movie with no bankable stars, whose plot and characters are a mystery to by far the majority of people. What does this mean? It means that Watchmen shouldn’t be compared to movies like Spider-Man 3, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, and all of the other superhero and/or comic book adaptations that it’s being compared to. In all of the movies I just mentioned, the characters and plot are more obvious, not least of all because a lot more people had much more in-depth experiences with those franchises when they were young. That explains the first amendment to the title of this post: why Watchmen won’t do as well as people expect – it’s because people are putting Watchmen on the wrong platform, comparing it with movies that aren’t on the same level. Whether or not the movies Watchmen is being compared with are better or worse are a different matter.

The second part of the asterisk note was that Watchmen won’t do well for now. This one’s pretty simple to address – this is a geek movie. Geeks buy lots of stuff. They will buy this movie on Blu-ray, because it’s that kind of movie. Geeks (myself firmly included) love directors’ commentaries, they love bonus features, and they love it when subplots that were left out of the film get made into their own supplementary film. Watchmen was made to be released for Blu-ray. The gorgeous visuals from the film are just begging to be seen at 1080p. This movie-being-very-profitable-in-the-home-market-after-not-doing-so-well-in-theaters thing has happened countless times before – Jersey Girl did it, Joss Whedon’s Serenity did it, it brought Futurama back and it brought Family Guy back. I will certainly be doing my part by buying Watchmen on Blu-ray when it comes out. As an aside, it’ll be interesting how well Watchmen does on Blu-ray as opposed to DVD – it’s a known fact that Blu-ray is far from taking off, but I think that the Watchmen crowd and the kind of people who appreciate the quality of Blu-ray have a lot of overlap. Could Watchmen be to Blu-ray what The Matrix was to DVD?

Sorry to pull the ol’ switcheroo there – I started out by comparing two movies, talked about the reason for the gargantuan difference that arose from that comparison, and then told you that the comparison was worth null. I kind of built up a sand castle only to push it over. Go see Watchmen.