MySpace Music: Why limit it to majors?
But there was always a major gap: if we wanted to sell downloads, CDs, or anything else, we had to guide fans to another site or service, such as our own home page with a PayPal account or CDBaby.Today, MySpace announced a deal with three of the four majors (EMI is sitting out for now) to offer DRM-free MP3 downloads, ringtones, and merchandise through the artist pages on MySpace. This is long overdue: the music industry needs to go where their fans already are, and with 30 million people regularly listening to music on the site, it's a mystery why the labels haven't tried to reach these folks before now.But major label acts are a small part of the MySpace experience. The only reason you ask The Police or Death Cab to be your "friend" is to show off your impeccable taste to your real friends, the individuals and small-time artists who you're actually connected with. These are the folks who leave individualized comments on your page and send you instant messages, and their gigs appear right alongside Radiohead's on your home page. MySpace is the ultimate long tail site for musicians, where bar bands and small-town heroes can appear in the same context as the biggest bands in the world. So I'm not sure that MySpace Music will be a game-changer. Fans of big bands already know where to buy merchandise--the band's Web site, or Amazon's CD section, or iTunes, or their local retail store. Sure, big fans who count major-label acts among their "friends" might now stay within MySpace to buy new songs from these bands, and some MySpace users might discover (and buy music from) new acts via friends of friends. But a lot of fans don't know (or care much about) the difference between major and independent artists, and might wonder why only some acts make their wares available for purchase. The inconsistency will be confusing, and drive users back to the traditional music-buying sites (or free file-trading services, which aren't going away).The real game-changer comes when MySpace offers a full e-commerce store--downloads, CD sales, the works--to every artist with a musician's page on the site. That way, users would never have to leave the site to buy any music they heard on the site. The challenge would be building the infrastructure, but once things like billing and provisioning downloads are in place for the majors, it might not be much harder to set up a CDBaby-like system for everybody else.
Beautiful Tengami papercraft game plays like a dream
Beautiful Tengami papercraft game plays like a dream
Sometimes a game comes along that urges you to take your time -- to soak up the gorgeous atmosphere, explore the world, and solve puzzles at a leisurely pace. It's about the journey, not the finish line.The Room is one such game. Year Walk is another. And now we have one more to add to the list: the newly released Tengami from Nyamyam.And yet, Tengami isn't quite like any game we've seen. It's based on the idea of a pop-up book and set in a sort of mythical feudal Japan. You control a young Japanese man -- although the actual details of the plot remain to be unfolded as the story progresses, with very minimal exposition and even fewer directions. It plays out, in fact, a bit like a dream: you unfold the landscape and wander through it, solving puzzles and collecting items to advance to the next stage of the story. And everything works as it would in a pop-up book: tabs that can be pulled allow you to removed obstacles and move items, and standing on glowing portals allows you to turn the page, collapsing the current scene and reopening the next. Nyamyam Each action, and each puzzle, needs to be figured out by you -- first, what the puzzle actually is, and then what you have to do to solve it. A series of four chimes, for instance, needs to be rung in a particular order, but the game gives you no clues as to what that order might be. Meanwhile, there's not a single flaw in the aesthetic execution. Your character, when turned sideways (or facing toward or away from you, since he is viewed from the side), all but disappears -- he is, after all, made of paper. Each environment collapses perfectly; you can easily imagine the scenes crafted out of real paper, and, in fact, they could be.Related storiesThe Room updates with new epilogue chapterYear Walk is spooky, scary beautiful "Tengami's world is built as an authentically folding three-dimensional pop-up book with an all new technology created just for this game," the description reads. "Everything seen in the game could be re-created in real life with just paper, scissors, and glue." The development team even scanned real sheets of paper to create realistic textures for the world. The result is something unique, beautiful and absolutely worth playing. Once again, an indie developer has proven that a game can indeed be a breathtaking work of art. Tengami is available as a universal app for $4.99 from the iTunes App Store. (Source: CNET Australia)
Sometimes a game comes along that urges you to take your time -- to soak up the gorgeous atmosphere, explore the world, and solve puzzles at a leisurely pace. It's about the journey, not the finish line.The Room is one such game. Year Walk is another. And now we have one more to add to the list: the newly released Tengami from Nyamyam.And yet, Tengami isn't quite like any game we've seen. It's based on the idea of a pop-up book and set in a sort of mythical feudal Japan. You control a young Japanese man -- although the actual details of the plot remain to be unfolded as the story progresses, with very minimal exposition and even fewer directions. It plays out, in fact, a bit like a dream: you unfold the landscape and wander through it, solving puzzles and collecting items to advance to the next stage of the story. And everything works as it would in a pop-up book: tabs that can be pulled allow you to removed obstacles and move items, and standing on glowing portals allows you to turn the page, collapsing the current scene and reopening the next. Nyamyam Each action, and each puzzle, needs to be figured out by you -- first, what the puzzle actually is, and then what you have to do to solve it. A series of four chimes, for instance, needs to be rung in a particular order, but the game gives you no clues as to what that order might be. Meanwhile, there's not a single flaw in the aesthetic execution. Your character, when turned sideways (or facing toward or away from you, since he is viewed from the side), all but disappears -- he is, after all, made of paper. Each environment collapses perfectly; you can easily imagine the scenes crafted out of real paper, and, in fact, they could be.Related storiesThe Room updates with new epilogue chapterYear Walk is spooky, scary beautiful "Tengami's world is built as an authentically folding three-dimensional pop-up book with an all new technology created just for this game," the description reads. "Everything seen in the game could be re-created in real life with just paper, scissors, and glue." The development team even scanned real sheets of paper to create realistic textures for the world. The result is something unique, beautiful and absolutely worth playing. Once again, an indie developer has proven that a game can indeed be a breathtaking work of art. Tengami is available as a universal app for $4.99 from the iTunes App Store. (Source: CNET Australia)
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