Long Tail, But Short Memory

This WIRED article's getting a lot of coverage and rightly so. "Long Tail" was the Top Meme at Web2.0.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

But there's one troubling section that makes an historical reference (history is WIRED's perennial weak point):

Deep in the article (scroll down to the section "Rule 3") Chris writes about the story of Michael Robertson and MP3.com, and then Anderson makes a pretty outrageous claim, one I have never, ever heard of before:

Putting aside the fact that many people actually used the service to illegally upload and share commercial tracks, leading the labels to sue MP3.com, the model failed at its intended purpose, too. Struggling bands did not, as a rule, find new audiences, and independent music was not transformed. Indeed, MP3.com got a reputation for being exactly what it was: an undifferentiated mass of mostly bad music that deserved its obscurity.

Many people illegally uploaded and shared commercial tracks? Who says? Got a cite for that, Chris? I sure would love to hear some facts on that assertion. I worked at MP3 in 1999 and 2000 and this is the first I've heard of this. Gee, I thought that's what the large staff of musicologists were there for: meticulously filter and review every song that was put on the site. Chris, did you ever use MP3.com during that era?

Paging Rod Underhill, white courtesy phone...

Downloading Upriver

The brouhaha over Sinclair's plans to air a feature-length anti-Kerry commercial seem to be distracting folks (isn't that a consistent pattern? always distraction) from awareness of another Kerry feature documentary, called Going Upriver. I actually managed to find this at a local cinema recently and was really impressed by it. Actually thought it was a very well-made film, better than, say, Fahrenheit 9/11 on a number of dimensions. I learned a lot from this film. Not all of it was good about Kerry, but it painted what I felt was a fair picture of the man circa 1968-74 (would that we had a documentary of GWB from the same time period...)

Turns out the whole movie is available as a gigantic 600+ MB Quicktime movie at a site called TheKerryMovie.com. If you've got the bandwidth, it's worth starting a download at night and it ought to be done by morning. Of course, if your city is showing this in a local cinema, by all means, pay to go see it and then make up your own mind.