Lollapalooza is God, And God Is Blackout Drunk

Sup guys. I'm new here, so allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cory O'Brien, and this is what most of my days are like:

     Lollapalooza was hardly an hour old, and a gangly boy in a muddy yellow t-shirt had already become an object lesson in collision physics. In the midst of the mob he was safe enough, bobbing as he was in a sea of people animated by a tsunami of bass, but take the crowd away and he became a newborn wildebeest with half the requisite number of legs. I could tell you what music we were listening to when this happened, but you've got the whole rest of the internet for that. Instead I am going to tell you about the crowd, because the crowd is where I found the agents of the gods.

     More accurately, they found me. My friend and I were a little sick of having all the hollows of our anatomy vibrated in four-four time while strangers cheerfully attempted to feed us their elbows, so we retreated to the relative safety of the port-a-potties, where the only danger was hepatitis. I wasn't too jazzed about locking myself in a closet full of other people's shit, so I opted to wait outside. I found a few square inches of lightly-trampled grass to call my own, and began juggling to pass the time. This was my first mistake...

Ad Space For Sale

We are now offering ad space here, in targeted posts or in the sidebar that appears on every page. Rates forthcoming, or contact me if you want to get positioning immediately. ~1000 visits / day plus RSS, niche readers of above average intellect. Such as yourself.

The skinny... This decision comes after several internet marketing companies approached us asking for rates or just making an offer out of the blue, and the decision to start focusing on this site and the content that we run again in a more concerted manner moving into 2013. It got me thinking - regular cash flow would allow us to easily double or even triple traffic rates. I know this from past experience. (For reference, the last funded group blog / web mag project I managed got up to about 10k visits/day.)

Media and Monetizing The Container

By James Curcio
Some of us still remember going to a store to buy a CD, a tape... a record! Or a book. Most of us don't want to buy just any book. We want to buy a book with certain content. A book associated with a certain author or idea we are attracted to.

A few of us bemoan the loss of quality that occurred with the containers themselves over the years. The decline of paper quality, the loss of craftsmanship in the process of mechanization, mass-market industrialization. They are the few who relish the feel of the material object in their hand, consider its craftsmanship a part of what it is. Books themselves used to be works of art. But this is unfortunately an even older perspective on media. Most consumers don't think much about the container, the packaging, or anything else. It is all to be discarded, it is all attractive junk. They want to devour the "good stuff" inside. Or maybe they just want to put the book on their bookshelf and make people think they read it.

You know the story of what's happened. Digital media doesn't require a container. You can download an album, a movie, and now a book, without needing a container. You can carry hundreds or thousands of them around with you. And so we have the advent of "piracy," because all these years we've been monetizing the container. This is not an entirely new point, even for me - I've weighed in on this subject many times in the past. 

What I want to ponder - what I want all of us to ponder - is the conundrum facing both the producers of media and the companies that "support" them. We'll also look at some of the ways that these companies have failed to sufficiently understand the problem they're facing.