Do you read Waiter Rant? He’s out of the closet, in a manner of speaking, now that his book is out. Here’s a photo, here’s an interview in New York Magazine, here’s a review of the book in WSJ.

Unrelated, Wired takes a look at statistics on Radiohead’s In Rainbows album. Even though it was available to download for free from Radiohead’s web site, 2.3 million copies were traded via various P2P software. And the album was still number one on the sales charts in the US and UK once it was available in stores.

… people tend to develop habits around the acquisition of music; once they find something that works, they tend to keep using it. As the paper mentions, “The Pirate Bay is a powerful brand with a sterling reputation in the minds of millions of young music fans.”

The hard lesson to the music business here is that it must license venues for music acquisition that fans prefer to file sharing networks or otherwise make the toleration of file sharing part of their business plans. If even Radiohead’s freely available album was torrented 2.3 million times in the first three and a half weeks, how can more traditional offerings successfully clamp-down on file sharing? They can’t, pure and simple.
…
Applying economic principles to digital music, Garland and Page found that “the challenge of achieving popularity (or attention) when the old rules of scarcity and excludability don’t apply (to information goods) the way they used to, changes the monetization game completely.” And Radiohead clearly won that game, regardless of how many times its album was traded online.

Garland and Page came to the undeniable conclusion that the music industry needs to stop thinking of shared files as lost sales, and start treating them as an aspect of reality upon which they can build part of their businesses.

I was considering going to the new Mummy movie this weekend. I liked the first one, the second one sucked and the Scorpion King sucked hard. I figured if they were reviving the franchise (and adding in Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh) maybe there would be some improvement? A 10% score on Rotten Tomatoes would seem to suggest otherwise. And in the NY Times review, Stephen Holden writes, “In the movie’s futile drive to conjure visceral excitement, the action sequences are edited into an incoherent jumble that makes you feel trapped on a rickety airplane sitting in a pool of yak vomit.” Guess I’ll pass.

I’d go for Wall-E, except that most theaters are showing the Cantonese version. And the few that have the English version seem to have shoved it into shoe boxes that only have six or eight rows of seats – and are mostly sold out for night time shows this weekend. If it’s going to be such a freaking small screen, might as well just wait for the DVD.

I’d happily go see this:

But it’s still almost a year away! Them viral marketing campaigns are starting earlier and earlier.