When the OED or Newsweek (or whoever) come out with their year-ending “Word Of The Year” award and lists, it’s usually as topical as whatever their choice of movies or literature winds up being. While it’s only March, it’s not too early to start throwing some contenders into the pool.
And so for today’s initial installment, we’re going to go with the early favorite:
Cramdown.
Regardless of whether this rumor is true, this represents a loss of innocence for last.fm users. Realistically, anybody who used the service had to know in the back of their mind that sooner or later the RIAA would figure out a way to turn it against people, and when last.fm sold itself to CBS, the writing was on the wall. But now, even if this story turns out not to have legs, a lot of people are going to disable scrobbling on their less-than-legally-acquired albums.
Shame.
The assertion that Apple is buying up memory to put in new iPhones is speculative. However, given that sales of iPods have leveled off, it’s hard to imagine what else the company would do with all that flash.
Aside from the fact that it sounds like some vintage Bond film where a villain buys the world’s entire stock of [fill-in-the-blank], Fortune lacks imagination. Have these people never heard of flash-powered planet-destroying laserbeams? (Or, you know, netbooks…)
The boosterism of some of Dubai’s proponents during the boom always read like that of the more snakehandling-inclined members of the Bush administration. The idea that those with money or power can create their own reality only works as long as the check clears.
Last week’s speculation about the iphone becoming the dominant platform for comics arrived right on schedule, as the New York ComicCon brought the official announcement of UClick, which is selling comics on the iphone App Store. The io9 article on the introduction also mentions the existence of iVerse, another company attempting a similar venture. UClick’s apparent advantage here lies in how they adjust the content for the technology: they work with the creators to actually adapt each panel for the frame-by-frame reading style of the iphone screen, rather than simply cramming down PDFs.
This won’t be enough. At least initially.
Initially, the technology, nice as it is, won’t drive the content.1 People aren’t going to read comics on their iphone because the technology works, they’ll read them because they feature the creators and characters they want. Even now, people bootleg godawful scans of in-demand comics, conclusively proving that technolgy isn’t the driving factor here.
Eventually, though, the company that manages to distribute a better content lineup is going to get to dictate the technological standards for comics on the iphone. If people wind up going through one distributor or another next year because that’s where Marvel2 is, then they’re not going to hop over to the competition to browse for an unknown impulse purchase, and no difference in screen resolution is going to change that.
iVerse's layout
This leaves two imperatives for all would-be entrants into the the iphone/mobile comics field:
Don’t blow it.
You can change technology, but you can’t change standards. Once a standard gets established, it takes hell or high water to change it. Feel free to rush out as many beta products as you want, but whatever you sell damn well better be interoperable with the next generation. This isn’t video-game consoles here; we don’t need a format war.
Don’t sign exclusive contracts.
I know, I know, you’re trying to put the boot on your competitor’s neck. Why wouldn’t you want to lock them out of Scott Pilgrim 6 or whatever next year’s hot title will be?
Thinking like this predates the DRM fiascoes of the last decade and go back to the formitive days of the computer industry. Throughout much of the 1980s, the corridor in Massachusetts centered around I-495 was the hub of the technological universe. It had industry giants like Wang and Digital,3 and a steady stream of graduates from MIT supplying the talent. It had snatched the crown away from California, and just as quickly, it lost it. There’s plenty of reasons why this happened, and some of it falls to pure luck: there’s no accounting for Stanford having a better graduating class, or Michael Dell turning Texas into the Third Coast of tech, but a lot of why Massachusetts fumbled the ball had to do with the state’s labor laws. California is unique in that non-compete clauses are banned in the state. In an industry with as much flux and turnover as the tech business, tying all employees to non-compete clauses, as employers did in Massachusetts, wound up hamstringing the industry by artificially limiting the talent pool. Regardless of how much sense it made for a company to limit its employees’ prospects away from the next, it wound up cutting off the oxygen supply of the industry, which left a lot of unemployed (and legally unemployable) programmers moving to California. You can guess what happened next.
At a time when the industry is in its infancy, the most important goal of all players in the market should be to grow the viability and legitimacy of comics over a mobile device. Limiting distribution channels may seem like competitive advantage for the company writing the contract, but if it keeps the industry from flowering, it’s not doing anyone any favors. Again, the technology might be brilliant, but it’s not like the public is beating down Apple’s door for comics on the iphone. You’re not going to get a lot of chances to get it right. Now do it.
1 And let’s not kid ourselves, the content available at the moment is, charitably, pretty marginal.
2 Of course, Marvel will invent new ways to blow it here. Their current walled-garden model is a faithful electronic reproduction of the worst parts of the comic-shop experience. The Big Two seem to be taking their cues from the RIAA circa 2002, when it thought Rhapsody, Napster, and whatever Microsoft was calling its music store were the way forward.
3 If you haven’t heard of these companies, you’re proving the point even further. Imagine if HP and Dell didn’t exist ten years from now, and you get the meantime. In the meantime, you probably don’t have to look at the back of your computer to check if it was designed in Massachusetts.
If bad things do indeed happen in threes, I shudder to think what the next blow will be. In the same month as Diamond’s coup de grace comes the announcement from Village Voice Media that they will be “suspending” the syndicated comics in the fifteen papers they own. The move is supposed to be temporary until the state of the alt-newsweekly business improves, which is approximately never. It’s hard to imagine any circumstances, short of a violent reader revolt (note: do not attempt this) that will ever allow the alt-weekly publishers to reach a comfort zone where they can afford to bring on new expenses. The weeklies in L.A. are feeling noticeably thinner as of late.
As most of the affected cartoonists (Tom Tomorrow and Max Cannon among them) are quick to point out, the publishers are not the villain here. Just because the alts have traditionally leaned on strip club/escort ads rather than car dealerships does not mean they are immune from the seemingly irreversible death spiral of print journalism.
Perhaps cartoonists have it better than the music industry and the movie industry in that they have largely led a marginal existence, in both finances and artistic credibility, that the sea change of the last ten years does not represent a massive lifestyle readjustment that the Sumner Redstones and Clive Davises are facing. In the meantime, that’s likely cold comfort for the giants of alternative cartooning who are watching their primary source of income dry up overnight. Max Cannon’s highly personal “Apocalyse” post is a must-read for a creator’s take on it.
If this isn’t proof that something’s gotta give, what is? Are we waiting on a sign from God?
Please stop using the term “retail concept.” It’s a store. Thanks.
Only a few posts ago, I was talking about how Marvel’s power play in the comics industry backfired. Now comes news that Diamond Comics Distributors is raising the order threshold for publishers. In English, this means that independent publishers now must pre-sell a higher number ($2,500 of which must reach Diamond) of comics or lose access to what is, essentially, the only distribution channel in the industry. Even before the economy went tits up, indie publishers were having a hard enough time staying financially solvent while also meeting Diamond’s requirements. Now, a bloodbath is all but assured. People like Thomas Friedman1 view this as the kind of creative destruction that revitalizes the economy. I’m sure most publishers facing insolvency might have a slightly different view of the matter.
That said, the current situation was untenable, and hopefully, there will be a silver lining to come out of this. Hopefully, more publishers view the iphone2 and the Kindle as more than mere novelties, and take the initiative in the field that the major publishers have not. Hopefully, more truly pissed-off publishers look to coalesce into a serious competitor to Diamond. Hopefully, this makes people who aren’t Marvel or DC realize what should have been painfully obvious all along: the Direct Market is not their friend, and never will be. In a medium that constantly fumbles for respectability (and an audience), the Direct Market only served to further ghettoize comics, while providing publishers with a comfortable, built-in (though ever-shrinking) audience that stunted the development of the medium, both artistically and financially.
Whoever emerges from this mess to create a sustainable business (and helps grow the audience for comics as worthwhile entertainment) will have to take the internet seriously, for promotion and distribution. They’ll likely have a creative commons-inspired ethos that doesn’t fear giving away (some) content for free. They’ll need the business acumen to run a serious distribution network. Most importantly, though, they’ll have the chutzpah to approach retail venues that haven’t traditionally sold comics, and demand a place at the table.
This isn’t necessarily going to be one business. The paragraph above may wind up describing forty companies that emerge from this mess, and most of them may well flame out within a year or five. But people are coming around to the idea that they don’t have a choice. This week, a whole lot of people suddenly got radicalized.
1 Read: people with ironclad job security who get paid to write about the excitement of economic disruption.
2 The Kindle itself isn’t suitable for reading comics (yet), but the iphone has rightly been described in multiple quarters as the greatest comics delivery device ever invented. This isn’t just a concern for publishers: writers need to explore the creative possibilities offered by the format.
Resources: For an idea of the brouhaha this has created, here’s some reactions from the community at large.
Warren Ellis’ forum
Philip Clark
Dwight MacPherson
David Lillie
While the death of perennial Gawker punching bag Radar is hardly surprising given the current bloodbath in the publishing industry, it still leaves a gaping void in the world of pseudo-anthropology. In addition to its backpage lists and over-the-top Scientology-bashing, Radar really found its groove when it picked up the torch from Robert Lanham and created new stereotypes for personalities commonly found in New York’s hippest (and, more often than not, most privileged) corners.
And making fun of people is fun, but making money is even funner. Today, we’ll be looking at the Freindies (Frat + Indie), and how we can use this to pump up our stock portfolio. Seriously. In a move that would probably appall Naomi Klein, we’ll call it Fashion Disaster Capitalism.
Meet Jeremy
You’ve probably seen Jeremy on Fairfax before, skateboard in hand (never on the ground, it gets the deck dirty!), and the freshest Nikes on his feet. As one of the opinion leaders in his frat, Jeremy checks Hypebeast on a regular basis. While you might assume he’s frivolous, he’s actually here on business. You see, he’s an entrepreneur. No, despite all the Clipse mp3s on his iPhone, we’re not winkingly implying that he’s a coke dealer (focus on demand-side economics instead). Really though, his buddy Chad’s got a clothing line. They’ve even sent samples to Pharell. And Jeremy just wants to see if it’s made its way into Supreme yet. In the meantime, Jeremy’s putting that entrepreneurial personality to use in B-school, although he hasn’t quite figured out what his business venture will be yet. In the meantime, there’s shopping to do!
After scoring a vintage Bash Brothers T-shirt at &Still (how many protein shakes stand between him and biceps like Jose Canseco?), Jeremy is forced to ponder the all-important shades question. As one of the fashion alpha-males in his house, he needs to come correct in the sights game, or risk losing his Influencer status to that fag Trey. Jeremy was the first to spot the end of the shutter-shades bubble, and his move to neon Ray-Bans branded him a visionary. Now that other houses are passing them out as party favors, Jeremy needs an encore. Help arrives from an unexpected source. Looking at his newly acquired t-shirt, Jeremy sees a vision from his patron saint, Jose Canseco. Oakley M-Frames. Like 2003’s trucker hat boom, they have just the right touch of white trashiness, combined with a touch of 1991 street attitude. If he moves in now, he can get his M-Frames in place before The Cool Kids inevitably start rocking them in their next video.
Meet Debbie
Debbie checks her Blackberry (iPhones are for dilettantes, everyone knows that) as she leaves the Save Darfur meeting. Still no word from Jeremy, who’s been blowing her off ever since he took her to the MGMT show last week. Typical: he’s got time to party, but ever since she wanted him to get political, he disappears. She might as well have told him she was pregnant. Having earned a brick of karma points all morning with the Darfur thing, Debbie decides to treat herself to a day on Robertson. She considers a new pair of jeans, but feels frivolous adding to her already sizable collection. Anyway, when Jeremy was driving her to the concert, one of the rappers that came up on the shuffle on his iPhone was talking about wearing True Religion. What does that even mean? Debbie’s not sure if this means that True Religion’s Nuked The Fridge, but she holds off on buying new jeans, just to be sure. There may be a power vacuum in the premium denim market for now. Cruising down Robertson in her Prius, she sees that Kitson’s a mob scene at the moment. Some skank-ass celebutante’s probably in there. With both denim and Kitson out of the question, she decides to feed her conscience and head to American Apparel. Sure, Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance warned that their owner’s a major skeeze, but they’re labor friendly and all. Plus, after the meeting this morning, Debbie’s political side is in full swing. She loads up on tights and boy shorts and heads off to Barnes & Noble to get a new Moleskine.
Stock Lessons
Buy:
Nike: Hasn’t lost any steam yet, and Jeremy’s busy putting Phil Knight’s kids through college.
Luxxotica: Whether Jeremy’s vision is right, or the neon Ray-Bans have some life left in them after all, you win either way: they just bought Ray-Ban and Oakley.
Apple: Debbie might have a point, but with the recent dip in price due to Steve Jobs’ health crisis, now’s the best time to stock up. Anyway, when Jeremy winds up with that sweet Deloitte internship, you know he’s gonna treat himself with an upgrade to the 3G model.
American Apparel: Well shit, their stock can’t get any worse, can it?
Short:
True Religion: Debbie doesn’t want to be rocking the same jeans as Pusha T. Also, their cost structure seems kind of inefficient.
Barnes & Noble: Not even Debbie’s Moleskine habit can save this walking corpse.
Research In Motion: Seems to have hit market saturation, and Apple’s upcoming support for Microsoft Exchange server can’t be a good sign for these Canucks.
DISCLAIMER: At the time of writing, The Commodore owns positions in Nike, Apple, and American Apparel. He does not have any short positions. Much like the gambling spreads for dogfights that make their way into respectable publications, this investment advice is for entertainment only. Before investing real money, consult with a financial professional, because God knows they don’t have any conflicts of interest.
Fox appeared to be using a tilt-shift effect for the lead-ins to commercial on the Eagles-Giants game.
This is from a network whose design philosophy (at least in the sports department) leans towards CGI dancing robots.
