Adam Wiener

The New York Times has published a long article on Foxconn which, while it doesn’t provide much in the way of new information, does act as a sobering reminder of just how companies like Apple can make so very much money. When our own John Biggs visited Foxconn, he focused on the company itself, its scale, its intentions. When I wrote about Apple’s suppliers failing to meet environmental standards, it was more about the laxity of regulators within China. Today’s NYT piece depicts Apple as prime mover and potential catalyst of change — but its actions and information from insiders suggest that it is simply unwilling.

There is a certain genius to negotiating down the price of every screw and wire, and never paying a yuan more than is absolutely necessary. As in design and build quality, other companies aspire to Apple’s accomplishment in this area.

Something the article only fleetingly acknowledges is that Foxconn is used by most of the major electronics brands in the world. Samsung, Microsoft, Amazon, and the rest all contract with Foxconn to manufacture, assemble, or finish their products. The threatened mass suicide the other week was, in fact, at an Xbox production facility. The author suggests that HP and Nike “push” their suppliers, presumably in a good way, but Apple does not.

The comparison is made without much in the way of evidence. But it doesn’t appear that Apple is being unfairly targeted: people from within Apple confirm the company’s attitude towards suppliers, and acknowledge that they rarely back up their threats with action. This is for the reason that has been making the rounds over the last week: the suppliers they have are the best in the world, and they are barely able to keep up with Apple’s demands.

There’s a sort of power inversion going on there. Here is Foxconn, which celebrates whenever a client like Apple comes by to make a big order. And here is Apple, which dictates the terms and is, to some extent, the money in the relationship. But which one of these two could fare better if the other backed out? Foxconn would have to spend a few billion reconfiguring its factories to pump out Galaxy Tabs and Kindle Fires. Apple, which has come to rely on Foxconn’s guarantee of millions of products being manufactured at will, and to specs that may change by the hour, would be adrift.

So it has never been a surprise to me when I hear that Apple, and others, only do so much to change the situation in factories and factory towns in China. The simple fact of it is they’re not the ones at the reins. Foxconn and China have our all-important tech companies by the scruff of the neck, and bear the big bad audits by Apple (more likely by people representing people representing Apple) like they’d bear a kitten swiping at their face. It’s a high stakes game, and Foxconn and its like hold all the cards.

Well, not all the cards. As I wrote once, the reason Apple does the things it does is to please us, the consumers. We demand a new iPhone every year that must be better and cheaper. We insist that a thousand dollars is too much for a state of the art computer. We want bigger TVs and external hard drives and slim cameras. And we, almost without exception, fail to care when our demand for more iPads drives Apple to double its orders, driving Foxconn to push more overtime, driving poorly-maintained ventilation systems to their maximum, driving a spark to ignite an aluminum-dust explosion. It’s not our problem, it’s Apple’s or it’s Foxconn’s or it’s China’s. Very reassuring.

One dreamer quoted in the NYT article says: “If they committed to building a conflict-free iPhone, it would transform technology.” Yes, and at the same time, it would transform Apple into a bankrupt company. A conflict free iPhone would cost far, far more and would in all likelihood not be as well-built. Apple knows this. The system we and they have in place works, unfortunately, at least for everyone but the workers coated in N-hexane. And at a twelve to a hundred thousand dollars a pop, they aren’t worth rocking the boat for, especially when you’ve got record profits coming in.

Just don’t forget that we’re in that boat too. Unlike many other companies whose profits come largely from ads, enterprise products, or components, the vast majority of what Apple makes comes straight out of a consumer’s pockets, more or less willingly. More than any other mega-corporation you and I deal with on a daily basis, we are fully in control of our contributions to this company. We’re part of this. Some would say the biggest part.

First popcorn, now a cartoon spinach company. Anti-'s blog points out that Wilco's been immortalized in this week's edition of the iconic "Popeye" cartoon series. The drawing by Frank Caruso and Ned Sonntag features cartooned versions of the band members handing out Wilco-brand spinach that's been unloaded from a Wilco-named ship. Ahoy!

Guests at London's Savoy Hotel and other luxury hotels will be able to visit and record in Abbey Road Studios' famous Studio Two, where The Beatles recorded the bulk of their songs. The commercial partnership between the studio and the Fairmont...

Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book is I Was Blind But Now I See. You can follow him @jaltucher.

I hate Woody Allen. Here’s why. Because if you’re Jewish and a little neurotic then it has become a cliché that nerdy neurotic Jewish people describe themselves as “Woody Allen-esque” thinking it will attract women. They do this on dating services. The idea is that they will then attract some waif-like Mia Farrow-ish  (or the 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan) blonde who will love all of their neuroses and want to have sex all the time and will, in the ideal case (the 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, the 21-year-old Juliette Lewis in Husbands & Wives), be the most mature  in the movie and yet still be madly in love with the 30-year-older Allen.

This only happens in Woody Allen movies. And power to him. He made the movies. He can do whatever the hell he wants in them. If Mariel Hemingway wants to have sex with him all the time then no problem. He wrote the movie! It’s up to you whether you believe it or not.

And people believed it. Manhattan is considered one of his greats – shot in black and white, skyscapes of Manhattan in every direction which are actually shot from Allen’s penthouse apartment. It was beautiful and makes you fall in love with Manhattan.

Allen puts out a new movie or two every year. None of them will compete with Star Wars or Harry Potter in terms of gross dollars. But it seems like his studio gives him $10 million, his movie will make $20 million, and everyone is happy and he gets to keep doing what he’s doing.

So he’s built up a substantial body of work that we can learn from. Why learn? Because clearly he is a genius, regardless of what other opinions anyone might have of him (and I only know him through his work. I don’t know his personal life at all). It is interesting to see how he, as an artist and creator, has evolved. To see how his idiosyncratic humor has changed,  how he twists reality further to stretch our imagination. He always stands out and stays ahead of the other innovators. And for other people who seek the same, he is worth observing.

Here’s some of the things I’ve learned from him:

1. Failure. Some of his movies are just awful. He admits it. In a 1976 interview in Rolling Stone he says, “I would like to fail a little for the public…What I want to do is go onto some areas that I’m insecure about and not so good at.”

He elaborates further. He admits he could be like the Marx Brothers and make the same comic film every year. But he didn’t want to do it. It was important for him to evolve. To risk failure. To risk failure in front of everyone. And his movies did that, going from the early slapstick humor of Sleeper to the darker Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point.

One of my earliest memories is having a babysitter while my parents went to a movie. Then when they got home I asked them what they saw and they described a movie where a man falls asleep and wakes up in the future where a giant Nose ruled the world. Woody Allen has been there since the beginning for me. And just the other day I watched Midnight in Paris with Owen Wilson (who, despite looking very un-Woody Allen-esque, plays the virtual “Woody Allen” role very well. The movie explores the history of art and how no art form exists by itself but is always influenced by generation after generation of artists before it, dating back hundreds if not thousands of years).

Woody Allen has also failed spectacularly, in every way we can imagine – personally, professionally, etc. And yet he’s always pushed forward, trying to surprise us again and again, and largely succeeding rather than giving up.

2. Prophetic. In a Washington Post interview in 1977 he states, “We’re probably living at the end of an era. I think it’s only a matter of time until home viewing is as easy and economical as desirable.” In the past three days I’ve watched three Woody Allen movies on my ipad. I don’t know if this changed the way he made his movies. But it’s clear he never got himself stuck in one particular form or style that would eventually fail to cater to the tastes of the average audience.

3. Flexible. We admire the entrepreneurs who quickly recognize mistakes and then transition their business accordingly (the catch-phrase lately is that these entrepreneurs know how to “pivot”). Allen typically starts off with a broad outline, a sort of script, but it changes throughout the movie. Specifically he states, “To me a film grows organically. I write the script and then it changes organically.I see people come in and then I decide…it changes here. It changes if Keaton doesn’t want to do these lines and I don’t want to do these- we shift around. It changes for a million reasons.”

The entrepreneur, the entre-ployee. Relationships in general, all shift and change. You set out in life wanting certain things – the college degree, the house with the white fence, the promotions, the family – but things become different. You have to adapt and be flexible. To say only the lines you are comfortable with and evolve into.

4. Productivity. To put out a movie every year or so, plus plays, magazine stories, books. you would think Woody Allen works around the clock. From a 1980 interview, “If you work only three to five hours a day you become very productive. It’s the steadiness of it that counts. Getting to the typewriter every day is what makes productivity.”

He states later in the interview that when he was younger he liked to get things out in one impulsive burst but he learned that was a “bad habit” and that he likes to wake up early, do his work, and then set it aside for the next day.

Probably the most productive schedule is to wake up early – do your work before people stop showing up at your doorstep, on your phone, in your inbox, etc, and leave off at the point right when you are most excited to continue. Then you know it will be easy to start off the next day.

I read in a recent interview that it takes Allen a month to write a comedy and three months to write a drama. On three to five hours a day it shows me he writes every day, he’s consistent, and he doesn’t waste time with distractions (going to parties, staying out late, etc)

5. Avoid outside stimulus. Every day right now I make a huge mistake. I start off with the loop: email, twitter, facebook, my amazon rank, my blog stats, my blog comments. My wife Claudia asks me: “did you finish the loop yet?” And I think it will only take a few seconds but it actually takes about twenty minutes. I probably do it ten times a day. That’s 200 minutes! 3 hours and 20 minutes! Ugh.

Here’s Allen’s description of when he won an Oscar for Annie Hall. First off, he didn’t go to the Oscars. Why get on a plane (8 hours door to door), and go to a party where he would feel uncomfortable, to win an award he probably didn’t care much about (although it magnified his prestige in Hollywood, the city that paid his bills):

In a 1982 interview with the Washington Post he states that he went to Michael’s Pub to do his weekly jazz clarinet playing although he says “I probably would not have watched anyway” just to see everyone he knows hunched down in the audience waiting for hours to see who would win. He states that he had “a very nice time” at Michael’s. So for him his pleasure came first. Rather than the anxious watching and waiting.

But then, when he got home, he didn’t even care. He went out the back way of Michael’s so he skipped all the photographers, went home by midnight, had “milk and cookies,”  went to sleep. And then he TOOK THE PHONE OFF THE HOOK. Who even does that now? In an age where we (or, I should say, “I”) literally sleep with my iPad and phone in the bed. He took the phone off the hook on Oscar’s night, went to sleep. In the morning made his coffee and toast. Got the NY Times, and then finally opened it up to the entertainment section where he saw he won the Oscar. It’s in this way that his productivity (compared with the lack of productivity many of us suffer now because of the constant influx of outstide social stimulants) was kept at a very high point.

6. Imperfection. Allen has stated many times that none of his films were exactly what he wanted. That they were constantly imperfect. It’s almost like he’s the imperfect perfectionist. He wants things just right and he tries very hard to get it that way. But he knows it will never happen.

That said, he doesn’t give up. He states in 1986, “we go out and shoot…again…and again…and again if necessary. And even at that rate, all the pictures come up imperfect. Even at that meticulous rate of shooting them over and over again, they still come out flawed. None of them is close to being perfect.” Ultimately, he says, all his movies prove to be “great disappointments”.

And yet, knowing that he will always experience the same thing, he goes out, stretches his boundaries of where he’s comfortable failing, and does it again. And again. Knowing nothing he will do will be the masterpiece he initially conceived.

Nothing comes out exactly how we want it. But we have to learn to roll with it and move to the next work.

7. Confidence. I watched Husbands & Wives the other day. It wasn’t a funny movie. It wasn’t a pretty movie. I watched it with Claudia and by the end we were thinking, ugh, I hope that doesn’t happen to us in ten years. Meanwhile, the movie itself was jarring. Instead of being shot traditionally it was shot with a hand-held camera. It was edited with lots of jump-edits, where you’re looking at a character and suddenly she’s an inch over because some small piece of film was cut out. The editing itself became part of the jolting and jarring in the story. It was as if the story was not just being told with the acting and the writing but with the way it was shot and edited.

It reminded me of something Kurt Vonnegut once said. He’s usually considered an experimental author. But, he said, to be experimental, first you have to know how to use all the rules of grammar. You have to be an expert first in tradition. It also reminds me of Andy Warhol, who was a highly paid, very straightforward, commercial artist, before he went experimental and started the pop art phenomenon.

Allen says about Husbands and Wives in a 1994 interview (note: Husbands and Wives was his 20^th movie): “Confidence that comes with experience enables you to do many things that you wouldn’t have done in earlier films. You tend to become bolder…you let your instincts operate more freely and you don’t worry about the niceties.”

In other words: master the form you want to operate in, get experience, be willing to be imperfect, and then develop the confidence to play within that form, to develop your own style. You see this in Kurt Vonnegut too as he transformed from the more traditional “Player Piano” in the early 50s to “Slaughterhouse Five” a novel about World War II that includes aliens who can time travel.

8. Showing up. As Allen famously stated: 80% of success is “showing up”. Nothing more really needs to be added there except it might be changed to “99% of success for the entrepreneur is showing up”. What do you have to show up for: you have to find the investors, you have to manage development, you have to find the first customers, You have to find the buyers. They don’t show up at your door. You show up at their door. Otherwise your business will just not work out. Let’s take Microsoft as one example among many: Bill Gates tracked down the guy in New Mexico to build BASIC. Bill Gates put himself in the middle when IBM wanted to license an operating system. He just kept showing up while everyone else was skiing.

9. The medium becomes the message. I mentioned this in the point above but it deserves further elaboration. The jump-cutting, the hand-held camera, every aspect of the film became woven in with the story. Allen states: “I wanted it to be more dissonant, because the internal emotional and mental states of the characters are more dissonant. I wanted the audience to feel there was a jagged and nervous feeling.” In this he shows not only his own evolution as a filmmaker but what he’s borrowed from the artists before him – not only Godard and Bergman who did their own experimentations, but musicians like Profokiev where the dissonance itself is so tightly wound with the music it becomes a part of the music, as opposed to just the notes being played. This is underlined in his latest movie, Midnight in Paris, very highly where Owen Wilson, the main character, pinpoints the roots of his own art by going back further and further in time.

My takeaway – study the history of the form you want to master. Study every nuance. If you want to write – read not only all of your contemporaries, but the influences of those contemporaries, and their influences. Additionally, draw inspiration from other art forms. From music, art, and again, go back to the influences of your inspirations, and go back to their influences, and so on. (See also, “Steal and Get Rich”)

The facets that resonate with time, even if it’s hundreds of years old, will resonate with your work as well. It’s like a law of the universe.

In today’s day and age, we want to transform decades of work into years or even months. Allen built up his career over five decades and kept at it persistently, even when scandal, or a bad movie, or a bad article, would cast gloom over his entire career. But he shrugged it off.

So what can we learn from Woody Allen?

• Wake up early
• Avoid distractions
• Work three to five hours a day and then enjoy the rest of the day
• Be as perfectionist as you can, knowing that imperfection will still rule
• Have the confidence to be magical and stretch the boundaries of your medium.
• Combine the tools of the medium itself with the message you want to convey
• Don’t get stuck in the same rut – move forward, experiment, but with the confidence built up over experience.

The same can be said for successful entrepreneurs. Or for people who are successful in any aspect of life. Is Woody Allen a happy man? Who knows? But he’s done what he set out to do. He’s made movies. He’s told stories. He’s lived the dream, even when it bordered on nightmare.  I can only be so lucky.

While bookstores are reporting increased sales this month, I foresee a time when “Staff Picks” at the local booke shoppe will soon be replaced by recommendation engines that tell you what ebook to pick up next.

Services like Amazon’s own recommendation engine and smaller guys like Booklamp all promise to let you know what tome to crack after you finish the Stephen King epic but GoodReads adds a bit of value-add to the burgeoning self-publishing movement.

The service lets authors create their own author pages and fans can follow and interact with writers in the comments and on private author blogs. You can also rate fifteen books to begin getting recommendations for future reading. Authors can run private blogs, send out giveaways, and publicize events using the service.

The service has recommended 6 million books to 6.5 million users and there are currently 240 million books in the database. They are adding 14 million books a month. The team has doubled this year from 10 to 20 people (and they’re hiring).

“We’re profitable,” wrote Otis Chandler in an email. “We think we have the best book recommendations on the internet right now (yes, better than Amazon) and we launched our recommendations in September after having acquired a company (Discovereads) in March to power them – and the results have been phenomenal.”

In the end services like GoodReads and good old word of mouth will power the publishing industry. If I can market my own books – for free or for a price – and sell them to eager customers, I’m much more likely to self publish and, although this will be decreasingly likely, work with a publisher. The old model of publishing was the movement of widgets, by truck, from warehouse to store to consumer. The new model is one-to-one and sites like GoodReads are powering this revolution.

This is the first Christmas where I didn’t get a single gift. Because I had to take care of a bunch of logistics issues, I decided not to celebrate “the holidays” this year, and you know what? It was awesome.

It’s amazing not having any expectations about what you’re going to get, give and whatnot. Also, for some reason I got tons of digital messages of gratitude in lieu of material gifts, and I absolutely adore all the people who reached out to say ‘Merry Christmas,’ adore.

There is a darker side of the blatantly consumerist holiday (why are people being killed on Black Friday? WHY?), and comedy writer Jon Hendren (@Fart) managed to perfectly capture everything that is wrong with Christmas by searching for tweets that were particularly spoiled, like “I swear, everybody got an iPhone 4S. I asked for one and I didn’t get it. Santa, I hate you” and “My parents are the worst mother Fucking parents in the world fuck you mom and dad for not getting me a Iphone. FUCK YOU. FML,” and then retweeting them.

This simple action resonated with the webosphere, so much so that Internet bard Jonathan Mann turned Hendren’s retweets into a song (above) within a 48 hour turnover.

To compile material for his impromptu performance art, Hendren used Twitter search strings like: ”not getting,” “iPhone” and “iPod” or “iPad” or “Car” which would return tweets for people unhappy about “not getting.” “You can do the same thing with ‘didn’t get’ or ‘where’s my’ as well,” he says.

So what possessed this sort of ad hoc social commentary on people unhappy because of  the lack of iProducts under the tree? (Amazing in light of the 1.4 billion people who don’t have clean drinking water, right?)

“I was visiting with my family,” says Hendren on the impetus behind his critique. “They’d all gone to bed somewhat early on Christmas Eve night, and I was lying awake playing with Twitter’s search function on my iPhone (oddly enough). Nobody I was following was tweeting much of anything at that time, so I didn’t feel too bad about flooding my timeline. I think I did about 40 or 50 before people started posting fake tweets, which made it harder to find real ones among the search results, so I cut it off probably around Noon on Christmas morning. There are probably even better real ones among all the fake ones out there by now, but it’s too hard to tell.”

Hendren currently writes part-time for Something Awful as a day job and got laid off three weeks ago from his full time job due to “restructuring.” For the record, I am really really upset that no one bought me a house this Christmas. Okay, not. Well, maybe a little.

Hyperlocal content network Examiner.com is partnering with CBS (NYSE: CBS) Local Digital Media to provide exclusive content for CBS’s locally targeted properties in 25 cities.

The stories, by Examiner.com writers local to those markets, will focus on “Best Of” guides and “Top Spots” lists. The content will appear on a few CBS Local sites this month and spread to all of them in the first quarter of 2012.

CBS launched its first Local Digital Media site in New York City in August 2010 and says it now has 33 million unique monthly visitors across its 25 sites. The sites serve as the homepages for CBS TV and radio stations and already provide editorial content. (The picture at left is from the CBS New York Holiday Vertical.)

Examiner.com has 85,000 writers and is owned by the Denver-based Clarity Digital Media.

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Know Your Meme, the Web site and show that dissects Internet phenomena — and gives me the feeling I’m about to be quizzed — has put out a summary of its Top 10 online memes of the year.

They include Rebecca Black, planking and Nyan Cat — which you’ve either never heard of or think are dreadfully out of date.

Here’s the 2011 video roundup:

Foursquare is giving away a free $25 credit to American Express cardholders through a new promotion taking place on November 26th, aka “Small Business Saturday.” (Yes, everyone has their own Black Friday spinoff now). To get the credit, Foursquare users have to spend $25 at a local merchant and check-in using the mobile app.

There are “hundreds of thousands” of participating merchants across the U.S., according to the map in the Foursquare blog post.

To claim the deal, American Express users will first need to sync their account with Foursquare at sync.americanexpress.com/foursquare. Afterwards, the available merchants will appear in the “Explore” tab in the Foursquare app and on the Foursquare homepage, starting on Saturday the 26th.

In order to claim the credit, after setup, users will need tap the new “load to card” button that appears upon check-in. To save some hassle, you may want wait to check in until after you know you plan to spend the $25.00 at the merchant. Update: Foursquare says you *have to* check in on Foursquare prior to checkout. You know, just to make things harder, I guess.

The credit will show up on your next Amex statement, five business days after your purchase.

Foursquare isn’t the only social media service American Express has tapped in promotion of this Small Business Saturday thing which it created via its American Express OPEN group. The company recently appeared as a Klout perk too. If you’re not into Foursquare and Klout, there’s also a Facebook page where you can find businesses and claim your credit.

As previously mentioned, Brian Eno appeared last night on "The Colbert Report", chatting with Stephen Colbert about his "77 Million Paintings" installation, his time in Roxy Music, the Long Now project, and more.

But the highlight of the episode came after the interview, when Colbert brought out Michael Stipe (and sat him on a shelf). Colbert, Stipe, and Eno, then sang "Lean on Me" a cappella together.

Watch it below:

Last year, Tim Heineke of Twones and Tone.fm, Marcel Corso and Diedrik Martens launched a new Amsterdam-based music startup, called Shuffler.fm, to let users listen to the tunes and artists being covered by music blogs while they read.

The startup thus began its career as a cool web app for music discovery, with the goal of aggregating music from blogs across the Internets — based on genre. Over the last year, Shuffler.fm has evolved into a service that now allows users to play continuous mixes of their favorite music blogs, browse through popular songs and artists through a nifty search function, as well as create personalized channels based on “favorite-ing” tracks and blogs. Music blogs can also create their own pages, including a “Play this blog” button that launches the blog’s own channel. (Check out Sarah’s coverage in August here.)

With its initial functionality, Shuffler.fm was really a hybrid of Pandora and ex.fm for music blogs-curated tunes. Yet, on Tuesday, the startup expanded that influence to include Flipboard, launching an iPad app that transforms music blogs and websites into radio stations, curating them in a Flipboard-style layout of words, pictures, and streaming audio.

The Shuffler.fm iPad essentially app creates an aggregated music magazine that serves content from a diverse set of music bloggers and experts in realtime (content is updated by the minute), providing a ready-to-consume filtered stream of music optimized for discoverability and at the same time presenting a curated experience so that users don’t have to deal with parsing the ridiculous amount of noise being dished out by music content producers. In other words, it’s music listening with an editorial filter.

Of course, rather than basing the content it serves on your existing tastes, like so many other music services out there (Last.fm, Pandora), Shuffler’s audio is brought to you in genre-based channels that are populated by (only the coolest) blogs, like Pitchfork, TheMusic.FM, and Stereogum to name a few.

Users can create playlists of songs from these visual RSS blog feeds at the bottom of the app, where they can then listen via the app’s player, all while reading about the songs they’re listening to. The app also supports AirPlay so that users aren’t just confined to listening to music from their iPad’s speakers.

For those who’ve already been using Shuffler’s web app, the experience of using the iPad app will be familiar. The two experiences are comparable, with perhaps even a bit more simplicity in terms of design and UX in the new iPad app. The experience is also, of course, very reminiscent of that of Flipboard, in that content is displayed in a visually attractive, tile-based layout that does a great job of balancing visual candy without distracting from the music and discoverability features.

Listening to a blog-powered radio stream while being able to view relevant video content or swipe through to the band or blog’s homepage is at once a familiar experience that may not sound particularly earth-shaking, but it’s done in such a way that it still feels new. It’s a great human curated alternative to the slew of machine algorithms that are today powering many of our favorite music apps. And it also helps that the app has built-in bookmarking and sharing features that let you come back to your favorite tracks or blog posts while sharing the music you discover with friends.

To help it in its mission to become the new Pandora/Flipboard of the iPad, Founder Tim Heineke told us that the startup has just closed a $700K round of angel funding. While Heineke was not yet able to share the names of the investors, he did say that Shuffler.fm has gained nearly 500K users to date. Will update as we learn more.

Check out Shuffler.fm on the App Store here.

It’s easy to beat up the music industry for being intransigent and stupid when it comes to technology. Because the music industry is so often intransigent and stupid when it comes to technology.

So let’s take a minute to praise a big music label for something that — on paper, at least — looks pretty flexible and clever. EMI Music is offering developers a way to leapfrog onerous licensing negotiations and just start building cool stuff with the label’s songs.

The idea: Developers building an application that needs music can sign up for access to a “sandbox” which will let them play with a pool of the label’s songs. And after a minimium of hoop-jumping, the “OpenEMI” plan is supposed to let developers bring their stuff directly to market, without having to track down rights holders, negotiate rates, etc.

EMI has precleared a selection of about 12,000 songs — 2,000 from its general catalog, another 10,000 from its Blue Note jazz label, and a few artist-specific catalogs from bands like Gorillaz and the Pet Shop Boys — and has worked out a standardized fee for all of them, via a revenue split.

The label takes 60 percent of net revenue and uses that to pay rights holders; 40 percent is split between developers and the Echo Nest, a Boston-based music tech company that helped cobble the deal together and which provides developers with tools they might use to build their apps. EMI and Echo Nest say developers should end up with the lion’s share of that 40 percent.

Given that Citigroup, which ended up owning EMI after financing a disastrous private equity deal, may or may not be selling the company any day, it’s always possible that this kind of offer may disappear if and when new management shows up.

And there are a few catches, but they seem doable — for instance, the deal requires EMI to act as the publisher for any apps that eventually make it to venues like Apple’s iTunes or Google’s Android Market. So, at least on paper, it looks like an attractive way for developers to get their hands on music without having to worry about breaking the law or hiring lawyers.

The program won’t do you any good if you want music that EMI doesn’t own. And a pool of 12,000 songs won’t do you any good if you’re trying to create a comprehensive music service like Spotify, which features some 15 million songs. Instead, think of applications that incorporate music, like Disney’s Tapulous, or any other Rock Band-like game. Developers might eventually want to use music that isn’t in EMI’s pool, but it seems plenty deep enough to get going.

Lee Ryder, of Franklin, TN, peacefully passed away on October 29, 2011.

He was born on July 5, 1937 in Matamoras, PA to the late Herbert and Mildred Ryder. Lee was a 1955 graduate of Port Jervis High School and went on to earn his Bachelor of Science Degree from St. Lawrence University and his MBA from New York University.
Lee began his career at Citibank in New York City before returning to Matamoras to carry on the family business as President of J.O. Ryder Rendering Company alongside his late cousin, Kent Ryder.

Lee was an avid skier and resided for a period of time in Taos, NM. He was also an accomplished cyclist and cycled the entire Lewis and Clark Trail from St. Louis, MO to the Oregon Coast. Additionally, Lee was a car enthusiast which inspired him to race Formula Fords on the Northeast Racing Circuit.

Lee Ryder is survived by his wife, Elaine and son, Casey of Franklin, TN; his daughter, Karen and her husband, Jack Warrington of Denver, CO; his daughter, Amy and her husband Christopher Kranick of Nolensville, TN; his son Lee Ryder, Jr. and his wife Kristin of Denver, CO; his brother, Robert Ryder and his wife Carolyn of Lady Lake, FL; his sister, Linda and her husband, Ralph Cowell of Milford, PA; as well as his five grandchildren: Cooper Warrington, Emily and Natalie Kranick, and Burke and Teo Ryder.

Visitation will be at Williamson Memorial Funeral Home and Gardens located at 3009 Columbia Avenue, Franklin TN 37064 on Thursday, November 3, 2011 from 5:00-7:00pm.
Funeral Service will be at Franklin First United Methodist Church located at 143 Fifth Avenue, South Franklin, TN 37064 on Friday, November 4, 2011 at 1:00pm.

Donations may be made to:
The Vanderbilt Hematology/Oncology Department at Vanderbilt University Medical Center
3927 The Vanderbilt Clinic
1301 Medical Center Drive, Nashville, TN 37232

This bilingual indie dance quartet answers the question that no doubt lingers in the mind of every music fan: “What would it sound like if David Bowie was the lead singer of Depeche Mode and sang half of his songs in Spanish?” The answer, thankfully is that it would sound phenomenal, and Rey Pila delivers, weaving funk and electronica into tunes that you will be unable to get out of your head, maybe ever. Far from being superficial, they effortlessly slide between peppy and melancholic, wistful and romantic, giving a perfectly balanced album. But even in the more thoughtful songs, their sound drips with adrenaline, making the whole track list unquestionably fun.

See more Rey Pila on mySpoonful - a taste of new music

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