#iPad on sale today; but what percent will buy now vs "wait and see"? (pic) - http://bit.ly/95cLL1
Friday, March 12, 2010
Unreal Engine 3 adds extra dimension with NVIDIA 3D Vision
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/12/unreal-engine-3-adds-extra-dimension-with-nvidia-3d-vision/
Unreal Engine 3 adds extra dimension with NVIDIA 3D Vision originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google Reader Play: Fullscreen Playback of Popular/Recommended Reader Items [Google Reader]
In Google Reader Play, items are presented one at a time, and each item is big and full-screen. After you've read an item, just click the next arrow to move to the next one, or click any item on the filmstrip below to fast-forward. Of course, you can click the title or image of any item to go to the original version. And since so much of the good stuff online is visual, we automatically enlarge images and auto-play videos full-screen.
You can also just run Reader Play as a auto-advancing slideshow if you just want to sit back and bask in the stream. Thanks Joey!
Intel's 6-Core Gulftown Gets Tested, Blows Us Away [CPUs]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5491045/intels-6+core-gulftown-gets-tested-blows-us-away
Meet the world's fastest CPU. OK, so we just gave away the big reveal to our report before you even flipped one page, and without so much as the common courtesy of a spoiler alert. For that, we do not apologize, because it's not like you couldn't have guessed how this one would end up. After all, Intel's new 3.33GHz Core i7-980X builds on all the goodness of the ass-kicking quad-core 3.33GHz Core i7-975 Extreme Edition, but is smaller, cooler, and has an additional two cores under its heat spreader. With Hyper-Threading enabled, that's a cool 12 threads at the ready. How could anyone screw that one up?
With Hyper-Threading enabled, that's a cool 12 threads at the ready. How could anyone screw that one up?
In fact, Intel's Core i7-980X seems to be one of the most flawless launches we've seen from the company in some time. By flawless, we mean there are no contortionist acts, such as explaining to consumers that a new socket (LGA1156) will have the same CPU branding as an incompatible existing socket. Nor is there the head-scratcher of a very novel, yet very limp, integrated graphics chip in a CPU (Clarkdale), which, by the way, won't work in boards that lack graphics output ports.
With Core i7-980X, you update your BIOS, drop the chip in, and-voilà-you spend hours rocking a six-core high. Put simply, Core i7-980X is 24-ounces of prime-rib red meat for performance enthusiasts who really haven't had much to gnaw on since the original 3.2GHz Core i7-965 Extreme Edition came out two years ago.
So we're done, right? You don't need to read on? Sorry, there's still more to learn. If you want to know if your motherboard works with the new chip, what applications can really exploit the six cores, and how this bad boy performs, you'll have to keep reading.
What's in a Name?
We know that, by now, enthusiasts should be immune to Intel's confusing model numbers, but there's one thing that sticks in our craw about the Core i7-980X: Despite it being the world's first consumer x86 hexa-core, and despite it using the latest 32nm process, it's label is a mere five notches greater than the quad-core Core i7-975 Extreme Edition part it ostensibly replaces.
Surely, all the goodness of two more cores and a total 12 threads of computing would warrant a Core i9 designation, or at the very least, a much higher model number, right? No, Intel officials told us. The company said that, despite previous reports that it would call its hexa-core Core i9, Intel backed off when retailers and vendors complained of too many blasted brands. And as to why it isn't a 999X or 9900X, Intel said such gestures are unnecessary. The part is designed for enthusiasts and the folks who buy it will know that it's not a mere five clicks more than a Core i7-975.
Beneath the Surface
Fortunately, the chip is fairly simple to understand. It uses the new 32nm process that was introduced with the dual-core Core i5/Core i3 Clarkdale CPUs. For code-name junkies, that makes it part of the Westmere family-not part of the original 45nm Nehalem family. All six-cores reside on a single contiguous piece of silicon. Like the original Nehalem CPUs, each core has 2MB of L3 available to it, giving the CPU a total of 12MB of L3 cache. The cache is shared across all the individual cores, which means a single core can have up to 12MB of L3 cache if the other five cores are sleeping.
As is the case with all Extreme processors, the chip is fully unlocked letting you change multipliers as well as Turbo Mode ratios. Turbo Boost is present but not as pedal-to-the-firewall as the LGA1156 parts. The Core i7-980X will give you a Turbo Boost up to 133MHz if more than one core is active. With single-threaded apps, the CPU will Turbo Boost up to 266MHz. That's boring compared to the Core i7-870, which will boost from 2.93GHz to 3.6GHz, or about 733MHz. We'd be remiss, though, if we didn't point out that the Core i7-870 starts out at a much lower clock speed.
Tick-Tock
Keeping with Intel's tick-tock model, with ticks being little jumps and tocks being huge jumps, 980X is a tick. For the most part, besides the process shrink, there's very little that's changed from Nehalem to Westmere. The most notable new feature is the inclusion of advanced encryption instructions, which accelerate encryption.
Overall, Westmere is just a smaller, denser 45nm Nehalem. How much smaller? The Core i7-975 Extreme Edition weighed in at 731 million transistors and occupied 263mm2 of die space. Core i7-980X has 1.17 billion transistors but occupies just 248mm2 of die space.
Westmere will run its course until 2011 or 2012 when Intel introduces its Sandy Bridge CPUs. Where Westmere is a tick, Sandry Bridge will be a tock, introducing a new microarchitecture that will include advanced vector extensions as well as other enhancements. For entry-level CPUs, Sandy Bridge will also move the GPU core onto the die. Initial Sandy Bridge chips will be 32nm with a shrink to 22nm due soon after.
Pushing the Boundaries
Normally, a smaller process leads to enhanced overclocking and the same holds true for the Core i7-980X. With the original Core i7-965, we've never exceeded 4GHz on air. The D0-step Core i7-975 improved overclocking, but even there, we've never seen production machines exceed 4.2GHz reliably-and that's with water cooling. With the Core i7-980X, we went into the BIOS and dialed the base clock up until the processor was at 4GHz. From there, we had no stability issues and ran multiple benchmark runs without incident. Mind you, this was without tweaking core voltage for the CPU, the QPI, RAM, or other various knobs we could have turned to get more reliability. We even got the machine to POST at 4.5GHz on air cooling, but then it crashed. The verdict is that the Core i7-980X looks to be a wonderful overclocker.
Early Adopters Get the Respect
Let's face it: When Intel introduced its LGA1156 Lynnfield CPUs last year, every single person who bought into the Core i7 CPUs and LGA1366 motherboards had a panic attack. Would Intel, as some feared, abandon the LGA1366 platform altogether in favor of the more cost-conscious new socket? It's happened before. Think of Intel's short-lived Socket 423 and AMD's original Socket 940. With those, early adopters got one or two upgrades and then were left waving their DIMMs in the wind.
Fortunately, users who chose the early adopter route will be rewarded for once. The Core i7-980X is an LGA1366 CPU that should be drop-in compatible with nearly every LGA1366 motherboard. To keep things compatible, Intel even kept the official spec for the Core i7-980X to DDR3/1066 only. Even though the CPU is quite capable of supporting memory at far higher speeds, Intel said it didn't want to require motherboards makers to recertify boards for higher speeds of RAM. For what it's worth, we tested both the Bloomfield and Gulftown LGA1366 Core i7s at DDR3/1333.
You'll still have to update the BIOS before dropping in a Core i7-980X, but we haven't heard of any LGA1366 motherboards being incompatible with the new chip. That's quite an accomplishment for Intel, which has a history of burning people when new CPUs are launched. We don't want to rehash ancient history, but let's just say we're happy it worked out for early adopters for once.
Extreme Exclusivity
Intel has long had a dilemma with its Extreme series of CPUs. Only folks with deep pockets actually purchased the Core i7-975-most consumers just bought the poor-boy Core i7-920 and overclocked that puppy up to the 3.7GHz+ range. There was simply very little incentive to buy the top-end part when the low-end part overclocked so well. That little cheat no longer works, though. To get a hexa-core chip today, you'll have to pay for an Extreme series. That's why we were actually surprised when Intel priced the Core i7-980X at $999. Sure, it's still too rich for most, but as the only game in town, we expected Intel to charge $1,500 for the CPU. At $999, the Core i7-980X is actually the same price as the Core i7-975 part that it will slowly replace.
When will Intel offer a friendlier-priced hexa-core? The company won't talk about unannounced product but several Internet rumor sites have reported that Intel has a hexa-core Core i7-970 in the $500 range on tap for the end of the year.
If You Build It, Will They Come?
If you think it's all sunshine and lollipops for hexa-core computing, it's not. As always, the problem is finding applications that will actually use the available threads. That was a problem with the original dual-cores and quad-cores; now with a hexa-core and Hyper-Threading, the situation hasn't improved much. The apps aren't nonexistent, but they're certainly not as prevalent as you would hope. That makes upgrading to the Core i7-980X something you'll want to think about first. Certainly, if you are a mega-multitasker, more cores don't hurt. But if your primary applications are single- or dual-threaded, the extra cores will just sit idle, so you'll need to seriously consider whether paying for a hexa-core makes sense.
A Close-Up Look at the Core i7-980X
All six cores of Intel's Core i7-980X share 12MB of L3 cache on the die. The 1.17 billion–transistor CPU also has two QPI connections but only one is enabled on consumer CPUs. The second QPI is use for multi-CPU Xeon configurations.
Even 100 Cores Won't Help Lazy Code
Multiple cores are only useful if there's software that takes advantage of them. Thus, we queried a couple leading software developers on where they saw the multicore sweet spot to be. Their answers shed interesting light on the quest for more threads.
Jeff Stephens, president of Bibble Labs: "Bibble 5 'supports' unlimited cores, and with fast enough disks and efficient OS-level scheduling, we can scale up to about 30 CPUs (performance benefits stop there, so 32 CPUs runs as fast as 30-right now). Without sounding glib, the reason no one else is doing this is because it's hard.… To scale beyond four or so threads, all aspects of a program must be built around parallel processing of huge amounts of data, efficient scheduling of processing tasks, and disk reads/writes to prevent starving CPUs of work to do by waiting for data, etc."
Paul Schmidt, president of Photodex: "In my opinion, more cores don't solve the biggest problem. The biggest problem is how the code is written-most code just isn't written to take advantage of more cores. I don't see that changing soon because writing code for multiple cores is hard and the development world is moving away from hard and toward easy. I think the trend is due to the same old brute-force single-core speed improvements that have been happening combined with how cheap computers are now. Why rewrite for more cores when you can wait a year and get a CPU that is another 20 percent faster?
AMD Responds with Phenom II X6
By now, we've pretty much become accustomed to AMD taking a back seat to Intel, particularly in matters of core count and performance. This year, however, it doesn't look like AMD fans will to wait as long for a six-core proc.
AMD expects to release its own hexa-core processor, the Phenom II X6, hot on the heels of Core i7-980X this spring. The chip will be a derivative of the company's Istanbul CPU that's been available for some time in Opteron-based servers. The chip is likely to have 6MB of L3 and will be compatible with AM3 sockets. It's not clear if the new chip will work in AM2+ boards, as we've been told that DDR3 will be mandatory for the new chip.
One other trick AMD may have up its sleeve-if a news report from Xbit Labs is correct -is its own spin on Turbo Boost. Using so-called Dynamic Speed Boost, Phenom II X6 processors may overclock individual cores when the full complement of cores is not in use.
AMD is also continuing to forge ahead with its Bulldozer core, which the company hopes will put it back on a competitive edge with Intel. Bulldozer's new microarchitecture will support advanced vector extensions and will be built on a 32nm process. Bulldozer is expected to be available in early 2011.
Let the Benchmarks Begin!
For our showdown, we decided that the new hexa-core has two primary competitors: the Core i7-975 Extreme Edition and the LGA1156-bound Core i7-870. We considered adding AMD's Phenom II X4 965 to the mix but the pricing ($185) and performance of that CPU puts it in a different class than the three Intel chips. When AMD's Phenom II X6 hexa-core hits in the near future, we'll certainly put it into the mix.
For our benchmarks, we used both older and newer benchmarks to stretch the Core i7-980X. We used both synthetic and real-world applications for video editing, encoding, 3D rendering, and memory tests, along with a handful of gaming benchmarks. Be advised, when we review a CPU, we set resolutions fairly low in order to remove the GPU from the equation.
The verdict: We have no problem proclaiming the Core i7-980X as the world's fastest. Obviously, it shined the brightest in our multithreaded 3D-rendering benchmarks, where its performance surmounted the already ludicrously fast Core i7-975 by 37 to 55 percent. Encoding also gave us a healthy 25 percent performance boost. Likewise, video editing saw the hexa-core achieve anywhere from 10 to 25 percent performance boosts. In applications where multithreading is minimal, the Core i7-980X was usually tied with the similarly clocked Core i7-975. We do suspect that the larger L3 cache of the Core i-980X paid off dividends in several of our gaming benchmarks.
One figure we couldn't quite square was the memory performance of the Core i7-980X. We expected its memory bandwidth in the synthetic tests to be equal to the Core i7-975's, but the hexa-core was at a disadvantage. The lower memory bandwidth didn't seem to hurt in the other benchmarks, though.
In the final analysis, this is a CPU that turns in performance that is, at its worst, equivalent to the Core i7-975 it replaces. At its best, the i7-980X offers up to 50 percent more performance than its closest competitor. That's pretty much unprecedented and certainly helps the Core i7-980X earn its crown as the new performance king.
Best scores are bolded. We tested both LGA1366 CPUs using an Asus P6X58D Premium motherboard with 6GB of Corsair DDR3/1333, an EVGA GeForce GTX 280, and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional. The LGA1156 CPU was tested with a Gigabyte P55A-UD6 motherboard, 8GB of Corsair DDR3/1333, an EVGA GeForce GTX 280, and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional. Both configurations used a 150GB Western Digital Raptor hard drive.
Record Labels: Change or Die [Music]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5481545/record-labels-change-or-die
"Change or Die" may sound like hyperbole, or an idle threat, but for the music business, the two alternatives have never been more real. EMI may very well go extinct in the coming months, and all of the major labels are fighting losing battles. But all is not lost.
The traditional role of a record label, in the broadest sense, is to bankroll a band until they start making lots of money, at which point the label gets to keep most of it. They own the master recordings a band makes, and by taking on this ownership they put all of their resources behind selling said recordings.
This setup makes sense when bands lacked the wherewithal to produce and record their own albums and when manufacturing and distributing physical copies of albums and marketing said albums costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. It also makes sense when a popular album will sell millions of copies at $15 a pop.
But that's definitely not the case now. Record stores are dying at an alarming rate, and fewer and fewer people are buying CDs every day. It's safe to say that the current generation of teenagers has never perused record stores as a normal activity; it's all downhill from here for physical music sales. And FM radio isn't doing too hot either. In short, everything that the music industry has known to be true for the last few decades is quickly turning to dust. Big labels can still bank on country, R&B and pop acts, but the bottom has already fallen out on alternative groups and other internet-friendly genres. And that's just the beginning.
The Old, Dead Way of Doing Business
The way bands operate has changed so much in the last decade that what a label can provide and what bands require of a label has changed drastically, faster than labels have been able to adapt.
Manufacturing and distribution used to be the cornerstone of a label's business; every major label owned its own plants to make the albums and also dealt with shipping the albums worldwide. Today, only Sony still owns plants that manufacture CDs, with the other three big labels outsourcing manufacturing to them. But they all still have reps who have to go out to record stores and make sure that their albums are getting proper shelf space. They have to deal with defects and returns. There are lots of resources required to deal with the manufacture and distribution of a physical product, but that physical product is quickly headed towards irrelevancy.
The biggest music stores are now virtual, so there's no need for someone to go gladhand every Sam Goody manager so they give you endcap space for Use Your Illusion II. The iTunes Music Store sells 25% of the music sold in America as of last August, and that number is definitely going up, not down.
According to the IFPI, physical sales of music dropped 15.4% globally between 2007 and 2008. But in that same year, digital sales rose 24.1%. And Nielsen SoundScan numbers show that the number of units sold between 2006 and 2009 rose from 1 billion per year to 1.7 billion per year, with a unit referring to either an album or a song sold. It's a significant increase, but when someone buying three songs counts the same as someone buying three CDs, you can see why the labels are losing money despite the positive-sounding stat.
And TuneCore's internal numbers show that online sales are growing even faster for independent acts than those already well established. TuneCore CEO Jeff Price told me that between 2007 and 2009, TuneCore artists have gone from earning $7-8 million a year to $31 million, with $60 million in earnings projected for 2010. That's insane growth, to be sure, but it's got a long way to go before it represents a sizable proportion of global music sales. To put things in perspective, the IFPI recorded $4.9 billion in sales for 2008.
Furthermore, these days it's easier than ever for musicians to record music without an expensive studio. Software such as Reason, Pro Tools and Logic can be bought for $300 or less, and run on a mid-range laptop. Cheap mics and gear can be found all over eBay and Craigslist. Tie everything together with a $200 to $500 mic preamp analog-to-digital/digital-to-analog box, and you have a mini-studio in your bedroom.
And music blogs have turned the way artists are discovered on its head. It used to be that high-paid A&R executives would scour clubs to find underground bands to sign, acting as the filter between the millions of mediocre bands and the discriminating public. Today, obsessive music fans scour clubs and the web for free, discovering new acts and writing about them on blogs. Labels then discover bands from these blogs. The A&R system is no longer as relevant.
As Voyno from the musicians-as-entrepreneurs blog New Rockstar Philosophy told me, it's very possible for a band to use the internet to replace much of what a label provides:
There are artists on YouTube who use creative on-the-cheap strategies to garner millions of views that direct traffic to their main site, iTunes pages, Facebook page and bandcamp.com profile. They then build an e-mail/text subscription from their new fans, which allows them to offer new merchandise, tickets for shows and other related info directly to fans. The web traffic analytics from all their sites can help them plan successful tours, target Facebook ads, and make better decisions on how to move forward.
These changes have shaken the foundation of the industry, and the biggest labels have borne the brunt of the losses that these changes wrought.
Tough Times for Major Labels
EMI is owned by Terra Firma Capital Partners, a British private equity firm that also owns waste management companies, gas stations, residential home builders and movie theaters. To them, the art EMI is releasing is about as important as the trash that Waste Recycling Group collects. If it doesn't make them money, it isn't worth keeping around, 80 years of history or not.
Billboard's Senior Editorial Analyst Glenn Peoples told me that it's not for lack of trying that EMI finds itself in this position. "Labels have cut as many costs as they possibly can, they've taken fewer risks, they've signed fewer artists and tried to make safer bets," he says. "They're doing what they can, but the revenue might not be there to support the way they do business. So it's very possible that the recorded music division of EMI will be sold off and will go elsewhere. An acquisition by Warner Music Group is a possibility, and that would take it down to three majors in recorded music, and that'd be pretty drastic and a lot of concentration between three companies."
An EMI Music spokesperson told me, "EMI Music is doing well. We've reported revenue growth, despite a declining market, and strong operating profit and margin improvement, both in the last financial year and in the current year." But if they can't convince Terra Firma that they have a way out of the quagmire they're in, the possibility of the number of major labels to dropping to three is very real.
And if that happens, what of those remaining three? Universal Music Group is owned by French media conglomerate Vivendi, a company with stakes in the Universal and Canal movie studios and the video game publisher Activision Blizzard amongst other holdings. Sony Music Entertainment is obviously a division of Sony, and we all know Sony has had problems of its own lately. Warner Music Group is the only major without a parent company to answer to, as it spun off from Time Warner in 2004, and its revenue dropped about $3.5 billion last year.
The Upside of Signing on the Dotted Line
But all is not lost, and the death of the record label at a business is not a foregone conclusion. Labels from EMI down to the smallest indie labels are racing to change the way they do business. And they still have quite a bit to offer.
I talked to Josh Roth, Ra Ra Riot's manager, about the reasons bands still have for signing with a label. One big positive that signing to a label provides a band, he told me, is giving them legitimacy. "I think right now with the internet, there are just so many bands out there that it's easy to go unnoticed," he told me. "There's still is a certain charm to having a label saying 'We like this band and we're going to sign them and you should take a listen.' With the amount of bands that are out there, it's hard to filter what is actually good now."
Furthermore, as outlets such as radio and MTV have become less relevant, new venues for being heard and getting paid have opened up. "Commercials are becoming much more relevant," Ra Ra Riot guitarist Milo Bonacci told me.
"That's how a lot of bands get paid or get their music out there. That's how a lot of people hear a song for the first time. I feel like commercials are taking the place of commercial radio." And to get on a commercial, it sure helps to be signed to a label with a nice licensing department.
Of course, there are different types of record labels. A major label, such as EMI, has a lot more money to throw around and can make more promises, but contracts with majors can end up with artists further in the hole due to these deep pockets. As Bonacci told me, "There's more risk. There's more fuel to propel you forward up front, but that's no guarantee." That same fuel could blow up in your face. We've seen how bands who don't hit it big can end up "owing" their major label hundreds of thousands of dollars, after all.
Indie labels (true indie labels, not boutiques under the umbrella of a major) have less resources and therefore will give bands less to recoup. Indies also will often offer the artist a chance to interact with top brass, something that is almost never done at a major. Indies are presumably owned by passionate music fans rather than gigantic multinational holding companies, which is important when a band needs to know that a label is 100% behind them, according to RRR's Bonacci.
Indie labels seem to have a better chance of adapting and surviving in tumultuous times. Since for the most part they're private companies with few employees, they're able to make drastic changes in their business models much more quickly than major labels. But that doesn't mean they'll all survive; famed indie label Touch and Go closed down last year, and in addition to repping bands such as TV on the Radio, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, !!! and Blonde Redhead, they also handled distribution for other venerable indies such as Drag City, Kill Rock Stars, Jade Tree and Merge. It was a huge blow to the indie label scene.
Getting a Cut of Everything
The way labels are moving to stay alive is by becoming involved in the places that bands still make money, such as touring and merchandising. Traditionally, labels only made money off records sold, while any profits made from t-shirts or posters sold on the road went to the band. After all, if the label just owns the master recordings, it can only make money off the sale of said recordings, not any ancillary profits that come from things like touring.
But now some labels are pushing what are called 360 deals, which involve them in virtually everything an artist does. One of the most famous 360 deals was EMI's 2002 deal with Robbie Williams, which was worth a whopping £80 million, giving EMI a piece of basically everything that Williams touched. That didn't go so well, with Williams threatening to withhold albums from the label and trying to get out of his contract. But last week, according to UK trade paper Music Week, Williams' manager Tim Clark publicly came out in support of the embattled label, saying, "My own view is Citigroup would be mad at this stage not to keep EMI on as a going concern. It just would be bonkers."
In any case, 360 deals and general diversification are what big labels such as EMI are looking to move into, according to Billboard's Glenn Peoples. "They're definitely diversifying and they're actually getting into agencies, artist management, concert promotion. There's really no area that the four majors are not pursuing right now."
These deals make the most sense for huge acts with lots of opportunities for branding and licensing. You've seen it in action here on Giz, in fact, with Dr. Dre's Beats headphones and Lady Gaga's new Creative Director "job" at Polaroid. Both those acts are signed to Interscope, a sub-label of Universal that's clearly pushing artists towards these new revenue streams. But many smaller acts are still reluctant to give a label a slice of the entire pie with such a wide-reaching deal.
The fact of the matter is that bands do still need someone working for them, 360 deal or not. For some bands, just having a small team of a dedicated manager, publicist and lawyer who can handle the nitty-gritty of online sales, tour organization, merchandising and marketing will be enough for them. But many can still benefit from the huge networks that labels have with their contacts in every facet of the industry. Sure, you can print your own t-shirts, but a label with contacts with clothing manufacturers, stores and distributors can make that process a lot easier. And just how much of this work do you want to do yourself?
And it makes sense that a manager would be wary of labels moving into their territory, but there's still a distinction between label and manager with these deals. "For example, a new artist signed to a multi-rights deal may use the major label's merchandise company and e-commerce division in addition to its publishing and recorded music companies," Peoples says. "In the past, a manager could pick and choose which merch, e-commerce, publishing and record companies it wanted to work with. Now they're more likely to be under the same umbrella."
Sometimes, a band's management team can replace what a label does entirely. Just yesterday, OK Go announced it was splitting with EMI, whom they didn't have the greatest relationship with, to strike out on their own with a new company called Paracadute. Paracadute is basically OK Go's own team to handle management, promotion and distribution of their records. "The things that a major has to offer above and beyond anybody else are the things that OK Go really didn't need so much," Peoples says. "And that's radio promotion and access to brick and mortar retail. If you're going to create nearly all of your consumer awareness through cheaply made YouTube videos, you don't need this big promotional and distribution system behind you."
But not all bands can do what OK Go has done. The digital world looks a lot more accessible when only viewed through the lens of rock acts. "If you're an R&B act, if you're a straight up pop act, a country act, you're going to need radio and you're going to need brick and mortar retail, and that's not going to change anytime soon. Things are changing definitely for alternative rock, rock and indie, but some genres sell a lot better in digital than other genres."
But clearly, the money that's to be made in music is no longer just in album sales. And bands seem to be presented with a choice: they can either allow labels to become more involved in everything that they do, and give up money that used to go exclusively to them in the process, or strike out on their own. Either way, they'll entering a landscape where getting their song on Gossip Girl for 40 seconds is more important than any amount of FM radio play, where getting a music video posted to Stereogum is more important than getting it on MTV and where you make more money touring behind an album than selling that same album.
And in order to prove to artists that signing with a label is a better idea than going out on your own, they'll need to make big changes; bigger than they've made so far. "It might be how an addict ends up turning his life around," Peoples says. "He's gotta hit rock bottom. And I dunno if the record industry has hit rock bottom yet, but maybe that's what'll need to happen for there to be really big change."
But at the end of the day, the saving grace of record labels might be a lot more basic than who gets what percentage of merchandise or who deals with distribution. The big question is this: do bands really want to try to make it completely on their own? As Bonacci says, "I don't necessarily want to have all that nitty-gritty stuff to worry about. I'd rather just worry about making music. I don't want to worry about numbers or distribution or marketing or publicity or anything like that. That sounds like a desk job. I used to have a desk job, that's why I'm playing music. Now look at me. I sleep on couches."
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