Full disclosure: I’ve always been a huge fan of the rock opera. Tommy, Ziggy Stardust, yes even Aqualung. Some may celebrate the rise of the individual download, but I miss the concept albums that were designed to entertain for more than 3 minutes. I’m also a big fan of cinema. Even beyond the entertainment factor, I love being able to look into the past and see the shadows that film has left behind.

Unfortunately, as much as I enjoy watching old films, the soundtracks during the silent era are almost unbearable. The Jazz and Ragtime ballads may have been popular in their day, but they usually cause me to fall asleep within 20 minutes of starting a silent film. Because of this, I’ve more or less ignored nearly 2 decades worth of cinematic history, so when I saw Reddit user Feverdream post the following suggestion, you can understand why it may have caught my interest.

“[1]Put on silent movie “Metropolis” on Netflix [2]turn down volume [3]Custom quickmix on Pandora in a separate tab [5 6 7 8 9 ...]“

After trying out the instructions exactly, I’m proud to report that the results were amazing. In and of itself, Metropolis is a fantastic film. As a sci-fi fan, I’m really happy that I was able to see it. Even today, it’s probably still 30 years ahead of it’s time. When I combined it with music that was relevant to me, the film took on a life of it’s own. Just like when you sync Pink Floyd’s dark side of the moon with the Wizard of Oz, there were all kinds of intersections where the film and the music collided. It almost felt as if my custom Pandora mix had been made exclusively for that film.

What’s even better about the experience is that it’s not just limited to the film Metropolis. You can literally mash up any silent film on Netflix with a Pandora custom mix and it creates a very personalized experience. The dialogue, the acting and the plot all remain unchanged, but the addition of music that you actually enjoy creates a different sort of connection when watching the film. Throughout my experience, I noticed that my mind seemed to drift more. Instead of getting distracted by the explosions and witty one liners, I was actually thinking about the plot and trying to anticipate each step. It was as if the music was forcing the story to play out in my mind instead of on the screen.

Netflix only has about 25 silent films on their watch instantly service right now, but since you can sort by star rating, it’s pretty easy to find the ones that you’re most likely to enjoy. YouTube also has a pretty impressive collection of public domain silent films for those interested in playing at home.

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been almost five years since I wrote my first blog post on Thomas Hawk’s digital connection. Since then, the internet has changed almost as much as it did in the previous five years, but I’m still having fun sharing my thoughts with others online. While I normally write about other people’s ventures (I’m just not that interesting) I did want to take a moment to share a piece of my life with you.

When the Hawk first started to recruit me to write articles for his site, I was a little bit reluctant. Part of it had to do with a lack of interest in creative writing on my part, but a large part of it had to do with my not wanting to take center stage in front of so many people. You wouldn’t know it if you met me in person, but deep down inside I tend to be shy and don’t particularly care for the spotlight.

To help overcome my stage fright, Thomas Hawk suggested that I publish under a pen name instead of mixing business with pleasure. Since I share my legal name with a celebrity, my chances of being heard above the fan posts were slim to none anyway. When picking a pen name, I wanted something that reflected a part of me, but had never been used on the internet before.

Ten years ago to the day, I was finishing up my final semester in college and was taking a course on entrepreneurism. I must of have saved the best for last because unlike some of my more stuffy classes, this one really connected with me. At the time, the internet bubble was still inflating and .com madness was everywhere, but even before we saw the wealth creation of the 90′s, I always knew that I wanted to start my own business.

One of the projects for my class was to create a business and to try and raise funding for it. After many late night brainstorming sessions, our team finally settled on the idea of an MP3 car radio. At the time, Napster was just taking off and while most people over the age of 30 hadn’t heard of an mp3 yet, I knew that it would be the format of choice to replace the CD. With limited hardware supporting MP3s, we felt that there was a large market opportunity for the first company to build an MP3 car radio.

Immediately, we set out to build a prototype and was lucky enough to attract top tier tech talent to our team. We also assembled an out of this world advisory board to help and started putting together a business plan. By the time we were done, we had a great idea, but lacked the experience to actually make it take off. At the time, I remember thinking if I had only been born ten years earlier, it would have been a lot easier to raise financing. We did enter our business plan into several competitions (and performed quite well I might add), but overcoming the challenges of educating investors on MP3 technology, ultimately proved too tough for a scrappy group of college seniors.

I remember one meeting where an investor who had never heard of the MP3, told us that we were foolish to try and take on the compact disc. He had asked us why we thought we could compete against Sony as a startup. When we pointed out Sony’s reluctance to embrace the technology because of their studio business, he just kind of rolled his eyes and told us that if the format was any good, it would only be a matter of time. As it turns out he was right in a way, but Sony ended up waiting too long and lost their walkman franchise to Apple’s iPod.

Since then, the MP3 has become the de facto standard of choice and while there are plenty of mp3 players and other devices, there still isn’t a lot of choice when it comes to the MP3 car radio market. Maybe we were ahead of our time or maybe we simply lacked the experience to create something this big, but whatever the reason, our business never got the funding and eventually became a fond memory.

Since this experience had such a profound affect on my life, when trying to come up with a pen name, I wanted to use something that referred to the original idea. Since the name of our business was Discfree, Davis Freeberg was born. Before hitting publish on my first post, Google said that there were 0 search entries for the term “Davis Freeberg.” Today, there are 105,000 references. While it’s probably too late for me to go back and be the first to create an MP3 car radio, the entrepreneurial spirit that was discovered during the project has carried over to this very day.

Eventually, I set up a business on my own and am living out my dream from ten years ago, even if the details are different than I imagined them at the time. As a way of thanking all of the great readers who’ve stopped by my site over the last five years, I wanted to share a copy of my original business plan with you. I’ve removed some of the details to protect the anonymity of my partners, but it should give you a good idea for what we were trying to build.

In retrospect, I think that our numbers were a bit aggressive (what startup isn’t?) and that we were asking for too little money given the equity that we were prepared to give an angel investor, but the idea was solid and had we moved forward with our team, I think we could have at least made a run with it. While Discfree won’t ever become the business that I had hoped it would be, I am pleased to see Davis continue the dream, even if it’s in a different form. Thanks for making the last five years a truly remarkable experience for me and I hope you enjoy the sneak peak at what Davis was blogging before he even knew what blogging was.

One of my very first jobs was working behind a concession counter for a big multi-plex cinema. It isn’t the sort of place where one would expect to learn a life skill, but early on I learned an important lesson in business, the art of the up-sell.

You see, movie theaters make very little from the box office receipts, so the concessions counter is the lifeblood of the industry. The setup is pretty much the same at every theater, but most people don’t tend to think about it. Because the actual cost of the popcorn and soda is so low, the theaters reap big profits from selling captive customers overpriced snacks and beverages.

One of the problems that theaters face, is that there are a ton of people who tend to order small sizes. It could be that they are trying to save money or that they don’t need oversized portions, but because the containers cost the theater more than the actual popcorn or soda, going from a small to a larger size, tends to be pure profit for the theater.

To help “encourage” movie goers to pay the max, theaters will price their small popcorns at ridiculously expensive levels and then have a minor jump in price from small to medium and medium to large. If you were to price the popcorn by ounce, a small would cost four times as much as a large, but because of the high cost at the small level, it makes it easier to convince consumers to pay a little bit extra for a lot more food.

When I sold concessions, the sales pitch would typically go “hey did you know you can get a large for only 50 cents extra?” That was all it took and at least 75% of the customers would go big.

In thinking about why my theater was so effective at up-selling, two things jump out at me. The first has to do with the way the pricing was set. Consumers got tremendously more value at the higher levels, then the lower ones. It might be tough convincing someone to spend $5 on a bucket of popcorn to begin with, but once they made that purchase, an extra 10% for 200% more, seems small. Secondly though, they had an actual human explain this value to the customer. Concession employees were expected to upsell or suggestive sell on every single transaction. It could be subtle, but management made sure that every employee was at least presenting more options to the customers.

What made me take this trip down memory lane is a recent experience with Real’s Rhapsody music service. Before the internet, napster, and digitization, I used to collect music with a passion. Records, Tapes, CDs, it didn’t matter. I would scour local garage sales and thrift stores looking for bargains, (not to mention all of the BMG and Columbia House memberships.)

When the internet first started to take off, my collecting habits intensified. I’d surf Ebay for favorite artists. I didn’t care about the singles or the greatest hits, I was after the rare B-sides that were released internationally. There is something amazing about listening to an artist’s entire discography in order, but back then, it took a lot of money to buy every single song that an artist produced.

Once MP3′s took off, I abandoned physical playback and spent many late nights digitizing my music. As time has gone on though, I’ve realized what a hassle it is trying to maintain a large digital library. Computers have a way of freaking out once you go over a certain limit, there are countless hard drive failures involving added expenses and I don’t even want to think about the amount of time I’ve spent dealing with buffer overrun errors while backing up my music. The bottom line is that if you’re trying to collect a couple hundred thousand Mp3′s, it’s not only cheaper to rent then it is to buy, it’s cheaper just to store it.

Because I had such a large music collection, I never gave Rhapsody a chance, but as one hard drive failure after another has taken large chunks out of my music library, I’ve found myself turning to the internet for specific artists or songs that I’m now missing.

Over the last year, I’ve signed up for Rhapsody three different times to listen to music that’s disappeared over time. Thanks to their free trial offers, I’ve been able to hear a lot of great music, but never kept my membership for longer than a month.

What surprised me so much about the experience was how much I enjoyed it. Not only can I get the latest top hits for a fraction of what I used to spend, but I also get access to the expensive b-sides that were never in wide circulation. The first time I logged onto the service, I was estactic after discovering an entire album’s worth of material from my favorite artist.

Given how much enjoyment I’ve gotten out of the service, one would think that it would be a no brainer for me to spend a modest amount of money for access to more music then you can even think about, but when it came down to becoming a paying member, Real Networks lost me on the up-sell.

You see, as a streaming internet music service, Rhapsody really is an amazing product, but its lack of a robust download solution, means that if you want to take your music on the go, customers have limited options. Since Real realizes that not every consumer wants downloadable functionality, they price their service in two tiers.

The first is the standard all you can eat streaming music of just about any song or artist you can think of (we’re talking stuff not even on Bit Torrent.) For $2 more though, you can download songs to “approved devices” and rock out using a portable device that doesn’t need to be connected to the net.

As an internet streaming service, I would have been happy to pay their monthly fee for all of the music that they provide, but by offering a download “upgrade”, it makes me keenly aware of a significant limitation to the service. As is, I can listen to Pandora via the internet now, so a streaming only service makes me second guess how much value Rhapsody really has. I wouldn’t even mind paying the $2 more per month just for streaming access, but don’t see enough value in the $2 upgrade to justify signing up for the downloading tier.

Part of this is because I’m not able to download a DRM free MP3. Even if you download your music, you still have to “refresh” your approved device once a month or your songs get disabled. You’re also limited in the number of devices you can play your Real files on.

As much as I prefer downloading over streaming, it simply isn’t worth an extra $24 per year for a weaksauce version of the real thing. Having to connect my cell phone to the net once a month is obnoxious and I’m not particularly fond of downloading music that I can’t play on all the electronic gadgets that I own.

If they eliminated the download tier, I’d probably be a customer right now, but by making me choose, they’ve persuaded me not to sign up for either package.

Not everyone purchased an up-sell when I sold concessions, but during my entire time behind the counter, I never had a single customer walk away without at least buying the small popcorn that they originally asked for. When it comes to Rhapsody though, the different pricing tiers have cost them at least one customer who would have paid, if he didn’t have to choose between streaming only or weaksauce downloading.

I don’t know if Real does consumer surveys, but I bet that I’m not the only one to agonize over this distinction. Instead of using the price difference to highlight their weaknesses, Real would be better off by either raising the price $2 on everyone and then including their downloading solutions with the service or eliminate the downloading tier entirely and focus on being an amazing and comprehensive streaming service only. By trying to straddle between streaming and downloading, they are only confusing customers and highlighting the limitations to their service.

My 2 Dollars has a post up where he lists 35 different ways you can ditch cable and satellite, but still get free TV. Since his list has already grown to 41, it inspired me break out the old Karaoke machine and record a tribute to internet TV. I’m not ready to quit my day job for a professional Karaoke career, but hope you enjoy it anyway. My apologies ahead of time to both Mr. Simon and my readers. This song is dedicated to Comcast for all of their years of craptacular service.

50 Ways To Leave Your Television Provider

She said why don’t we both
Just sleep on it for a fortnight
And I believe that in the future
You’ll begin to see the HD light
And then she comped me for a free month
And I realized she was right
There must be fifty ways to leave your TV provider
Fifty ways to leave your TV provider

Whether its their ridiculous lawsuit against XM Satellite radio or Creative’s decision to remove FM recording from their MP3 products, there are plenty of examples where the RIAA has used heavy handed tactics to try and stifle innovation.

Yet, no matter how hard they try, they can’t put this genii back into the bottle and by taking such a strong stance against legitimate companies, they’ve driven DVR radio underground, where they’ve now lost all control over it.

The RIAA may have been worried about RadioShark, but it was the radio piranhas that were the real threat and while they were busy suing their partners, the open source movement has been filling the stream ripping wake, that corporations are now too afraid to touch.

Stream ripping software isn’t new, but the functionality has been relatively limited and the interface hasn’t been ready for the average user. Screamer Radio is an excellent open source solution for DVR radio, but it lacks the aesthetic appeal and scheduling features, that make traditional DVRs so easy to use.

Luckily, the open source community has been hard at work and what Screamer Radio leaves out, Raima Radio is now bringing to the table. Raima Radio is a powerful freeware program that fuses features like wishlists, program scheduling, and video support with the traditional features of most stream ripping programs.

This combination turns a tremendous amount of power over to the consumer and will certainly have the RIAA taking extra heartburn medication (when they find out about it ) If they didn’t like XM’s limited subscriber base, having the ability to record satellite radio, then they will hate this program. It gives anyone with a computer and an internet connection, the ability to time shift radio to an mp3 player.

Raima supports a large number of internet radio stations and includes links to web pages, where you can find even more mainstream programs. If you are midway through a program, you can hit record and it caches the data, so that you can get all of the program. For years I’ve wanted to tune into Kevin and Bean’s morning show on KROQ, but since I live in San Francisco, I haven’t had easy access to the program. Now I can use Raima’s program to start recording, before I even wake up. By bridging the gap between the internet and the mp3, Raima allows you to follow radio that would normally be out of geographic reach.

Even more powerful then the scheduling capabilities, is the ability for Raima to monitor and record specific songs or artists that you are interested in. Instead of illegally downloading songs from the P2P networks, Raima allows you to create wishlists and will scan for those songs on any station that you tune into. The number of streams that you can simultaneously record is only limited by your bandwidth. This allows you to set up filters, record 10 different stations overnight and in the morning you’ll have a hefty mp3 collection.

This is the functionality that has the RIAA so terrified. If consumers are able to easily record the songs that they hear off the radio, it reduces their need to buy the hit singles. As someone who prefers albums over singles, I think that this is the wrong way to look at it, but I can still understand why they would see this as a threat to their business model. If you get me hooked on a few of your best songs, I’m going to buy your albums, go to your concerts and tell my friends about you, but if you are a casual music listener, this software will enable you to avoid ever having to purchase music again.

While the radio capabilities are Raima’s strongest suit, they’ve also thrown in support for recording streaming video. There isn’t a large selection of channels and the quality is terrible, but its a nice bonus over some of the other stream ripping programs. I would like to see them add support for recording internet video into XviD, but portability is more important for music, than it is for video.

The biggest drawback to Raima’s software is that the quality of the sound files isn’t always the best. The songs usually start recording ten seconds early and cut off before they finish. Unlike TiVo, there is no way to tell the system to start recording earlier or later to account for the lag. The mp3 streams also tend to include commentary from the DJs and sponsors. This isn’t a big deal if you’re trying to listen to a half an hour of talk radio, but it can be annoying, if you are only focused on the music. The quality of the mp3′s is also dependent on your internet connection. If you are trying to record a stream from Japan, while watching YouTube, running Bit Torrent, and playing online poker, then expect stuttering and interference to show up in your recordings. If you have a dedicated connection to a local radio station, then you should be fine.

While these deficiencies aren’t a major drawback, they still help to differentiate time shifted radio from buying the actual music. As great as Raima Radio is, it still can’t replicate the selection or quality that you can get from visiting Amoeba or buying .mp3′s online.

Another drawback to the software is that you can’t tell if a station is broadcasting until you try to tune into it. Because Raima includes a lot of dead streams, it means that you have to spend a lot of time trying to load dead air.

Overall, Raima Radio is a great freeware program and one that is pushing the envelope for time shifted radio. While there is plenty of room for improvement, its one of the better stream ripping programs out there. Universal may be relishing the royalties that they extracted from XM, but in the end, they paid a fair steeper price by trying to squash innovation.

Apparently, the RIAA wants to start charging radio stations for access to music. I guess without payola going on, there isn’t as much of an incentive to give away content, plus it’s hard to argue that internet stations need to be paying crazy rates, when they are giving away the content to their terrestrial cousins.

Since the NAB would obviously suffer from having to actually pay for their music, they decided to take a cheap shot at the RIAA by going after where they are vulnerable. Instead of making the RIAA defend the price increase, they are instead raising the question of whether or not that money will end up going back to the artists. It obviously won’t because the studios have a well documented history of taking full advantage of the artists that they promote, but it still puts the RIAA on the defensive over the legislative issues that they are proposing. If the NAB is successful, you could even see the RIAA back away from this, before they would be willing to better compensate their artists. I’ve always hated politics, but I can still appreciate an evil stroke of genius when I see it.