In this case, later. Much later. I'm a big fan of using Rhapsody on my Sonos, so I've been frustrated that my band's second album seemed to get lost on its way to Rhapsody. For some strange reason, when my band Soul Patch released the album earlier this year, we used CD Baby to handle physical and digital distribution, and the album quickly found its way to iTunes, Amazon and numerous other digital services, but Rhapsody was a serious laggard. Rhapsody told us they had a big backlog and were a bit behind, and promised we'd get up there in June, July, August and October. I had given up and had stopped asking the folks at Rhapsody what the deal was. Finally, sometime in the past week, the album found its way through the clogged tubes of the interweb and is now available for your streaming pleasure:

Sooner or Later by Soul Patch

Finally, as an investor in Topspin Media (and in the spirit of distributing Soul Patch's music as widely as possible), I've trying out various different direct-to-fan musician's publishing platforms, so I decided to put Sooner or Later up on Bandcamp, a very slick system indeed. Kudos to Ethan & Co. for a job well done, and to the fine folks over at True Ventures who invested in Bandcamp. Here's a nice embed that Bandcamp provides:

So this story hit the news a few days ago, but I've been busy eating turkey, so I didn't get around to posting it until now. Atlantic Records announced that sales of their music from digital downloads are now greater than those from sales of physical CDs. They are the first of the major labels to be able to make this claim, though this day has been a long time coming, and no doubt the other labels will reach this milestone in the relatively near future, whether they care to or not.

Atlantic clearly deserves praise for reaching this milestone first -- most of their brethren's digital sales as a percentage of overall sales trail Atlantic's substantially, closer to the 20% range, indicating that Atlantic is further down the road in re-tooling their business for digital. Nonetheless, I think Atlantic is being a bit disingenuous in touting this as an accomplishment -- I could claim that wise investment choices in my muni bond portfolio in the past year have led to it becoming a majority of my holdings, rather it was the meltdown in the equity market that caused my bond allocation to overtake my equity allocation. Cold comfort when the overall pie has shrunk disastrously.

While the continued strong growth of digital sales is promising, this isn't wholly good news for the labels: while their digital revenue streams may be growing quickly, their CD revenues are declining even more sharply -- the NY Times article I link to above quotes NBC Universal's Ed Zucker apt characterization of the difficulty old media businesses are facing in their digital transition as "trading analog dollars for digital pennies". (Note: As I was posting this, I noticed Fred Wilson recently wrote a post with this quote as a title, so clearly Zucker's quip is a bit viral).

To survive, the major labels will need to significantly restructure over time to adapt to the (rapidly approaching) day when CD revenue becomes a small minority line of their businesses. As Ian Rogers, CEO of Foundry Group portfolio company Topspin Media eloquently put it, "the physics of the music industry have changed". The tools of production and distribution have been democratized. The leaves talent and the ability to identify it and market it well (by building strong relationships directly between artists and their fans) in the digital world as key differentiators in the music business going forward. The labels, artists, artists' management and new entities that will emerge who don't fit in any of these categories who embrace this new reality are the ones who will prosper going forward.

I'm very pleased with the people Obama is bringing on board his administration. In David Brooks' op-ed piece in the NY Times today, he refers to this new administration as the valedictocracy - rule by those who graduated first in their high school classes. Having been valedictorian of my high school graduating class in 1989, I'm glad to see my long-suffering people are finally getting their shot. (That's a joke, folks.)

I'm hopeful that an Obama administration will (among other things) help buck the long-standing trend towards anti-intellectualism in our country. The world is a complicated place, and I want my leaders to be as intelligent as possible, be comfortable with nuance and speak in complete sentences. The last eight years have proven what a disaster voting for the guy you'd like to have a beer with can turn out to be. Fortunately, voters used a different filter this time around.

Call me elitist if you must, but I'd much rather have a beer with a guy or gal with advanced degrees from Harvard, Stanford or Yale than with Joe the Plumber. Time to hand over the controls to the eggheads -- even if you are suspicious of this "elitist" approach, let's face it, there's very little chance they could do a worse job at the helm than the previous administration did.

A couple weeks ago, Foundry Group portfolio company Topspin Media's CEO Ian Rogers delivered the keynote speech at the Grammy Northwest Music Tech Summit. He just posted his presentation on Topspin's blog -- if you have any interest in the current (and future) state of the music business, it is well worth a read. As I've mentioned before, I'm honored to be a part of Topspin, and think Ian is one of the most cogent thinkers out there about the intersection of technology and the music business. His post made it on to Boing Boing today, so I'm sure his keynote is getting a ton of well-deserved attention. Good stuff.

I just bought myself a brand new MacBook Air, with a 128GB flash drive and the faster graphics. It runs much faster than the first-gen one I have and also runs much cooler, so in general I'm a happy guy.

But twice now, I've hooked up the ethernet dongle and plugged it into a network cable/port that I know works, and the adapter does not recognize that the cable is plugged in, and nothing I do (restart, unplug/replug) seems to help.

Has this happened to anyone else? I've tried it with two different dongles too, and the problem happened with both of them. Can anyone out there help?

After spending a moment looking back at the past in my previous post, now it is time to look into the future. Foundry Group invested in a company called Oblong about a year ago, but when we made our investment, we couldn't say much at the time (though Brad did hint about their Minority Report UI heritage) because Oblong wasn't quite ready to tell the world exactly what they were doing. Oblong was Foundry's first investment in our HCI theme. Well, today they have officially de-cloaked and have launched their website. Go check out Oblong.com and get a feel for the mouse-free computing environment of the future: the g-speak spatial operating environment.

Ahh, a trip down memory lane. About seven years ago, Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod. I've included a video of the event here. A couple things stand out to me after watching this video -- first is the ongoing and relentless march of Moore's Law. The original iPod, as amazing as it was when it was introduced, now looks rather clunky, while the current generation iPod Nano is a fraction of the size, has a color screen, runs video, has more storage and has evolved beyond the hard drive. The other thing that stands out is how low-key this product launch was, and how technical the marketing-speak was -- they focused on battery life, capacity, and the competitive landscape: remember the Rio and the Zen? Even the lowly portable CD player made the competitive matrix in the presentation!

As Apple has reached ascendancy in the consumer electronics world, the product launches have become much glitzier and Steve Jobs has become a much more self-assured showman. Today they so dominate the market (with 160m units shipped to date) that in the most recent introduction of the new iPod product line, they only mention the competition in order to mock it (and let's face it, competition doesn't really exist, with all due respect to the Zune). For comparison, here's the most recent iPod product launch video as well:

I really like the sound of that. Forty-eight hours after the (decisive) election results were called (and North Carolina just put Obama at 364 electoral votes), I am still basking in relief and rekindled pride in my country.

Starting with Al Gore's popular vote victory in 2000 in an election plagued by voting irregularities, when his presidential bid was upset by a partisan Supreme Court selection (not election) of George W. Bush, I became disillusioned by the social and political climate in my country. My pride in my country diminished further when Bush and his neocon cronies led us into an ill-advised quagmire in Iraq that squandered a trillion dollars, thousands of lives and seriously harmed our international reputation. And when George W. Bush decisively won re-election in 2004, I was forced to revisit every assumption I had about the understanding of reality I had relative to my fellow citizens. How could The Worst President Ever (tm) have been re-elected?

Happily, with this historic election, we have elected a leader who has redrawn the electoral map and inspired millions with hope, something that has been in very short supply in this country over the last eight years. As I drove to the airport on Wednesday morning listening to the recap of the election results, my eyes welled with tears of relief and pride that my country made the historic choice to elect Barack Hussein Obama as our next president.

Obama ran a masterful, positive and inclusive campaign that demonstrated his intellect, his ability as an executive and his ability to inspire a broad spectrum of voters in this country as well as citizens across the world. John McCain, a great American that I previously held in high esteem, succumbed to dirty politics in a campaign filled with innuendo and outright lies, and made a cynical and irresponsible choice of running mate in Sarah Palin, a shockingly unqualified candidate who cannot speak coherently in unscripted situations, denies the existence of climate change and possibly evolution, and thinks Africa is country rather than a continent. As happy as I am about the outcome of this election, the fact that Sarah Palin will likely remain a figure on the national stage serves a stark and depressing reminder to me that there remains an insidious cultural undercurrent of anti-intellectualism and theocratic yearning in our county.

In watching McCain's concession speech and Obama's acceptance speech, one thing really struck me -- the crowd in Arizona was filled with a bunch of angry old white people, while the Chicago crowd was a colorful sea of faces that actually represents the population of this country. While I happen to be a White Guy closing in on 40, I identify far more strongly with an inspiring and eloquent high-achieving well-educated guy of mixed ancestry as a representative of the best ideals of our nation.

Obama has inherited a country in disarray - a shattered economy, two ongoing wars and a dwindling supply of global goodwill towards our country. It may be that no leader is up to the massive challenges that face our country, but I am optimistic about Obama's chances. The immensely important symbolic choice our country made in choosing Obama to lead us at this time of crisis has made me feel more confident about our country's future than I've felt in a very long time. We finally have a leader I can believe in.

(Several of my friends and colleagues have written some excellent posts about their thoughts on this election, which are worth a read: check out posts by Ian Rogers, Seth Levine, Brad Feld and Fred Wilson).

Two weeks ago, I attended the second Lobby Conference, and, as expected, it was one of the best of year for me, so kudos to David Hornik for iterating and improving - an already great conference became even better. Same as last year, one of the best ideas from the conference is that all attendees are encouraged to make videos introducing themselves to their fellow conference-goers, a great way for everyone to learn a bit about one-another before the conference begins. And to help increase participation, everyone who submits a video in advance receives an iPod filled with the intro videos that they can watch on the plane on the way over to Hawaii. No video, no iPod. You can see my video from last year here, or check out my submission for this year below:

Everything that happened at the conference is off the record, so I won't comment further on any of the content or conversations that occured, but I figured my own introductory video was fair game, and therefore suitable to be re-published on my blog.

As a longtime fan of the Sonos (see here, here, here and here), I've been wondering ever since the launch of the iTunes AppStore when Sonos would release software to turn my iPhone and iPod Touch into a Sonos controller. Well, today was the day, and having just installed the software and played around with a bit, I have to say that Sonos has done an excellent job. I have a feeling the iPhone is going to become my default controller for my Sonos now. One big bonus over the Sonos controller with the iPhone app is the ability to use a virtual keyboard to search for music -- on the scroll-wheel-based Sonos controller, text entry is a bit cumbersome. Way to go, guys! Finally, I have to give Sonos props for making it a free app, a very classy touch.

Update: I should point to a nice in-depth blog post over at Zatz Not Funny! for folks looking for more information, and also will embed the youtube video that appeared on that post. One excellent point the readers over there made is than Sonos really needed to do this -- since a user armed with a mac, and a couple airport expresses and the Apple Remote Application on their iPhone could get pretty close to the same functionality that Sonos provides.

That being said, I still give Sonos the victory nod by a wide margin -- access to internet radio, and the ability to consume services like Last.fm, Rhapsody and Pandora (now FREE on Sonos, BTW) without the use of ANY computer give the Sonos a distinct edge. It is just a more complete and well-integrated solution, IMHO.

And, here's the youtube demo.