June 21, 2002

Big, Bigger, Biggest: The Supersize Suburb

Big, Bigger, Biggest: The Supersize Suburb

Does anyone actually need an 8,500 square-foot house? There’s something vaguely pornographic about a house that big. My own house is somewhere in the range of 1,550 to 1,800 square feet, and families of four have lived in it comfortably. You could fit my house into one of these McMansions four or five times over. When I lived in Japan, I shared an apartment that I generously estimate to have been 240 square feet.

Goodbye, Internet radio

Goodbye, Internet radio. There’s no way the hobbyist-level operators, who are doing this as a labor of love, will be able to pay these royalties (apparently, about $500 a day). Up until today, I barely listened to conventional radio at all; I listened to Internet radio all the time. As of today, most of my favorite streams are dead air, and I have to imagine the others are not long for this earth.

No doubt the big broadcast-radio conglomerates and the RIAA are happy. The RIAA, which has had its collective head stuck up its collective ass for years, shouldn’t be so smug. I’ve bought quite a few albums as a result of music I heard on Internet radio–probably more than I’ve bought because of broadcast radio. In the past, there was a chance they’d get some revenue through record sales. Now, they’re not going to get any royalties from the Internet streams (since they’re disappearing), nor from the album sales spurred by those streams. This is arguably more of a clear-cut win for big radio, since it eliminates real competition. Then again, I’m not going to start listening to broadcast radio more as a result of this.