Fortressof Solitude reports that a Silent 10-Minute Track Reaches Top 100 on iTunes:
Released by Samir Rezhami on iTunes, his creation titled “A a a a a Very Good Song” peaked at #44 on the US iTunes chart this past weekend. In addition, the ‘song’ has sold over 5,000 in sales across the world in the four days since its release and is still just hanging on in the top 100 tracks on iTunes in terms of sales. This is a very noteworthy achievement by any means, albeit a rather weird one. So how does a silent song sell a single copy on iTunes, let alone reaching the heights it has?
Picture this. An iPhone or iTunes users plugs into the AUX input of their car stereo. In many cases what happens next is that the alphabetically-first song in their library plays.
Every. Single. Time.
This has been enough to turn some people off their one-time favorites of the A Team and Ella Fitzgerald's "A-Tisket A-Tasket".
For the paltry sum of only $0.99, these folk can have up to 10 minutes to set up a separate playlist — in silence.
Silence is golden... and Samir is raking in the gold.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday August 21 2017, @05:17PM (3 children)
It just works.
(Score: 5, Touché) by bob_super on Monday August 21 2017, @06:20PM
> An iPhone or iTunes users plugs into the AUX input of their car stereo.
Funny that, I thought they had devoted considerable engineering resources and courageously solved that behavior issue by removing the headphone jack.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Monday August 21 2017, @07:01PM (1 child)
It does.
It's stopping it fucking working by doing whatever it wants that's always been the problem.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday August 21 2017, @07:10PM
Why code an alternate behavior? How could anyone not want their phone to enforce having a complete U2 album?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @05:39PM (2 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3#Precursors [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Murdoc on Monday August 21 2017, @10:26PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @08:51PM
There is actually a huge difference.
Cage's work is 4'33" of environmental sounds. This is 10' of utter silence.
As to copyright, it seems like silence has been around long enough it must be public domain.
Even the bit about using the silence to give you time to decide what to play is not new. I've been doing it as long as mp3 have existed. Just set your player to NOT start playing automatically, exact same thing achieved, far less work.
(Score: 3, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Monday August 21 2017, @05:49PM
"You have to listen to the notes she's not playing!"
"Pfft. I can do that at home."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Monday August 21 2017, @05:50PM
Seems everyone wants to hear the sound of silence.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @06:04PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2RSdlodHdA [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by NewNic on Monday August 21 2017, @06:08PM (2 children)
In other news Samir Rezhami was sued for copyright infringement by John Cage.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 5, Funny) by maxwell demon on Monday August 21 2017, @06:45PM (1 child)
Cage argued that his complete work was contained in Rezhami's track, while Rezhami countered that he didn't copy even a single note from Cage. An expert testified that both of them are right, at which point the judge decided that Rezhami is both guilty and not guilty of copyright infringement. This was then considered a landmark case for the first application of quantum mechanics to a juristic problem.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Funny) by mhajicek on Monday August 21 2017, @08:24PM
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: -1, Redundant) by aristarchus on Monday August 21 2017, @06:18PM (4 children)
No Comment.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @07:22PM (1 child)
Just as well. They consider you a far-left agitator. Any comments you make will send some alt-wrong snowflake crying off to law enforcement accusing you of "hate speech." You'll be hounded. They'll use the Establishment to silence you. Free speech is over. The purge has begun.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by aristarchus on Monday August 21 2017, @08:14PM
Well, I did learn how low karma can go! And I would ask that others join me, but really there is no point. The only true "no comment" is that actual absence of comments.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @12:31AM (1 child)
(Score: 1) by aristarchus on Wednesday August 23 2017, @12:31AM
Parent is one of the clearest, most lucid comments I have ever seen on SN! If only we had more of nothing, and less racist whining, MRA simpering, and alt-right gandy dancering.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @06:35PM (4 children)
This sad story is also evidence of the total technical ineptitude of the global masses. Creating a compressed, silent sound file is trivial with lame (or flac or any other encoder) and is a two command pipeline on a Linux machine.
And yet, fools pay money for something they can trivially create for themselves.
PT Barnum was correct all along.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @06:43PM (2 children)
And if you don't regularly use those tools, it can take you quite a bit of time to set them up and find out how to do it. Or you can pay a dollar. How much is your time worth?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday August 21 2017, @07:23PM
Or you can put cheese in your ears for ten minutes. How much is cheese?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday August 22 2017, @01:43AM
It's worse than that. I ripped a CD for a friend (her CD) so she could copy the audio files to her iPod. I gave her the tracks in mp3 format (192kbps CBR) on a USB stick.
A week later she returned the USB stick to me and I asked how it went. The answer? She could not figure out how to use iTunes to put music files on her iPod and so just re-bought the album on iTunes the "official iTunes way."
I don't see it that way. Those dollars add up. I hate them. For her sake.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @10:59PM
Ok, so you've got a sound file on Linux. How to you upload it to your iPhone? Please tell me the steps. I've spent a weekend trying to figure it out so I wouldn't have to pay money to be able to set an alarm to vibrate only (plays a silent alarm sound) without having to mute all other audio. The only solutions I've found involve Microsoft or buying a complete computer from Apple, neither are acceptable.
This is the sad story of stupid UI designs who can't let users make decisions for themselves and asshole software devs who write software that's far, far too restrictive. No configured sound, so don't try to play sound? Nope, no sound means input not accepted as we can't handle nulls in our software.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @06:39PM (2 children)
I do not understand how "A a a a a" is sorted first. What about song titles beginning with numerals, how are they sorted? Symbols?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @07:59PM
And wouldn't a track called simply "A" come before? I don't think someone should have passed their CS Reqs with their understanding of "sorting".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @11:06PM
It's AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-1 Plumbing all over again
(Score: 2, Interesting) by daver!west!fmc on Monday August 21 2017, @06:49PM (3 children)
A few years ago I put a Clarion CZ500 stereo in the car. (I'd broken the AM/FM button on the factory radio and thought a Bluetooth speakerphone might come in handy.)
So I start the car. The radio comes on, then Bluetooth gets going, then the CZ500 and the iPhone figure out that there's A2DP support on both ends and start playing from the phone, even if what you were lately using the CZ500 to listen to was the radio. No way to override this, you have to wait for it and then fiddle with the CZ500 to get back to the radio.
If the phone has been used to play music since its last reboot, it'll pick up where it left off. If not, you get the first track in the library, sorted by name. (I'm thinking some versions of iOS would shuffle-play from the whole library.)
The CZ500 has a USB port too, and knows how to work iPhones over it (but not older hard-disk iPods). I listen to rock, in a car (not really an audiophile environment), playing MP3s ('cause that's how I roll, even when ripping CDs in iTunes), and playing over Bluetooth, I heard distortion that was not a part of the program material and not heard when playing the MP3s in iTunes or from the phone with wired connection. So I learned to prefer the USB connection. And yes, it can get all the way through figuring out that there's an iThing on USB and start playing from it (same rules) and then switch over to Bluetooth (with a hiccup).
I'm not really sure what Samir Rezhami's track would do for all this.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday August 21 2017, @07:32PM
Eliminate the need for a car stereo. Duh. Coulda saved yourself all that trouble.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday August 21 2017, @08:29PM
I'd prefer a CZ550:
http://cz-usa.com/product-category/rifles/ [cz-usa.com]
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday August 22 2017, @12:40AM
Unfortunately almost all OEM infotainment systems have similar issues. Toyota is the one exception: my last rental would search for Bluetooth automatically if it is the last played device, and NOT turn on the radio. But everyone else defaults to the radio if a media device is missing, and Bluetooth always will be missing on start. This is an inconvenience when I'm listening to a quiet podcast and need to increase the volume, then the next start have obnoxious advertisements blaring at me from terrestrial radio.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @07:25PM (2 children)
How such a simple concept as "options -> do no autoplay" was left out I'll never know. I blame Apple, but they rake in too much profit to care about these edge cases.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @08:01PM
Given a user an extra option is akin to giving them one more way to break the thing.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @08:41PM
Apple prides itself by not offering "options". Much like the 3 button mouse vs. the one button mouse or the removal of the numpad and arrow keys, to these modern GUI designers, choice suggests there's something wrong with their creative vision and that they can't predict their customers' needs and wants. To the Apple genius, there can be only one way to navigate their interface. For their interface is the one true interface. And none shall navigate it using arrow keys or right click it's curved buttons.
Praise be the Apple.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @07:53PM
The emperor's new fashion combines perfectly with this vanguardist tune.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday August 21 2017, @11:43PM (1 child)
Thanks Marty!
Now that I know about this, I bought all my friends and family three copies each of this song!
Everybody loves me now because I'm so generous with this incredibly creative endeavor!
My mom (at least I think it was my mom) was so happy about it that she sent me a fresh horse head along with a note saying I'd get mine too.
People are wonderful!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Insightful) by martyb on Tuesday August 22 2017, @12:08AM
Gee, are you sure? That sounds rather, ummm, nebulous [wikipedia.org]!
=)
Wit is intellect, dancing.