Lillytown as Virtual Reality: Can Alizée make money from "The Cloud"?

[FanDeAliFee]

Quoting Alizée at: http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showthread.php?p=93082

"Mp3 players are not at the source of piracy, it's the price of progress and the Internet... we can't do anything about it, we made a lot of laws, it was a battle lost before it [was] begun, unless we go back to vinyl records. I think we should prepare for the death of the CD... I have always liked new things in technology..."

Unlike fixed-content performances, such as are stored on CDs and DVDs, interactive experiences can't be "ripped" and pirated. They provide a revenue stream for as long as there are subscribers. Is it plausible to think that our favorite artist might make a business enterprise in this new venue when it becomes ever less profitable to sell CDs, DVDs and iTunes on account of piracy?

What if one could play a MMORPG version of Assassin's Creed II in which it is possible to stop off in 15th century Verona at the Casa di Giulietta and learn some secret hiding places for artifacts, etc. from our favorite cyber-Mademoiselle?
(See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/ar...8assassin.html )

This is only the very most rudimentary suggestion, and so I invite your imagination to run wild. Maybe instead you'd like to tour Corsica with a certain native guide and entourage. Or you'd like a "gated community" ($) in "Second Life" to be called Lillytown - the sort of place you could build and furnish a townhouse and later meet with friends at cafes and concert halls to see your favorite shows. What if using alizeeamerica.com was more like REALLY visiting "Lillytown"?

As we move into a majority-broadband cyberspace era, many new things become plausible. If you are here, you probably do not want Alizée to stop creating art and start selling teddy bears by mail order or Nutella on television. Can we use the emergence of "cloud computing" (quo vadis) to help our favorite multimedia artist remain commercially viable in a "post-copyright" world?

A quoi rêve une jeune fille?
...
Et dans les airs...
Survoler la terre...

-------

Since making this post I came across the following

1. The thread here:

http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5061
"Lilly en 3D"

It explores the related topic of representing an animated Alizée in 3D graphics.

2. The thread segment started 02-14-2009 by Roman here:
http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/show...2&postcount=23

He proposes using Second Life to build a Lilly Town.

[puffyrock2]

About her quote, i don't see the CD going away any time soon. Audiophiles, and people like myself who care about sound quality, know that the sound of a CD is obviously better than any MP3. Depending on your equipment, vinyl records are even better sounding than CDs.

[jung_adore_ALIZEE]

ahem....

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/FltQ3SX3tPE&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/FltQ3SX3tPE&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

oh and she chats in there
not everyone would do that aye?

[User22]

Originally Posted by jung_adore_ALIZEE

ahem....

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/FltQ3SX3tPE&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/FltQ3SX3tPE&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

oh and she chats in there
not everyone would do that aye?

wait, what does this have to do with anything(not being mean)?

[jung_adore_ALIZEE]

^it is a virtual reality

[FanDeAliFee]

Originally Posted by jung_adore_ALIZEE

ahem....
oh and she chats in there
not everyone would do that aye?

Hello,

I had never heard about Melissa Mars before, so
I looked around to get my bearings. I started at the French
Wikipedia article at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Mars
which explained she had been compared to Alizée, especially
in her "Lolita" phase. I suppose the comparison was not hurt
by the fact that her three alternative names, viz.
Melissa Mars/Sefrani/Maylee share a first name that sounds
a bit like "M'(oi) Alizée." One of the rather early French
entertainment news stories about Alizée I have seen made
the point that the "clone" industry went into high gear when
Alizée hit the top of the music charts.

I then looked at a couple of Melisaa Mars videos on YouTube
to get a more immediate idea of her work and persona. In one
of them she starts to spell-sing, chanting:
"Eh oh eh ah"
which you may not be surprised to learn reminded me of
"El oh el (ee te) ah"
(cf. ...bien Lola / Du pareil au même)

I must confess I felt a little dirty listening to the music of
another young French Med-littoral woman. But I persuaded
myself it was okay, as it was just innocent: I hadn't actually
gone "all the way" and purchased her recordings - as I have
from Alizée!

But my rationalized lack of shame turned to guilty horror
when I heard the next Mars video. In that one she got all
Gothic and said she hated me and tried to get me to join
some sort of Charles Manson family! It was then I realized
that Melisaa Mars was something like the grown-up, unaborted
rape-child of Marilyn Manson and Alizée! I ran away screaming
and tried to expunge the vile image from my memory. After that,
I think I know how Agnes died - and I'll be damned if I bring any
of my pets to a veterinarian who employs this Mars girl in his
office!

Given all this, I don't know why MM's programmers would bother
creating a new virtual world just for her. Why not just use the
"Marstown" featured in the video game "DOOM!"?
(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(video_game) )

As for me - I'll stick to "Lillytown," thanks!

By the way, no one here would be associated
with the redirected Web site discussed at:
http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5157 ,
would they?

[TheBarrett]

1.) Okay
2.) Sure
3.) Indeed

Simple and sufficient.

[FanDeAliFee]

Originally Posted by puffyrock2

About her quote, i don't see the CD going away any time soon. Audiophiles, and people like myself who care about sound quality, know that the sound of a CD is obviously better than any MP3. Depending on your equipment, vinyl records are even better sounding than CDs.

Please understand that sound recording is nothing more than the attempt to adequately summarize the audible temporal progression of sound pressure variation at one or two of your ears. Over the decades, we've used various means to do this, bounded by technological and economic constraints which vary, and are now improving at astronomical speeds. Improved accuracy is obtained by increasing the precision of the individual pressure measurements (amplitude fidelity) and spacing successive measurements ever more closely together in time (increasing the sampling rate or "bandwidth"). As signal storage gets cheaper with technical progress, one can improve both parameters to more perfectly capture the signal - far beyond the ability of any creature to hear differences if one likes.



The Philips-Sony ("Redbook") audio CD introduced one LIMITED method for doing the encoding digitally, while the MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 or "mp3" scheme uses another LIMITED (but highly variable) one. And there are as many potential coding schemes as one cares to imagine, and many standards are in fact being used today: read about "codecs" to learn more.

When mp3 encodings of sound began traveling on the Internet at the end of the early 1990's, memory was ENORMOUSLY more expensive than it is today: (As we approach 2010, it is approaching a cost 1000x less than at the start of the century, compare to the graphic above.) Thus, people kept the bitrates the mp3 files used then low - typically 128 kbps to squeeze the contents of about a dozen Philips-Sony CDs onto a single mp3-encoded CD. But now it is no big deal to crank up bit rates to Philips-Sony CD levels and beyond if one likes, because memory is all but FREE compared to its cost 15 years ago! File-based music purveyors are now slowly cranking up their standard bit-rates, in light of the presence of a broadband Internet pipe into most US homes today and the plummeting costs of digital memory documented in this post. For details, read a NYT article <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/business/media/10audio.html">here</a>.

And that it my point: with "free" memory, there is no economic constraint on making illicit copies of sound recordings, or even video recordings. As Alizée says at the URL I had cited: "someone like me has a musical library that is 40GB in size! I prefer to take all my music in my pocket..." (on her iPod).

When mp3's hit the Internet, memory cost so much that it was about as expensive to make an electronic copy of a book as to print a paperbook codex of it - about US$2. It didn't make a lot of sense to steal the intellectual property of many common books by making an electronic copy, because the physical storage media cost so much. But as we approach the ability to store a MILLION books electronically for $2 (still the cost of physically making one in paperback), there is enormous incentive to "trade" illicit copies of entire LIBRARIES, copyrights be damned by the Fee Clochette's nemesis Capt. Hook!

By the way, that is why projects like the Internet Archive and Google Books work for material that is beyond the tenure of copyright or otherwise licensed for free use - the storage is worth NOTHING compared to the content.

If the production of new aesthetic and practical SYMBOLIC art is to continue - whether one means textbooks, movies, songs or what-not, we need to discover new ways to compensate its creators. They can't eat our love! Ideas include sponsorship and even taxation.

Again, while one can RECORD & REPLAY an interactive experience like a MMORPG session, that is NOT the same thing as DOING THE INTERACTING. That is why "cloud-based" (Internet historians cf. ASP) art is a way to extract revenue from those who enjoy it, which is immune to the pernicious effects of "free" memory.

P.S. When my late mother's vinyl-record-playing system broke in the 1990s, I used another turntable to move her recordings to electronic media for playback. I could have more easily simply bought new digital masters of the same works, but I realized all the old pops and scratches had become an intrinsic part of enjoying the company of her "old friends," and so I made sure to meticulously preserve ever last little familiar and comforting imperfection!

[jung_adore_ALIZEE]

Originally Posted by docdtv

Hello,

I had never heard about Melissa Mars before, so
I looked around to get my bearings. I started at the French
Wikipedia article at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Mars
which explained she had been compared to Alizée, especially
in her "Lolita" phase. I suppose the comparison was not hurt
by the fact that her three alternative names, viz.
Melissa Mars/Sefrani/Maylee share a first name that sounds
a bit like "M'(oi) Alizée." One of the rather early French
entertainment news stories about Alizée I have seen made
the point that the "clone" industry went into high gear when
Alizée hit the top of the music charts.

I then looked at a couple of Melisaa Mars videos on YouTube
to get a more immediate idea of her work and persona. In one
of them she starts to spell-sing, chanting:
"Eh oh eh ah"
which you may not be surprised to learn reminded me of
"El oh el (ee te) ah"
(cf. ...bien Lola / Du pareil au même)

I must confess I felt a little dirty listening to the music of
another young French Med-littoral woman. But I persuaded
myself it was okay, as it was just innocent: I hadn't actually
gone "all the way" and purchased her recordings - as I have
from Alizée!

But my rationalized lack of shame turned to guilty horror
when I heard the next Mars video. In that one she got all
Gothic and said she hated me and tried to get me to join
some sort of Charles Manson family! It was then I realized
that Melisaa Mars was something like the grown-up, unaborted
rape-child of Marilyn Manson and Alizée! I ran away screaming
and tried to expunge the vile image from my memory. After that,
I think I know how Agnes died - and I'll be damned if I bring any
of my pets to a veterinarian who employs this Mars girl in his
office!

Given all this, I don't know why MM's programmers would bother
creating a new virtual world just for her. Why not just use the
"Marstown" featured in the video game "DOOM!"?
(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(video_game) )

As for me - I'll stick to "Lillytown," thanks!

By the way, no one here would be associated
with the redirected Web site discussed at:
http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5157 ,
would they?

No matter how long that post is I don't think you know what you are talking about on that one.

Originally Posted by TheBarrett

3.) Indeed

My favorite part xD