Post by Brian Fauteux, University of Alberta

This is the first post in our new series “The Podcast Review,” which offers critical appreciations of podcast series or episodes and other notable digital soundwork.

Podcasts about music come with a particular set of challenges. For one, it can be difficult for hosts to balance their own musical preferences against those of their listeners. Also, for more amateur productions, there is the tricky question of whether to acquire the rights to use songs in the podcast, to rely on brief clips that may fall within fair use (or its equivalent in other countries), or to just risk it and worry about consequences if they arise.

For these reasons and others, music podcasts, especially those that aren’t produced by a radio station or network like NPR or KEXP, often have a limited run. Staffan Ulmert of The Only Music Podcast explains that he and his co-host Louise Hammar had no idea why so many music podcasts barely make it to twenty episodes. He wonders if it’s because of licensing issues or if those involved in creating music podcasts start to resent each other around episode fifteen. Their new podcast, created just this year, provides an excellent perspective on how labels, artists, and listeners are discovering music today and how various facets of the music industries work.

The Only Music Podcast is produced in Gothenburg, Sweden, and is available via iTunes or from the podcast’s website, which organizes its episodes into a visually striking grid of images that are demarcated by a topic. The episode titled “Girls!“, for instance, is marked by a photo of Björk’s face surrounded by a black background. Episodes are released every two weeks and the goal of the podcast is “to avoid being too nerdy” and to ensure it appeals to listeners beyond those who “consume music and music news 24/7.” Staffan is a music producer who has released sample-based music under the moniker Mojib and is also the founder of Has it Leaked. Louise co-runs Telegram Studios, one of Sweden’s biggest indie labels; she has also managed a number of international artists.

Each episode is broken down into three distinct sections: News, “what we’ve been listening to,” and a distinct topic such as remixes. Two episodes have deviated from this format due to summer holidays: One, a list of guilty pleasure songs, and the other, a list of cover songs the hosts enjoy. Featured news topics are related to the music industries, such as the release of Tidal and its lack of transparency in terms of what they pay artists, recent album leaks (Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta”), and the popularity of surprise album releases in the United States. When introducing listeners to Tula, Louise does so by explaining the creative process behind the group’s music and offers some insight into why she thinks it resonates with listeners. She is able to provide this context since Tula works with her label, Telegram. During a discussion of Jamie xx’s “Loud Places” from Episode 3, we learn about the samples used on the track and the process of mixing and remixing. Louise then takes us through the history of remixing by rocksteady, reggae, and dub artists.

The final section of each podcast installment is particularly appealing for music fans, since it deals with compelling and familiar issues in the music industry, but with a refreshing perspective that isn’t filtered through the United States or the U.K. On Episode 5, “Girls!” (April 28, 2015), the discussion of women in the music industry centers on the year 1996 when Sweden was “bombarded with U.K. rock bands” and the “laddish” culture that accompanied it. The hosts discuss how there were many women artists on the charts that year (Mariah Carey, Toni Braxton, Celine Dion) but argue that because the industry was heavily dominated by men, it was hard for women’s perspectives to emerge. As a point of comparison, they then discuss Robyn and her promotion of women in technology. In the next episode they mention that this is a much larger topic and one that they will discuss again on a future episode.

Being able to hear the podcast evolve over the course of its 11 episodes is a fascinating component of The Only Music Podcast. At this year’s ICA conference, a panel on podcasting was followed by a discussion of the increasing popularity and professionalization of the podcast. A few points that were brought up included the “podcast/public radio voice” and the importance of large distribution channels. By contrast, the 11 episodes of The Only Music Podcast allow us to hear the hosts working through technical issues such as having two microphones recording at the same volume level (they have yet to receive their proper microphones). At one moment Louise admits that her iPhone battery has died and that the audio quality may now decrease. Many episodes end with Staffan asking listeners to write to the hosts if they have suggestions for improving the format. So, while the two hosts are clearly experts in their fields, I enjoy hearing the podcast develop and change over each episode. In the pilot episode Staffan admits that “It’s very difficult to create a podcast. We thought it would be very easy. It’s not…” He adds that he had a hard time listening to the first few episodes but supportive emails from listeners gave them the confidence to continue.

Staffan says that he and Louise are getting better at being themselves once they hit the record button. He imagines that they will run into some problems with licensing music if the podcast develops and its audience grows. If that’s the case, he hopes that sponsorship can help. This is a great time to tune into The Only Music Podcast, both because it deals with the ever-changing contemporary music industries, and because we can hear a podcast develop and find its voice.

Post by Tim Anderson, Old Dominion University

Let’s begin with Taylor Swift so we can get that out of the way: Swift stands tall, talented and influential. Her ability to call bullshit on not paying during a “promotional” period should stand as a reminder that the best weapon for a musician in the industry is knowledge. Historically, musicians have not received royalties when their music was being “promoted” through radio airplay and free copies. However, this promotion had nothing to do with Swift’s or any other artist’s latest release. The three-month promotional period is about promoting the Apple Music service. The latest streaming music service is an iteration of Beats, which was an iteration of MOG. As every Apple user knows, Apple does not invent technologies so much as refine them. In this case the five days I have been using the service has brought me to an odd conclusion: I am impressed, and am convinced that we have seen just the tip of what Apple Music can add to a counter-reformatory music industry of continually-concentrating publishers and labels.

I say this for two reasons. First, the June 8th presentation of the service at the annual WWDC was muddled and confused at best. Seeing Jimmy Iovine stumble and Eddy Cue dance awkwardly while they proclaimed another revolution simply felt forced, and now we know why. The service is hardly revolutionary. Instead, it is a very interesting and important entry into an already-existing streaming game. Even the new service of “Connect,” which purportedly connects artists with fans, feels like another version of Twitter or Instagram. Furthermore, Apple couldn’t even deliver the service on time and delayed new versions of iTunes for OS X several times throughout the day. These delays suggest that they were pushing to the very last moment to produce a product whose capabilities they have yet to truly conceive. In other words, expect changes, many of them, and expect them often as iTunes continues to mutate while Apple Music finds new ways to service its listeners.

Secondly, this is really about extending the iTunes application. This already-overloaded portal that delivers iOS updates, books, podcasts, movies, and more is Apple’s most important application. It most likely has your credit card and now it offers a very convenient and quality walled garden of a streaming service for a monthly fee. Indeed, the three-month promotion is Apple’s 90-day gift, allowing users to freely frolic in a garden of 256kps streams that seamlessly integrates in your iTunes. It will likely temper thousands of skeptical users into their service. And unlike Spotify, iTunes’ advantage is that it is the playback device that you’re most likely to use first when you play any music. By placing the streaming service in the iTunes app, Apple has, again, used its most important consumer-face application as the media-oriented Trojan Horse that it is.

As gifts go, the user in me doesn’t mind accepting this one. Although Apple consumes my data while it surveys every single stream and search I provide it, as a streaming service I find it a worthy successor to Beats and a competitor to Spotify. Please note: Spotify and the seemingly doomed Tidal offer comparable catalogues with better bitrates. However, the combination of convenience and the fact that I don’t stream through the most high-end equipment in the world means I will be using this service a lot more than I ever anticipated.

Truth is, until relatively recently, Apple had not anticipated offering such a service. Steve Jobs never believed that subscription models were viable when it came to music. Indeed, when Apple purchased the pay-per-stream music service Lala in 2009, it was rumored the streaming service was purchased primarily to acquire its engineers. Indeed, Apple quickly and quietly gobbled up the firm only after it had submitted a never-released iOS app to Apple’s App Store that practically turned an iPhone into a portable, cloud-based jukebox where users could license the infinite playback of any track for a dime. Impressed, Apple transformed the basis of Lala’s services into the form of Apple’s iTunes Match, a service that allows users to essentially store 25,000 songs in the cloud and stream them through an iOS device. Still, the acquisition of Beats Music pointed to something much, much bigger. Indeed, the 2014 $3 billion U.S. purchase of Beats happened in a new Apple, one that was almost three years beyond Jobs’ passing and willing to bet on becoming a competitor to the dominant music-only streaming service, Spotify.[1] Five days into using both services, my gut feeling is that Apple Music will be able to compete with Spotify. Furthermore, I suspect that the two will lead a new oligarchy of on-demand streaming services. As interesting as Tidal may be, its app and debut has stained it as a loser service that – along with Rdio, Deezer, and the all-but-forgotten streaming pioneer, Rhapsody – will be vying for a distant third place. These big two services, and little three to whomever, will be a very substantial portion of a near future of the industry that is based on data aggregation and mining rather than sales.

All of which makes me yearn for 2005. Ten years ago I penned a post for Flow noting that after multiple record chains shuttered and MySpace had emerged as an interesting distribution mechanism for artists, such as Annie and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, that we had “a chance to, like punks in the late 1970s and hip hop of the early 1980s, once again see what it means to get really small together.” If anything, the fact that I find the debut of Apple Music a pleasant service makes me believe that this chance has, for the moment, passed. With Apple Music and Spotify the legal alternatives to piracy have emerged and have found supporters such as Taylor Swift and Led Zeppelin. And while The Beatles have yet to allow their catalogue to become “streamable,” one of the last classic rock holdouts, AC/DC, has relented and placed their music on both Spotify and Apple Music. As more and more legacy acts have relented to a ever-improving technical capacities and new business models, streaming services are now in a position to dominate. And at $14.99 a month for my family of five to legally access eight million plus records, Apple Music is providing a walled garden of goods that, although they could not have imagined to be successful, sounds great and has nothing revolutionary about it.

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[1] Technically, YouTube is the dominant music streaming service. Indeed, rumors have abounded for the last two years that the Google-owned service would debut its own service, somewhat independent of Google Play.

However, in prominent popular discourse surrounding the series’ return, journalists have privileged the value of the programs to producers rather than their value to audiences. While talk of profit margins is all well and good, the two soaps’ move online involves asking audiences to accept new definitions of a soap opera’s value—once “free” over broadcast—within the television marketplace. Although the product itself—its characters, its narratives, its evolution—will determine its ultimate value to fans, Prospect Park’s release strategy intersects in complicated ways with discourses of televisual value within an evolving space of digital distribution, which is being adapted in order to fit the specificity of an atypical televisual form.

When broadcast networks started selling their shows through the iTunes Store, it was a pivotal moment for the digitization of media content and the growing impact of convergence on industry business models. However, it also rearticulated our conception of televisual value by placing a distinct price on an episode of television as a discrete twenty- or forty-minute entity.

This articulation was part of the larger digital distribution revolution: while iTunes and its competitors Amazon Instant Video and YouTube continue to sell individual episodes, streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime have reframed televisual value through access to expanded libraries of content, largely leaving the iTunes model as an industrial afterthought (albeit one which is still useful for cord-cutters).

Prospect Park’s distribution strategy for All My Children and One Life To Live is an unorthodox merger of these two business models. Their primary partnership with Hulu—under their “Hulu Exclusives” acquisition strategy—is itself a combination of two different streaming logics: the online Hulu service features recent episodes of the series for free, ad-supported web browser streaming, while the multi-platform Hulu Plus service—$7.99 a month—will have the entire library of each series along with HD ad-supported streaming to tablets, game consoles, Roku players, etc. In order to articulate these options, particularly to viewers—imagined as older viewers in popular discourse—unfamiliar with online streaming, Hulu drafted One Life to Live stars for a video explanation:

In the process, Prospect Park and Hulu have dissected the experience of watching soap operas on television into two discrete values. The first is being able to “revive their daily drama habit”—to use Hulu’s marketing rhetoric—for free, with the caveat that their viewing must remain daily (as only the most recent episodes will be available). However, the second is the ability to “relax on your sofa and watch on your TV,” which Hulu has commodified by limiting device-based streaming to its subscription service. The distinction allows viewers to determine which parts of their soap viewing experience were most valuable to them, and specifically asks if watching on a television—or on a tablet—is worth $7.99 a month.

And yet Prospect Park’s arrangement with iTunes is even more interesting, given that no currently running soap operas are distributed through the service (whereas Days of our Lives and General Hospital also stream on Hulu). They are offering what they call a “Multi-Pass,” which is comparable to a “Season Pass” for primetime series with one caveat: instead of an entire season, it instead gives viewers twenty episodes—or four weeks—of a series for $9.99; viewers can also choose to purchase individual episodes for $0.99.

Whereas the Hulu arrangement asks viewers to place a value on their soap viewing habits, the iTunes arrangement explicitly asks viewers how much they are willing to pay for an episode of a soap opera. Prospect Park’s choice of $0.99 is half of what iTunes charges for primetime television episodes in standard definition (Hulu Plus remains the exclusive home of high-definition episodes), a decision that reflects the large volume of content viewers are expected to pay for—hence the Multi-Pass discount of $0.50 an episode—but also reinforces existing hierarchies of value between daytime and primetime programming.

However, the two soaps also fit somewhat awkwardly into the logics of streaming, given that one of the key values of streaming services—an extended library of previous episodes—is thus far unavailable to the two programs. Although one could expect that many fans of the two shows would invest in the ability to access decades of soap opera content through a streaming service like Hulu, the ability to revisit previous episodes has less perceptible value when there are thus far no previous episodes to revisit (as ABC’s stake in the new ventures—as license holders—is not strong enough for them to actively support Prospect Park with such library content beyond 8-10 minute recaps for potential new viewers).

Although it’s unclear what kind of data Prospect Park will be releasing—it will, as always, depend on whether releasing the data has value to them—any determinations about the “value” of the two relaunching soap operas have to be withheld until we understand how audiences respond to these initial articulations. While online distribution is often framed as offering audiences new ways to experience television, the habit-based nature of soap viewing has led Prospect Park and Hulu to devise and promote specific distribution strategies which emulate more traditional viewing patterns, at a price.

As a result, the stakes of this project are neither as simple as Prospect Park’s financial investment in All My Children and One Life To Live nor as broad as the very future of digital distribution. Rather, the specificity of this experiment will determine what value soap audiences have within future conceptions of digital distribution, their acceptance or rejection of industrial definitions of value shaping how and where they will be programmed to in the future.

1) Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium will become the first Sony film mixed both for Dolby Atmos and for Barco’s rival Auro 11.1 format. Meanwhile, the British theater chain Vue said it is currently “testing” Atmos in its select Xtreme auditoriums, while Barco signed a 15-picture deal with DreamWorks Animation. The two companies are hoping that their products will coexist in theaters so as to avoid an all-out format war.

2) DreamWorks also announced a potentially controversial coproduction with its Shanghai based Oriental DreamWorks and the state-owned China Film Group to adapt the popular Tibet Code adventure novels for the big screen. Jeffrey Katzenberg, however, denies any political motivation behind the project. The Indiana Jones-esque films will begin production after King Fu Panda 3.

3) Quentin Tarrantino’s Django Unchained will get another chance at the Chinese box office after officials pulled the film from theaters within minutes of its initial release on April 11th. The film will re-open on May 12 with several sexual and violent images likely removed.

4) In streaming news, Amazon.com announced it will soon release a set-top box to compete with Roku and AppleTV. Netflix is adding the option for a single account to stream up to four videos at once.  The current limit is two simultaneous streams. Netflix also unveiled nine new posters for their upcoming season of Arrested Development.

5) NBC renews five of its dramas for next season, including Revolution and Grimm. Meanwhile once-popular shows like The Office and Fox’s American Idol hit all-time ratings lows this past week.

6) In cable news, CNN is in talks to add Stephanie Cutter and Newt Gingrich to its reboot of the network’s once-popular Crossfire debate show. CNN also topped Fox and MSNBC in the 25-54 demo during the Watertown manhunt on Friday.  However, Fox bested all of cable programming in total viewership during the week of the Boston bombing, edging out USA 2.87M to 2.62M.  CNN placed third with 1.99M and MSNBC placed 19th with only 923k.

7) Reddit general Manager Erik Martin admitted he deeply regrets how some of the Boston marathon discussions on his site “fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties.” Some media outlets have been critical of the way the website was handling the ongoing investigation, though others were more defensive of Reddit’s involvement.

8) In twitter news, the AP’s twitter feed was hacked with claims of two explosions at the White House, causing the Dow to see momentary drop of about 130 points. The Onion‘s twitter feed responded in form, and has had more than 1,000 re-tweets since its posting. None of this seemed to deter Former President Clinton from officially joining the social media site, nor from making the announcement on The Colbert Report.

9) Disney’s slated film adaptation of Stephen Sonheim’s Into the Woods is inching toward including Meryl Streep and Johnny Depp as leads. The company’s theme parks in Florida and California will also stay open for 24 hours on Friday, May 24th in order to offer visitors an all-nighter to celebrate the beginning of summer.

10) iTunes celebrates its 10-year anniversary, and though some journalists called the online music store an “instant revolution,” analysts suggest it is now losing significant market share to streaming services like Spotify.

1. The big news in Hollywood last week that caught many by surprise: Kevin Tsujihara was named CEO of Warner Bros. The studio is hopeful he’ll bring stability, but especially digital distribution savvy. Also shooting for stability is MGM, which is reworking its credit line to free up more money, while 20th Century Fox also cut a new financing deal. Unrelated bonus link: a Nielsen demographic study of movie audiences.

2. Fruitvale was a big winner at Sundance, which Variety critics thought was a successful, if commercially inclined, festival this year. Also of note was the equal gender balance of directors in competition, a first for the festival. This is representative of a higher percentage of female directors active in independent cinema than Hollywood studio filmmaking, according to research shared at Sundance by USC researchers.

3. There are still some Blockbuster stores left to shutter, and sadly, 3,000 jobs will be lost in this latest round of closings. Stores are also closing in the UK. Dish is still backing the Blockbuster brand, though, with a new On Demand redesign coming. But iTunes rules the online On Demand world right now, while discs fight to maintain home video sale prominence.

4. The music industry is having trouble making streaming royalties worth it to musicians. Too bad they can’t all enjoy a Super Bowl sales bump from being a halftime performer or make $8 million in ad deals like “Gangham Style” (though you have to watch out for sound-alikes) or have fans who are big pirates.

5. The company that supplied my very first video game console one lovely Christmas morning way back when has filed for bankruptcy, though apparently Atari hasn’t been what it used to be for awhile now, and it will even sell the iconic logo. Some other gaming bummers: THQ is being dissolved, Disney is closing a game studio and laying off fifty people while shifting to a focus on mobile and social gaming, and weak Wii U sales and 3DS piracy are hurting Nintendo.

6. Despite those bummers, the video game industry’s many challenges, and EA posting a recent loss, EA executives are optimistic about the future of console gaming. There’s a new Xbox coming with more processing power, and we’ll soon hear more about a new Playstation, though some think Sony should just move on from that platform’s legacy.

7. Samsung is warning that major smartphone growth is over, but maybe the company’s just bitter that Apple has surpassed it as top US phone vendor. The iPhone is declining in Asia, though, and Apple is losing tablet ground globally to Samsung and others. Apple’s still doing good work with tax loopholes, though. And at least it’s not BlackBerry.

8. France is having none of your English-language “hashtag” business on Twitter. For the French, “mot-dièse” will be the word for # on Twitter. (Mot-dièse means “sharp word,” though a sharp symbol leans the other way than the hashtag symbol, but hey, quoi que). France is also demanding that Twitter identify users who tweet with racist and anti-Semitic hasht…er, mots-dièse. Back in the US, Twitter’s dealing with a porn problem on the new Vine platform and is trying to censor porny hashtags. I doubt the French would respect that. #prudes 

9. GIFs are on the decline?!

10. Some of the finer News for TV Majors posts from the past few weeks: Soap Contract Conflicts, Glee’s Song Theft, Super Bowl Ad Issue, Netflix Strategies, More on Netflix, 30 Rock Reflections, Spoiling Super Bowl Ads, CNN Changes, TWC & Dodgers, Aereo Update, The Following Criticism, Pilots Updates.

Programming note: Because I recently took on some new time-consuming duties, like Associate Online Editor for Cinema Journal, I’ve regretfully had to step away from WAYM for the time being. But don’t fear: WAYM will still be here! Eric Hoyt’s media industries course will be taking over for the rest of the semester on the regular bi-weekly schedule, and I can’t wait to see what they can do with it. (Sage advice: When in need of a good link, Lionsgate and porn are always there for you.) See you later!

1. China had a big box office year in 2012, though a good chunk of the revenue came from American studio imports, like Life of Pi. The Hangover-esque Chinese comedy Lost in Thailand has become the country’s biggest domestic hit ever, though, and some expect the rise of China to global number one movie market status to come courtesy of shallow blockbusters.

2. Hollywood studios are turning to outside funding to support its films that aren’t shallow blockbusters, while Disney is looking at budget cuts for everything. DreamWorks is still a great place to work, though. Video game makers want greater control over the films Hollywood makes from their properties, while Disney is meshing together gaming and its movies with the upcoming Disney Infinity game.

3. We’re getting more info about Redbox Instant, which is expected to launch in March, because a group of users have gotten to beta test it. We know that it will be focused on movies, not TV shows, and Redbox’s CEO also says the company won’t abandon DVDs. But Austin Carr isn’t impressed with the service.

4. Home video revenue finally rose a bit last year, halting a seven-year skid, with streaming getting most of the credit for the uptick. UltraViolet also continues to grow, and Walmart’s “disc to digital” cloud service has been improved. Don’t expect Amazon to extend its “Amazon-purchased CD to digital” plan to movies, though.

5. Amazon has also launched a new mp3 store targeted toward iPhone/iPod users, offering a shot across iTunes’ bow. iTunes now has a partnership with Rolling Stone, whose iPad magazine will have links to Apple’s music store. The blog Asymco has graphed the iTunes economy.

6. 2012 music sales indicate the CD’s impending demise and the digital single’s growth. Other trends revealed from the figures are that big hits take up an increasing share of download sales; rock and pop music dominated, though country music sales rose compared to 2011; and indie labels grabbed one-third of album sales.

7. The number of children reading books on digital devices is rising, though over half of kids still have never read an e-book. Libraries are also said to be losing their influence among children, but maybe video games at libraries can help. There’s also a plan in the works in Texas for a bookless, all-digital library.

8. The Wii U is bringing in more revenue than the original Wii did in early sales, but that’s only because it costs more. Nintendo’s president says sales of the Wii U are “not bad,” given the competitive landscape, and Nintendo is merging its console and handheld divisions to better deal with that landscape. Xbox 360 has finished its second year as the best-selling console, and Microsoft says that the next Xbox system will fill your living room with images to immerse you in games. And we can now say goodbye to the dominant console of the past, the Playstation 2, which will no longer be made.

9. Pingdom offers a slew of stats on how we used the internet around the world in 2012, from search to mobile to email, while Mashable has an infographic specifically on social media use in 2012. The FCC is looking to expand Wi-Fi spectrum space so we can do even more online in 2013, like look at video ads.

10. Some of the finer News for TV Majors posts from the past few weeks: Anger Management Returns, CNN-SI Change, OWN Hopes, Double Your FX, TCA & Twitter, The Killing Will Return, Dish & CBS Battle Ropes in CNET, Corrie Coming to Hulu, Five-0 Ending, Time-Shifted Viewing, Soap Revivals, Video Sharing Passed, Netflix & Ratings, Al Jazeera America, PBS at TCA, The CW at TCA, CBS & Showtime at TCA, Arrested Development at TCA, ABC at TCA, FX at TCA, Fox at TCA, NBC at TCA.

1. Moviefone’s Drew Taylor highlights ten good films you likely didn’t see in 2012, while Indiewire critics pick the ten best films you definitely didn’t see, because they went undistributed. Indiewire also warns you about the films you shouldn’t see, plus the site offers an A-Z summary of women in film in 2012 and an assessment of LGBT representation in American films of the year.

2. 2012 is looking like a best-ever year for Hollywood box office grosses, both domestically and internationally. Among the studios, Universal did have its best year ever. And among individual films, The Avengers easily takes the 2012 box office crown, while Zero Dark Thirty is heading toward the critics’ poll crown, followed by The Master.

3. The Economist Group has a slew of revealing digital publishing charts that look back on 2012, and while 2012 was a tough year for newspapers, some, like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, are at least still profitable, while the Washington Post’s multiplatform model may be one to keep an eye on in 2013. Newsweek’s shift to online-only status (ending not with a whimper but a hashtag) marked 2012 as a digital year for magazines, and most recently, Spin and the 126-year-old Sporting News announced they’ll only be available online in 2013.

4. Fifty Shades of Grey cleaned up in 2012 print book sales, and Amazon’s rankings show that Gone Girl put up a good fight too. The e-reader market shrunk noticeably this year, with tablet sales rising correspondingly. Apparently indie bookstores are still doing ok through all of this.

5. Billboard looks back on the year in music, one it calls tumultuous. According to iTunes downloads, it was a good year for Adele and Carly Rae Jepsen, while Britney Spears out-earned all other women in music.

6. VentureBeat has a series of bleak charts detailing 2012 video game sales. In brighter news, Mass Effect 3 and Call of Duty: Black Ops II sold well, while the game that people spent the most individual time playing was Borderlands 2. Back to bad news, Call of Duty is under scrutiny for the amount of time Newtown shooter Adam Lanza spent playing it.

7. YouTube had a big year, from news to ads to lip-sync vids to Gangnam Style. Looking ahead, we should keep an eye on Maker Studios, channel renewals, and Iran’s YouTube. Plus, as always in internet video, porn.

8. Google’s annual report on searching reveals the trends borne across 1.2 trillion searches in 2012. We also visited Google a lot in 2012 simply for the awesome doodles. Using all search engines, we apparently sought out Facebook the most (haven’t most of us found it already?). We also sought out a lot of GIFs.

9. Once we figured out where Facebook was, we talked about the presidential election and Duck Dynasty a lot there. Even dead people found things to like on Facebook. Over at Twitter, its year in review offers a personal perspective, and over 200 million users are now laying the groundwork for 2013’s results.

10. News for TV Majors has its own Best of 2012 critics’ lists post, and here are some other informative posts from the past two weeks: Value of Older Demos, Mazzara Leaving Walking Dead, Hulu’s Direction, Nielsen Twitter TV Rating, ABC Making C7 Deals, TWC Dropping Ovation, Nielsen Buys Arbitron,  Newtown Impact, Media Violence, Newtown Analysis, Amazon Gets TNT Shows, Golden Globe Noms, Top Rated & Buzzed Shows, Regional Sports Surcharge, Ownership Vote Delayed.

The following is a list of some of the technologies I either researched or tried out. I hope that these either help others connect to the TV they’re missing or inspire readers to post their own experiences with or suggestions for getting TV while away from home. A side note: some of the technologies listed below require negotiating ethics and legalities, others less so, although none would likely be greeted with enthusiasm by American television executives.

Bit Torrent—Invented in 2001, this is, by internet standards, an ancient file-sharing service that most readers are probably familiar with. Its advantages are being well tested, having lots of users, and often providing the quickest turnover from airdate to streaming on your computer. The downsides are that relying on file-sharing isn’t the safest thing for your computer, and in May 2011, 23,000 BitTorrent users were, according to Wired magazine, the subject of the biggest file-sharing lawsuit to date in the US. Despite the problems, BitTorrent is the best known and most-used of the semi-standard pirating—er… sharing—sites or services.

Streaming Services—Various streaming services from Netflix to iTunes or Amazon have the advantage of being perfectly legal. The downsides are pretty much everything else. iTunes is hugely expensive at $2.99 an episode for current half-hour or hour-long network shows (Modern Family and The Good Wife, for example) or $49.99 for an HD season pass, $38.99 for an SD season pass. Programs from premium channels are only available for past seasons, and there’s no guarantee of finding your show if it’s more obscure. Amazon.co.uk doesn’t offer the streaming services available in the US, and Amazon.com blocks streaming outside the US. Netflix in the UK and Ireland, while having racked up an impressive million users in the short time since its launch in early 2012, has a very limited catalog.

Slingbox—This requires you to have a friend in your home country willing to connect the sling box to his/her TV set. Basically, Slingbox gives you access to your home DVR on your computer or any other device connected to the internet. It works extremely well, and while it’s a US company, you could probably connect it to a TV in any country. The boxes cost between $179.99 and $300, and the newest box, while top-of-the-line, mostly looks hard to stack with all the other black boxes that are probably connected to your TV.

AmericanTV2Go—This service essentially charges you a monthly fee for access to a centrally hosted Slingbox. I used the free trial and it was great, but ranging from $49.99-$99.99 a month, too expensive to continue regularly, especially on top of a local cable subscription.

VPN Clients—This is what I’ve settled on as the best for me. Most U.S. colleges and universities have a virtual private network that you can set up so that you can still log in to your school’s server and access your virtual learning environments, shared files and library subscriptions on days you work from home. If you’re abroad temporarily, you can use your home university’s vpn and connect to the internet in your home country, giving you access to any streaming content available there. If that’s not an option, for $7/month, companies like Strong VPN will let you log in to a vpn in another country. Strong only has networks available in the US and the UK right now, but for a bit more per month, PC-Streaming offers networks in Canada, Australia, and several European countries; you could likely find similar services connecting you to wherever your home country is.

1. Twitter has Facebook beat on mobile ad dollars, but Mark Zuckerberg plans to change that. Facebook is also developing new strategies for web ads, including sponsored search results. And in an effort to maintain the integrity of perceived value, Facebook is cracking down on fake “likes.”

2. USA Today has completed a web-inspired redesign, but newspapers are still mired in a world where they’re getting only $1 in digital ad revenue for every $25 they lose in print ad revenue. The Village Voice seems in dire shape, and entertainment industry trades are fighting to stay relevant. Maybe they all need to look at Reddit.

3. The most interesting conversations in the wake of Amazon unveiling its new Kindles involve debates about Amazon’s stated strategy to go for slim profit margins on hardware and reap bigger rewards on the digital goods people purchase to use on that hardware, which is counter to the Apple model. Though early reviews of the new Kindles don’t indicate that it’s an iPad killer, some think Google should at least be worried.

4. The new Wii U console will be available in the US on November 18 (though don’t bother checking Amazon for a pre-order), in Europe a few weeks later, and in Japan in early December. Its price has proved to be controversial, though a price cut will likely come later, and we may even be treated to a console price war over the holidays.

5. Even with the profitability of music streaming still in question, Nokia has launched a free streaming music service for smartphones, and Apple has a streaming radio service in the works that would use your iTunes history to select songs. This would pose a challenge Pandora, which saw its stock plunge on the news. Meanwhile, Spotify is making some changes, with a browser-based version coming soon.

6. After 20 months of investigating and over a million warning letters sent, a French anti-piracy agency now has a conviction to point to under its “three strikes and you’re fined” law: $200 is the price to be paid for two pirated Rihanna songs. In the US, a music-sharer has seen her fine reimposed: $220,000 for 24 songs. And Pirate Bay’s co-founder has been arrested; the penalty he faces is a little bigger.

7. Film (as a format) is dying, with Fuji as the latest abandoner, and studios are trying to adapt, with Warner Bros. especially devoting considerable attention to developing digital media options. Warners hopes that its Flixster and UltraViolet combo will encourage people to buy movies rather than rent, and Fox has similar motivation behind its plans to release digital versions of films before disc versions. A new digital storefront could help UltraViolet, while Amazon Prime Instant Video has gotten a boost from a film deal with Epix.

8. The Telluride Film Festival  marked the start of Oscar bait season, and Ben Affleck’s Argo and the documentary The Gatekeepers left with the most buzz. Meanwhile, the frenzied Toronto International Film Festival saw very active sales, with Lionsgate being an especially aggressive buyer, while Sony Pictures Classics, The Gatekeepers’ distributor, was busy showing off its wares, and documentaries grabbed a lot of attention.

9. The acquisition of AMC theaters by Chinese mogul Dalian Wanda is officially complete, and Wanda is now eyeing other US entertainment purchases. Back in China, the film industry is booming, but tensions with Hollywood are increasing due to import restrictions. China at least wants some Hollywood imports, though, especially those films they’ve got product placements in.

10. Some of the finer News for TV Majors posts from the past few weeks: CBS Threatens Dish, Hurry-Up Problems, NBC is NBCU’s Priority, CBS Adjusts Schedule, Over-the-Top Increases, Netflix Good & Bad, Breaking Bad Story Sync, Colbert & Religion, No New Apple TV Products, Gilligan Interviews, Fall Schedule.

1. One analyst is telling the Hollywood studios to defy exhibitor objections and make early video-on-demand releases of theatrical films happen. Funny or Die likes that idea so much, it’s making Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie available online even before it hits theaters. One theater chain has boycotted One for the Money not because of distribution objections; they’re mad that Lionsgate made a Groupon deal for tickets. (Just when you thought Lionsgate might not make an appearance in WAYM for once, boom, there it is.)

2. Distribution deals at Sundance have been modest but steady, as buyers forge on despite few of last year’s deals paying off. A partnership between a digital exhibitor, Cinedigm, and a veteran distributor, New Video, looks to make possible multi-platform deals for indie films, and there’s even now an automated way to submit indie films for distribution consideration. (Bonus link: Sundance awards were handed out last night.)

3. Independent films snagged 60 Oscar nominations (though you’ll see in the comments section of that article a debate over what qualifies as independent), but the French indie film Declaration of War got snubbed. Given Fox International’s new strategy of investing in foreign films made for their local markets, it seems the major studios could horn in on the foreign language film category someday soon. Once again, there won’t be many women at the Oscars for producing, directing and writing awards, as 2011 was a dismal year for female employment behind the camera. The imbalance is even worse in trailer voiceovers.

4. Tablet and e-reader sales are soaring, and about one-third of Americans own some form of e-reader now. And while e-book sales growth has been slower than many predicted, e-book lending is surging. While this seems to spell death for bookstores, some indie bookstores are growing, and African-American independent bookstores in particular illustrate that relationships with the local community are crucial to survival.

5. Musicians are increasingly objecting to streaming services carrying their music, though a Sony exec insists they don’t hurt download sales. Either way, we may end up seeing distribution windowing of music soon, and it will also be interesting to see where the RIAA’s lawsuit against ReDigi will go, as ReDigi insists it’s legal to buy and sell pre-owned iTunes music files.

6. Nintendo’s got some challenges ahead: Wii-related sales are plunging, the 3DS isn’t selling, and no one seems to know what the Wii U even is, plus the next Xbox will well surpass the Wii U in performance. Meanwhile, Microsoft managed to make a whole theme park out of the Kinect.

7. McDonald’s’ attempt to encourage #McDStories on Twitter went awry, but the #littlestories campaign has apparently gone smoother. More profoundly, an homophobic hate group’s anti-gay hashtag got brilliantly hijacked. Soon, the power of hashtag trending and hijacking will be available to right-to-left language users.

8. Comcast is tops in broadband speed, but has given up on the wireless business, while telecom companies are dumping DSL. A “Super Wi-Fi” network now exists in North Carolina using old analog TV spectrum (thus it’s technically not wi-fi) to send signals across a further range, but its future prospects are in question thanks to the spectrum bill in Congress.

9. Google seems determined to violate its traditional “don’t be evil” standards lately: the company has been accused of poaching Apple employees, conspiring with Apple and other companies to keep wages low, facilitating illegal pharmaceutical websites, misrepresenting its privacy policy and trampling on privacy rights, and detrimentally limiting access to the Google Maps platform.

10. Some of the finer News for TV Majors posts from the past two weeks: Social Growth, NAB Criticizes TWC, Stealing Downton Abbey, Leno Complaint, Netflix News, More Netflix News, Defending Episodic Viewing, Live & Streaming Audiences Diverge, TV Nudity Clause, Modern Family Placement, Fans Affect Revenge, TV Everywhere Revenue, Piracy Fight, Prime-Time GH, Letterman Booker Fired, NBC’s Flaws, New TV Analysis Site.