WOW Raph, you sure are digging up some esoteric software solutions this week….

PS: Im NOT knocking the Zep or Doors btw I’m a huge fan, heck I even like VU (someone mentioned them) but well Floyd, not so much.

Yeah, but that’s true for all bands, of all times, everywhere. There’s no less industry incentive to sell the Carpenters’ music than there is to sell Led Zep’s. You can argue that Zep, the Doors, the Stones, Bealtes, etc. have better music, or better marketing. Or both. But for some reason “Dark Side of the Moon” continues to sell, year after year, generation after generation, and “Passages” does not.

Here’s an interesting “cultural value test:” go to eBay and type in the name of a band, performer, artist, writer, pop “thingy,” etc. Count both the number and value of the stuff being offered. Because, as we know, everything that has value has a price tag and somebody who has inherited it or found it in a garage sale. Pink Floyd (at the moment) has 4,554 items up for sale, with top price-tags of US $1,200 and lots of items in the $200-$300 range. The Carpenters? 191 items, top asking price for anything in the $100 range.

Yikes. I wonder if eBay could get us those statistics. Over X amount of time, what was the total value of items sold with “Brand A” vs. “Brand B.”

Double Yikes. I wonder if that’s not a huge opportunity for some enterprising marketeer…

Andy Havens said: When I teach the history of advertising, one of the break-water points I really land on is the “invention” of pop culture,

That was one of my favorite “units” in college, though I don’t think it was part of my advertising track … maybe interpersonal communications. I think it was in conjunction with our reading of Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins, which was one of my favorite books for that course (hard to recall … coming up on 15 years ago now )

Andy also said: But just because something starts as “pop” doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t live on and become part of the enduring cultural legacy of a particular time or culture.

Man, deja vu … were teaching 15 years ago, Andy? I’m having flashbacks

[...] Raph Koster is one of my favourite bloggers. He was a lead designer on the best game of all time. His blog is nominally about games but he covers a lot of the surrounding territory too. Today’s post is about the recent history of pop culture as seen through the covers of Entertainment Weekly whenever a new actor took on the James Bond role. In 1995, with Pierce Brosnan on the cover, we see an article on “What’s Hot (And Not) on Laserdisc.” To which today’s response is “what’s laserdisc?” We see a pre-Shakespeare in Love Gwyneth Paltrow insisting that “I’m more than a head in a box.” And the cover article asks, “Do we still need 007 in a post-Cold-War world?” [...]

[...] Some musings on ephemeral pop on Raph Koster Some musings on ephemeral pop on Raph Koster The August 18th issue of Entertainment Weekly has a fun little gimmick: six covers, one for each of the James Bond actors, going back in time. It provides an interesting window into the changing pop cultural preoccupations. In 1995, with Pierce Brosnan on the cover, we see an article on “What’s Hot (And Not) on Laserdisc.” [...] via Raph Koster [...]

Of course, they didn’t have to worry about outdated-looking graphics.

Speaking of outdated-looking graphics, Raph’s baby Ultima Online is getting a facelift. Ultima Online with a new client, new graphics, and a new interface… That’s definitely a game I shall revisit!

Part of this is planned obsolesence, of course. The big conversion to 3D games happened because some companies could do better 3D graphics and pushed them as being “new” and therefore “better” than the old 2D stuff. Now that we look back on them, we can see that the early 3D graphics really were awful eyesores. Yet, people thought they were the best thing since sliced bread back in the day. Seriously, go back and look at the original graphics for EverQuest; some people say it was the “full 3D” aspect that pulled people into online games in such large numbers. Really? Those graphics?

Online games are an interesting aspect to this conversation. People used to think these types of games were effectively immortal. After all, text games were still going strong. Of course, they didn’t have to worry about outdated-looking graphics. We’ve also seen that the audience is fickle, and willing to jump to the newest game easily. The original EverQuest now looks hideous by modern standards, even with the upgrades to the engine over the years. Meridian 59 will never be a large game, even if it can be kept profitable with a very low overhead. I’ve even heard the old hands start to talk about how games have a finite lifespan.

Moving on to other phenomenon, I wonder how much of this ephemeral nature applies to things we see today. People are going crazy over MySpace, but isn’t this probably just the next version of Geocities? Remember when people talked about Geocities like it was the next coming of robotic Jesus here to save the world? Perhaps someone should do a Where are they now? for Geocities. (Yeah, still at http://www.geocities.com/, but it’s more filled with spam than useful pages these days.) Will MySpace really be able to avoid becoming eventually overused, abused, and ignored like Geocities (or Usenet, or… well, you get the idea.)

Interesting to think about.