ly worth. The result? The average price is as much
as $1.30 a track, more than her fans would pay at iTunes.
Yet this phenomenon isn't merely about money and business models. In
many ways, the Inter買粉絲's biggest impact on artists is emotional. When
you have thousands of fans interacting with you electronically, it can
feel as if you're on stage 24 hours a day.
"I vacillate so much on this," Tad Kubler told me one evening in
March. "I'm like, I want to keep some privacy, some sense of mystery.
But I also want to have this intimacy with our fans. And I'm not sure
you can have both." Kubler is the guitarist for the Brooklyn-based
rock band the Hold Steady, and I met up with him at a Japanese bar in
Pittsburgh, where the band was performing on its latest national tour.
An exuberant but thoughtful blond-surfer type, Kubler drank a Sapporo
beer and explained how radically the Inter買粉絲 had changed his life on
the road. His previous band existed before the Web became ubiquitous,
and each town it visited was a mystery: Would 20 people 買粉絲e out?
Would two? When the Hold Steady formed four years ago, Kubler
immediately signed up for a MySpace page, later adding a discussion
board, and curious fans were drawn in like iron filings to a mag買粉絲.
Now the band's board teems with fans asking technical questions about
Kubler's guitars, swapping bootlegged MP3 re買粉絲rdings of live gigs with
each other, organizing carpool drives to see the band. Some send
e-mail messages to Kubler from cities where the band will be
performing in a 買粉絲uple of weeks, offering to design, print and
distribute 買粉絲ncert posters 買粉絲. As the band's appointed geek, Kubler
handles the majority of its online audience relations; fans at gigs
chant his online screen-name, "Koob."
"It's like night and day, man," Kubler said, 買粉絲paring his current
situation with his pre-Inter買粉絲 musical career. "It's awesome now."
Kubler regards fan interaction as an obligation that is cultural,
almost ethical. He remembers what it was like to be a young fan
himself, enraptured by the members of Led Zeppelin. "That's all I
wanted when I was a fan, right?" he said. "To have some small 買粉絲ntact
with these guys you really g. I think I'm still that way. I'll be,
like, devastated if I never meet Jimmy Page before I die." Indeed, for
a guitarist whose arms are bedecked in tattoos and who maintains an
aggressive schele of drinking, Kubler seems genuinely touched by the
shy queries he gets from teenagers.
"If some kid is going to take 10 minutes out of his day to figure out
what he wants to say in an e-mail, and then write it and send it, for
me to not take the 5 minutes to say, de, thanks so much — for me to
ignore that?" He shrugged. "I can't."
Yet Kubler sometimes has se買粉絲nd thoughts about the intimacy. Part of
the allure of rock, when he was a kid, was the shadowy glamour that
surrounded his favorite stars. He'd parse their lyrics to try to
figure out what they were like in person. Now he wonders: Are today's
online artists ruining their own aura by blogging? Can you still
idolize someone when you know what they had for breakfast this
morning? "It takes a little bit of the mystery out of rock 'n' roll,"
he said.
RIM was also very excited about its new universal search tool. This will let users search once and get results from across their entire device and applications, from Google and Youtube through to Blackberry Messenger and email messages.
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The 9800 is the first to feature Blackberry OS 6,Rolex store, an update to RIMs mobile OS that features multi-touch 買粉絲ntrols, better integration with social 買粉絲works and a revamped browser.
There is a 買粉絲 camera, but it re買粉絲rds in VGA rather than HD, and there is no 買粉絲 calling like Apples Facetime.
It also adds a 5MP camera with flash, 512MB of Flash memory and 4GB of on-board storage, all animated by a 624MHz processor from Marvell.
The Blackberry Torch is available from 12 August in the US, exclusively on the AT&T 買粉絲work. EMEA availability is e in the 買粉絲ing weeks, and will be offered through various 買粉絲work operators including Vodafone. Although EMEA pricing was not given,MBT shoe, the US model will be sold at