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Wash. Post's Weisman ignored actual criteria used in study finding McCain voted with Bush 90 percent of the time

Media Matters for America

- 1 days and 4 hours ago

In a September 5 online chat, Washington Post national political reporter Jonathan Weisman claimed of the finding that Sen. John McCain voted in line with President Bush 90 percent of the time, "The 90 percent figure is true, but I cover Congress. The vast majority of those votes are procedural, and virtually every member of Congress votes with his or her leadership on procedural motions." In fact, Congressional Quarterly's finding that McCain had voted with Bush 90 percent of the time was based on an analysis of "votes where the editors of Congressional Quarterly determined that President Bush had taken a clear position prior to the vote." CQ gave no indication that the "vast majority" of the votes it analyzed to determine presidential support were procedural votes.

CQ separately analyzed how often members of Congress voted with the majority of their party in "all roll-call votes where an absolute majority of one party voted against an absolute majority of the other party." According to CQ, McCain voted with his party 81 percent of the time.

CQ, a nonpartisan publication, describes its process for determining presidential support as follows:

Presidential Support: This analysis uses all votes where the editors of Congressional Quarterly determined that President Bush had taken a clear position prior to the vote. There were 443 such votes in the House during the period (9 percent of the total) and 564 such votes in the Senate (22 percent).

On average, House Republicans supported Bush on 80 percent of such votes and Democrats supported the president on just 20 percent. In the Senate, where votes on confirmations tend to elevate presidential support scores, Republicans voted with Bush 88 percent of the time, and Democrats gave him their support on 51 percent of the relevant votes.

CQ describes its party unity score as follows:

Party Unity: This analysis looks at all roll-call votes where an absolute majority of one party voted against an absolute majority of the other party. There were 2,675 such votes in the House during the period (52 percent of the total) and 1,505 such votes in the Senate (58 percent).

From Weisman's September 5 washingtonpost.com chat:

Anonymous: Sen. Obama says a McCain Administration would not represent a change from Bush administration policies since Sen. McCain has voted in favor of Bush 90 percent of the time. Is this true?

Jonathan Weisman: The 90 percent figure is true, but I cover Congress. The vast majority of those votes are procedural, and virtually every member of Congress votes with his or her leadership on procedural motions.

That said, on the two fundamental issues of the campaign -- the Iraq war and economic policy -- McCain and Bush are indeed pretty much on the same page.

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Free Live iPhone Passlock Bypass Webcast for iPhone Forensics Book Launch

Hacker to Bypass iPhone Passcode Lock During Live Webcast on September 11th

Hacker to Bypass iPhone Passcode Lock During Live Webcast on September 11th [IPhone]

21:23 Van Damme - 400 m: les Borlée, 4e et 6e

Crowdsourcing Book Excerpt: The Canary in the Coal Mine

Wired Top Stories

- 1 days and 9 hours ago

First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article, "crowdsourcing" describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few.

Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise -- it's talented, creative and stunningly productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today's technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It's a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education and job history no longer matter, where the quality of work is all that counts and every field is open to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service, design the product or solve the problem, you've got the job. But crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent employed, research conducted and products made and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption are inevitable.

When the original article was published, crowdsourcing still constituted a nascent business model. A few small companies had achieved limited successes with it, and large companies had only begun to test the waters. In this excerpt, Howe argues that in just two years crowdsourcing has revolutionized an entire industry -- stock photography -- and may well be poised to create disruption in other fields as well.

- - -

Adapted from Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, by Jeff Howe.

More at Howe's Crowdsourcing Blog.

Chapter 7: The Canary in the Coal Mine

There's a story people like to tell about Bruce Livingstone. In late 2005, Getty Images, the world's largest photo agency, was looking to acquire Livingstone's company, iStockphoto, the world's most successful crowdsourcing company. Long before the contracts were drawn up, Livingstone, to show his commitment to the deal, tattooed the word "Getty" in cursive across the tender flesh on his inner wrist. Then he e-mailed Getty CEO Jonathan Klein photos of the tattoo under the message: "Don't make me write another word after this!" It's just the kind of tale -- emblematic of determination and just the right amount of quirky eccentricity -- that tends to burnish the reputation of its subject. In Livingstone's case, it has the added benefit of being demonstrably true.

With his penchant for muscle cars, rockabilly haircuts and, yes, tattoos, it's tempting to call Livingstone an unlikely CEO. But I prefer to think of Livingstone as a perfectly reasonable chief for some corporation from, say, the year 2020. A company not unlike iStockphoto. Located in a single, cavernous room inside a former factory in downtown Calgary (Alberta, Canada), iStockphoto houses a tiny fraction of its actual workforce. And Livingstone, dressed in T-shirt and jeans, occupies a desk -- chosen, it would seem, at random -- in the middle of the floor. The corner office clearly loses significance in a company that thrives on decentralization.

Jeff Howe explains crowdsourcing, which activates the transformative power of today's technology, liberating the latent potential within us all.

Video: Courtesy of Jeff Howe

Westeel Rosco built the factory in 1925 to manufacture nails, screws and other bits of hardware. Unlike Westeel Rosco, iStock's products -- stock photos, illustrations and videos -- aren't manufactured on-site. They're created by a global, fluid workforce of 60,000 part-time photographers and artists, only a fraction of whom make a living from the work they sell on iStock. Yet they have a devotion to the company matched by few traditional firms. The full-time staffers who spend their days in the old Westeel Rosco plant play a support role for the community -- and community is the only applicable word -- that is making the product iStock brings to market every day. And that community has been very, very good to Livingstone and his investors. In the course of several years iStock has grown from a hobby to the third-largest purveyor of stock images in the world. When Getty purchased iStock in early 2006, Livingstone took home more than half of the $50 million Getty paid for the company.

The first stock photo agency was founded in 1920, and for most of the 20th century the industry was an afterthought, trafficking in the outtakes from commercial magazine assignments. Very few photographers tried to make a living off the market in preexisting images alone. This changed after the desktop publishing revolution of the mid-1980s led to a rapid growth in the publishing industry, and to a commensurate demand for images. Suddenly photographers were making six figures a year selling photos they'd already been paid to shoot. It was like minting money. Stock photography is, in relative terms, a tiny industry. The annual global gross for the entire business is estimated to be around $2 billion, which makes it a bit bigger than the market for gift baskets, but a little smaller than the annual sales of orchids. But this little industry has undergone big changes, and could well be a case study in how the crowd will impact much larger businesses.

In just the last few years the influx of talented amateurs armed with inexpensive, high-resolution digital cameras has upended the economics of stock photography. Five years ago, a professional-quality image was still a scarce resource. No more. This isn't to say the market for high-end photographs has disappeared. A gifted photographer will always find work. But the professional no longer has a lock on the middle and lower ends of the stock photo business. With a modicum of training, just about anyone can take a decent shot. Sophisticated cameras and photo-editing software do the rest. iStock exploits this fact. Design firms and other small companies working on a budget quickly embraced what became known as the "microstock" model. One graphic designer told me he went from paying hundreds of dollars an image to less than $10. "I pass on some of the savings to my clients and keep the rest. We're both delighted."

iStock might be great for buyers, but it's caused all sorts of headaches for professional stock photographers. In my original Wired article about crowdsourcing I quoted a Los Angeles-based photographer, Mark Harmel, saying that this influx of cheap images had caused a slight decline in his income from stock photo sales, which had dropped to $60,000. But in the two years since that decline has fallen off a cliff, to $35,000 in 2007. "If I look at the trend line, it just keeps going down. I'm really concentrating on getting assignments now," says Harmel. "I recently came back from London with 70 really wonderful shots. I'll probably use them on my website, but it's not worth my time to bother submitting them to a stock agency. They won't sell."

Harmel's far from alone. In fact, Getty's other businesses have struggled in the crowdsourced era. In the year I spent writing this book the company's stock slid 60 percent, falling to just under $22 by February 2008. That month Getty was acquired by the private equity firm Hellman Friedman for $2.4 billion, a considerably lower figure than the company had originally sought. According to a report released at the time of the sale, Goldman Sachs estimates that Getty's core business -- the sale of rights-managed, professionally produced images -- will continue to suffer an irreversible decline, falling to just 29 percent of its revenues by 2012. In the same period the investment bank projects iStock to continue its rapid rate of growth. iStock sold $72 million worth of images in 2007, a figure expected to jump to $262 million by 2012.

In this light, paying $50 million for a crowdsourced photo company looks like the smartest decision Getty ever made. The company is in the midst of transforming its business, from one reliant exclusively on professionals to one that is at least equally reliant on amateurs. As the Goliath of the industry, where Getty goes its competitors are sure to follow, which is to say, stock photography itself has been utterly transformed through crowdsourcing, in which a once-scarce commodity has become abundant. The question to ask is whether the upheaval roiling stock photography is only a leading indicator, like the minor volcanic eruptions that can precede a catastrophic earthquake.

Already the trend is migrating to other fields. Most immediately, the same dynamics that made the stock photo ubiquitous -- affordable digital SLR cameras and burgeoning communities of enthusiastic amateurs -- are affecting other markets for visual images. So-called "citizen paparazzi" use cellphone cameras to snap impromptu shots of stars and then sell them to new photo agencies such as Scoopt, which specialize in buying up and marketing their work. Amateurs can beat professional paparazzi for the simple reason that they vastly outnumber them. It's a question of probability: The throng of pedestrians in Greenwich Village, for instance, have a much better chance of catching an unkempt Gwyneth Paltrow than a single paparazzo.

And photography may well be just the beginning. iStock itself is doing a burgeoning business in the sale of stock video footage, and the crowd is also making commercials, collaborating on TV scripts, and recording and distributing their own music. They're writing political analysis, creating their own video games, and making feature-length movies. For the time being, all this activity has taken place in something of a parallel universe, without causing any of the economic upheaval visited on the stock photo or pornography industries. But those universes are beginning to collide as more companies attempt to package all this outpouring of creativity into a marketable product.

While crowdsourcing has already emerged as a potent force in the media and entertainment industries, it's also profoundly influenced the way even Fortune 100 companies like Procter & Gamble do business. Once famous for its insular culture, Procter & Gamble now crowdsources much of its R&D process, using global networks of scientists such as InnoCentive and NineSigma, which boast a combined membership of 2 million professional and amateur researchers. Even companies operating in a conventional field such as mining have found crowdsourcing applications. The Canadian gold-mining group Goldcorp put geological survey data online and offered a $575,000 prize to anyone who could identify likely areas for exploration. Goldcorp says the contest produced 110 targets that yielded $3 billion in gold. Following its lead, the mining giant Barrick Gold Corporation recently offered $10 million to anyone who could improve its silver-extraction process. The open call of crowdsourcing is also being used by companies such as Google (to develop applications for its Android mobile platform) and Netflix (to improve its recommendation system). The question is whether the iStock secret sauce can be applied to industries like television and journalism and, possibly, even beyond to any business that traffics in bits and bytes. To answer that question, it helps to know what's in the secret sauce.

The Community Is the Company

iStock has been compared to a cult, and the analogy isn't entirely unfair. It's no accident that the most successful companies in the web's second coming -- most of whom traffic in the crowd's creative output -- are led by outsize personalities. "Bruce is to iStock what Tom is to MySpace," notes Garth Johnson, iStock's VP of Business Development. (Johnson resigned his position after this book went to press.) For those readers over the age of 30, Tom is Tom Anderson, the president of the social networking behemoth MySpace and the first "friend" to greet any new user. Under this new archetype of a company -- in which the community, as much as the customer, comes first -- the cult of personality plays a crucial role in community building, and Livingstone has been as essential to the growth of the iStock community as Anderson has been to MySpace's. "Bruce has a really strong, extremely charismatic personality online," says Johnson. "And that's really helped us build the community."

It's safe to say that iStock has left the community-building phase behind: Sixty-thousand people have combined to create an enormous portfolio of over 3.5 million images and 100,000 videos. By contrast, Getty's other divisions combined only use 2,500 photographers. The iStockers offer the company their artwork, and in return iStock goes to extraordinary lengths to keep the iStockers happy. The site offers the budding photographer all manner of free tutorials, and the forums buzz -- at a rate of 38 posts per minute -- with questions about lens sizes, polarized filters and F-stop settings. iStock doesn't offer a chance to get rich. It offers the chance to make friends and become a better photographer.

"We don't own anything, the community does" says Johnson. "Everything we do affects these people, whether they're just earning enough to pay for their equipment, or they're making mortgage payments from their photo sales. They all want a voice, and we have to give it to them, because really, the community is the company."

The upside to this state of affairs should be obvious -- a dedicated, efficient workforce with no expectation of receiving a living wage -- but there are downsides as well: Even the smallest changes can roil the fickle, passionate community of iStockers. In March 2006, iStock launched a new feature on its web forums, a "forometer" which measured an iStocker's popularity through "bafflingly complex scientific methods" including the date and number of posts to the forum. The forometer displayed its results through a set of red, yellow or green bars. It did not go over well. The community questioned the principles behind the feature, as well as its functionality. Not long after its launch, the feature had been removed. Employees may be hell on overhead, but they're paid to accept all but the most draconian policies with a polite nod. Communities, on the other hand, aren't paid to stick around, and nothing stops them from selling their photos to one of iStock's many competitors. "They don't work for us," Livingstone laughs. "We work for them." If the iStocker feels a sense of ownership over the site, that's understandable: The iStock community predates iStock the company.

Livingstone didn't set out to revolutionize an industry, he just wanted to fill a personal need and help a few friends at the same time. In 2000 Livingstone was running a small graphic design and web-hosting firm in Calgary. Bruce is an avid photographer himself, and over the years he had developed an extensive network of photographers and designers. Early in the year he took 2,000 of his images and put them online. Anyone could download his photos in exchange for giving him an e-mail address. Livingstone's friends decided they wanted to share their images with the public, too. That June the budding community instituted a credit system: A user could download one image for every image of theirs that had been downloaded by someone else.

It was a classic example of the gift economy, the non-monetary exchange that grew up alongside the internet. During iStock's early years, everyone took something and gave something in turn. "The feeders and the eaters were the same people," as Livingstone puts it. Everyone profited by acquiring new images, though no one made (or spent) a dime. Soon friends of friends heard about Bruce's nifty idea and started uploading their images, too. Then around 2002 a wider public got wind of iStock, and the site began to hit critical mass. Soon Livingstone was paying $10,000 a month for the bandwidth to support it. He could have taken advertising to cover the cost of hosting, but he felt that would violate the spirit of the site. "The focus was on the community, and good design. Advertising would have cluttered the site," says Livingstone.

Instead, he started charging a quarter for each image, and he opened the system up to the public. This proved to be a momentous decision. Word quickly spread among publishers that there was a site offering cheap, usable images, and photographers began flocking to iStock to upload their portfolios. Traffic to the site skyrocketed, and soon Livingstone raised the price to $1 per image. "I thought it might become a sideline business," he says. It quickly became much more than that. The quality of the images wasn't always as high (or as consistent) as a traditional stock agency's, but the differences were indiscernible to the general consumer, and after all, you couldn't beat the price. By 2004 a host of other so-called "micro-stocks" had sprung up with strategies similar to iStock's. The professionals panicked. Microstock photos, they charged, were flooding the market with subpar images. At first, the industry aligned itself against iStockphoto and other microstock agencies such as ShutterStock and Dreamstime.

Then in early 2006, Getty announced it would buy iStockphoto for $50 million. "If someone's going to cannibalize your business, better it be one of your other businesses," Getty CEO Jonathan Klein told me shortly after the sale. Smaller magazines, nonprofit organizations, and all manner of websites have continued to flock to iStock's high-volume, low-cost model. As of February 2008, iStockphoto had 2 million regular customers purchasing photographs, video footage, illustrations and animations. "Bruce's brilliance," Jonathan Klein once told me, "is that he turned community into commerce." Livingstone uses a slightly different formulation: "I turned commerce into community,"

iStockphoto has perfected the Jedi Mind Trick that's at the heart of crowdsourcing. It's an incredibly cost-effective strategy -- iStock boasts a 55 percent profit margin. And yet, Livingstone stumbled into this business model by creating a context -- a community of like-minded enthusiasts -- in which financial measures take a backseat to considerably less tangible concerns. Ask someone in the office, and they'll tell you: It's not about the money. Ask an iStocker and they'll tell you the same thing. In fact -- would-be crowdsources take note: If it is about the money, it won't work. It will fizzle, not sizzle, as one of iStock's designers put it. "What's funny is, the money people, they pretty quickly get pulled aside in the forums by the core people. Or they just don't have a voice. People will ignore them, like 'Oh, that's just so and so, they're just here to make money.'"

That doesn't mean the iStockers are unmotivated by self-interest. The more a photographer's images are downloaded, the more recognition they receive in the community, and the more credits they earn to download other people's photos to use in their own designs. And the additional income is also welcome, of course. Unlike other cases in which large corporations have attempted to monetize community, iStock does reward its contributors. It paid out $21 million in 2007. It's significant that people in online communities like iStock's react with great hostility to the idea that crowdsourcing is a form of cheap labor -- despite the fact it demonstrably is. After all, no one wants to feel exploited. In the end, what iStock provides is an invaluable if impossible-to-measure currency: meaning. The crowd will give away their time -- their excess capacity -- enthusiastically, but not for free. It has to be a meaningful exchange.

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INTERVIEW MARIAGE

Julien Doré et Fogiel sur le plateau d'On n'est pas couché

CULTURE K7

Global Techno

- 1 days and 16 hours ago

Auteur : Jean-Yves Leloup

Version longue de l’article publié dans le numéro de Juillet du magazine Tsugi.

A l’heure où l’on s’inspire de l’esthétique et de l’invention eighties, la figure de la bonne vieille cassette audio est à nouveau à l’honneur. Retour sur l’âge d’or de la mixtape, du walkman et du ghetto blaster. Magnéto, Serge !

Ce n’est pas vraiment un revival. Plutôt une tendance, encore légère, à la fois tendre et nostalgique, qui voit refleurir ici et là le motif de la cassette audio. T-shirts ou porte-cartes, vêtements et Å“uvres d’art réalisés à partir de bande magnétique (le très bel oreiller tricoté par l’artiste Christian Marclay), cassettes recyclées en objet de déco, en figurines, en porte-monnaie, en boucles de ceinture, en clé USB ou en pendentif, bref, c’est toute une esthétique, une imagerie, une culture même, née vers la fin des années 70 et disparue au cours des années 90, qui semble inspirer à nouveau notre époque diablement rétro. On repère ça et là sur le Net, sur eBay, au fil de blogs, de sites spécialisés ou de projets arty, quelques collectionneurs de K7 vierges au design typique et désuet. A la boutique et galerie parisienne Objet Sonore, spécialisée dans la hi-fi vintage, on vend walkman, boom box et magnéto à tous ceux qui souhaitent écouter leurs vieilles bandes, qu’ils soient mélomanes ou nostalgiques (les collectionneurs s’intéressent encore peu à cette époque).
Du côté des labels, si les trublions parisiens de Mort Aux Jeunes se sont récemment amusés à renouer avec le format oublié de la cassette deux titres (ou plutôt, cassingle) avec le très électro-pop Chanson d’Amour de Catherine Ferroyer-Blanchard, c’est plutôt dans le domaine du noise, héritier de la musique industrielle, que l’on perpétue la tradition de la cassette. C’est ainsi chez Bimbo Tower, disquaire et libraire spécialisé de Bastille, que l’on trouve les derniers résistants à l’ère du numérique et du CD, parmi lesquels pas mal de petits labels américains (Eastape, Hung Like A Horse ou Goaty tapes). Parmi ces vestiges d’une autre époque, plutôt dédié à un public de quadras, le tout jeune label français, Tanzprocesz, se distingue avec de jolis boitiers faits à la main, dans la droite lignée d’une esthétique DIY et manuelle inspirée par la culture underground des dernières décennies. Son fondateur Jonathan Terroir édite ainsi avec ferveur des artistes plutôt spé comme Evil Moisture, Placenta Popeye ou Kommissar Hjuler, pour des tirages limités entre 20 et 110 copies. Après être passé par le MP3 et le Cdr, le parisien a fini par choisir le format de la cassette pour des raisons à la fois pratiques, sentimentales et artistiques. « Ca me permet de faire des éditions limitées (la cassette est l’un des rares supports analogiques qui le permette), ce qui est plutôt plaisant quand on sort des trucs pas toujours très vendeurs. Quand on y pense, l’écoute par face permet aussi d’apprécier différemment la musique, comparé à un CD, et les artistes travaillent véritablement en fonction du média. Côté technique, le son est bon si on règle un tant soit peu les niveaux à l’enregistrement, et si les niveaux sont trop élevés, la saturation est classe. Par ailleurs, c’est un format très résistant. Et puis, en tant qu’auditeur, on reprend la lecture là où on l’a abandonnée et on écoute tous les morceaux plutôt que d’appuyer sur un bouton pour zapper direct au titre suivant, ce qui implique une manière différente d’apprécier la musique. Enfin, je peux les écouter en voiture et ça me rappelle surtout mon adolescence voire ma préadolescence quand j’étais un gros nerd du walkman » .

Pour beaucoup (hormis les gamins nés avec un iPod glissé dans leur couche-culotte), cassette et walkman témoignent en effet d’une époque révolue, d’un certain âge d’or de la culture pop, teinté d’innocence et de découverte. Avec la K7, ainsi que l’autoradio, le baladeur et la boombox, c’est toute une nouvelle culture mobile qui prend son essor au cours des années 80, libérant teenagers, musiciens et mélomanes de la dictature de la hi-fi de salon comme de la domination des radios grand public. Laurent Massaloux, designer et grand fan de musique, analyse ainsi très bien l’apport de l’objet à la culture musicale de l’époque. « La forme de la K7, sa petitesse et son absence d’encombrement conféraient à l’objet un côté inaltérable, en tout cas incassable, nomade. On pouvait la mettre dans une boîte à gants, dans la poche de son blouson, sans que cela porte à conséquence sur la qualité de la musique. Ce qui était très différent du vinyle, plus fragile et précieux. D’un point de vue plus social, toute une culture de la mobilité, de l’échange et du partage se sont incarnés dans cet objet. Lorsque j’étais adolescent, mes parents m’ont offert pour Noël le Walkman II de Sony, et ça été pour moi aussi important que ma première mobylette. Le fait de pouvoir s’affranchir des contraintes des parents, du lourd matériel du salon et partir ainsi, sans soumission, peut sans doute être comparé à ce que la caméra portable a apporté aux cinéastes de la Nouvelle Vague. En tant qu’ado, j’ai gagné là une nouvelle autonomie, une forme de liberté culturelle qui m’a sans doute beaucoup construit, ou qui a en tout cas construit l’amour que je porte encore pour la musique ».
Grâce à la simplicité d’usage de la cassette, la possibilité de composer ses propres compilations, d’enregistrer les vinyles de ses potes ou ses titres préférés à la radio, c’est une nouvelle culture d’échange et de découverte qui prend son essor à cette époque, plus de vingt ans avant l’avènement du Net, du P2P, de l’Ipod et du MP3. Une forme de fraternité pop en quelque sorte, incarnée par ce que les anglo-saxons appellent la mixtape, pour désigner ces compiles perso patiemment enregistrées, destinées à ses balades en walkman, mais plus encore à ses amis ou à l’être aimé, comme en témoigne le roman best-seller de Nick Hornby, Haute-Fidélité, ou le bouquin plus volontiers visuel et nostalgique de Thurston Moore, Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture. Ce très bel ouvrage initié par l’un des leaders de Sonic Youth, compile en effet pas mal d’anecdotes, de souvenirs, de confessions, d’histoires d’amours ou d’amitié lié à cette pratique populaire, manuelle et intimiste.

Mais la mixtape perso comme la K7, ce furent aussi pour de nombreux musiciens, DJs et labels indé, une manière de se libérer des contraintes du music business. Sans la mixtape (appelée au début des années 70, party tape), les Djs pionniers du hip-hop new-yorkais, parmi lesquels Kool Herc ou Grandmaster Flash, n’auraient sans doute jamais pu populariser leur musique auprès des gamins du ghetto (les premiers maxis de rap viendront en effet quelques années plus tard). Sans la mixtape, la plupart des grands rappeurs n’auraient sans doute jamais pu faire entendre, au public des quartiers, leur art de la prose et de l’invective. Enfin, sans la simplicité d’usage et les faibles coûts de production de la cassette, c’est tout simplement l’ensemble de l’underground international qui n’aurait pu parvenir aux oreilles de ses auditeurs. En France, c’est même tout un réseau, entre fanzines, radios libres et labels défricheurs, quelque part entre punk, cold-wave et musique industrielle, qui a pu prendre essor grâce aux vertus de la bande magnétique. Si les pays anglo-saxons possédaient de prestigieux labels K7, comme ROIR (plutôt rock) ou Touch (plus expérimental), chez nous, c’est dans l’univers du punk et du post-punk, que des structures comme V.I.S.A ou Bondage se sont alors distinguées. Marsu, figure tutélaire de l’underground de l’époque, compagnon de route des Bérus et label manager de Bondage, se remémore ainsi que « le premier moyen d’expression des groupes, s’ils voulaient se faire entendre et s’ils n’avaient pas les moyens de se payer du studio ou de produire un vinyle, c’était clairement la K7. Si par exemple, Lucrate Milk, groupe dont je m’occupais, avait sorti des 45 tours, c’est une cassette qu’ils ont sorti sur V.I.S.A qui leur a vraiment mis le pied à l’étrier. Ce label fût d’ailleurs l’un des premiers à s’équiper d’un duplicateur multiple qui pouvait faire 8 K7 en même temps, ce qui énorme pour l’époque. Et on peut dire que V.I.S.A. à fait découvrir beaucoup de groupes grâce à ce format. Normal, c’était un objet qui bien, les gens les dupliquaient, et pas mal de versions pirates circulaient. Comme il y avait très peu de groupes comparé à l’époque actuelle, quand on disposait d’enregistrements de qualité approximative, avec un souffle pourri, hé bien on ne s’en formalisait pas. Il y avait chez nous un tel apétit musical que l’on considérait chacune de ces K7 comme une forme de trésor. Moi-même, il doit m’en rester plus de 500 de cette époque, dont pas mal d’enregistrements historiques, entre OTH, les Thugs ou même les Clash, qui ne sont disponibles que sur ce format ».

Cette mobilité, cette liberté d’usage acquise tant par les labels indépendants, les pirates mélomanes que les utilisateurs de walkman n’ira tout de même pas sans mal et sera férocement combattue par l’industrie discographique, alors particulièrement florissante et très vorace. Dès 1980, la RIAA, le puissant lobby américain, lance sans grand succès la fameuse campagne « Hometaping is killing music », en vue de combattre l’économie parallèle de la mixtape, avant de finir par faire voter l’établissement d’une taxe sur les cassettes vierges. Mais la vraie victoire de l’industrie du disque, ce sera l’invention et la démocratisation du format CD, qui mettra un point final à l’aventure de la cassette et du vinyl au début des années 90. Un format fermé, « playback only », c’est-à-dire n’offrant pas la moindre liberté d’écoute à l’auditeur, à part la touche « skip », bien sûr, petite victoire sur le « fast foward » et le « rewind » laborieux de la K7. Cette liberté refusé à l’auditeur, cette mesure de retorsion en quelque sorte, l’industrie du disque finira par le payer cher une décennie plus tard, à l’heure de l’émergence du numérique et du MP3. Mais alors vraiment très cher.

Musicassette story : L’histoire du support en quelques mots

-Magnétophone et bande magnétique sont développés dès les années 30 par les industriels allemands AEG et BASF, et d’abord utilisés par la propagande nazi, avant d’être adoptés par les professionnels de la musique et de la radio dès la fin des années 40.

-Début 60, c’est Philipps qui lance sa « musicassette » et son premier magnéto grand public, s’assurant une domination du marché international grâce à la cession gratuite de son brevet.

-Le support prend son essor au cours des années 70 avant de connaître son pic au cours des années 80. En 1986, on compte aux USA 350 millions de K7 vendues contre 110 millions de LP.

-Le Walkman est lancé en 79Â sous le nom de Soundabout, avant que le Walkman II impose en 81 cet appareil auprès du grand public, entraînant dans son sillage le succès des « personal stereos », dont le ghetto blaster est l’exemple le plus caractéristique.

-Le format K7 décline au cours des années 90 face à la popularisation du CD, sauf dans certains pays comme l’Inde, l’Afghanistan, les Emirats Arabes ou la Turquie, où il est toujours utilisé.
Liens :
http://www.designboom.com/contemporary/cassettes.html
http://www.tapedeck.org/
http://tanzprocesz.free.fr/
http://artofthemix.org

Boutique Objet sonore, 19 Rue Debelleyme, 75003 Paris
http://www.presence-audio.com
Boutique Bimbo Tower, 5 Passage St Antoine, 75011 Paris
http://bimbo.tower.free.fr/

Thurston Moore Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture. In Loving Memory of the audiocassette tape (Universe)

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[AE] Yochai Benkler