NIKKEI VIEW: The Asian American Blog

CNN this week ran this Associated Press story, about how musicians who’ve been holdouts from the iPod/iTunes bandwagon — the Beatles, Led Zep, Garth Brooks and others among them — will probably cave in and finally allow their music to be downloaded song-by-song.
Apple’s iPod dominates the digital music player market, and iTunes accounts for over [...]

[Read more →]

I love how smart Apple is with its line of iPods, and more important, the content it makes available for iPods. I got a video iPod for Christmas (good thing, since my 40GB 4th generation iPod is filled up with over 11,000 songs), and in addition to putting all my classical music and odds and [...]

[Read more →]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I wrote a rhapsodic review of Madonna.
I thought back then that she was a perfect encapsulation of American consumerism, and though that’s kind of an icky concept, I thought she was special because her music was so good. She captures (or at least back then, captured) [...]

[Read more →]

When Barbie was “born” into the Mattel family of toys in 1959, she wasn’t just a doll. She was the epicenter of a retail revolution.
When parents bought their baby-boomer girls a Barbie, they were agreeing to an unspoken but implicit contract with the toy store to return time and again and buy stuff – lots [...]

[Read more →]

Every day’s bus ride from the Westminster Park and Ride is like listening to the weirdest radio station imaginable — a lot weirder than even the heyday of “underground” radio of the late ’60s and early ’70s.
And every ride, I hear gems out of the 10,064 tracks on my 40GB 4G iPod that make [...]

[Read more →]