hmm im not sure i follow. what does this description from the qtrax website mean: "the support of advertisers allows qtrax to compensate artists for their work." qtrax is stil paying the record companies in hard cash, it seems. the enterprise ultimately falls on this company 'qtrax', and their ability to get paid by advertisers, pass this money along to the record companies, and still turn a profit at the end of the day. id be curious to see what kind of contract they have set up. but if i am right in interpreting this quote, i dont think your assessment is really whats happening. not that capitalism and 'the spectacle' (debord) or the surplus of 'attention' (my old deleuzian prof jon beller) are not clearly at stake, but i just dont see this as an earth shattering moment in the contemporary late capitalist crisis, per se.

ha. what a characteristically deflationary 'Dan response'.

as i said, it's not surprising. However, there's no question, it will be a big shift if we see the music industry completely reterritorialised on the ad industry. and yes, apropos my dot, the contracts aren't coming up like they were supposed to, and the music will be encoded with hidden author info and there will be a bunch of invasive 'data collecting' tracking efforts both in the songs and the software. all this is totally predictable. but even if this specific company doesn't pull this off, it signals a trend that someone else inevitably (i predict, anyway) WILL accomplish. this is just the beginning.

ps. "surplus of attention" is a good expression too. me and nealist were just talking about that last night.

goddamnit now look what you made me do-- typical 'dan responding to the typical response to the typical dan respoonse, how typical'
check out beller.. oops i mispelled his name before.

but duude.. your analysis still doesnt make sense. my counterprediction is that drm goes down within a year and we see a general push away from this type of crap. the advertising thrust has been coming on strong for decades now. i dotted some stuff about a major ad company a while back, i thought it was pretty interesting. but also the early years of adbusters has some good stuff. and klein's 'no logo'.. but i dont see this 'tail wagging the dog' kind of reversal you are talking about. its like 'the matrix'-style fantasy.. just isnt economically viable. beller's point is much more to do with the political re-valorization of 'watching' away from the supposedly total passivity of the spectator. it is actually a *critique* of debord in a lot of ways. and echoes my point contra what you're saying: advertising simply can't do what you are claiming for it, because it never was that to begin with. how could advertising generate capital? it is a straight expenditure: corporations burn billions a year on ads that may or may not be effective at 'manipulating' us to buy the *actual product that creates revenue*. whatever metaphysics and/or technics surrounding its effects are secondary to the full-out expenditure that is advertising. its one of the oldest ideas: "spend money to make money". but in that distinction (which is a typical capitalist understanding of political economy), what remains unquestioned is the status of capital itself. i will save you the marxist rant, but what is 'generative' (if anything-- using such phrases in relation to capital and value is a little problematic) is the viewer/listener/being-there/performance-of-a-body. when i sit through the advertisement, or submit to the viewing experience of a film full of product placements, etc etc, it becomes the site of value, and if the capitalist machine works as it aims, of surplus extraction. but the actual ads themselves are not the central thing.
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just like it doesnt matter *which* product is being marketed, so long as the gross effect of marketing as such constitutes the BwO of the capitalist territory, or the singular modality of signification that we call 'exchange'. individual ad companies actually compete *against* this (to the extent that 'branding' is the attempt to hierarchize the generalized field of exchange and establish 'brand loyalty' to an otherwise generic product), but because their attempts succumb to the *symbolic* criteria of the field, the attempt to ascend beyond the staus quo ultimately perpetuates exchangability, in perpetual cycles of ascendancy and decline (competition between brands). on account of this, we could even say that (the scientistic formula) the field does not necessarily 'precede' its disruption, or (the hegelian formula) negation is primary. in any case, wagging of dogs and tails aside.. we can see the 'ad phenomenon' in terms of the transcendental supremacy of -- not just the signifier -- but the generalized field of exchange: what badiou basically identifies as the functional/technical side of maths-- 'the count'. advertising has more than just this condition, since it occurs, obviosuly, in time and space and various media. so, it is on this -- and only this -- basic level, that we can talk about anything resembling 'univocity'. but if there is such a thing (as a univocal plane), it could never be simply 'advertising'. it could only be 'capital' as such. as the BwO of capitalism.

anyway. check out beller. he's the dopeness. his forthcoming book on the bush presidency and the war and sovereignty could be really good, too.