The Official Site of Jordan Farmar

Tue, Jan 20th 2009, 11:01

Jordan's Playboy.com Blog - Five on 5: Week 10

I didn’t get my invite to the Inauguration, lol. I’m right on schedule with my rehab and while I’m itching to get back, I’m focused on making sure I don’t rush things. As for the Lakers, we’re still best in the West in spite of continued injuries on my unit, the “bench mob” as we’ve been dubbed.

I wanted to talk first about the way we’re consuming and listening to music today. Technology is creating new models. In the Chris Rock movie, I Think I Love My Wife, one character jokes, “Pretty soon the only place you’ll be able to buy CDs is at Starbucks.” Truth is I don’t buy CDs anymore. More and more, people are choosing to buy their music from legal downloads. Some of the biggest revenue generating artists today like Madonna, Kenny Chesney and Coldplay get up to 25% of their album revenue from music downloads from stores like iTunes and Amazon.com. Coldplay’s last album Viva La Vida earned like $6 million from legal downloads alone. And Billboard estimates iTunes’ music download revenue at close to $2 billion annually. These are big, big changes.

I buy whole albums off iTunes. Whenever a new recording is available, I’m right there, buying it, downloading it onto my computer and onto my iPods, so I can have the music with me. I like to support the artist, they work hard just like us athletes, so I’m big into paying for any music I download. I like having the whole album and the artwork on my iPod. When you put the random play feature on, the album artwork comes up so you know where it originates from, and the quality is better.

Another good thing is that we save a lot of physical material, the plastic that CDs are made, the paper, etc. With downloads, we don’t need those materials. The whole model of the way we consume music is changing and you don’t really need the hard CDs, unless you don’t have an iPod or MP-3 player. For the record, I’m an Apple guy, I have several iPods, an iPod Touch, an iPhone, a Mac desktop and three Mac laptops.

I’m a big fan of Will.i.am’s music, both with Black Eyed Peas and his solo work, like his terrific last album Songs About Girls, featuring songs like “Heartbreaker.” Will.i.am, who performed at Obama’s Inauguration Celebration on Sunday, is a big supporter of emerging technology. He says he was traveling in Asia when he came across a billboard of T-Pain and you could put your cell close to it and get a download of his new music, paying for it with your phone minutes. That is cool! And it’s not just about downloading music. We’ll be able to walk by a billboard or display while we’re traveling, point our iPhone or cell at it and get additional information and services from the Internet. We’ll be able to buy things or learn stuff on the go. I wouldn’t say my life is run by technology, but it’s definitely helpful.

Our tough Eastern rivals Boston were 27-2 and rolling when they played us on Christmas Day. We beat them and they went on a 2-7 skid before recently getting back on track. People were asking whether we rattled them, but I don’t know if that’s what it was. The NBA season is so long, and when you’re a top team like the Lakers or Celtics or the Cavs, whenever you play you’re going to get the other team’s best shot every night. And when you’re not playing your best basketball, it can haunt you and you can lose ballgames. It doesn’t matter who you have on your team on paper, you still have to come out and play. That’s why there’s the saying, “That’s why you play the game.” You can’t just simulate it like on a videogame, where the best teams usually win the game and the championship. We have to go out there and play the game, no matter who the opponent is, no matter what their record is. It can wear on teams sometimes.

Boston’s coach Doc Rivers admitted maybe “we exhaled a little after Christmas.” And once you get in a funk, it can spread throughout the whole team. Year after year, you see teams in the NBA go through that type of swing. The good teams can keep it to a minimum of games, and then they right the ship and cut it off. Sometimes, it becomes a week-to-week struggle, but the good teams find a way to get it back. Basketball is a big game of momentum, within one game itself or over a matter of several games. When you’re in a little funk it’s hard to get that momentum back.

Back to this week’s Inauguration… I think a lot of us are excited. It’s an historical event in American history, and also in world history. I’m definitely looking forward to it and to see where President Obama and his team lead us. I think we have to expect change, change for the better, hopefully. But we have to give him some leeway. It’s a new job, he’s got a host of challenges and we got to give him some time to turn it around. Just like a new management team in a corporation or on an NBA team, we’ve got to let things take their course.

I didn’t get into my rehab on the blog this week. It’s been strenuous and painful, but it’s all good. I’ll fill you in more on that next week. — JFarm.