Can I Get That To-Go?

Chocolate and Wine: Bariloche and Mendoza

2011-03-05T05:58:00.000-08:00

Following a few days in El Chalten, I pushed northward to Bariloche which is a two day bus ride from El Chalten with an obligatory stop over in Perito Moreno (the town that is, not the glacier with the same name) at the end of the first day's leg.

Bariloche is a small town nestled along the Lago (lake) Nahuel Huapi and surrounded by a string of mountain ranges (Cerros Catedral, Lopez, Nireco and Shaihuenque) which, if pressed for a California analog, might be a distant cousin to Lake Tahoe. Notorious as a mecca for chocolate, the town is festooned with chocolate stores everywhere you step. I ended up here for about a week getting some work done and enjoying the scenery before moving on knowing that this would probably be the last stop with such agreeable weather as the rest of the stops would steadily increase in temperature and humidity.

Trading chocolate for wine, I moved on to Argentina's wine country, Mendoza. Aside from the obligatory wine tastings, Mendoza's Parque General San Martin was a pleasant diversion from the bustle of the city. The park is a runner's paradise encompassing some nice waterways, a museum, natatorium, soccer fields, basketball courts, you name it.

Silverlake and Echo Park Lake walkers will find this setting somewhat reminiscent:

Back to Argentina: El Calafate, Perito Moreno Glacier and El Chalten

2011-02-23T11:44:00.000-08:00

After disembarking the MS Expedition in Ushuaia, I began my way northward in Argentina the next day with a flight to El Calafate in order to bypass the Argentina-Chile-Argentina immigration and customs tango. To get to Ushuaia (which is in Tierra del Fuego -- and is split between Argentina and Chile), from Argentina, you have to cross into Chile briefly (about two hours) and then back into Argentina. This requires overland travelers to go through immigration/customs twice in about as many hours -- not fun considering you have to load/unload your bags from the bus' undercarriage each time. Since the last two hours of a 12-hour drive into/out of Tierra del Fuego /Ushuaia does cover some spectacular views, it's worth doing maybe once, but certainly not twice -- instead, a 90-minute flight will do just fine, thank you.

El Calafate and the Perito Moreno Glacier

El Calafate is the most convenient staging area from which to access the Perito Moreno Glacier and a soon as I got into my hostel, I booked a tour for the next day. The tour was comprised of a boat ride to one side of the glacier followed by the adjacent side in the Parque Nacional Los Glaciers which provides some amazing viewpoints. The park's viewing points consist of a series of walkways situated across from the waterway from the glaciers. The day's weather was perfect for viewing the glacier alternating between clear blue skies and occasional moments of cloudy overcast which actually accentuates the blueness of the glaciers.

If patient enough you can hear the ice cracking and, at opportune moments the cracking may result in calving as ice breaks away from the glacier into the water below.

During the day I also came across some fellow passengers from the Antarctica trip also there to see Perito Moreno. Only a few days had past since Antarctica, but we all agreed the trip was still fresh in our minds and would, fairly or unfairly, serve to be a barometer for all our other experiences moving forward.

Perito Moreno Glacier video -- Facebookers, you'll have to go to the blog to see the video :(

El Chalten

After El Calafate I picked up an overnight bus to El Chalten.

El Chalten is a hiker's paradise. Nestled in a valley with the iconic Cerro Torre and Cerro Fitz Roy as the backdrop, it reminds me of the sparseness of civilization in Joshua Tree, although only one-tenth the size.

The number of treks and vistas one can cram into a single staging area makes El Chalten an enticing destination. While I was not anticipating any major trekking on this trip, I still made a few treks decked in running shoes which had been hazed back in Ushuaia on the Cerro Guanaco hike. Still replete with knee issues from running which I hoped this trip would serve some recuperative benefits, I was careful on the uphill and downhill footings. Still, I was able to make short hikes to thie Chorrilla del Salto waterfall and a stunning viewpoint along the Laguna Torre trail which looked down into the Rio Fitz Roy river, the Grand Glacier above it and the omnipresent Cerro Torre and Cerro Fitz Roy in the background.

Antarctica, Day 7: Danco Island

2011-02-22T06:32:00.000-08:00

Danco Island this morning was our final excursion of the tour. A 45-minute hike uphill led us to a Gentoo penguin colony and spectacular views of the surrounding waters and ice-scape.

We took a final slide down the hill before boarding our Zodiac back to the ship. Other travelers were fortunate enough to come up close with humpback whales as their Zodiac returned to the ship.

Later in the evening we met up with the Polar Star at Deception Island after an earlier attempt in the afternoon was aborted due to foul weather. Over the next two days we would sail back across the Drake Passage to Ushuaia.

Antarctica, Day 6: Goudier Island, Antarctic BBQ & Pleneau Bay

2011-02-19T12:13:00.000-08:00

This morning we visited Port Lockroy and Jougla Point on Goudier Island. Port Lockroy was originally constructed by the British as part of Operation Tabarin and later was used as a science station. Today, it's a popular destination restored to faithfully preserve its interior as it was while in operation.

Port Lockroy, back in the day:

A short Zodiac ride to the other part of Goudier Island was Jougla Point which hosted another penguin rookery and what appeared to be a well-preserved whale skeleton -- later I found out it was reconstructed from various whale bones by the United Kingdom Joint Services Expedition in the 1970's. Still makes for a nice photo-op, though.

Following a visit to Port Lockroy and Jougla Point on Goudier Island, the crew prepared an outdoor BBQ for lunch on the ship's deck as we exited Goudier Island. The food was excellent and the setting unbelievable; who would of thought you could enjoy such an outdoor meal in jeans and a t-shirt in the Antarctic.

After lunch we took a cruise around Pleneau bay to see the various glaciers/icerbergs and even saw one iceberg calving and crashing into an adjacent iceberg -- unfortunately, I wasn't quick enough to capture the action, but you can't live all your experiences through the camera lens or you'll miss the experience itself. Sam, our Zodiac driver cautiously motored back to avoid any excessive waves the calving may cause in our general direction lest we be caught in a tsunami-like aftershock. During our cruise we also saw Crabeater seals and Leopoard seals sunning themselves -- one Leopard seal dove in and approached the Zodiac for a curious gander while another group even had a close encounter with a whale.

Along the way, the MS Expedition crew picked up some 2,000 year-old ice to stock ice cubes for the bar, this called for a toast:

That evening we learned of another ship (the Polar Star) in the vicinity had run aground and required assistance from nearby ships. While the damage was restricted to just the outer hull of the double-hull ship, regulations stipulate that the ship cannot continue in such a condition and all passengers must be off-loaded. In the spirit cooperation between ships and sea etiquette, multiple ships with additional space arrived to absorb the stranded passengers. We would do the same the following day.

Antarctica, Day 5: Half Moon Island and Deception Island

2011-02-19T11:24:00.000-08:00

Our morning excursion on Day 5 was to Half Moon Island where we saw Fur seals and Chinstripe penguins -- among the throngs of Chinstripes there was one lonely Macaroni penguin which was sorta like a penguin version of Where's Waldo although my point-and-shoot camera did not have sufficient zoom to capture the guy.

In the afternoon we proceeded to King George Island to evacuate the injured passenger. Despite the detour to King George Island, the staff worked diligently to revise our itinerary and after dinner we proceeded to Deception Island. The island is shaped like a crescent/horeshoe since its creation sprang from its volcano (it's still active and erupted as recently as 1970). We cruised through a narrow opening called Neptune's Bellows into the middle of the crater/caldera known as Whaler's Bay which kept the waters quite calm. Formerly a whaling station, then hosting science bases and also British Base B, a military outpost during World War II to conduct Operation Tabarin which monitored enemy activity the in the souther seas. Ultimately, Half Moon Island was abandoned after a mudslide triggered by a 1969 volcanic eruption, but it's littered with abandoned buildings and decrepit machinery which seemed to give a very foreboding and ominous vibe as rain began to fall from dark clouds gathering around us. We proceeded with a short hike Neptune's Bellow and then a freezing dip in Whaler's Bay -- a tradition for visitors based on the fact that the shore produces geothermally heated waters, albeit a very, very thin layer of "heat", which seemed pretty much nonexistent.

Antarctica, Day 4: Cuverville Island, Neko Harbour, Course Correction

2011-02-16T15:41:00.000-08:00

The first excursion of the day brought us to Cuverville Island which houses one of the largest Gentoo penguin colonies in Antarctica. We started off with a 40-minute uphill hike to get a nice view of our surroundings after which we had the option to slide down the hill -- a bit like body-surfing on ice; needless to say, it saves you a lot of time to slide instead of hoofing it back down the hill.

Fellow passenger Hebe demonstrating textbook sliding technique:

On our return trip back to the ship we also spotted some lounging Crabeater seals -- and no, they don't eat crabs, "kreb" is the German word for krill which is what they really eat, and thus, their name.

Later that afternoon after lunch, we prepared for the moment we had all been waiting for: touching down on the Antarctic continent. Our destination would be Neko Harbour on the Antarctic peninsula. As we approached the peninsula, the amount of ice in the water increased noticeably over the previous days, making the reality of finally reaching Antarctica more tangible as we ventured even further south of 60 degrees (the previous day's excursion to Aitcho Islands located past the 62 degree latitude marker). Once we boarded the Zodiacs, anticipation grew more palatable; most of the passengers were noticeably quiet, taking in the view and savoring the experience before finally landing on the continent in a few short minutes. Once we landed, the next thing that happened was pretty obvious: cameras started snapping, videocams were set on REC and passengers exchanged taking each other's picture.

The experience was no less visual than it was audible -- 2,000 year-old ice cracked and moaned as a prelude to a potential calving (ice breaking off from a glacier and floating into the sea). The sound was constant though witnessing an actual calving was rare (a future excursion would allow us to see such an event more up-close, though).

A 360-degree video view of Neko Harbour:

Later, back aboard the MS Expedition, we found out a woman had fallen and injured her wrist during the Neko Harbour excursion and, while not life-threatening, the ship doctor determined it was best to evacuate her to the nearest hospital facilities. This required us to adjust our itinerary and head to King George Island (a 24-hour detour) which was the nearest airstrip available for a medical evacuation. Ultimately, we would have to adjust our plans and may have prevented us from making another excursion to the peninsula; the crew and staff worked diligently to modify the intinerary and identify other potential excursion in the Antarctic Circle. Considering the Aitcho Island landing was an unexpected early excursion afforded us by calm seas (which reduced our time through the Drake Passage) and agreeable weather, it became apparent the trip would become a series of compromises, both good and bad, due to factors beyond our control.

Antarctica, Days 1-3: Crossing the Drake Passage, Aitcho Island

2011-02-08T13:12:00.000-08:00

We boarded our ship, Gap Adventures' MS Expedition, in the afternoon and soon headed for the Drake Passage. I was pleasantly surprised by the level of service and the quality of the room and board that Gap Adventures had arranged for the trip. While cruises I've typically been on are usually the epitome of luxury and service, one doesn't normally expect such amenities on a trip to the Antarctic (especially for this backpack-and-bus traveler). The food and accommodations, while not the peak of luxury of say, a Princess Cruise, far exceeded my expectations -- even the bar was reasonable: almost all beer, wine and liquor were $5 USD or less and bottles of wine started at $18. Breakfast and lunch sittings were buffet-style and the dinners were a sit-down affair consisting of four courses.

Crossing the Drake and reaching our first destination would take about two days. Since the timing of our our landings and exact destinations were entirely dependent on weather conditions, we didn't know for sure when or what/where our first destination would be. Fortunately, the seas were calm and two days after leaving Ushuaia, we made our first landing on Aitcho Island on the afternoon of the third day.

Landings typically involve loading small groups into Zodiacs (from the MS Expedition's "Mud Room") which transport passengers directly to the land. The staff told us the Expedition is the only ship equipped with a Mud Room which makes storing, cleaning and drying the gear needed for each of the landings much easier. With heated floors and storage space for boots, jackets and gloves, waterproof pants, etc., the Mud Room was a welcome sight after each landing (especially after an Antarctic dip in frigid waters, more on that later).

While on Aitcho Island we were able to see Chinstrap and Gentoo penguins up close. No longer small chicks, the young penguins on Aitcho had reached an age where they can wander freely away from their parents and presented us with the best opportunity for up-close encounters as the youngsters were very inquisitive and had no fear of humans as terrestrial predators. The staff advised us to simply sit down or be still and the penguins would freely wander up to you. Sure enough, we were able to meet the penguins face-to-face, nibbling various zippers and loose articles of clothing or sidling up right next to your leg for a closer look. One thing about the penguin rookeries is the amount of guano (penguin poop) that litters the ground; thick, slick, stinky and everywhere -- this is where the Wellington boots would become invaluable for each landing. On another side of the island we were able to see some elephant seals as well.

Fellow passenger Simon gets up-close and personal with the chicks (photo courtesy of Paul Geary)

Travelin 2011 Edition: South of 60 - Argentina to Antarctica

2011-02-06T12:53:00.000-08:00

Things have been relatively silent here for a couple reasons. From February to December of 2010, I've been doing some consulting work with one of the major record labels and the nature of work I should not really elaborate upon. While unable to address the work specifically, it has prompted many ideas for posts in dealing with the globalization of the workforce, the challenges of enterprise-level music companies (as compared to their smaller, or start-up contemporaries) and the technological, project and process/procedural obstacles (and advantages) it has presented.

However, being extremely busy has curtailed activity here and the time I'd normally reserve to write about these topics. On the upside, the work itself has funded the next travel adventure (this particular adventure being the most financially ambitious, as you'll see) and its conclusion has finally presented the window of opportunity to take advantage of it. The goal this time is Antarctica to bag that oh so elusive seventh and final continent. Along the way, I'll be spending about two months traveling through Argentina as well. Some of the following posts were written retrospectively or day-of and uploaded later so the narrative may reflect an odd mix of past, present, and future-tense statements. This post, for example is being written in the middle of Antarctic waters even though it serves as a prologue which will need to be posted when I'm within range of the interwebs.

Rather than use a separate blog designed for the specific needs of travel bloggers as I have in the past, I'm going to attempt to put it all here so bear with me if past posts are constantly re-updated/re-formatted with new pix, maps, etc.

Lala.com Shuts Down May 31, 2010

2010-04-30T09:20:00.000-07:00

http://www.lala.com/shutdown

Well, that was fun while it lasted. Thanks Apple. First Yahoo and now Lala -- still needing an open music metadata collection system to hedge my bets against future shut-downs.

R.I.P. Vic Chesnutt. Make a Donation to the Family.

2009-12-26T21:05:00.000-08:00

Vic died yesterday (Christmas Day) at the age of 45. From RollingStone.com:

Vic Chesnutt, the Georgia-based singer-songwriter known for his darkly comic songs, died yesterday in Athens, Georgia, after spending several days in a coma caused by an overdose of muscle relaxers.

Click here to read the rest of the story.

Read Kristen Hersh's tribute and make a donation to the family here.

Listen to an audio interview by Terry Gross of NPR's "Fresh Air", recorded earlier this month. If you had any doubt about the state of health care in the U.S., listen to Vic's experience of being not only a quadriplegic, but a musician with limited access to health care coverage.

Michale Stipe remembers Vic.

Visit/Donate/Learn more about musician assistance programs:

Testdrive: Free All Music Ad-Supported Downloads

2009-12-21T16:08:00.000-08:00

I got beta preview invite for the new Free All Music web site which lets users download a free MP3 after watching a short video ad (think of the 15-30 second spots you watch while on Hulu). The site's homepage touts that I'm only one of 250 people testing the service before it goes full-beta next week (really? wow, don't I fee special!).

Here's a few screenshots of the entire process:
Step 1: Choose a song. I opt for "Daniel" by Bat for Lashes...

Step 2: Choose which sponsor's video spot to watch.

Step 3: The video spot plays.

Step 4: Following the video, you advance to a download page.

Step 5: Once you initiate the download process, you are presented with a sponsor-branded download page.

The downloaded MP3 is 320kbps/44.1khz and is powered by Neurotic Media, which powers many consumer-facing download stores.

Overall, a pretty painless process for a free song. While the selection is a bit thin, we'll see if they can expand on the catalog over the next few months. As for a financially viable model involving user data collection and branding impressions, I'm curious to see how the math and rev-splits work.

Touring Bands: Use Your Cell Phone to Accept Credit Cards for Merch

2009-12-03T21:12:00.000-08:00

TechCrunch had a interesting piece on a new product/service called Square that lets anyone with a mobile phone accept credit card payments with a simple attachment. For bands on the road selling merch, this is the perfect solution for the non-cash carrying plastic crowd.

Read the post here and watch the video demo below:

Crafting Your Band's Online Presence and Strategy

2009-09-21T16:06:00.000-07:00

I came across an amusing post on Andrew Dubber's blog "New Music Strategies" that details his and Ben Walker's renegade tactics to create an online presence for a band they had just seen live who had NO web presence whatsoever (so, first lesson: make sure you have something online before you play your first gig). In a few small steps (none of which are technically difficult and easily accomplished by the average web/Internet user), they had purchased a domain, set up Posterous as the site's main blogging/content manager, uploaded a few videos to YouTube, pulled in some Flickr pix and even created a t-shirt.

So that was easy --- and they hadn't even started to create and incorporate a Twitter account or create profiles on the usual suspects like MySpace, Facebook, ReverbNation. In the past, you may have felt this was simply over your head or too technically complicated for your skillset, but I urge you to take another look. Over the years (even the in past 1-2 years), the technical barrier for the average user to set up a domain/website with simple tools to manage it has dropped dramatically.

By now, most bands already know how to set up their profiles on social networks so I won't go into great detail, but simply setting up your profile is only the beginning. If you're not reaching out to fans and engaging them on a regular basis, you're not maximizing the tools and the access these sites provide to build your fanbase. Techdirt has a great summary of a study in Australia conducted with 99 indie artists describing the importance of engaging your fans on social networks (read the full PDF report here), with the following key points:

The highest proportional returns to artists corresponded with the use of multiple inter-linked sites, including a dedicated website or blog as well the use of mailing lists and the provision of free content. Of the artists studied, few had developed this type of integrated or strategic web presence and many of the artists studied could be making more effective use of the tools available to them.
When viewed in isolation, the use of popular web services such as Myspace, Facebook and YouTube to promote an artists music did not correspond to a dramatic increase in artist earnings. In fact, as a whole, users of Myspace or Triple J's popular Unearthed website actually received proportionally lower returns than the median. However higher levels of fan or audience engagement -- for example in the form of Blog coverage, YouTube views, Facebook fans or Myspace friends -- tended to correspond to proportionally higher artist earnings inclusive of services whose users tended receive lower returns overall.
Finally, the level to which higher earnings corresponded to online activity appears relative to artists off-line profile. That is, artists who perform and tour regularly, receive radio airplay and off-line press and media coverage tend to receive significantly higher returns and appear more likely to benefit from online promotional activities.

In other words, this isn't some kind of Field of Dreams If-You-Build-It-They-Will-Come approach.

For some ideas ideas on how to engage your fans, check out:

7 Ways to Connect with Your Fans (GrindEFX)
Best Practices In Online Promotion of New Music Offerings (another great summary on Techdirt)

And, if you're on MySpace, a few suggestions on setting up your page here.

Also, if you're tired of trying to keep track of, and updating, all your different band profiles' blog posts, tour dates and calendars, check out Artist Data.

The Artist as Start-Up: DIY Bootstrapping Remixed & Mashed-Up

2009-07-28T16:36:00.000-07:00

The term "artist as start-up" has been bandied about recently spawned by the coverage of Polyphonic, a new label founded by Brian Message (Radiohead manager), Terry McBride (Nettwerk), and Adam Driscoll (MAMA Group) that intends to operate on a venture capitalist model. Brad Stone's piece in the NY Times summarizes the model in this way:

Under the Polyphonic model, bands that receive investments from the firm will operate like start-up companies, recording their own music and choosing outside contractors to handle their publicity, merchandise and touring.
Instead of receiving an advance and then possibly reaping royalties later if they have a hit, musicians will share in all the profits from their music and touring. In another departure from tradition in the music business, they will also maintain ownership of their own copyrights and master recordings — meaning they and their heirs can keep earning money from their music.

While all agree the model is innovative, others are more skeptical about its viability -- indeed, David Pakman, former eMusic CEO and now partner at VC firm Venrock, has an excellent post that crunches the numbers like any good venture capitalist would to measure the potential upside and downside of prospective investments.

However, the intensity of the focus on the Polyphonic model as it relates to artists as a start-up venture ignores the other model most start-up companies adopt, not so much out choice, but necessity: bootstrapping. Actually, when you think about, it seems that artists actually pioneered the concept and called it DIY long before tech companies ever yanked their first bootstrap.

Coming full circle, there are a few lessons that artists operating as a start-up of the boostrapping variety can learn from the techies:

Your innovations and intellectual property are your lifeblood: artists are empowered more than ever to be shrewd and maintain control over their copyrights and licensing
Experiment and challenge your revenue models: seek revenue models not based on the traditional recorded music industry
Outmaneuver the big fish: technology has made it possible for the artist to perform many tasks that once required huge man-power (music distribution, marketing), expertise (recording music, building a web presence), or time (building fan relationships, manufacturing product)

There's probably more, but these three stand out most to me.

For more on Polyphonic:

Main-Streaming the Future of Music Consumption

2009-07-27T18:22:00.000-07:00

Last week, the blogosphere was all abuzz over a recent study in the UK that indicated streaming music was supplanting downloading music (legal or otherwise) as the preferred method to consume music. The New York Times follows up its own article last week with another one yesterday which nicely encapsulates various opinions around the net.

The proliferation of on-demand streaming services (ad-sponsored for a "feels like free" experience, or subscription-based) has mainly put this option of music consumption in the forefront. As I mentioned before, the appeal of streaming over downloading is that streaming offers access to music faster and simpler than downloading, and eventually, even confronting this choice will fade into a non-issue as Internet access becomes ubiquitous with respect to location and device. When you have to compete with free (i.e. illegal downloading/P2P), you have you to look at value propositions other than price -- namely, access, breadth of content, and ease of use.

For further reading:

Knitting Factory Hollywood To Close

2009-07-20T14:11:00.000-07:00

Digital Music News points to a story on the LA Times music blog Pop & Hiss about the impending closure of the Knitting Factory in Hollywood.

Eighteen Streaming Music Resources

2009-07-16T21:17:00.000-07:00

From ReadWriteWeb: Eighteen Streaming Music Resources

DISH Earth: I Was Lookin Back To See If You Were Lookin Back At Me To See Me Lookin Back At You*

2009-07-12T21:16:00.000-07:00

After two months in Mexico (get the full play-by-play in my experimental travel blog here), my DishNetwork DVR and I have been getting re-acquainted...about 90+ hours of re-acquaintance, powering through marathon viewing sessions of Lost, 24, and other televised detritus.

In my absence, I noticed DishNetwork had gone through some routine channel shuffling and minor additions, and stumbled upon a random channel titled "DISH Earth". Curious, I switched over and discovered it was a channel dedicated to a live feed view of the Earth as captured by a camera mounted on one of DISH Network's orbiting satellites.

Normally, I wouldn't be entranced at such a piece of self-promotion, but the real-time nature of the footage made it immensely fascinating to watch -- despite being accompanied by a random assortment of inoffensive AC pop hits. Probably as close I'll get to feeling like an astronaut in space for, say, oh at least another 15 years or so. Supply your own bong for enhanced viewing options, kids.

*Title cribbed from Massive Attack's song "Safe From Harm" (click to listen) off their stellar album Blue Lines.

The Devil Is in the Digits: Evidence That Iran's Election Was Rigged - washingtonpost.com

2009-06-26T21:22:00.000-07:00

The Devil Is in the Digits: Evidence That Iran's Election Was Rigged - washingtonpost.com

Do the Swine Flu Freak-out: a Little Perspective, Please

2009-04-29T12:19:00.000-07:00

While I wasn't planning on making any posts while traveling, this swine flu freak-out has forced me out of hiatus -- if just for a few minutes while I sit on the beach in Zipolite, clinging to two bars of wifi signal strength...and a margarita.

While I am taking reasonable precautions, I haven't had much reason to cancel my trip or resort to a self-imposed exile -- however, if I did, I couldn't find a better place to do it:

Although I am getting bummed out that the remaining Mayan ruins I want to hit up may be closed (Palenque, Calakmul, Chichen Itza, etc.), leaving the score at, Beaches: 2, Mayan ruins: 1 and sinking like a stone...at least I made it to Teotihuacan.
...and I'm not really looking forward to any overnight bus rides amongst passengers coming from who-knows-where.

So, yes, there are palpable fears everywhere, but that's all it is for now, at least, a few hundred miles away from Mexico City. In times like these, it's hard to gain perspective from your normal information sources: the media operates on a culture and economy of fear -- the more freaked out you are, the more you'll buy their newspapers or magazines, or spend time surfing their site and happily increasing their ad-views. And the government and government agencies, with their cover-your-ass mentality, would prefer to over-inflate warnings for the greater good and at least leverage the fear to their advantage and limit the rate of infection.

So, to at least temper the alarmist information environment we're in, take a read of the following, two of which refer to Dan Ariely which is a personal favorite author of the book "Predictably Irrational" and one from David Whelan at Forbes.com:

Travelin: Mexico 2009 Edition

2009-04-25T09:42:00.000-07:00

A little R&R is on the books for April and May -- Mexico for two months of sun, beaches and Mayan ruins. Updates from the travel trail here:

I Need a Personal Music Library/Collection Format That's Portable and Open

2009-01-19T18:43:00.001-08:00

If I asked you, "Show me your music collection/library?", what would you show me?

Back in the day, chances are you pointed over to your physical collection of CD's, vinyl, cassettes, 8-tracks and other assorted music formats. A few years ago, you might also have started to point to your computer's hard drive and/or iPod, but now, well, your music collection is a bit more scattered among even more devices and services -- multiple computers, MP3 players, songs you downloaded into your cell phone, and maybe even your collection of music on a subscription service like Rhapsody.

Truth is, I've become a bit dissatisfied with how limited I am in how to organize and collect my personal music library/collection compared to the numerous ways in which I'm consuming music -- not to mention all the ways I'm discovering/finding/sampling new music. The notion that one must first "acquire" a song, then place it in a repository before it becomes part of a personal music library is quickly becoming antiquated to me. The mere act of downloading a song just to get it into your music repository and make it part of your library for easy access and listening starts to seem a bit tedious. I mean, I spend a fair amount of time finding new artists and sampling new albums from my favorite artists on Last.fm, Pandora, and Lala, but it's so much more difficult to include these finds in my music "collection" since they are segregated from my library of song files being managed by whatever is my music manager of choice (iTunes, Windows Media, SongBird, Winamp, etc.). Despite the industry and government's attempt to distinguish royalty rates between streaming (Internet radio and on-demand), downloading and all gradations in between, the general public continues on, consuming music in its various forms with little worry about which is which. Indeed, as I've mentioned before, as the world becomes more networked, near ubiquitous access to music anytime, anywhere and soon, anyhow, the delivery/storage method of consumption increasingly becomes irrelevant to the consumer.

Then there was the Yahoo! Music fiasco. For a year or two, I signed up for the Yahoo Music Unlimited service at a favorable introductory rate which was similar to Rhapsody's subscription and tethered download service. During that time, I amassed a hefty collection songs I "added" to my collection which basically meant I tagged/bookmarked them into my collection. Eventually Yahoo discontinued their service and opted to transfer subscribers over to Rhapsody. By then, the free alternatives like Last.fm's and Deezer's on-demand streaming offerings were maturing at a rate where I didn't really feel like getting on the Rhapsody bandwagon. Perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of the whole experience was that this collection of music I had assembled simply disappeared and I was left with no record of what I had bookmarked and had to leave it up to my memory to recall all that music and search for it elsewhere. In my mind, even though I didn't buy or download any of those tracks, they still rightfully belonged in my library of cherished music. For all the anticipation of Nokia's "Comes With Music" program and the ability to keep a few of the songs I download after the life cycle of the service, if I chose to end it, I'm still sufficiently stung by the Yahoo experience to ever allow another company to exert such control over the size and shape of my collection -- and how easily it can be lost.

In an ideal world, your personal music collection and the way in which you find/collect (note collect can mean many things: download, find a stream, etc.) music should be:

consumption-independent: including a song in your collection shouldn't be restricted by whether you consume it as a downloaded music file (nor its file format) or a stream
platform-independent: including a song in your collection shouldn't be restricted by the platform you found it on, whether it's Rhapsody, Last.fm, imeem or Pandora
repository-independent: including a song in your collection shouldn't be restricted by which repository the song is located (be it in the cloud, on your hard drive, or any other device)

In the most abstract of terms, the only litmus test for a song to be included in your music collection is that you deem the song worthy to be in your collection. Any notion of whether that song can or can't be included in your collection -- because it is an improper format, exists only as stream, or is located somewhere on the web -- is inconsequential.

By decoupling the notion of a personal music library from these three requirements, the personal music library becomes a completely metadata-driven representation. Of course, this concept is hardly new or earth-shattering. In fact, the XSPF playlist format demonstrates the concept quite well. On the scale of an entire personal music collection, the iTunes Music Library XML file comes even closer, but is restrictive about what song formats can be included. Again, varying file formats and music media managers' favoritism for differing file formats (and the exclusion of pure metadata sources of collecting music) derail the ability to unify songs into a single personal library.

What's also missing is a layer that can represent the various ways each song in a library can be consumed. For every song represented in a metadata-driven music collection, it can be consumed in multiple ways. Allowing a personal music collection to include as many consumption nodes for any given song allows the user to see and adapt their consumption based on multiple scenarios. As the user adds more consumption nodes (buying a download file, adding a subscription service, visiting new on-demand streaming sites), the way in which they can consume the song expands as well.

Think of a data portability concept like OpenID, Facebook Connect, OpenSocial that can be applied to your music collection where your songs are the friends/contacts in your networks and the additional social data available on each of your social network profiles provides additional data to access a song from that node.

Once it encompasses "everything", the different sources you go to consume the music becomes just another "node" which can be added or replaced with other sources. Having a music library format that embraces the various nodes or sources to consume the music (re: the where you "get" the song from and how it's being made available to you whether it's on your hard drive, located on remote server, as a stream) frees the song's requirement to be accessible from one source. Thus, the various sources expands the breadth of your collection's accessibility without limiting what music can be appended into the personal collection.

To at certain extent, you might envision your personal music collection as in the cloud, subservient to no device, service, website or file format -- but ingesting and updating music from these nodes nonetheless. In an interview with HP's Russ Daniels on Ars Technica, Daniels offers his vision of the cloud in sync'ing and saving data and although his analogy involves a user's contact list, the model would be quite similar to managing your personal collection of music:

"One of my favorite examples is, I have a car that has an entertainment system that supports Bluetooth so I can use it as a hands-free headset. But to be able to do voice dialing, I have to load the contact list from my phone into the car. Which means that the car and the phone both have to implement a complex Bluetooth protocol correctly, and they don't. It's very difficult to get those kinds of point-to-point complex protocols debugged in the context of the large number of devices that might need to interact.

But the whole idea is flawed because my phone's not authoritative for my contact information. The phone has a local cache of information that it gets from Outlook. But Outlook's not authoritative for my contact information, neither is Gmail, neither is my Vonage, neither is Grand Central, neither is the six or eight other things that I have in my life that think they are.

What none of them do is the simple thing of, "tell me the URL for your contact service." Additionally, it has to be a service, not a repository, because in fact the contact information that's relevant for me includes the global address list for HP, and I have to be able to have that invoked... I can't replicate that data and keep it synchronized, so I need to be able to use a federation model behind this single endpoint to answer those kinds of queries.

If you get that piece right, then if an application or device wants to cache that information locally for offline access, that's great. If one of them wants to proxy for another one, that's great, because those are all based on standard protocols and implementations—we do know how to do well.

So when I think about the authoritative data source, it should be in the cloud. And it's a service, not a repository, so I can deal with the complexities of the real world where there are many potential data sources. However, I have to get every piece of software that's involved to do the right thing—to delegate responsibility—rather than acting like they're independent owners and whatever they have in their local state is good enough."

This is a powerful model and concept for music -- and one I'd love to see implemented in an open and portable architecture to counter the services any companies may develop and turn into a walled garden (while I like Gracenote and Omnifone joint-venture to save/sync music into your home and car, I'm curious to see how proprietary it will be).

Casting a Wider Net: Capturing Intent and Affinity into the Collection
To extend this even further to define what music belongs in one's collection, why wouldn't any song I voted up, favorited, or rated up during my experience on Pandora, last.fm or anywhere else also rightfully be included in my collection?

If you liked a recommended song from Pandora, you would do something similar -- you might even bookmark the song or give it a thumbs up. On Last.fm you might "favorite" an artist or "heart/love" a song, or add it to your personal playlist on MySpace. The subtle piece here is that, before you even buy a song to add to your collection, you've already performed actions that demonstrate your affinity for a song and your intention to add it your collection -- once you buy it, download it for free, etc. This affinity/intent vastly expands what one normally thinks of as a music collection -- previously, your music collection was a repository of sorts, now, your music collection is more synonymous with a collection of "all your favorite songs", regardless of whether you "own" it, or "subscribe" to it, or "added" it to a favorites list -- if you like the song, it should be part of your collection; the act of downloading or buying is really today's intermediate step to get it into your collection. Once you've demonstrated your affinity for a song, the only other crucial question is how do you want to consume it. As an MP3 file you can store it on a device that's available anytime? As a stream whenever you're connected to the web? How you want to consume a song is really secondary to the expression of your affinity to the song, or your explicit (or implicit) intent to have it included in your personal music collection.

Innovating On an Open, Portable Personal Music Collection Format
With an open and portable format, applications and services can innovate new and useful services for users on a level of personalization that would otherwise be less efficient. A great example are services currently leveraging your iTunes XML Music Library file as an efficient method to know your musical preferences. Prior to that, the other options were:

asking you to input/search for your favorite artists one-by-one
monitoring your listening habits
upload your entire music collection into the cloud

Services that can access the iTunes Music Library XML file can accomplish the same processes on a purely metadata level, for example:

Lala can mirror your iTunes Library and put it in the cloud and give you access to your entire collection as streams over the web
SonicLiving can provide you alerts, notifications and personalized calendars of when your favorite artists come to town

Both these examples provide great views into the future of music consumption (live music and recorded music), but also points to the deficiency of not being open (it only works with iTunes) nor portable (the repository concept still limits it breadth and interactivity with secondary services).

Lawrence Lessig on NPR's "Fresh Air"

2008-12-25T00:02:00.000-08:00

A nice interview with Lawrence Lessig by Terri Gross on one of my favorite NPR shows "Fresh Air": "Lawrence Lessig's 'Remix' For The Hybrid Economy"

Have You Seen This WebApp? I Need a Streaming Podcast Player

2008-12-03T20:59:00.000-08:00

Part of me is hoping this will be a "duh, it exists already, you moron" type of no-brainer moment and another part of me is hoping that it might be a "me too" moment to prove that my podcast-listening habits are not an anomaly among other podcast listeners out there.

I spend a fair amount of time in front of my computer during the day and I've often debated between listening to music vs podcasts during my workday and most of the time, I opt for music because the flexibility with which I have to consume it far outweighs the amount of baggage that comes with listening to podcasts.

Consider this: with music, I can choose a continuous song-after-song experience via my personal music collection on my hard-drive, or, I can jump on a site like Last.fm, FineTune, Pandora, Lala, or Deezer and have the music streamed to me. Minimal effort for a continuous listening experience.

However, listening to a continuous string of podcasts forces me to queue up multiple podcasts ahead of time, and, for a modicum of control, I pretty much have to download the files first. I've already mentioned my point of view that as Internet access becomes more ubiquitous, the notion of "downloading" music will give way to instant access anytime that is more fitting to a streaming model (see also this post on Ars Technica).

So, I can't quite figure out why it's so hard to automatically queue up a string of podcasts to listen to without first being required to download each of the files first. Instead of the download-then-listen scenario of the iTunes player, or, a stream-one-at-a-time scenario of a feed reader like Google Reader, I really need something that combines the aggregate-and-stream experience of HypeMachine with the curation controls of a feed reader (i.e. mark as read, view unread items, star/tag items, view podcast description/summary). For podcasts that are issued daily (hello, any NPR fans out there?), a chronological view or calendar grid view showing what I have left to listen to or easily see on what day it appeared would be awesome. And of course, widget-izing it for placement on a personal start page would be sweet.

Here's what I have in mind:

Easily add the URL of a podcast RSS, xspf playlist or mp3 into a queue for streaming playback w/o the need to first download the content.
Allow for seamless playback of content w/o manually clicking Play for each item.
View content by date posted/loaded/updated or by feed/item.
Easily mark an item as played/listened.
Insert a bookmark at where a stream was paused or discontinued to resume playback at that location at a later time.
Playback view can be accessed via webpage or insert a widget onto a personal start page (w/a popout option?)

And here's a rough wireframe brain-dump:

Now before you get all in my face about the lack detail and specifics, keep in mind this is more of a back-of-the-napkin rendition of the concept...just be thankful I made the effort to transfer it from the napkin to Visio before I posted this, okay?

Like I said, there may already be a webapp out there (if so, pleeease, let me know!) or media player (I have to admit, I'm not into installer a new player every other day so my installed players are pretty plain-vanilla) that's more podcast-friendly than what I've found, but I can sure use some suggestions before I try and build something from scratch.

Seth Godin's "Tribes"

2008-11-18T12:56:00.000-08:00

Seth Godin has a new book out called "Tribes" which discusses how to lead and create passionate followers. It's a good read and there's been a lot of discussion recently about creating a passionate following for products, services and music, but Seth also talks about how to lead, which is often less discussed -- I mean, if you've got a product or idea that you want to create a passionate community around, who exactly is going to lead the charge, if not you?

Audible is currently offering "Tribes" as a free audiobook if you register. And also, a few other related items:

In support of Seth's book, he's a doing a "virtual" booktour via Author Teleseminars. I discovered Author Teleseminars a while back in which each stop on the booktour starts out as a conference call with the author and a panel of like-minded authors or thought-leaders. Afterwards, the call is offered as a free streaming or mp3 podcast. There's four installments to Seth's booktour:

I highly recommend you check out the site and see what other upcoming talks are scheduled (right now there's a great ongoing booktour for Guy Kawasaki's new book "Reality Check").

Finally, Hypebot has been running a series of posts on tribes and "primal branding":

The Most Watched TV Shows Are Not The Most Talked About Online

2008-10-28T22:45:00.000-07:00

From TechCrunch The Most Watched TV Shows Are Not The Most Talked About Online

"If you were a brand marketer, would this matter to you? Would you shift your ad budget to shows that capture more attention after the fact online, or keep it with the tried true on TV proper?"

Interesting study that also got me thinking whether there is an analog to this behavior (and the subsequent question posed) in the music space....

...And the Beat Goes On. MTV Music and Shockhound Emerge

2008-10-28T16:20:00.000-07:00

This week reveals the official launch of MTV Music, and Hot Topic's Shockhound comes out of beta.

MTV Music has a clean design with most of the usual suspects out of the "social network" toolbox: comments, user ratings, and quite surprisingly, the ability to embed full-length videos offsite:

Dire Straits |MTV Music

While it seems the content on the site at launch focuses more on a catalog of videos from the past rather than the present, I don't expect this to be the case for very long. Given MTV's clout and industry relationships, playing catch-up with all the other video sites out there for current videos shouldn't be a problem.

Meanwhile, Shockhound is looking to erect a social network on top of Hot Topic's formidable collection of music, merchandise and original programming. The social tools are a bit light and not too in-depth just yet (member profiles, friending, commenting/reviewing and a rudimentary Facebook-like activity stream which is the social utility flavor-of-the-month). The activity stream offers no personal control, making public every user's navigation path across the site from artist pages to music/album pages to member pages etc. (no really, it's just a coincidence every member profile I've visited has a pic of a sexy girl and I was just researching Tom Jones' page for mom's birthday present).

The original programming is well-produced and compelling, which is largely due to Hot Topic's intimate knowledge of their audience's tastes and lifestyle, yet has not been integrated deeply into the artist pages (see Darker My Love's great live set at Hot Topic HQ, yet no mention on the artist page itself). And said pages have yet to provide artists with any top-of-line tools to encourage artist-fan interactions. Normally, this isn't a necessity in the music consumption ecosystem, but with such a large effort invested in gathering original programming, it's a shame not to leverage it in a way that convinces artists to make Shockhound part of their virtual PR toolkit and, by transference, encourage fans to recognize Shockhound as a brand that can bridge that interaction better than anywhere else.

Based on subsequent feature roll-outs, we'll see if Shockhound can engender a true community based on its content and social utilities or just ends up being window-dressing for a successful ecommerce destination (nothing wrong with that, though).

Both MTV Music and Shockhound are backed big players with deep pockets which have allowed them to invest heavily in pre-launch preparations, in particular, gathering/licensing and creating a large body of content prior to launch. This is the most significant task that most start-ups and DIY web apps can't compete against. So where true UX innovation may be lacking, the trade-off is the volume of content that a first-time user will find impressive and fulfilling.

As we've seen already, social network tools alone does not a social network make...it's only when the utilities enable users to engage and share content beyond the confines of the destination (and transfers to other destinations/networks). Niche-specific destinations face another dual-edged proposition: can you infiltrate your visitor's daily life in a way that makes you ("you" as in your website, or your content or your tools -- it's no longer about the pageview anymore) indispensable, or will users just stick with the networks that most broadly encompass their daily social interactions. It would behoove niche-specific destinations who aspire to reap social network effects to go "open" with API's and methods to integrate amongst other destinations of a user's social graph -- to distribute the stickiness as oppposed to having them stick to you.

Regrets, I Have a Few...

2008-10-02T22:20:00.000-07:00

Sometimes no matter how many shows you go see, you can never see all of them. Even if I end up out at shows 5-6 nights a week and see 10-20 bands in that timeframe, some still fall through the cracks; from those, there are a few that become true heartbreakers in hindsight. So I find some solace in the fact that even the pros have a few setbacks...which is why I found this segment on WNYC's Soundcheck so enjoyable.

"Music fans and critics alike often prematurely dismiss or miss out on important acts because of immaturity or circumstance. Today we talk with LA Times pop music critic Ann Powers about why she missed the boat on artists ranging from David Bowie to Jeff Buckley to the White Stripes. And we take your calls."

As Home Simpson would say, "It's funny, because it's truuueee!"

Listen to the segment

Does ideology trump facts? Studies say it often does

2008-09-26T14:42:00.000-07:00

From Ars Technica:

Does ideology trump facts? Studies say it often does:

"We like to think that people will be well informed before making important decisions, such as who to vote for, but the truth is that's not always the case. Being uninformed is one thing, but having a population that's actively misinformed presents problems when it comes to participating in the national debate, or the democratic process. If the findings of some political scientists are right, attempting to correct misinformation might do nothing more than reinforce the false belief.

This sort of misinformation isn't hypothetical; in 2003 a study found that viewers of Fox News were significantly more misinformed about the Iraq war, with far greater percentages of viewers erroneously believing that Iraq possessed WMDs or that there was a credible link between the 9/11 attack and Saddam Hussein than those who got their news from other outlets like NPR and PBS. This has led to the rise of websites like FactCheck and SourceWatch."

Read on at Ars...

Pandora Ready to Kick the Bucket or Unwilling to Set Internet Radio Advertising Precedent?

2008-09-23T21:57:00.000-07:00

So, some chatter today about new royalty agreements that may set the stage for revised SoundExchange rates for Internet Radio -- the agreement only applies to "streaming services, including subscription and ad-supported music (think Last.fm and SpiralFrog)" and not Internet Radio per se. Still, this may bode well for Internet radio giant Pandora and other of its ilk. But ever since Pandora stressed its likelihood of shutting down if the rates aren't reduced (see this and this), I've wondered where the balance is between acceptable rates for Internet radio and ad revenue rates for new advertising mechanisms.

While others more mathematically savvy than I have pegged a reasonable ad-support music rate at $1 CPM for on-demand music services (and noting Internet radio, relatively speaking, is less of a black hole than on-demand), few Internet radio services have progressed from graphic-based advertising to audio advertising, including Pandora. Wired's Listening Post blog recently pointed to punk rock webcaster PunkRadioCast providing a vehicle to insert audio ads between songs and provide advertisers with better-than-terrestrial radio reporting/stats. I'm sure there's a value-add here for advertisers to pay for premium advertising, but I'm not sure what that amount would be.

Back when Pandora was in early beta and called themselves Savage Beast, I was on a call with them and a client where they talked about a subscription model that would entitle listeners to advertising-free radio, which, I thought, meant graphic-free advertising (which was in the beta product) and audio-free advertising which they had yet to roll out. Over time, the revenue model required some course-correction since not enough folks paid the subscription fee and yet the audio ads never materialized, but I wasn't sure if that was because no advertisers were interested in audio ads either. Since, audio ads never materialized, it was unknown what effect it would have on subscription rates, but I'm willing to bet not much. Were there no funds to build-out the infrastructure for audio-ads since the subscription model was a dud? Was it scrapped when no advertisers showed interest? Was it technically unfeasible (obviously, it wasn't for PunkRadioCast)? Would the user experience be so horrendous it was better left in the closet?

Fast forward to today, where huge rates still threaten Internet radio's livelihood, but the one radio webcaster that has enough clout and resources to create a new advertising stream still has not implemented audio ads -- something that SoundExchange calls into question. Rather than make an effort to implement audio ads and test the market for increased, premium advertising it seems Pandora would rather threaten to close its doors. Really?

Or, is it a bluffing tactic to bring more attention to the unfair royalty rates being imposed on Internet radio? Don't get me wrong: I'm not a Pandora-hater and wholeheartedly agree the rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board are totally unrealistic. But if audio ads can bring Pandora out of the red, it would prove the royalty rates are reasonable and would also prove disastrous for all the other radio webcasters who couldn't meet these rates. That would be a dangerous precedent indeed.

If anyone has numbers to move the needle in either direction, please share and I'll post them up.

L.A. Music Publisher's Suit Against Lil Wayne Threatens to Rewrite Rules on Mixtapes - Music

2008-09-06T17:26:00.000-07:00

From the LA Weekly: "L.A. Music Publisher's Suit Against Lil Wayne Threatens to Rewrite Rules on Mixtapes"

"'This is the first case where a song that hasn't been sold is the subject in a copyright-law case — and that's very rare,' says Jack Lerner, a professor of intellectual-property, Internet- and technology-related law at USC's Gould School of Law. 'The big question is, how far can copyright holders go to stifle or silence someone who sampled a song and isn't selling it, even if they are using it in performances?'"

How the 'Net works: an introduction to peering and transit

2008-09-03T14:04:00.000-07:00

Ars Technica - "How the 'Net works: an introduction to peering and transit"

"In 2005, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre famously told BusinessWeek, "What they [Google, Vonage, and others] would like to do is to use my pipes free. But I ain't going to let them do that…Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?"
The story of how the Internet is structured economically is not so much a story about net neutrality, but rather it's a story about how ISPs actually do use AT&T's pipes for free, and about why AT&T actually wants them to do so. These inter-ISP sharing arrangements are known as "peering" or "transit," and they are the two mechanisms that underlie the interconnection of networks that form the Internet. In this article, I'll to take a look at the economics of peering of transit in order to give you a better sense of how traffic flows from point A to point B on the Internet, and how it does so mostly without problems, despite the fact that the Internet is a patchwork quilt of networks run by companies, schools, and governments."

Read on or download the PDF here.

Does Bundling an Album's MP3's and CD Together Make a Convincing Proposition?

2008-08-17T16:50:00.000-07:00

Hypebot brought up an interesting point about whether combining CD's and MP3's into the purchase price of an album could encourage customers to buy music:

"Why not price albums as follows?
1. Download album $7.99
2. Physical album $14.99
3. Download and physical album $14.99
Since the additional cost of allowing people to download the album is minimal (the cost of the bandwidth) then by using the physical album as a decoy, retailers may push more people towards buying the physical album since they perceive the download as ‘Free’. despite the fact they can naturally rip the album as soon as they receive it."

The observation was inspired by the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely which looks into how the psychology of consumers' minds can lead to irrational purchasing decisions and behaviors.

This was exactly the scenario I encountered a few weeks ago when I was trying to choose between a download or physical CD for the Duke Spirit's new album Neptune: Go for the immediacy/instant gratification of the download or get the CD and rip it myself. (As a music fan/collector I still have certain affinities for physical product).

But then I came across a Lala.com promo Flash widget on the Duke Spirit's MySpace page that allowed users to purchase the download AND CD as a bundle.

This was the price breakdown between my choices:

CD only (on Amazon): $12.99
MP3 only (on AmazonMP3): $8.99
CD + MP3: $9.99

I chose the third option. In the decision-making process, I basically considered that for $1 more than just a download, I got the CD w/my MP3's which could be perceived as a premium bonus -- or alternately, that I was more than willing to pay an extra buck for the bundle and avoid going through the trouble of ripping the CD myself. In either case, the extra $1 price point was convincing.

TechCrunch: Perhaps Pandora Must Be Our Sacrificial Lamb

2008-08-17T16:12:00.000-07:00

TechCrunch: Perhaps Pandora Must Be Our Sacrificial Lamb:

"Pandora made a bold political statement today, saying they’d likely shut down rather than continue to pay exorbitant fees to play music to listeners of its massively popular service.
Radio stations pay different rates depending on how they broadcast music. Terrestrial stations (normal FM/AM stations) pay nothing, a tribute to their powerful corporate parents with limitless lobbying budgets. Satellite stations pay approximately 1.6 cents per hour per listener. By 2010, Pandora and other Internet radio stations, which have few lobbying resources, must pay 2.91 cents."

Supporting Indie Bands: Do You Wanna Be a Music Fan or a Music Mogul?

2008-08-16T02:04:00.000-07:00

Wired recently profiled Sellaband and highlighted a few successes of the bands on its site:

"In the two years since the site launched, Sellaband has financed 23 albums, with two more bands soon to reach $50,000 -- the point at which Sellaband helps them find a producer to record their album. So far, ten albums have been completed and are available for purchase, and approximately 30,000 "believers" have invested over $2 million in Sellaband artists."

In this day and age where virtually anyone can record an album of songs with a laptop, do you really need to collect $50,000 in $10 increments from fans before you start recording? (At least $30,000 is used to fund the recording/producer costs, the rest for printing and sending the CD) It would be nice if part of the money could help line the pockets of the artists so that they can focus on writing/recording full-time for the duration, but I'm sure that would be too irresistible for a few artists to swindle some unsuspecting investors/fans.

It got me thinking whether this is an effective value proposition to the music fan: would you prefer to invest a minimum of $10 for a future product (your investment will be refunded if the album never gets made), or, pay a fixed-cost that gives you immediate access to some product plus new songs throughout the year?

In one situation fans are asked to front the money before any new product is created for the fans to consume, whereas in the other, the artist jump-starts the relationship by first self-funding a few songs in order to create buy-in from prospective consumers/fans.

As examples of the latter, see a few of the bands that Topspin are servicing with their technology which allows users to contribute set dollar amounts to receive immediately-available product plus ongoing new material (Imaad Wassif, Jubilee, Dandy Warhols, Josh Rouse), or CASH Music (Kristin Hersh, Donita Sparks, Deerhoof).

Granted, these artists aren't first-timers like the majority found on Sellaband, but the proposition and payoff to the music fan is much more immediate and appealing to me.

What Sellaband does offer is a quantitative indicator (re: money raised) of a band's potential success in the marketplace which is a good proposition for A&R or prospective label. The bands that can accumulate $50,000 from such a die-hard fan base ("believers" as Sellaband refers to them) are certainly worthy of major-label consideration -- a sort of economic battle of the bands for industry folk to separate the wheat from the chaff.

As a part of music industry, I may feel motivated to invest in an undiscovered band in hopes of reaping future monetary returns, but as a music fan, I'd prefer to the cast the profits aside and just get the music.

States may tax iTunes, other digital downloads | The Iconoclast - politics, law, and technology - CNET News.com

2008-08-13T02:14:00.000-07:00

States may tax iTunes, other digital downloads | The Iconoclast - politics, law, and technology - CNET News.com:

"With retail e-commerce sales now estimated to exceed $130 billion a year, and iTunes song purchases topping 5 billion, state politicians and tax collectors have begun to levy new fees on digital downloads."

Know Your (Copy)Rights and Licenses

2008-08-11T18:41:00.000-07:00

This podcast from the 2008 SXSW Panel "The Trials and Tribulations of Using Music Online" is a good primer for musicians looking to get the basics on licensing and copyrights for online music usage. Also essential listening for any programmers and start-ups using online music as a core component/offering in their product.

See this previous post for more info and links, plus a handy chart from the Future of Music Coalition breaking down the basic copyright/licensing schemes.

Also see the entire 2008 SXSW Podcast Archive for more topics.

The Record Industry’s Digital Distribution Plan (TotalMusic) Comes Back From the Dead

2008-08-08T17:51:00.000-07:00

TechCrunch has an interesting post trying to decipher the major labels' next big move when it comes to banding together to assemble another digital distribution platform. A couple of interesting snippets...

Pricing is still problematic:

"Right now the going rate for streaming music is a penny per track, which comes to an effective CPM (cost per thousand) of $10. That means that music streaming Websites need to be able to charge more than $10 CPMs just to cover the music licensing. And $10 CPMs are not economical. A $1 CPM would make more sense [see the math behind this here].

As one music startup CEO says, “The only guys who have negotiated terms are guys who have gotten sued.” That is certainly true for imeem and MySpace. With others, the threat of a lawsuit might have been enough to bring them to the table. Although, interestingly, as part of its deal with Warner Music or some time after, imeem received a $15 million investment from Warner, it was revealed today in Warner’s quarterly SEC filing. (Warner also invested $20 million in Lala)."

This latter point is nothing new, but hardly seems to be a strategy with any more significant upside than a last-man-standing business plan.

Then again, whatever happened to that original plan for labels to set up a P2P "Licensing" fee?

Also, a reminder that you can always peek in to what I'm reading online on my Google Shared Items page or subscribe via RSS.

A Look at Lala.com's In-Page Music Player

2008-07-31T15:54:00.000-07:00

CD or MP3? The other day I pondered that exact question when debating which format I wanted to purchase the new sophomore album from The Duke Spirit, Neptune (amazing, by the way...highly recommended). That's when I came across their MySpace page with a Lala.com widget promotion offering both the CD and "iPod version" (actually 192kb MP3's) for $9.99, allowing me to skirt the question of whether I wanted to spring for Amazon's MP3 bundle ($8.99) or CD ($11.99).

I hadn't been back to Lala.com since its redesign, but when I stopped by to download the MP3's, I found myself taking their in-page music player for a test-drive and was immensely impressed with its implementation.

After working on a bunch of different music-based websites, in-page media player implementations have always bothered me for three main reasons:

Everytime you surf from one webpage to another, the player reloads and interrupts the music playback.
Sites that try to avoid #1 tend to use some sort of frame set-up which makes bookmarking and identifying unique URL's a no-go which is a big Fail when you want to make sharing, blogging and sending to friends as easy as possible.
Full-Flash websites....yech.

Various sites have attempted workarounds with pop-up windows, but those always seemed less than ideal. ReverbNation came the closest with their pop-up player which synchronized play controls between the pop-up window and the in-page version which followed you from webpage to webpage. The pop-up gave you uninterrupted playback and could reside underneath your main navigation/content window. If you decided to skip/queue/pause/etc from the in-page version, it sent the same command to the pop-up (and vice-versa), keeping things neat and synchronized.

However, Lala's solution was different and quite elegant. While their webpage implemented ~~frames~~ (correction, while there are iframes on the page, Lala uses div's to implement the player) to achieve continuous playback independent of webpage refreshes and AJAX for queuing/playlisting, site navigation and unique URLs weren't compromised in the process -- you could navigate the site and it would load a unique URL into the browser's address bar for easy cut/paste or bookmarking.

Looking closely at Lala's URLs as you navigate the site, you'll notice it basically uses anchor-based navigation to accomplish this, which is nothing new, per se, but quite effective for websites that are content-heavy or derive a high level of utility value in having users link back/bookmark their content. The need for ease-of-linking/bookmarking is a requirement less vital to web-application type sites like MP3tunes.com or browser extensions like FoxyTunes, but crucial for sites that heavily integrate media playback/queuing with copious amounts of data browsing/reading/navigation.

The other issue a colleague pointed out is getting search engines to recognize the anchored hierarchy as spider-able. A few searches on Google for content on lala.com revealed that omitting the anchor (#) brought you to the same page as those with anchored URLs that you encountered while navigating (i.e. http://www.lala.com/#artist/The_Duke_Spirit are redirected or rewritten to a fully formed URL http://www.lala.com/artist/The%20Duke%20Spirit) of the same page). Overall, Lala.com has come up with a great solution for a nagging user-experience shortcoming.

Resnikoff's Parting Shot: Why iLike & Rhapsody Don't Mix — Digital Music News

2008-07-23T17:06:00.000-07:00

Resnikoff's Parting Shot: Why iLike & Rhapsody Don't Mix — Digital Music News:

"Instead of predictable recording rate structures, companies interested in licensing on-demand content are saddled with massive upfront costs, and a variety of onerous demands. Major labels routinely impose that structure on startups and established companies alike, though a shrunken recording industry may eventually produce easier licensing terms and structures. And that could translate into greater freedom for startups, and more interesting experiences for music fans."

Last.fm Shares Ad Revenues with Artists, But There's Still a Large Equality Gap To Be Bridged

2008-07-11T17:25:00.000-07:00

A lot of discussion the past few days on Last.fm's roll-out of their artist royalty program which will share advertising revenues with artists. While definitely a good start, the initiative also shines a light on the current inequities left to be resolved.

Merlin, which respresents 12,000+ indie labels in an effort to collectively negotiate licensing deals with music service providers like Last.fm, discourages artist to enlist in the program until "past illegal use of repertoire" is addressed.

The past aside, Lucas Gonze posted a great piece breaking down the ad-revenue pie in June (which was re-edited and posted on Silicon Alley earlier this week) that shows just how far ad-revenues have yet to come to create a compensation model that's financially viable. Ars Technica summarizes:

"Briefly, labels want a penny a play, which sounds miniscule compared to the 70 cents they get from iTunes, but that number can still be tough for streaming sites to hit. To cover the cost, the site needs to earn back that penny on each page view, which means that its advertising CPM (cost per thousand impressions) rate needs to be $10. For every page. All the time.

Gonze argues that this needs to drop by a factor of 10, down to a $1 CPM. This means that labels make only a fraction of a penny per play, with the idea being that they make it up on volume. Otherwise, the big streaming sites might not be long for this world."

For further reading, see:

RED, Rhapsody and Digital Music — KCRW

2008-07-09T22:30:00.000-07:00

Celia Hirschman, who normally hosts On the Beat on KCRW, hosted Tuesday's Politics of Culture with guests Don Mackinnon who's heading up the (RED) music service and Tim Quirk, the VP of Music Programming and Content at Rhapsody (and lead singer of Too Much Joy).

"RED, Rhapsody and Digital Music," listen/download the podcast here.

It was an interesting discussion covering (RED)'s strategy on launching a music service to create "a new revenue stream for artists and labels and buy life-saving medicine for those living with AIDS in Africa", Rhapsody' DRM-free music rollout and the future of music consumption in general.

RED, Rhapsody and Digital Music — KCRW

For more coverage on (RED), see:

Fore more coverage on Rhapsody's MP3 store, see:

A Musician's Guide to Distributing Your Music Online

2008-06-25T17:47:00.000-07:00

Any musician looking to get a crash-course on how to distribute your music online should check out the multi-part series on TuneCore's blog, "TuneCorner". There's three parts so far:

What Every Musician Should Know About Digital Distribution

Suge Knight's Death Row Records Assets Auctioned Off to Global Music Group

2008-06-24T22:30:00.000-07:00

As reported by Bloomberg.com:

"In advance of today's auction of music assets of bankrupt rap music producer Marion ``Suge'' Knight and his record label Death Row Records, the trustees received a $24 million offer from Global Music Group that topped the previous high bid of $23 million from a subsidiary of Koch Entertainment LP, the primary distributor in North America for Death Row's music catalog. The assets include recordings by late rap music artist Tupac Shakur plus works by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. The cases are In re Death Row Records Inc., 06-11205, and In re Marion Knight Jr., 06-11187, both in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Central District California (Los Angeles)."

Spain Ignites 'Digital Canon' (re: a Digital Anti-Piracy Tax)

2008-06-24T20:28:00.000-07:00

See original Billboard article for full text. A few excerpts:

"Spanish consumers will from July 1 pay a special anti-piracy tax on all new gadgets capable of recording, copying or storing sound and images.

...The tax is highly controversial. It is imposed to compensate authors and creators from the money they lose due to private copying, according to collecting societies such as authors' and publishers' society SGAE. The government accepts this argument. But consumer groups, Internet users and gadget manufacturers say many consumers do"

Copyright 2.0 and the Future of Online Music Licensing

2008-06-23T21:47:00.001-07:00

In the past, I've tangentially referred to the differences in licensing music for online purposes according to its consumption as either a download or a stream, and, whether it is on-demand or more akin to a "radio" experience.

The Future of Music Coalition has a nice chart representing the current state of licensing:

Eventually, the distinction between streaming and downloading will become superfluous; becoming inversely proportional to the rise of always-on/accessible internet and networked devices. However, today's licenses continue to make this distinction and I've often wondered how this will be reconciled in the future -- especially with discussions emerging on new blanket licenses for online music consumption.

I came across a slideshow by Gerd Leonhard for his presentation at "a think-tank event organized by Peter Jenner (of the IMMF) on the subject of the Digital Flat Rate" where he posits "an actual distinction between ‘Copy’ vs ‘Performance’ of music no longer exists." Check out the slideshow below (or download the PDF:

| View | Upload your own

Without a narrative to accompany the slideshow, you might be missing some of Gerd's arguments supporting his views so you may want to also check out a recent interview he gave on IT Conversations' Tech Nation

Listen to Gerd

Orange goes after Nokia's Comes With Music service with new Musique Max

2008-06-13T18:55:00.000-07:00

From Ars Technica: Orange goes after Nokia's Comes With Music service with new Musique Max:

"Announced in a brief press release on Orange's site, Musique Max boasts over 1 million tracks from the four major labels as well as indie labels, including songs from Coldplay, Kylie Minogue, Amy Winehouse, Red Hot Chili Peppers, DJ Assad, and more."

Additional features that differentiate Orange's service from Nokia are possibly DRM-free format for music that can also be played on different hardware in perpetuity:

"Tracks can be downloaded to compatible mobile handsets and PCs using the Orange Media Player, and—perhaps most importantly—all tracks can be kept and played in perpetuity."
"Orange describes Musique Max as "unlimited" a number of times in its press release, but that's only partially true. While the plan costs €12 per month with no contractual obligation and tracks can be played even after canceling an account, a monthly download limit of 500 tracks will be enforced."
"Another possible advantage Orange's plan may have is the reported lack of DRM or, what is more likely, a much more flexible DRM scheme."

ISP As Big Brother: Enlisted to Monitor P2P Activity

2008-06-09T21:52:00.000-07:00

Another reason I love Ars Technica's coverage -- of all the blogs, their coverage has by far the most thorough analysis in addition to being well-written and timely.

Take for example U2 manager Paul McGuinness' continuing pressure to make ISP's monitor P2P traffic for copyrighted material (also covered by Billboard). It all started with his initial speech at MIDEM in January, but re-stated last week.

"Although music is only one of a large number of factors driving broadband adoption, McGuiness argued that service providers have a financial self-interest in helping the music business, and that self-interest should play out in part through filtering copyrighted content.
But technology for ISP-level content filtering isn't yet mature and is easily circumvented. Blocking or throttling P2P isn't a good solution, either, and ISPs that have tried it in Canada and the US have brought government investigations down on themselves. "

(see also Bob Leftsetz's post "McGuinness' Idiocy")

Cut to another Ars post covering how UK ISPs are being forced to send P2P warning letters out subscribers:

"Given the relatively mild nature of the letters, the implications of the
program are probably more important than the actions it entails. The program
suggests that at least some ISPs are beginning to take action on file-sharing
that's not directly related to the network congestion it involves."

And finally, another Ars post about similar inroads in the US: "Congress urged to investigate ISPs over user tracking":

"Last month, we reported that Charter Communications, a major ISP and cable provider, was testing a system that tracked the surfing habits of its subscribers, with the goal of sending them targeted ads. Charter made the system opt-out, meaning that users had to both be aware of it happening, and then find a form on Charter's web site to avoid being profiled. That opt-out feature immediately attracted the attention of Congress, and a coalition of privacy groups are now calling for a full investigation."

You can easily connect the dots on where old media is going with this, trying to exert control over content, that in this digital eccosystem, is pretty much futile. Between choosing to devote resources to preserving outdated revenue models and uncovering new models, it's pretty clear most opt for the former. I highly recommend you check out some of Gerd Leonhard's essays about how to negotiate your way through this new economy.

UPDATE: See a related Ars post following-up on the Virgin story: Cash, not idealism, behind ISP embrace of music biz.

Through the Looking Glass: The Future of Music Ecommerce & Consumption

2008-06-04T00:52:00.000-07:00

As I started catching up on a backlog of blog posts over the last four days, a few stories caught my eye worth commenting on but by the end of the day, I figure I might as well roll them into one post and be done with it. Incidentally, you can always check out what stories I've highlighted each day by just going over to my Google Reader Shared Items web page (not sure if there's an RSS feed for it or if you need to go to the page directly), or if you're actually looking at this blog, you'll find the latest stories to the right under "Read This".

Wired Listening Post: South Korea Leads in Digital Music, Japan in Mobile
Wired pulled some interesting stats from IFPI and MusicAlly about how tech-savvy countries were buying/consuming digital music in 2007:

"The US remains the biggest music market at $6 billion, amounting to one
third of the worldwide music industry. When it comes to digital revenue, the US creates about half ofdigital revenue worldwide.
Japan is the second biggest music market in the world, and its numbers
indicate healthy trends. Sales numbers remained flat there, while four of the
other five top music markets, including the US, saw declines (France was the
biggest loser of these in terms of both revenue and digital distribution).
A whopping 91 percent of digital music sold in Japan was sold via cellphone.
Revenue from mobile music in Japan trumped revenue from music sold over the internet in Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom combined.
Digital music sales increased 40 percent in Germany, but India saw the
greatest overall growth -- general music revenue there increased 12
percent."

Some pretty impressive numbers on how digital songs are being purchased and how the nascent initiatives by Nokia and Qualcomm's "Comes with Music" strategies for their mobile devices could play out in the U.S.

Although I wonder (aside from the other wonderings about what happens when you buy a new device or upgrade to another device-maker/mobile service) how the digital song purchase/ecommerce ecosystem will change as more and more companies (and labels) start embracing models where digital songs are free and downstream revenue opportunities gain momentum.

MusicAlly also reported an upswing in mobile and PC downloads in Japan for 2008 Q1:

"According to data published yesterday by the Recording Industry Association of
Japan (RIAJ) digital sales from mobile and PC-based downloads totalled USD $215m
in the first quarter, an increase of 28% from the same period last year."

Ars Technica: New FYE kiosks load your iPod with MP3s

"The idea is simple: patrons are able to browse a catalog of songs at an FYE Tunes kiosk in a store for single tracks or complete albums, then build a playlist. The customer can then either pay to have the songs burned to CD or downloaded as DRM-free MP3s to an iPod or other USB-compatible player for $.99 per track. "

I like this idea in the sense that it gives brick-and-mortar destinations that are heavily invested in attracting music-loving consumers a new way to quickly access new music in a physical space (think Hot Topic, Best Buy, live music venues). But again, as more and more models evolve that put the digital music file in a $0 environment, how this will play out is still anyone's guess. Who knows, in a world where Fry's and Walmarts are willing to stock loss-leaders to get foot-traffic through the door to entice consumers to purchase higher-margin product, could these kiosks produce the same effect if they offered the MP3s for free?

TuneCore Founder/CEO - lessons from the past, leads to the future seeds of a new music distribution model...and if you double as company publicist, know your network.
Ars Technica scored another good read with an article on TuneCore and founder/CEO Jeff Price who originally founded indie label spinArt Records in 1991. In an article Price penned for the The Huffington Post (also sited in Ars' article), he noted "spinART Records became the first label in the history of the music industry to put its available catalog up for paid download as MP3s" and from those early lessons helped fuel the business model behind TuneCore, as Ars summarizes:

"TuneCore charges $19.98 a year to store an uploaded album from any artist. It
charges an additional $0.99 per song on that album, along with a $0.99 charge
for each music store that it submits to (iTunes, eMusic, Amazon, and Rhapsody,
among others); these are one-time charges. That's it. "

Price's article in the Huffington Post gives this model an analogy of what it meant in the old days of the music industry:

"This is analogous to telling a band 15 years ago that if they paid $30, every
Tower Record store (god bless its now departed soul) around the world would have
their album on its shelf and never run out of stock."

Amusingly, TechCrunch also had some TuneCore ink today, but it pretty much talked about how they were rebuffed by Price when asked for additional company information. If you want to add Publicist to your official list of company hats, best to also get familiar your PR rolodex, too.

The Label as Brand - The Next Great Strategy?

2008-05-30T01:33:00.000-07:00

Hmm, seeems to be something in the air these days feeding the "label as brand" debate. Just the other day hypebot mentioned a similar sentiment in their "can the music industry save itself" series. Then Ian Rogers also discussed the notion and today hypebot followed up with additional thoughts from Capitol/Virgin/EMI's Jesse Kanner.

For me personally, the scalability issue sticks in my head on whether huge labels with such diverse rosters could really build a brand to support themselve and in my own past ruminations I often questioned whether the label as brand concept is a bit anachronistic of a past era of music-buying/record-shop browsing experiences and just a bit too "music-geek" to reach the tipping point. As a kid I was pretty rabid about any release from 4AD, Subpop, Projekt, Too Pure etc., but very few of my mutual music-fiends experienced that transference of their love of the artist to the label.

Would you pay $10.08 per Month for Unlimited Online Music Access? « Two Notes Ahead

2008-05-28T17:15:00.000-07:00

“How Much Would We Pay For Music Like Water?” or “Could Music Be A Pure Public Good?” « Two Notes Ahead:

Some off-the-cuff number-crunching by Two Notes Ahead comes up with a possible figure for monthly online music access.

"Unlimited access to music in the US would cost $120.90 per year per household, or $10.08 per month.
Unlimited access to music in Canada would cost $82.88 per year, or $6.91 per month."

It's nice to have some working numbers on what this figure would be given all the talk floating around a proposed music fee bundled with ISP services or even a new type of licensing fee. Of course, two major questions remained to be answered:

how do revenues get collected and split among artiists, labels, publishers, copyright holders, etc?
how this impacts the myriad of ways in which revenues are split by existing online music consumption that range from on-demand online streaming, purchased downloads, P2P downloads, monthly subscription models and advertising-based models

BBC NEWS | dot.life | DRM is dead, long live DRM

2008-05-21T17:47:00.000-07:00

An interesting article from the BBC blog about the future of DRM. While the walls are coming down on DRM and MP3 is the flavor of the day, the undercurrent of "Comes with Music" hardware+music deals like Nokia could delay it's ulitmate death:

"In other words, the world of DRM is about to get more complicated than ever.
And the risk, says [Jupiter Analyst Mark] Mulligan, is that music services could become Balkanized around specific devices in the future.
For example: If I invest in a Nokia phone that brings with it an unlimited supply of music, what happens when I decide to buy a Sony Ericsson phone in a few years' time?
Will I be able to transfer my music? Possibly not.
At the moment, says Mulligan, such concerns are not on the radars of consumers."

Rock's New Economy: Making Money When CDs Don't Sell : Rolling Stone

2008-05-17T17:50:00.000-07:00

Rock's New Economy: Making Money When CDs Don't Sell : Rolling Stone

Nice piece in Rolling Stone about how revenue streams for artists are evolving from the traditional model. It would behoove new artists to read it in its entirety, but a few choice quotes:

"While up-and-coming bands may find most of their licensing offers in the $2,500 range, established bands can make much more: from $30,000 at the high end for TV shows to $100,000 for movies and $250,000 for commercials."

"Ian Montone, whose Monotone Management handles the White Stripes, Vampire Weekend, the Shins, M.I.A. and the Raconteurs, says...'I think you're going to see artists doing more direct-to-consumer sales.' The Stripes have already been able to reapportion the record-company pie to their advantage: The band owns its masters and strikes distribution deals with the major record companies on an album-by-album basis."

"'When I first started Of Montreal, I probably would have been hesitant to do a commercial for Outback,' says the band's songwriter, Kevin Barnes. 'In the indie world, there's a holdover from the punk movement that any commercial endeavor will taint your art. But if you care about the band, you won't begrudge us a living.'"

"TV and film licensing fees have begun to come down as music supervisors use hungry unsigned bands from sources like MySpace. Insiders say $2,000 to $2,500 is a common fee for baby bands. Even the soundtrack to Juno offered fees in that range."

Google Confirms Friend Connect

2008-05-12T23:54:00.000-07:00

Google Confirms Friend Connect

If you're an artist struggling to keep up with all the different friends/fans you've collected across multiple social networks, the next iteration of managing those contacts is approaching. While systems exist for you to streamline your fan management and communications, a larger solution looms to make life easier -- appears as a natural progression as the number of social networks pushes contact management to the tipping point for such utilities.

As TechCrunch summarizes:

"I was able to talk with Google engineering director David Glazer to get some more details. The point of Friend Connect, he says, is to “, give users a shortcut to connections they’ve built up somewhere else.” So if you go to a Website that is part of Friend Connect, you will be able to sign in under your Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo IDs (you choose which one you want to sign in under, with more options coming). Then you authorize the site to go out and retrieve your friend’s list from that network. Any of those friends who also happen to be members of the site you are on will then show up and you can interact with them."

So if you're having trouble keeping up with your MySpace, PureVolume, ReverbNation, Virb, Facebook accounts, keep an eye out.

More on Google FriendConnect.

UPDATE: Ars Technica has its own take on FriendConnect along with a real-life example from Ingrid Michaelson's site which integrates some of iLike's features:

"Google illustrates the potential of this new platform with the website of independent musician Ingrid Michaelson, who used Google Friend Connect to embed music features from iLike into her site. Once Google Friend Connect goes live tonight (for a hand-picked group of whitelisted sites), Michaelson's visitors will be able to see comments from their social networking friends, who's going to one of Michaelson's concerts, add her music to their profiles, and more without having to visit iLike's site."

Software Goes Hard, And Vice-Versa

2008-05-09T18:02:00.000-07:00

These two stories alone are quite interesting but when put side-by-side certainly gives me a strange distorted, mind-fuck "what the hell is going on" haze for a Friday afternoon: Last.fm re-implemented as an actual radio (like, you know, made of plastic with buttons and shit) and a software-based "tape recorder" based on the same UI as yester-year (like, you know, big fat up/down buttons and the squeal of tape when you fast-foward/rewind).

The Olinda Last.fm Radio

The TapeDeck

Enter the Renman

2008-05-08T20:46:00.000-07:00

Back in my days at ARTISTdirect, I had the pleasure of working with Steve Rennie, then-president of AD property the Ulitmate Band List (UBL.com). Rennie also manages Incubus and was formerly an executive at Sony Music so needless to say his rolodex is quite thick with the who's who of the music industry. So when word spread that Rennie had started a blog complete with regular video posts, my ears perked up immediately.

For those that don't know Rennie, his video posts serve as an apt encapsulation of what it was like working for the Renman back in the AD days: irreverent, smart, golf-fanatic, consummate insider/dealmaker and fanatical early-riser (as you'll see in the regular good morinng introduction that preludes many an episode)...my only request is he do a video capture of his impressions of Mick Jagger and Jack Nicholson.

Anyhow, you can find his blog at http://renman.wordpress.com or http://www.htfdwftb.com (short for "How The Fuck Do We Fix This Business").

As it turns out, Rennie will be doing a segment with Marc Geiger soon -- co-founder and former CEO of AD....this oughta be interesting.

Pitchfork: My Bloody Valentine Announce North American Tour!

2008-05-06T23:59:00.000-07:00

Check it: Pitchfork: My Bloody Valentine Announce North American Tour!

Nine Inch Nails Releases New Album The Slip As Free Download

2008-05-05T17:15:00.000-07:00

check it: theslip.nin.com

story at nytimes.com

I'm Outta Here...for 6 Days

2008-04-24T20:30:00.000-07:00

I'm out for a few days to Japan -- six days to be exact, but probably only about 3.5 days actually in Japan not including air travel.

I figure this would be a good opportunity to test out a few travel blogs. In my travels (six continents in 10 years and counting) I get a lot of friends asking to check out pix, itineraries and whatnot and while I keep a travel journal, none have realy made it onto the web...till now.

After brainstorming on the multitude of widgets I'd want to add to a blog to embody the travel experience (tying pictures to posts and mapping destinations) it all seemed a bit overwhelming, especially if this was going to be something I'd theoretically be doing while traveling. Of course I then came to the bonehead conclusion that there has to be blogs out there specicially geared for travelers and after checking out a few, I settled on giving TravBuddy and Travelpod a test-drive. You can follow the links to see how they look and I'll let you know if I came across a clear winner.

Grooveshark.com: Legal P2P + Web Media Player on Steroids

2008-04-16T23:24:00.000-07:00

Just another day surfing the blogs until I came across a Techcrunch post about GrooveShark.com

It essentially marries a free on-demand streaming web media player with a legal P2P model: users upload content for free but subsequent DRM-FREE downloads are purchased with proceeds being split among the labels and a small kickback to the original uploader. Sweet.

Still playing around with the very slick UI and have yet to check out its downloadable app SharkByte.

See full list of features.

Myspace Music: Good or Bad for Indie Artists? Discuss.

2008-04-10T15:23:00.000-07:00

Amidst all the flurry over Myspace Music's joint venture with three of the four majors on board, Billy Bragg's editorial appears especially prescient as more folks begin to question how the venture will affect the indie and unsigned artists who served as the bedrock upon which the house of Myspace was built. Now that the majors can claim a stake in the earnings for the artists that participate in Myspace, where exactly does that leave the slice for the indie and unsigned artists.

Further reading:
The Orchard Cites Potential Problems with MySpace Music (Wired Listening Post)

Listening Post's Eliot Van Buskirk discusses further on NYC's Soundcheck podcast

This Just In: Major Labels And MySpace May Not Have Indies' Best Interests At Heart

Digital music firms pay heavy price for labels' support

2008-04-08T18:22:00.001-07:00

Interesting Reuters article delving into the trials and tribulations of start-ups negotiating with labels for the right to offer online music services:

The last 18 months have seen the major music labels accept new
technological and business models -- such as dropping digital rights management
and allowing ad-supported free music -- that have given rise to a new generation
of digital music services. But the flip side of this willingness to experiment
is a demand for higher upfront advances for licensing music and in some cases a
substantial equity stake in the company.

P2P "Licensing" Gaining Traction and More Details

2008-04-02T17:18:00.000-07:00

What began as an SXSW Panel Discussion turned into a genuine label-backed initiative to obtain funds from P2P music downloads (legal or otherwise) for artist and labels. However, the fee assessement mechanism seems to be evolving from the original panel discussion that was characterized as an end-user opt-in to a blanket license structure (think SoundExchange, ASCAP, BMI models).

Frank Rose elaborates more on the model in a recent Wired online article. Spending a significant amount of my time researching the payment and licensing models for online music and it's various forms of consumption, the most intriguing aspect is the payment and rev-split debate that will quickly follow:

"This raises big questions for artists. Still to be determined, for example, is whether a download should be treated as a purchase, in which case the artists would get at most 10 percent of the proceeds, or as an audio stream, in which case they would get closer to 50 percent.
"That's a huge row that's coming up," says Peter Jenner, a longtime Griffin colleague who manages Billy Bragg and heads the International Music Managers Forum. "If we don't get our shit together soon, we'll get screwed by the record companies. I think everyone should stop whining and get on with making sure we don't get shafted like we did on the old business model.""

It would be interesting to see how the financial breakdowns for this P2P model compares to the math for on-demand streaming like Last.fm and advertising-sponsored downloads like Spiralfrog. While all are different flavors of online music consumption, I'm still in the camp that in the future the end-user won't really care about the method, just that it's on-demand in one form or another.

Billy Bragg: Lookin out for #1,0728

2008-03-27T22:07:00.000-07:00

Great editorial in the New York Times written by Billy Bragg lookin out for the little guy in the music industry/machinery and now, part of the social networks helping/peddling/exploiting (?) all those bands.

Both bands and social networks benefit from a more enriching experience when members and bands contribute content, but Bragg asks:

The claim that sites such as MySpace and Bebo are doing us a favor by promoting
our work is disingenuous. Radio stations also promote our work, but they pay us
a royalty that recognizes our contribution to their business. Why should that
not apply to the Internet, too?

Other sites and services are already out there to bridge that gap: Panjea, Revver, Ning...

Too LIttle, Too Late: Accessing Music In An Ever Increasingly Networked World

2008-03-27T20:42:00.000-07:00

Greg Kot of the Chicage Tribune had a nice re-cap on a SXSW panel that discussed the idea proposed by Jim Griffin to bundle a fee to monthly Internet access bills for users who choose to download music -- a la the cable/satellite-style of billing for premium channels (in this case, the premium is the privilege to download music). The money would be split among artists, labels or the appropriate music copyright holders. Kot summarizes:

His plan would create a live-and-let-live world in which peer-to-peer file sharing would co-exist with iTunes and other legitimate MP3 music stores. With an estimated 750 million people expected to be hooked into wireless broadband networks in Western Europe and the United States alone in the next decade, the potential revenue from licensing fees on Internet service providers could be substantial.
Yet such a forward-thinking plan might already be too little too late for the industry, McGill’s Pearlman said. A portable data base containing all the music ever recorded is imminent, he said. “Once this paradise of infinite storage is entered,” he said, “it will represent the end of all intellectual property rights.”

Too little too late indeed: assessing fees for downloads seems more of an interim/short-to-midterm solution that may be on its way out by the time the ink dries on the final termsheet. In a progressively networked world, the notion of downloading music will probably fade in favor other more efficient methods of music delivery and consumption. Why download it first if you can hear it right way? Infinite storage will just give way to unfettered, infinite access -- anytime, anywhere. With seamless network access, users won't really care whether they're downloading a song or streaming it, they'll just care that you can Search It Then Play It On-Demand.

While download versus streaming may become inconsequential for the consumer, royalty and licensing structures fundamentally differ since a download implies "ownership" or purchasing a copyrighted work, while streaming does not -- not to mention "tethered" downloads that subscription-based models provide and the added legalities of offering music "on-demand".

The problem with today's streaming model (mostly subscription-based models such as Rhapsody and Napster) is that all the factors that make the experience seamless and simpler than the download model of today is relatively premature:

the ubiquity of Internet access has yet to reach critical mass (thus tying the user's music listening experience closely with a computer)
a walled-garden experience with proprietary software media players restricts where, when and how the user can consume the music
non-universal compatibility with popular hardware players (re: iPod)

In today's world, spending the time to download music is a small price to pay in order to gain the convenience to play the downloaded music any time, any where. But jump ahead a few years to a world where always-on Internet grants you access to music via your nearest available networked device, be it a a cell phone, laptop, Tivo, Playstation or Wii. Satellite radio offers a glimpse of how a single service can provide multiple ways of consuming music in a time-shifted and place-shifted future.

One would argue that as we approach infinite choice (re: infiite storage of songs), the traditional concepts of supply-and-demand economics change in the sense that the scarcity is no longer the "inventory", "supply" or "choices" of music to buy/listen, it's the consumer's attention that is now the scarcity. In a few years when an x-terabyte device can hold 60+ years of music the problem won't be how to store, or even own, the music, it's how you're going to choose what music deserves your listening time.

UPDATE: Warner Music Group has tapped industry veteran Jim Griffin to spearhead a controversial plan to bundle a monthly fee into consumers' internet-service bills for unlimited access to music.

Starbucks Free Wi-Fi: Goodbye T-Mobile, Hello AT&T

2008-03-25T21:15:00.000-07:00

Well, after charging folks for Wi-Fi access over the last six years, Starbucks is going free starting this spring (with a few caveats) according to a Seattle Times article back in February. While dumping T-Mobile as their wireless provider and taking on AT&T, the deal is particularly sweet for current AT&T wireless and internet subscribers.

One of the less-promoted features of being an AT&T DSL subscriber such as myself, is that I could log in to any wireless network for free at local MacDonald's (hardly ever go there, yech), Barnes & Noble and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (if you don't mind the micro-tables with a diameter of about a large pizza). Although I am at odds about when to combine my internet access between my phone and laptop. I use Verizon's superior EV-DO network for my phone and recently a broadband wireless card in my laptop and kissed the whole Wi-Fi cafe-roaming lemmings behind. If AT&T/Cingular's EDGE network ever get up to snuff (in speed and coverage, at least in my 'hood), I might seriously consider streamlining my internet access diet.

For the rest, the deal outlines a minimum of 2 hours free access (boo, only two hours?!!) or increased access through the following methods outlined in the Seattle Times article:

Limited 2-hour use per day: Anyone with an activated Starbucks card. The no-purchase-required card requires minimum $5 to activate initially.
Pay as you go: If you don't have a Starbucks card and aren't in any of the groups above, you will have to pay $3.95 for two hours' access. You can also pay $19.95 per month for unlimited worldwide access to 70,000 AT&T home and roaming locations, including 17,000 in the U.S. when the Starbucks deal is completed.

This in addition with their partnership with Apple to provide iTunes music downloads via iPhone and iPod touch users would "provide customers with location-specific information, more "digital experiences," and a sense of community online in each store".

Eh, for the time being I'll stop by the 'Bucks for a quick shot of espresso and internet if I'm in a pinch, othewise, I'll stick to the indie coffee shops and my wireless broadband (those who are just fine settling for ANY free, unlimited Wi-Fi, see the map at right :).

Ashley vs. Trent: Battle of Band-Celebrity Deathmatch Smackdown(loads)

2008-03-17T22:47:00.000-07:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, introducing tonight's Main Event!

In this corner: Two-time Grammy winning artist and fresh off his TKO bout with Universal Music Group -- Trent "Nine Inch Naaaaaaaails" Reznorrrrr!

from wikipedia

In the opposite corner: Hailing from the Emperor's Club, she knows What We Want and she'll Move Ya Body at $3,000 per hour -- The Governor-Terminator, Ashley Kristen Alexandra Nina Vanetta DiPietro Dupre Youuuuuumans!

from salon.com

Select your method of payment, start your browsers and let's get ready to RUMBLE!

Sorry, had to get that outta my system. The past week or two has been pretty interesting when it comes to the music download landscape, to say the least, and no thanks to SXSW.

Trent Reznor released his new Nine Inch Nails project Ghosts I-IV on his website, across major online MP3 retailers via TuneCore, and Bit Torrent. While free via Bit Torrent, and as a 9-song teaser set, there are also specially priced packages with increasing levels of value-adds such as CD, DVD and specially printed assets.

Meanwhile, after taking down NY Governor Eliot Spitzer, Ashley Dupre kicks her burgeoning music career into high gear by taking a different tack: using Amie Street to sell her songs. Amie Street's pricing model starts all songs at zero cents and incrementally increases the price as the songs accumulate in popularity among the Amie Street community until it maxes out at 98 cents. Popularity is accumulated as more members give "REC's" (re: Recommendations) to each song and the earlier a member gives a REC during the appreciation phase of the song, the more credits the member is awarded when it reaches 98 cents (credits then can be used to purchase additional downloads on the site).

The New York Times covers Dupre's upload and price appreciation chronology up to Friday AM:

"Ms. Dupré’s first single, “What We Want,” was initially available Wednesday morning for free. Within hours of The Times’s story identifying her role in the Spitzer saga, its price shot up to 98 cents.

On Thursday morning, a second single, “Move ya Body,” went online. As of 11:11 a.m., its price was at 92 cents."

Radar Online concluded the chronology confirming "Move ya Body" ultimately reached 98 cents on Friday.

I'm not sure what the pricing/REC calculus is and what it entails to push a song to 98 cents, but the number of paid downloads Dupre accumulated from merely curious listeners (or, maybe the impulse buyers that supermarket checkout counter tabloids target?) was enough to put her in the #1 spot for New Releases las week, #1 and #2 for the week's top songs, #1 and #2 for the entire month of March thus far.

While it certainly is interesting to see how the intensity of the celebrity (scandal?) spotlight creates a multiplier effect on consumerism, it also speaks to the pricing points of music downloads that the general public perceives as a fair price. In Dupre's case, a percentage of the music-buying/downloading audience were comfortable enough to pay up to 98 cents for a single download of an artist of dubious credibility or quality. Of course, this is all a bit anecdotal until hard numbers are attached to it; the best numbers I found were all relative in terms of the velocity with which the songs reached 98 cents and charting positions that Amie Street provided (previous attempts to apply actual downloads and earnings seems wildly inaccurate). Also, with Amie Street's kick-back credits to its members who originally helped her songs gain popularity with REC's, I'm curious what amount of activity on the site is a purely speculative exercise of the community at-large, making REC's and collecting credits like a stock trader buying low and selling high.

Alternatively, take Reznor's NIN earnings, which we do have hard numbers for, as reported by Eliot Van Buskirk's Wired Blog "Listening Post":

"According to the band, 800,000 transactions generated $1.6 million in sales revenue in the first week of the album's availability, despite the fact that the 36-song version of the album is widely available on torrent sites.

Nine Inch Nails included free downloads in these figures, which are not being released to SoundScan in the traditional manner, according to Billboard."

NIN also provided tiered pricing levels for various packages of the album which also helped segment the audience into a revenue model maximizing the gross earnings. The least expensive paid package cost $5 for 36 songs which averages out to 13.89 cents per track and the most expensive $300 Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition Package (which contains value-adds such as Reznor's signature, DVD's and high-end prints and booklets) averages out to a whopping $8.33 per track. Since the Limited Edition package sold-out on pre-orders, I assume about $750,000 of the $1.6 million can be attributed to its sales which accounts for 47% of the pie. The remaining packages each subsequently scale on a per song basis as follows: $10 package = 27.8 cents/song; $75 Deluxe Package = $2.08/song.

If Dupre had a little more time and creativity to develop additional pricing packages, one wonders what additional revenue she could have reaped --I'll refrain from proposing any snarky Seven Diamond Deluxe packaging ideas although it pains me so.

So while labels and artists each seek to find new and equitable revenue models in a P2P world, we're seeing whether the popular theory that once download prices reach a point where the inconvenience or dodginess-factor of P2P is the less favorable option, paying for a download becomes more favorable than stealing. Insert value-adds and other downstream revenue opportunities (concert tickets, merchandising) plus advertising-sponsored downloads and the permutations are just waiting to be tested. On a final note, I'll leave you with an interesting article from the March issue of Wired Magazine called "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business" which points out a very interesting distinction between the psycho-economic differences of free and almost-free:

"This difference between cheap and free is what venture capitalist Josh Kopelman calls the "penny gap." People think demand is elastic and that volume falls in a straight line as price rises, but the truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another. In many cases, that's the difference between a great market and none at all.
The huge psychological gap between "almost zero" and "zero" is why micropayments failed. It's why Google doesn't show up on your credit card. It's why modern Web companies don't charge their users anything. And it's why Yahoo gives away disk drive space. The question of infinite storage was not if but when. The winners made their stuff free first."

Deezer: Last.fm for the rest (or more) of the world

2008-03-09T20:51:00.001-07:00

While Last.fm gets most of the fanfare for its introduction of free, on-demand music streaming, another site out there actually beat them to the punch -- and is available virtually worldwide, not just the US, UK and Germany territories that Last.fm currently offers. Enter Deezer.com.

A recent embeddable widget, (more playing and listening controls on the site).

Deezer (headquartered in France), which orginally started out as BlogMusik has also implemented an ad rev-sharing model to compensate artists and labels. While not completely worldwide (still a few major-label territory issues according to a recent blog post), it seems to offer quite a few territories/languages (any international folks out there who can verify the coverage thus far?).

"Music 1.0 is Dead"; and, Free Music: Mikey Likes It!

2008-02-29T02:33:00.000-08:00

Ars Technica covers the Digital Music Forum East, where Ted Cohen declares the death of the music industry as we know it (props to Omar for sending along the link). I swear since that Napster 1.0 deathtoll back in the late 90's, I keep getting the "clear your schedule, the old bugger's gonna croak any day now" notice every nine months...does life-support count as being "not dead"?

Highlights include:

DRM on purchased music is dead
A utility pricing model or flat-rate fee for music might be the way to go
Ad-supported streaming music sites like iMeem are legitimate players
Indie music accounts for upwards of 30 percent of music sales
Napster isn't losing $70 million per quarter (and is breaking even)
The music business is a bastion of creativity and experimentation

Let's not also forget Last.fm's latest press release practically glowing about how since they made full on-demand song streaming for free (but advertiser-supported) a part of their offering in the US, UK and Germany, things have just been peachy:

59 percent more unique visitors per day
58 percent more pages served per day
92% increase in unique listeners since it was launched four weeks ago

I'll take them at their word, but feel free to (comparatively) check their numbers on compete.com.

Yup yup yup, kiddies like free music...I'm more interested in the ad rev-share deals and which dimes are lining whose pockets.

Adventures in Booking, Episode 1: Your MySpace Page Makes Me Nauseous

2008-02-16T19:22:00.000-08:00

During my most recent stint as a live music booker, I've found myself step over the line once again from passive music consumer to an active paticipant in the live music world. Only this time, I have the Internet in tow....namely MySpace.

For better or for worse, MySpace has become a booker's best tool to cull new bands. While MySpace has been championed as the darling of the social network movement and user-generated content, less emphasis has been made about how it essentially redefined the way bands manage their online presence. Sure, the social network aspects provided an unprecedented way to easily manage, cultivate and grow a fanbase, but I think even more significant was the basic turnkey tools of a MySpace artist page which provided bands with utilities that, before its advent, required a web designers' talents to integrate into their own website.

In the past, you bought your domain and THEN pumped in the content (song files, picture galleries, tour dates, news and email sign-ups). Your domain was everything -- it was your little off-ramp on the Information Superhighway that would deliver your fans directly to you. Today, you start a MySpace page, pump content into it, THEN buy the domain and build the website (or redirect it to your MySpace page). MySpace essentially compressed the learning curve for getting online so effectively that anyone (even a musician!) could figure it out, and in the process completely leapfrogged the value of having your own domain/website which had always been Step One in the Internet 101 Playbook of the 90's.

While viewing MySpace band profiles, listening to songs, checking out show dates, I sometimes wondered what exactly some bands were thinking when they conceived of the composition of their page. Of course, they weren't thinking -- and I was completely OVER-thinking the whole experience as a booker, and even more criminally, as one especially entrenched in the world of new media, music and user experience. So, musicians and bands, you have been warned. You have no more excuses -- disregard at your own peril, as I deconstruct your MySpace page through the eyes of a [insert snooty and jaded music-industry snob figurehead role here].

Hot pink text on a white background: Are you TRYING to make me nauseous?

So do you REALLY want your fans (or me) to really see your tourdates, read your latest blog headlines, comments or friends? Then stop making it look like a stereogram and put a contrasting color scheme for text and background on your page. Reconsider that big-ass background image of a full-moon against pitch-black outerspace if you really have to have white or black text.

Oh, and for background images, or any other images, if it's gonna take longer to load than three seconds, get rid of it. If I can't read shit on your page until a background image loads or your interminable pix load-time is keeping me from seeing the rest of your page, double-bad karma points on you.

Your Top Friends - Forbidden Doesn't Really Care She's There, And Neither Does Anyone Else

OK, I admit this is a little less obvious. But when a booker or A&R rep scopes out your page, your Top Friends are like one component of a mini-resume of your band. If your Top Friends are stocked with your signficant other, pets, planets, hot/cool/hipster peeps/celebs/models/pornstars, bands you idolize, etc. you're really missing a golden opportunity to show folks how you and your band fit into your local musical landscape. Top Friends composed of other local bands you gig with, music collectives you're a part of, local studios, recording engineers/producers you've worked with, local promoters/venues for whom you've played -- this all gives you a lot more credibility. This is also a subtle clue into how well you are self-promoting and networking. Sure, great music is definitely the cornerstone, but I can't tell you how many great bands couldn't break out because they just couldn't be bothered to network with other bands, contribute to their local music scene or even promote their own shows. As bands gain more and more momentum, Top Friends become less of a factor, but for new bands, take heed. Do me a favor and save Tila, Dennis Hopper, Jack Daniels, Spongebob and the Hoff for your personal MySpace page.

It's Cooler to Make You Think We're From LA (Even Though We're Really From Simi Valley).

Are you not based in LA, but put Los Angeles anyway to help get interest? OK, fair enough, it could help...at first. What about if your location is simply "California" or even bigger "United States". Yeah, cool, I get it. You either come from some po-dunk town you're too proud to reveal or, you're just so big you're not bound by the confines of your origin. Well, sure, if you're The Shins, or My Chemical Romance or Kanye. Other than that, I'm tying to figure out the best bill to put you on and if you're not local, I'll put you on with some other local bands so you're not playing to the crickets. If you say you're from "LA" but you're really from Simi Valley and I book three other bands from "LA" (but they're really from Whittier, Long Beach and Corona) who exactly do you think is going to come to see you? Of course, some industry types are equally geographically-challenged in which case you're better off opting for the hyphenated or slashed location like LA/Long Beach or LA-OC.

K, class dismissed. Now get Thomas and re-layout that page.

Blogs Better Than MySpace At Sellng Music?

2008-02-15T15:17:00.000-08:00

Hypebot sites a new study by New York University's Stern Business School that seemingly indicates that music blogs are more influential in music sale than MySpace. Of course there are exceptions, more specifically when major labels unleash their marketing and PR machinery upon traditional, mainstream marketing outlets (magazines, TV appearances, etc.).

Then again, the study also reveals the researchers' less than expert familiarty with the music industry in general. One commenter to the post noted:

...i would offer that their understanding of how albums are sold is suspect. to wit (and i'm paraphrasing):
"interestingly enough, almost all our our sampled albums came out on a
Tuesday"
"volume with traditional media tends peaks when records are out, while the
blogs peak before an album comes out"
"we excluded digital sales from the research" (while many albums for indies
are hitting a 40-50% rate of overall sales)
"albums by John Mellancamp and Catherine McPhee rewiewed poorly but sold
well"

See PDF of full study.

Better Than Free

2008-02-12T21:58:00.001-08:00

What happens when any piece of content that hits the web automatically becomes readily available to be copied or downloaded by virtually anyone? Where exactly does the value lie, if not in the actual content itself? Kevin Kelly has an excellent post ("Better Than Free") about this predicament, his intro summarizes it nicely:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super
abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Kelly identifies these eight "generatives", in addition to Trust, which adds value to content and cannot be copied:

Immediacy
Personalization
Interpretation
Authenticity
Accessibility
Embodiment
Patronage
Findability

When you consider these generatives in conjunction with solving a customers' "pain points" you know your product/service definitely has legs as a viable business model and not just the cool widget of the day.

Settin Up Shop: First, a Web Music Player

2008-02-08T20:39:00.000-08:00

Still getting things arranged here, but one of my first goals is to be able to post with maximum freedom, but also be able to extract any music files posted into an easily listenable (and findable) experience.

Enter the Yahoo! Web Music Player. See Ian C. Roger's post about it here: http://ymusicblog.com/blog/2008/02/03/the-yahoo-music-web-player/ . I first met Ian back in my ARTISTdirect days when he was active with Grand Royal and the Beastie Boys -- AD teamed up to provide the online presence for the Tibetan Freedom Concert. Since then, I've always had a close eye on whatever he had his hands on.

Anyhow, the web music player is pretty easy to implement as Ian explains:

Add this single line of javascript to your page:
<script src=”http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js”></script>
Add a link to any MP3 to your page, like so:
<a href=”http://209.133.33.135/~icr/BeastieBoys/Denver_Intro_TimeForLiving.mp3″>Mix Master Mike’s Tom Sawyer show opener and Time For Livin, from Denver</a>

...and presto, any hyperlink that's detected as an mp3 is accompanied by a play icon and nifty music player.

While I come across tons of new music in my other endeavours, I wanted to post it quickly without the formality of an official post. As an experiment, I'm toying with tumblr, and then inserted that blog via javascript in a separate container/component of the blog (for now, in the right column). The goal being to quickly aggregate music somewhere here and get the instant gratification to listen-right-goddamn-now without scrolling down posts to separate the tunes from the chaff, so to speak.

See more info on the Yahoo! Web Music Player here:

Yahoo! Media Player Home: http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/
Yahoo! Media Player on the Yahoo! Developer Network: http://developer.yahoo.com/mediaplayer/
The Yahoo! Media Player Wiki: http://goose.wikia.com/

See latest update to the player: http://ymusicblog.com/blog/2008/02/08/yahoo-media-player-release/