Author: jblogg

Classics like this that some how are inspiring and amazingly high quality!

The first YouTube music awards – it could have been worse, and I hope this is just the beginning!

But throughout the show, and just a few minutes after the LIVE airing, it seems like most people did not quite get it.

The show was live, and it did have the feel that anything could happen, swear words and all, but unfortunately the unexpected came across as just unorganized. If your going to make it free form and live, at least give the hosts headphone mics! One of the most painful moments for me was watching the hosts try to find a place to hold the handheld mikes while searching through cakes for the winners, climbing ladders and uncovering zombie girls. All not easy to do with one hand!

THE GOOD:

• Combining mainstream and YouTube grassroots artists is a great idea and the first disruptive step to acknowledging YouTubers popularity and cultural influence.
• Performances were inspired and innovative
• Live live via the google suite of apps and web sites
• Ridiculously ambitious
• New type of creativity for a live broadcast generated some impressive moments. like bringing Youtube elements of interactive videos to live tv moments ( the choose your own adventure live segment was interesting even if it didn’t quite play out). Suprised I didn’t see a live annotation walking around!
• YouTube did get every major music brand to cover the awards live, including MTV

THE BAD

• The hosts just didn’t work. They looked confused, weren’t  that funny, and didn’t rise to the unscripted nature of the show.
• Unorganized turned into bad TV
• Sometimes hard to tell who won and announcing winners was anticlimactic for some reason. The insanity of the show took away the winning moment for Artists.
• Ridiculously ambitious
• Not enough Artists
• Couldn’t feel the fans, I could hardly hear them cheer!

All in all – YouTube succeeded in getting me to care, tune in, and hope they try it again!

I found these two sites that inspired me to put them together in one post.

The first is a great pinboard of the emerging world of interactive TV interfaces. Regulars like Apple TV are here, but also some I never knew existed like this on from Western Digital (a hard drive company makes a TV interface?).

The second, is a gallery of fantastic fantasy user interfaces from all your favorite movies and TV shows. Who can forget Minority report, but there are so many more to check out here.

Then we can go back to the reality of an interface I’ll never understand from Window 8

“We wanted to start to tell a story that would take a long time to tell”.

Kevin Spacey gives a clear and inspired overview on how television piloting process is broken, and how it ruins GREAT story telling by artificially constraining the creative process with old rules! While new data shows it may be harder to monetize binge viewing ala “House of Cards”..
via variety: netflix may need to fast forward its spending for original shows

…the lessons still apply. I’d break it down like this:

– Do not make a pilot for anyone but your actual audience
– Start on Youtube
– If your story is compelling, you’ll find an audience
– If the network wants a pilot after you get some traction, give them your first episode, but don’t stop there
– The networks want you to have your own audience heading into prime time, there is no “audience” for NBC

Watch the clip for your own insights!

Keep your eye on this new channel from “freshbigmouf“. Beat Scout. Fresh and fun, he’s only got 675 subs on YouTube as of today!

UPDATE: A few days after Thom’s pulling of music from Spotify, Jay Z drives 14 million streams of MCHG on Spotify. According to Forbes, thats a record! The Streaming debate gets more interesting each day, with some artist pulling out, and superstar artists cashing in….

Thom Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich decided to pull some of their music from Spotify yesterday. “We’re off of Spotify,” Godrich said of their band Atoms For Peace. Twitter erupted, and from my timeline feeds, most people and news outlets seem to think that Thom and Nigel made the wrong move.

Didn’t Pink Floyd just put their music into Spotify? And to make it more confusing, before going into Spotify, members of Pink Floyd wrote a scathing letter against Pandora.

This battle over the future of digital music is tough because the fans are happy and already getting the music they want. From the sidelines, it looks like a mess, and I can’t see new consumers paying for subscription services in volume when there seems to be so much confusion. I’ll bet most younger music fans are scratching their heads as they continue to stream and rip mp3’s from YouTube while wondering what all the fuss is about.

Some in the artist community are now confusing the conversation and the future like the major labels did a few years back.

Artists like to give away music for free, it’s a confusing message for fans when you complain about services that are trying to build a new business but not paying you enough.

But this misses the most important point: What are you hoping to achieve by pulling your content? It’s a risky gambit, especially if you don’t have your team ready to track everything so you can make sure the move makes sense. I.e what if you pulled things and it got worse? How will you know? Did your sales go up, web vists go down… there are a million ripples to keep track of. Does it change anything?

PRECEDENTS
Warner Music Group pulled all of its content from Youtube for a year. Nothing really happened. Youtube continued to grow. Fans got what they wanted, artists were pissed, but mostly passive. No sales bump, no crazy shift in market share favoring those who had their content off youtube. No one even talks about it anymore! It’s hard to see a series of artists making a dent by pulling their content.

WMG is also not part of Vevo, and without all that music, Vevo still built a HUGE audience. Warner built their own Youtube channel for their videos only, and it is also doing well.

I worked at Warner though these experiments and I’m glad I did. Fans just moved on to the next thing they COULD stream, the next link in their timeline that worked. At the time WMG wanted to stand up for its rights and make a move to improve the business, but we all learned a lot from the experiment. It was much earlier in the debate, we tracked a lot of data and did it with a strategy and end game in mind. Eventually the WMG catalog went back into YouTube. Turns out it was really hard to tell if there was any positive short term impact by pulling, and impossible to tell if there was any long term impact. There is so much music!!! If your stuff isn’t in there, plenty of other stuff is, and it didn’t seem to drive revenue when you pulled stuff.

There is no need to write letters, or do a blanket pull of your content, just make sure you have a plan!

Try a windowing strategy, put one album in and take one out, do a small test with some content, make fan only music for your site….contribute…make more music so streams go up – play with all the new digital levers you have!

Follow the new generation of youtube stars, who based it all on streams. They didn’t wait for any one to give them the rate they wanted. Sales and money came second. Focus on building significant and repeatable streaming numbers and as an artist, you’ll find a way to make money, and you’ll definitely have fans! The money will only get better, but learning how to build a streaming fan base that grows your audience and business starts now.

Why oh why do subscription services fall so short when it comes to the product side? Check out a new site that is trying to make music flow the way fan actually use and share it.

http://www.fastcolabs.com/3014017/the-music-service-you-didnt-know-you-needed

The Verve – Lucky Man

Amazing track, will creep up on you an by the end you’ll be asking who’s this?

Wish them the best!

I was surfing through itunes this week, and saw see these rotating touts. Something struck me about seeing the stones and one republic back to back. It’s an almost comical evolution of “the band”. Both images just seem so un-inspired in a release week where it feels like Kanye and Jay Z are changing the whole nature of the game.

No wonder EDM and hip hop rule right now!

Social media has become a true extension of our lives. Now that our phones are  always with us, and powerful enough to vividly display photos and videos in near real time, our phones become companions in our hearts and minds. Human nature adapts to technology on a deep level, and it seems we always find a way to keep up at paces that just a year ago seemed impossible. Technology itself pushes human nature into adapting new consumption patterns of media and culture.

Kevin Kelly’s book “What Technology Wants”, provides a realistic and believable explanation of this force. He elegantly describes how technology is evolutionary in nature, with repeatable patterns of new technology leading to more new things, and more new behavior, which creates an inevitable march forward.

I’ve been to many places in the world, the poorest and the richest spots, the oldest and the newest cities, the fastest and the slowest cultures, and it is my observation that when given a chance, people who walk will buy a bicycle, people who ride a bike will get a scooter, people riding a scooter, will upgrade to a car and those with a car dream of a plane. Farmers everywhere trade their ox plows for tractors, their gourd bowls for tin ones, their sandals for shoes. Always.

When we integrate new technology into everyday culture,  our behavior changes.

 This one-way pull toward technology is either a magical siren, bewitching the innocent into consuming something they don’t really want, or a tyrant that we are unable to overthrow. Or else technology offers something highly desirable, something that indirectly leads to great satisfaction.

If you are into technology, media, culutre, or just new ideas, I recommend you read this book! His ideas are intense, but you can digest it slow because it works one meme at a time. His thinking will cause you to look at technology and humans as a co-evolutionalry force that shines light on whats to come!

What Technology Wants – Kevin Kelly

This is one of the best videos of 2013 and 2012! Only 3000 views? Revolt ! ! !

LA weekly featured and in depth article on the evolution of the YouTube ecosystem and the growing problems facing the big YouTube Networks. The article come down pretty hard on Machinima, and also mentions my former company Maker Studios. It’s simple, this space is going through some growing pains. One thing I can tell you from my experience is most YouTubers could use more help. It’s not easy to do it all on your own and the Youtube community should be more open to advice from both YouTube networks, as well as the “old guard”. There is SOME good stuff that old media brings to the table. While I had my issues with the old school nature of record companies, my time Warner Bros Records showed me the power of pushing back on Artists, challenging them to be better. Most YouTubers think they don’t need this type of advice. It seems that the YouTube Networks are starting to take on some of the worst characteristics of the old guard, without helping the Artist grow. You don’t need to throw everything out from the old way – evolve. My experience at Maker? They cared, and it showed 🙂

In September 2012, I took a chance working for a new company – 2013 means the full energy of Revolt TV is coming to life. Check out our linked in page to learn more!

“Revolution is the ultimate social leap – a period when the gradual accumulation of mass bitterness and anger of the exploited and oppressed coalesces and bursts forth into a mass movement to overturn existing social relations and replace them with new ones. A few days of revolutionary upheaval bring more change than decades of “normal” development. Rulers and systems that seemed invincible and immovable are suddenly unceremoniously toppled”

A little about us!

Revolt Media & TV is a new independent music and music news themed cable network under with distribution commitments from Comcast and a launch agreement slated for 2013.

Revolt changes the game by leveraging digital technologies, including social media, to give artists a powerful new platform to connect with viewers, and to create and deliver a category-defining experience. Like all great moments in television history as well as social networks, the channel’s programming will be live, immediate and in sync with today’s digitally connected artists and musicians. The network will recharge and reinvent music TV to reflect today’s digital technology. Anchored by a state of the art broadcast center to constantly lead and feed the dynamic changes in music in real time, Revolt will be a fully integrated digital/TV venue where artists rule the airwaves 24/7, while engaging directly with fans in an unpredictable hub where the magic of live is the link. Led by proven masterminds of music programming and pop culture taste making, Revolt will be the trusted curator that serves empowered artists and fans, offering viewers access to impromptu performances, live daily news feeds, breaking news for tour-on sales, last minute great seats, behind the scenes action, and real-time updates on what’s hot and what’s trending in music, by the minute.

TWITTER DEBUTS NEW FOX SHOW!

Check out the cool integration here

YOU TUBE SHOW GOES TO TV:

YouTube sees a show move to TV. Trium Entertainment’s “Recipe Rehab,” hosted on the Everyday Health channel, will begin broadcasting on hundreds of local ABC affiliates beginning on October 6

CW EMBEDS TWITTER INTO ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY PRINT AD

Check out this amazing campaign, courtesy of Lostremote.com