Category: music

MUSIC AT NEW TEE VEE LIVE 09

I love reading the New Tee Vee blog every day and video is an increasingly important aspect of the music business. Think about it – the majority of music is listened to on a device with a screen! I think I was the only music exec at New Tee Vee Live, but it was worth the trip – although the question “is the tv business going the way of the record business?” and the “we wont make the same mistakes as the music biz” quotes were slightly annoying.

So what are the broader trends and how do they apply to music? Here are a few quotes from some of the speakers, and some of the interesting things I heard during the panels.

Erik Flannigan
EVP of Digital Media,
MTVN Entertainment Group  

Hits are Hits. Eric explained that hit tv shows have big video numbers online, and shows with lower ratings have lower views. It’s a one to one relationship, and he said there seems to be no erosion in the ratings of popular shows by having them streaming online.

“Don’t underestimate the mass of passive”

Great point and a classic quote. People don’t want to spend tons of time looking around to watch what they want on you tube, torrents and other on demands sites. It’s more that programming for the mass doesn’t meet their needs anymore. If possible, most consumers would rather lean back and just get great programming that was relevant to them, instead of having to seek it out.

Now think of the long tail, radio, and music. Applying Eric’s comment to the much hyped long tail I agree its probably not the “solution”. It’s really about better music, engaging artists, and better programming.

Laura Goldberg
General Manager of NFL Online,
National Football League  

The internet turned the niche activity of fantasy football into a main stream pastime, and as a result, grew the audience for the NFL. Laura explained how fantasy football drives demand – now you need to watch all the games! Very clever. The advantage is football is a closed network – to watch all the games in real time you have to pay!

Chuck Seiber
VP Marketing,
Roku  

The Roku video player is an on demand video box with over 50,000 titles. Now they are opening their platform to anyone who wants to make a “channel” on their box. Their install base seems low, but is this a chance for someone to make a new type of music service? Seems like the infrastructure and hardware is in place.

Jason Seiken
SVP, Interactive,
PBS  

Nothing music related here, but I had no idea pbs launched the coolest video sites of all the networks!

http://video.pbs.org/

Gary Cohen
SVP of Marketing and Customer Experience,
Redbox  

Redbox offers kiosks in retails stores that rent dvd’s for a dollar. The talk was that some of the studios were upset about the impact of “substitutionally” of redbox rentals on dvd sales.

Substitution for purchase is something we talk about a lot in the music biz, with you tube, piracy, and streaming services such as myspace. Gary denied those claims, and said redbox did research to show there was less that 1% substitution for purchase (of course they did!)

However I loved his quote – “People who buy, buy, people who rent, rent”

Or as we sometimes say “people who buy buy, people who steal steal”

Great day – see you next year!

THREE LINKS: VIDEO, MOBILE, AND MUSIC

VIDEO
Great content, and nice technique for success:
How IKEA’s ‘Easy to Assemble’ Broke 1.9M Views (Without Cheating)

MOBILE
New product idea from the people:
World’s First Multimedia SF Novel on a QR Code T-shirt.
Buy it via ebay!

MUSIC
Devo is Back – I was there!
These guys are still unbeliveable!

“one of the few truly original rock acts of the last 40 years.”

San Jose Mercury news

Devo fans find `Satisfaction’

IT MIGHT GET LOUD, IT WILL GET YOU THINKING

I was deeply inspired by the movie “it might get loud”, a “guitar” documentary centered around Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White.

You don’t need to be a guitar head to love this movie – if you love music you will love this film! In my work with new media and music, I spend so much time thinking about how the changing ratios of communication change the way music is marketed, promoted and consumed, it’s refreshing to see these “masters” talk about nothing but sounds.

In fact – this movie was a needed reset for my brain. Take away twitter, facebook, and everything else – its irrelevant to these guys. The guitar and technology around making the guitar convey music is all that’s needed. Everything else will just happen.

The unbending dedication and focus around a single instrument was inspiring. Do musician’s lose this today while twitter facebooking, etc? Is the nature of technology infecting the creative process?

Or perhaps these legends have explored all of the sound frontiers and possibilities of the guitar, and now the current generation will explore how to connect people to these sounds? After watching this film, something about how easy it is to create and record music feels like we’ve forgotten a step. You will find yourself asking these questions of yourself throughout the movie.

JIMMY PAGE – incredibly elegant and well spoken. I’ve never heard him speak so much before When you see him, and the emotion still behind those eyes – you can have nothing but respect for his legacy.

JACK WHITE – “technology makes things too easy” – Jack talks a lot about how technology takes away from the artistic process. Everyone in new media needs to hear his thoughts as a balance to our hectic info mania. You need to struggle to create. He makes it harder for himself to create. Take a guitar that is broken down and out of tune and fight with it to make music…

THE EDGE – a stark contrast to Jack – the “sonic architect” uses technology and effects to change his sound and bring new soundscapes from the guitar. Interesting to see how he uses technology to create sound, while still respecting the instrument itself.

Reset your brain and love for music! See this Movie!

IT MIGHT GET LOUD MOVIE SITE

ASHLEY TISDALE AND TWITTER

Multiple press outlets picked up a piece about the campaign for Ashley Tisdale’s new album “Guilty Pleasure”. I’ve been working on the music side of Ashley’s campaign since her first album in 2006. She is hard working, and cares about her fans! One of the highlights of this campaign has been her use of Twitter. Ashley took to it right away and she understands how important it is to communicate direct.

The key is it’s all her. And that’s why her Twittering is generating lots of buzz and traffic to her site and store! Even a star as big as Ashley needs to understand the first key principle for successful twittering – authenticity.

This article from Reuters poked a little fun at her Tweets, and it somewhat diluted my point about the importance of Ashley’s’ communication with her fans:

“Tisdale is an especially avid Twitterer, with more than 750,000 followers.

“She’s very protective of it in terms of it sounding authentic,” according to Warner Bros. senior VP of new media Jeremy Welt. “There have been a couple of times where we’ve said to her, ‘Hey, why don’t you mention so-and-so?’ and she’s told us, ‘I wouldn’t say that.'” (What would she say? One recent Tweet read, “Happy fathers day!!! Goin to dinner with my family and the most amazing dad ever! I love you daddy!”)”

You may not see the connection in Ashley Tisdale twittering “happy fathers day”, but her 940,000 followers do. The series of seemingly simple tweets provide basic insights into her life (She’s subtly letting her fans know family is important to her), and it all adds up to a lot for her fans. They peak into the everyday activity. You don’t see overloaded shameless promo, or re-purposed press releases. It is exactly this type of communication that makes it Authentic, and why Twitter itself has grown so fast.

Check out the full interview here:

4 REASONS I’M GIVING UP THE NOKIA 5800 FOR MY IPHONE

The Nokia 5800 is more powerful than the Iphone, but it’s trapped by it’s software:

1.) NOKIA’S SYMBIAN TOUCH SCREEN OS DOESNT COME CLOSE TO THE IPHONE

It’s way to complicated and looks and feels as is if it wasn’t designed for a touch screen phone.

2.) TOUCH SCREEN RESPONSE IS “JERKY” NOT “SMOOTH”

You’ll miss the elegance and responsiveness of the Iphone. I quickly learned the “feel” of a touch screen counts as much as the hardware itself.

3.) MUSIC PLAYER ACTS LIKE A PHONE NOT A MUSIC DEVICE

The Iphone can legitimately be your music device. Nokia has some work to do with the music part of the 5800 before you can ditch your ipod and make this your main portable music device.

4.) NOKIA WEB BROWSER IS TO HARD TO USE

With the 5800, you’ll feel like the web and the phone weren’t meant to work together. I am still mystified at parts of the browser interface. Several steps are required to do basic browsing.

Main take away – It’s the software that matters! When you see the potential of powerful hardware and an open ecosystem, you wonder how Apple gets away with providing a closed ecosystem – a great mobile OS. Working outside the iphone/itunes ecosystem was a promise that excited me, but didn’t deliver. After two months of use, the basic software problems overshadow the 5800‘s potential.

Software trumps hardware, closed can trump open if the experience is amazing! The Nokia 5800 is much a more powerful phone, with open standards, yet not as desirable as the iphone because it is locked in by its os.

GREEN DAY QR CODES COMING TO YOU!

Get out your mobile phone, and check out the first in a limited edition series of QR code pieces we made for Green Day’s new album 21st Century Breakdown, in stores FRIDAY MAY 15th!

Green Day QR Code
 
This is the start of several QR code experiments were trying and you can find the Green Day Codes out and about in the US in the next few days. Thanks to David Harper at Delivr for masking this happen! You’ll need a QR code reader for your phone to try this – get a reader in the iphone app store (neo reader is a good free one), if you have a nokia phone, you probably already have a reader in your appp folder, or go here to get one for most other devices!

6 REASONS THE NOKIA 5800 IS BETTER THAN THE IPHONE 3G:

1.) OPEN ECOSYSTEM – phone not tied nokia software
2.) BETTER SCREEN RESOLUTION. Much brighter and crisp plus a 3.2 MEGAPIXEL VIDEOPHONE – with great resolution and camera like display
3.) WIRELESS FILE TRANSFER VIA BLUETOOTH. Youll get addicted to moving files this way
4.) DRAG AND DROP mp3’s from desktop to phone library
5.) BETTER BATTERY LIFE
6.) THREE BUTTONS ARE BETER THAN ONE! It’s a nice concept for the iphone,  but its a much better phone having the flexibility of a few more real buttons, to compliment the touch screen interface.

These things mean alot, and i was suprised at how unwilling I was to give these things up once I was used to the expereince, Nokia truly has made some improvements to the “super music touch phone experience”.

Once you get past manually setting up the 5800 to connect, you have a lot of flexibility to move files and music around. I love just draging my files from my imac to the 5800 via bluetooth! Slower, but so slick moving music with no wires! And having a great video phone in the age of you tube is a not acceptable iphone. 

COMES WITH MUSIC
The 5800 is a “”comes with music” phone, but Comes with music is not yet available in the US, so I focus on core phone feature set. Unless the phone and core experience are amazing, around a phone people really want, I don’t think Comes with Music can be a game changer.

So can the Nokia 5800 stand a chance against the iphone? Not yet…

 

 

LIGHTS EVOLVES HER ARTIST SITE WITH FACEBOOK CONNECT!

The Facebook party is winding down, and LIGHTS blew away an always tough industry crowd. It was hard to resist her energy, even if you missed the announcement that LIGHTS launched what could be the first ever artist site using facebook connect.

It was more than an industry showcase! Convincing Artist’s to take a chance on new technology can be tough (thats a big part of my job!). They need to have an understanding of where things are going to truly apply new ideas to their art. Its often a riskier proposition than people realize. But when an Artist has a vision for new music AND new media – you can create the perfect storm of innovation the music business needs.

The “Connect” technology is amazing – and it has that feel good moment when you log into LIGHT’S site with your facebook account. But it never would have happened if the Artist didn’t have a strong enough vision for herself to try something new.

LIGHTS is the future, as much as facebook connect is the future!

Thanks to LIGHTS, Ethan Kaplan, and Raquel and Dave at Facebook, for making the show, the art, and the tech happen! When they work together, things evolve.

TOP 5 CONCEPTS FROM FROM DIGITAL MUSIC EAST 2009

Capturing Some important concepts from the discussion, presentations, and panels at DME 2009.

1.) Music in the Background – increasingly music is a background activity (while surfing, while playing video games). Online activity and music fuse into a “new” “combo” state of mind between communication and music. Important to understand this context.

2.) Hard Drives are filling up? Russ Crupnic from NPD floated that some stats may indicate people are loaded up with more music than they can handle on their computers and devices. If Hard drives and devices get full, watch the change in acquisition behavior. I think this was the first i’d heard people discussing the reality of this concept in 2009.

3.) Power of Radio – still massive motivator of top downloads and social net discussion of music. Shows up as top source fro music discovery in many demos. Traditional radios power is a reminder that no matter where you are in digital music, online strategy must take into consideration all media. Online radio’s untapped potential – people like radio as a medium if done right. Explosive growth could be starting.

4.) “It’s a fact of life: If your business model depends on controlling or getting paid for copies of zeros and ones, you may need to look at a new business model” (Jim Griffin).

Increased discussion about charging at the isp level from Jim Griffin (transcript here) , and The Isle of man project.

5.) Sometimes when it comes to music, you just have to get lucky in the studio (Richard Gottehrer, CEO of the orchard digital service, and a songwriter whose hits included “My. Boyfriend’s Back”)

If you twitter search Digital Music East, you’ll get a good sense of what everyone else there was thinking!

Ted Cohen’s intro was brief but accurate, and the presentations were all interesting.

My panel “The State of the Digital Union” was after the first hour intro. The twiiter feed from the audience was streaming behind us, and I made sure to watch it a few times during the panel. Problem was no ATT service at all in the room, so I couldn’t participate later on.

Hyebot posts a recap of the panel and my Metalica example – some liked it some didn’t!

“STATE OF THE DIGITAL UNION” PANEL AT DIGITAL MUSIC EAST!

Ill be speaking at the “state of the digital union” panel at Digital Music East next week. The site says “This panel of industry experts will discuss the hot button issues of day, including the debate over digital music pricing, online and mobile music product offerings and business models….”. Thats the agenda – curious to know any topics you’d like to hear discussed?

RATATAT BIZARRE VIDEO MASHUP

I found out about ratatat through some random surfing. I dont know much about him, but hes a producer and remixer and I like his style!

RATATAT MYSPACE

But what really caught me were these videos on his site. They both have a very simple effect added to the exsiting clip, repurposing it into somethign startling, and bizarre.

I recognize the paul simon video, but not the first one.

And from his myspace, you findAudio Dregs, a record label and DIY music and art collective with a myspace page worth checking out!

NEIL YOUNG – FORK IN THE ROAD FOR A LEGEND!

When it came to the fork in the road for new media vs old, Neil Young went the new way, while keeping the music as good as ever! I cant believe I get to work on his projects, and in some small way, have helped him move into the new world. There’s an amazing guy named Jeff on the new media team who has a great relationship with Neil and has helped Neil use the internet. Now Neil does it all. It started a few years ago with blogging, and now it’s visual. Neil just shows up with new material, and we help him get the word out! Oh yeah – he’s also revolutionizing the auto industry! http://www.lincvolt.com/

This video and new album just showed up at WBR and we cant wait to get it out to you!
Neil Young – Fork In The Road