Trends in Media
Ruckus
Google Story
Nonesuch
Translation
Peerflix
Future of the Internet
Mercora Story
Mercora
Looks like Ruckus is raising quite a ruckus. It's almost exactly what the EFF website talks about, and I commented on the compulsory license landscape in my 12/27/04 post. However, from what I gather, this service does not allow you to own any music. Other than that, it sounds great as long as it stays indie. I worked in college radio, we students controlled the station completely, almost everyone on campus listened to it. It's just like what is described in the article (link above), the mental hub....hmmm, maybe that's why I'm so into this shared consciousness internet stuff....
Anyway, before I digress to personal excursions in shared consciousness... are we going to moot this whole downloading thing by making streaming personalized, commercial free and low cost? I doubt it. It's not gonna be that easy. My guess is that Ruckus may be or become big, commercial interests even more invasive on the desktops of these college students; young adults already beset by beer, credit card & other groups who view them as easily exploited.
Ownership & control of one's music library is the trend I'd like to see. I've got my library on my iPod, my iBook, a separate hard disk, a separate computer and on some 500 CDs, I can use them on Garage Band or any other software, I can email them, they don't self-destruct or whine, that's pretty good ownership. However, many of those songs are tagged and can be traced.
Grokster recently made a deal with the Norwest funded ($5M) Mercora, which offers P2P streaming that is supposedly legal, subject to Big Music's stamp of approval, which is currently being withheld. BM (Big Music.... or whatever else you might associate with BM) will now probably also enter as a direct competitor in both streaming ad downloading as a NY court just cleared the way for the labels to offer their "own" music directly online.
More promising to me is Google's entry into video image search. Not content with libraries of books, Google seeps into the complex world of TV...amazing. What will they think of next? Music? No no... not goin there!! So, let's tackle a newer medium. Why muck around the medieval medium of music when we have the modern landscape of TV, child of the advertising dollar? Someday, sooner than for music or film, we'll be able to find the exact TV archive (or maybe current too!) we're looking for... now if people only knew what they were looking for. What was that Springsteen song about 100's of channels yet, "nothing's on".
In film, I quit Netflix for Blockbuster because of the wait times, and my next move is Peerflix, more of a trading P2P deal. I watch a film almost every day. I believe in paying for film, and music too, all art, as long as my cost is proportional to the sellers', and artists are being fairly paid.
In terms of movement in the labels, most promising is Nonesuch records, rumored to have beaten last year's revenues of $35M. It is actually a growing record co. within a major label. The secret, as I've mentioned in countless posts, is building from the fan base. Wilco is a band much steeped in the Dead/DMB/Phish mentality of play for your fans - they are your customers. YOUR (the artists') customers, not the labels' .... we know how they feel about their customers. Nonesuch prez Bob Hurwitz gave the OK to a stream of A Ghost Is Born, and it still sold 250k records. The savings, for the company as a whole, were made on promotion.
Anyway, that's how they did it. It's now been proven to be the one successful strategy, and those little divisions that correct will float while the backed up behemoths sink of their own weight the same way the airlines did. Remember Pan Am, TWA? The indies now own 17% of the market, more than EMI or Warner and that would have also beaten Sony-BMG, had they not merged.
Another trend, which I mention more because of it's cultural importance than it's cultural benefit, is Steve Stoute and others like him, if there are any, who have elevated talent management & promotion into the level of almost corporate alliance as I discussed in my Apple/U2 posts (11/10/04 & 12/02/04). That alliance, which apparently grew from a friendship between Jobs & Bono, gave Apple a 70% market share and gave U2 a new life, doubling sales from its last album.
Stoute's company, Translation, matches top names in entertainment and consumer product with each other, to the munificent remuneration of both. My first blush on reading the Newsweek story was that the guy was an intervisionary. I admire people who can straddle disparate worlds, who can do a Gestalt thing and make a sum greater than its parts.
On the other hand it seems to promote the wrong values, unhealthy food, overpriced status sneakers, this is the kind of stuff that lowers, not raises black culture, or white. In other ways, it's positive, it's the kind of thing that promotes hip hop culture, giving a bigger avenue out of the Brooklyn streets that bred hip-hop thirty years ago. Now hip hop owns 30% of the music industry, and these mergers will only raise its profile in mainstream culture. I prefer to see artists get the big commercial deals than athletes because many jocks have that male/violence overtone, as I mentioned in my previous post.
I think the more interesting aspect of this trend is the branding of everything. The way it's structured, the tiny group of elite musicians are indeed brands. Beyonce is a company. JayZ, her beau, is a company. He, like P Diddy, cross brands, promotes younger artists, employs marketers, VPs of strategic alliance, the whole bit, whatever it takes to get out that name, cause it sells a lot of product and employs a lot of people. No wonder the guy hung up his artistic hat after the Black Album.
We see more of this intervisionary stuff in NY as B'way rocks it up; Good Vibrations uses Beach Boys catalogue and Yoko just coughed up two unpublished Lennon songs for his upcoming bioshow. This further changes the landscape of musical theatre which seems to have exhausted the Great American Songbook and, always a step behind, turns to classic rock, as the rest of the culture segues to hip-hop culture.
Also in live performance we see more blurred edges between sport and entertainment. The figure skaters and gymnasts are getting very theatrical and touring amphitheaters as smaller venues thrive for musicians. It looks like the industry got it, momentarily, after last years' disastrous summer concert season and appears to be poised for a summer of reasonable prices as small successful venues that took up the slack continue to thrive.
Hopefully we'll see more cross pollination in this realm, possibly indie oriented websites putting tours together with several of their top draws on the bill, promote and sell tickets, all online. While some of the smaller labels may have trouble putting their own tour together, if they hooked up... there's power in numbers. Matching up music sites to venues would enhance both, just as the consumer websites that survived corresponded to major brick and mortar stores.
On the internet, the future is open source, VoIP, and the home entertainment market, as Gates has already discovered. We'll see TiVoToGo stuff, putting your digital media onto almost anything, having control over it.
IBM made 500 of its patents available to the open source community, and is thinking about aquiring open source software maker JBoss. Over 17 million people have downloaded Firefox from Mozilla. Microsoft is such crap, it succeeds only on the basis of monopolistic coercion, it cannot be that hard to overthrow a sleeping giant, in such a dynamic world.
VoIP is going to be like a game of 52 pickup as every big entity imaginable scrambles for the internet phone call market.
Phone calls will soon be much more like emails; that pick up, hang up, telephone tag feature will phase out to always on "phones" (almost any WiFi compatible device). Meanwhile, the number of possible service providers grows and prices, hopefully, drop.
VoIP provider Vonage is attracting VCs trying to clear their overhang like crazy, but it probably won't hold up well as bigger players enter the market. Flickr, one of my links is also magnetizing VCs & buyers, as is Mforma, a mobile gaming start-up. Again, clicking on any pic in this blog will enlarge it and take you to my Flickr gallery. This feature soon to be available in all aspects of reality.
And we may soon need a reality check feature in the now $9B industry of internet advertising, one of the fastest growing segments of our economy, ( and huge, all box office in this country is $11B). It is jeopardized by its very openness and anonymity as advertisers wonder if the $12. clicks they pay for are even bona fide. It's easy to defeat Adsense ads with simple programs that can click on a competitors ads, maxing out their ad budget early in the day. Other scammers hire third world firms to click on Adwords ads driving profit for themselves off the fake clicks on their sites.
Magazines and TV go to great lengths to substantiate their readership and size of audience. These web players are gonna get a rude awakening if they don't deliver viable leads. They tend not to deal with the sophisticated agency players, as much as the traditional media do. If scam talk grows and these baby business owners scare off, or sue, we'll see an exodus to these smaller sites which are pouncing on Ebay's raised rates, and see more of a P2P business model, on a smaller scale. Soundclick type sites which offer everything, not just music. Listings at overstock.com went up 50% after Ebay's prices went up between 60% and 100%.
Biggest boomer trend...blogging baby! Bloggers cost Kryptonite over $6M in sales when they demanded locks that couldn't be popped with a Bic pen. Yes, people will increasingly turn to bloggers for truth and more instantaneous reality. Do you think Hearst, my old employer, would print this blog as a column? No way! My friend, Alan Grant, writes for ESPN. He's a legit Stanford grad, in English, he also played pro football. He writes in what we shall say is a very racially aware style. ESPN is consequently edging him out and he's been quite receptive to my little pep talk on going indie on the web.
Interesting, powered guys like Steve Jurvetson (on Blogger, BTW), Martin Tobias and Craig Newmark are blogging. Soon, anyone of any interest will be blogging and that is increasingly where I get my own info, especially after SV BIz Ink left me hanging with bancruptcy after paying for a long subscription. These days you can read right off your Treo. If you like your news totally fresh, as I do, websites, not to mention print, are just too stale. So, RSS is the future there, Bloglines, in Woodside, is rumored to have some 30% of the RSS market, or Delicious, which compiles bookmarks.
Also promising is a new technology that will allow a reader to click on any word in a story to get background on that person or word and technology which allows file sharing on an exponential level to what it is today. Under the new paradigm, the more a file is downloaded, the faster the downloads will go... the opposite of the situation today.
Google Story
Nonesuch
Translation
Peerflix
Future of the Internet
Mercora Story
Mercora
Looks like Ruckus is raising quite a ruckus. It's almost exactly what the EFF website talks about, and I commented on the compulsory license landscape in my 12/27/04 post. However, from what I gather, this service does not allow you to own any music. Other than that, it sounds great as long as it stays indie. I worked in college radio, we students controlled the station completely, almost everyone on campus listened to it. It's just like what is described in the article (link above), the mental hub....hmmm, maybe that's why I'm so into this shared consciousness internet stuff....
Anyway, before I digress to personal excursions in shared consciousness... are we going to moot this whole downloading thing by making streaming personalized, commercial free and low cost? I doubt it. It's not gonna be that easy. My guess is that Ruckus may be or become big, commercial interests even more invasive on the desktops of these college students; young adults already beset by beer, credit card & other groups who view them as easily exploited.
Ownership & control of one's music library is the trend I'd like to see. I've got my library on my iPod, my iBook, a separate hard disk, a separate computer and on some 500 CDs, I can use them on Garage Band or any other software, I can email them, they don't self-destruct or whine, that's pretty good ownership. However, many of those songs are tagged and can be traced.
Grokster recently made a deal with the Norwest funded ($5M) Mercora, which offers P2P streaming that is supposedly legal, subject to Big Music's stamp of approval, which is currently being withheld. BM (Big Music.... or whatever else you might associate with BM) will now probably also enter as a direct competitor in both streaming ad downloading as a NY court just cleared the way for the labels to offer their "own" music directly online.
More promising to me is Google's entry into video image search. Not content with libraries of books, Google seeps into the complex world of TV...amazing. What will they think of next? Music? No no... not goin there!! So, let's tackle a newer medium. Why muck around the medieval medium of music when we have the modern landscape of TV, child of the advertising dollar? Someday, sooner than for music or film, we'll be able to find the exact TV archive (or maybe current too!) we're looking for... now if people only knew what they were looking for. What was that Springsteen song about 100's of channels yet, "nothing's on".
In film, I quit Netflix for Blockbuster because of the wait times, and my next move is Peerflix, more of a trading P2P deal. I watch a film almost every day. I believe in paying for film, and music too, all art, as long as my cost is proportional to the sellers', and artists are being fairly paid.
In terms of movement in the labels, most promising is Nonesuch records, rumored to have beaten last year's revenues of $35M. It is actually a growing record co. within a major label. The secret, as I've mentioned in countless posts, is building from the fan base. Wilco is a band much steeped in the Dead/DMB/Phish mentality of play for your fans - they are your customers. YOUR (the artists') customers, not the labels' .... we know how they feel about their customers. Nonesuch prez Bob Hurwitz gave the OK to a stream of A Ghost Is Born, and it still sold 250k records. The savings, for the company as a whole, were made on promotion.
Anyway, that's how they did it. It's now been proven to be the one successful strategy, and those little divisions that correct will float while the backed up behemoths sink of their own weight the same way the airlines did. Remember Pan Am, TWA? The indies now own 17% of the market, more than EMI or Warner and that would have also beaten Sony-BMG, had they not merged.
Another trend, which I mention more because of it's cultural importance than it's cultural benefit, is Steve Stoute and others like him, if there are any, who have elevated talent management & promotion into the level of almost corporate alliance as I discussed in my Apple/U2 posts (11/10/04 & 12/02/04). That alliance, which apparently grew from a friendship between Jobs & Bono, gave Apple a 70% market share and gave U2 a new life, doubling sales from its last album.
Stoute's company, Translation, matches top names in entertainment and consumer product with each other, to the munificent remuneration of both. My first blush on reading the Newsweek story was that the guy was an intervisionary. I admire people who can straddle disparate worlds, who can do a Gestalt thing and make a sum greater than its parts.
On the other hand it seems to promote the wrong values, unhealthy food, overpriced status sneakers, this is the kind of stuff that lowers, not raises black culture, or white. In other ways, it's positive, it's the kind of thing that promotes hip hop culture, giving a bigger avenue out of the Brooklyn streets that bred hip-hop thirty years ago. Now hip hop owns 30% of the music industry, and these mergers will only raise its profile in mainstream culture. I prefer to see artists get the big commercial deals than athletes because many jocks have that male/violence overtone, as I mentioned in my previous post.
I think the more interesting aspect of this trend is the branding of everything. The way it's structured, the tiny group of elite musicians are indeed brands. Beyonce is a company. JayZ, her beau, is a company. He, like P Diddy, cross brands, promotes younger artists, employs marketers, VPs of strategic alliance, the whole bit, whatever it takes to get out that name, cause it sells a lot of product and employs a lot of people. No wonder the guy hung up his artistic hat after the Black Album.
We see more of this intervisionary stuff in NY as B'way rocks it up; Good Vibrations uses Beach Boys catalogue and Yoko just coughed up two unpublished Lennon songs for his upcoming bioshow. This further changes the landscape of musical theatre which seems to have exhausted the Great American Songbook and, always a step behind, turns to classic rock, as the rest of the culture segues to hip-hop culture.
Also in live performance we see more blurred edges between sport and entertainment. The figure skaters and gymnasts are getting very theatrical and touring amphitheaters as smaller venues thrive for musicians. It looks like the industry got it, momentarily, after last years' disastrous summer concert season and appears to be poised for a summer of reasonable prices as small successful venues that took up the slack continue to thrive.
Hopefully we'll see more cross pollination in this realm, possibly indie oriented websites putting tours together with several of their top draws on the bill, promote and sell tickets, all online. While some of the smaller labels may have trouble putting their own tour together, if they hooked up... there's power in numbers. Matching up music sites to venues would enhance both, just as the consumer websites that survived corresponded to major brick and mortar stores.
On the internet, the future is open source, VoIP, and the home entertainment market, as Gates has already discovered. We'll see TiVoToGo stuff, putting your digital media onto almost anything, having control over it.
IBM made 500 of its patents available to the open source community, and is thinking about aquiring open source software maker JBoss. Over 17 million people have downloaded Firefox from Mozilla. Microsoft is such crap, it succeeds only on the basis of monopolistic coercion, it cannot be that hard to overthrow a sleeping giant, in such a dynamic world.
VoIP is going to be like a game of 52 pickup as every big entity imaginable scrambles for the internet phone call market.
Phone calls will soon be much more like emails; that pick up, hang up, telephone tag feature will phase out to always on "phones" (almost any WiFi compatible device). Meanwhile, the number of possible service providers grows and prices, hopefully, drop.
VoIP provider Vonage is attracting VCs trying to clear their overhang like crazy, but it probably won't hold up well as bigger players enter the market. Flickr, one of my links is also magnetizing VCs & buyers, as is Mforma, a mobile gaming start-up. Again, clicking on any pic in this blog will enlarge it and take you to my Flickr gallery. This feature soon to be available in all aspects of reality.
And we may soon need a reality check feature in the now $9B industry of internet advertising, one of the fastest growing segments of our economy, ( and huge, all box office in this country is $11B). It is jeopardized by its very openness and anonymity as advertisers wonder if the $12. clicks they pay for are even bona fide. It's easy to defeat Adsense ads with simple programs that can click on a competitors ads, maxing out their ad budget early in the day. Other scammers hire third world firms to click on Adwords ads driving profit for themselves off the fake clicks on their sites.
Magazines and TV go to great lengths to substantiate their readership and size of audience. These web players are gonna get a rude awakening if they don't deliver viable leads. They tend not to deal with the sophisticated agency players, as much as the traditional media do. If scam talk grows and these baby business owners scare off, or sue, we'll see an exodus to these smaller sites which are pouncing on Ebay's raised rates, and see more of a P2P business model, on a smaller scale. Soundclick type sites which offer everything, not just music. Listings at overstock.com went up 50% after Ebay's prices went up between 60% and 100%.
Biggest boomer trend...blogging baby! Bloggers cost Kryptonite over $6M in sales when they demanded locks that couldn't be popped with a Bic pen. Yes, people will increasingly turn to bloggers for truth and more instantaneous reality. Do you think Hearst, my old employer, would print this blog as a column? No way! My friend, Alan Grant, writes for ESPN. He's a legit Stanford grad, in English, he also played pro football. He writes in what we shall say is a very racially aware style. ESPN is consequently edging him out and he's been quite receptive to my little pep talk on going indie on the web.
Interesting, powered guys like Steve Jurvetson (on Blogger, BTW), Martin Tobias and Craig Newmark are blogging. Soon, anyone of any interest will be blogging and that is increasingly where I get my own info, especially after SV BIz Ink left me hanging with bancruptcy after paying for a long subscription. These days you can read right off your Treo. If you like your news totally fresh, as I do, websites, not to mention print, are just too stale. So, RSS is the future there, Bloglines, in Woodside, is rumored to have some 30% of the RSS market, or Delicious, which compiles bookmarks.
Also promising is a new technology that will allow a reader to click on any word in a story to get background on that person or word and technology which allows file sharing on an exponential level to what it is today. Under the new paradigm, the more a file is downloaded, the faster the downloads will go... the opposite of the situation today.
posted by Intervision at 9:37 AM
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