dotboomboom.

I blogged about JetBlue and now JetBlue is following me on Twitter….hmmmmmmmmmm

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:40:27 -0400

I blogged about JetBlue and now JetBlue is following me on Twitter….hmmmmmmmmmm

Video

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 09:26:21 -0400

Adotas: Alternative Media Spending Going Gangbusters

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:26:54 -0400

The sputtering economy has failed to stymie spending on alternative media, according to a report from PQ Media. In 2007, spending on alternative media – such as social networks, mobile and interactive advertising – grew by an eye-popping 22% to $73.43 billion in 2007 and it is expected to grow by 20.2% in 2008 to $88.24 billion.

Spending on alternative media – which is slated to represent 26.6% of total U.S. ad and marketing spending by 2012 — is expected to post compound annual growth of 17% in the 2007-2012 period, eventually reaching $160.82 billion.

“By 2012, we anticipate one out of every four dollars spent on advertising and marketing will be earmarked for alternative media,” said Patrick Quinn, president and CEO of PQ Media. “Alternative advertising and marketing media are driving a new media order that presents vast opportunities for industry stakeholders, but also key challenges for some of the fastest-growing digital media segments. Technological advances have led to critical changes in consumer behaviors and media usage patterns, which have pushed the advertising and marketing ecosystems into a seminal period of transition. Driven by these market forces, brand marketers are seeking new strategies to connect with consumers through engaging means in captive locations, while at the same time providing proof-of-performance metrics. This confluence of trends is fueling the migration of dollars to alternative media.”

PQ Media broke alternative media into 18 segments – 12 alternative ad segments and six alternative marketing segments. Twelve of the 18 grew more than 20% in 2007 and are projected to drive the growth over the next five years.

In order of projected growth, these segments are: consumer-generated media, mobile advertising, videogame advertising, online video advertising, word-of-mouth marketing, advergaming and webisodes, product placement, search and lead generation advertising, and digital out-of home media. The largest alternative media segments in 2007 were event sponsorships and marketing, search and lead generation, e-direct marketing, online classifieds and displays, local pay TV, and product placement.

A few key breakdowns from PQ Media’s report:

Spending on alternative advertising, including online and mobile advertising and entertainment and digital out-of-home advertising, climbed 25.8% to $39.22 billion in 2007, and grew at a CAGR of 26.2% in the 2002-2007 period. Alternative advertising represented 17.7% of overall ad spending in 2007, up from a 7.0% share in 2002.
Spending on online and mobile advertising, including search and lead generation, online classifieds and displays, e-media, online video and rich media, internet yellow pages, consumer-generated ads, and mobile advertising, rose 29.1% to $29.94 billion in 2007, and increased at a CAGR of 31.4% in the 2002-2007 period. Growth was driven by brand marketers shifting budgets out of traditional advertising to reach key demographics that have increased online and mobile usage due to improvements in online and wireless technology, particularly with wider adoption of broadband access.
Spending on entertainment and digital out-of-home (OOH) advertising, including local pay TV, digital out-of-home media, video-on-demand (VOD), interactive TV (ITV), and digital video recorder (DVR) advertising, videogame and home video advertising, and satellite radio advertising, rose 16.2% to $9.28 billion in 2007, and climbed at a CAGR of 15.0% from 2002 to 2007. Spending was fueled by new ad insertion technologies, the pursuit of new ad platforms that reach young audiences; and the steady growth of local pay TV, satellite radio, and DVRs, subscribers.
Spending on alternative marketing, including branded entertainment and interactive marketing, rose 17.9% to $34.21 billion in 2007, and posted a CAGR of 17.5% in the 2002-2007 period. Alternative marketing represented 14.5% of total marketing spend in 2007, up from 8.7% in 2002.
Spending on branded entertainment marketing, including event sponsorship and marketing, paid product placement, and advergaming and webisodes, rose 14.7% to $22.30 billion in 2007, and climbed at a CAGR of 13.4% from 2002 to 2007. Growth was driven by deployment of media strategies aimed at being more interactive and entertaining than traditional media, as well as to engage target audiences in locations that are not impacted by ad-skipping technology.
Spending on interactive marketing, including e-direct marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, and e-custom publishing, rose 24.4% to $11.91 billion in 2007, and climbed at a CAGR of 28.6% from 2002 to 2007. Spending was driven by strong gains in segments that reach affluent and influential consumers with focused messages that are either opted-in to or come from very trusted sources.

Adotas » Alternative Media Spending Going Gangbusters

SonyBMG is retarded: Planning a subscription service.

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 11:00:33 -0400

SonyBMG is retarded: Planning a subscription service. : Oh my god. I’m flabbergasted. $12 for access to Sony/BMG’s music? With Sony’s history of questionable business moves, this one ranks right up there with the Minidisc, Rootkit, Memory Stick and others. Proprietary content is so 1990. Sony, get a clue, your customers don’t care if the music they love comes from Sony, they just care that its the music they want to hear.

Found this song on a compilation called “Indie Rock...

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:13:04 -0400

Found this song on a compilation called “Indie Rock Playlist: March 2008” buried amongst music listings on Youtorrent. Finding music like this is like going back to 1998 arriving early for the opening act.

Adobe: We Need Flash On The iPhone - Silicon Alley Insider

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:44:34 -0400

Adobe: We Need Flash On The iPhone - Silicon Alley Insider:

Steve’s covert plea for Flash compatibility seems to be paying off. Adobe sees the near term benefit despite the iPhone’s 1% penetration of the mobile market. That 1% has translated to an 85% mobile browsing share.

Despite it’s success, I don’t see Apple attaining more than a 5% share as long as they keep their exclusive with AT&T. Does anybody else feel like an Apple licensing deal may be on the horizon?

20 Biggest Record Company Screw-Ups of All Time :: Blender.com

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 11:59:43 -0400

20 Biggest Record Company Screw-Ups of All Time :: Blender.com

I can't believe more people aren't talking about Google Ad Manager

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 08:56:00 -0400

This is groundbreaking. This is revolutionary. On Techmeme there are only a few links. Rich media ad serving from Google:

http://www.google.com/support/admanager/publisher/bin/topic.py?topic=13161

They are changing the game, yet again. Just as Google Analytics did. They are going to put many of the niche ad serving players in a world of hurt. I have a sneaking suspicion that a minority of users are going to find alternative uses for this; widgets, sound clips, movie trailers. If any Googlers are out there, please send me an invite.

"Tribes" and the "Seinfeld Curve". Seth Godin put it better than I could.

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:05:00 -0400

I am in love with this speech Seth Godin gave. These excerpts explain beautifully WHY the NIN model works, and in short order.

Important to keep a dialogue:

…The next one is my biggest one, and what started me
down this whole path which is, if I asked you for the
name and address of your 50,000 best customers,
could you give it to me? Do you have any clue? Then
what happens every day is you guys go to a singles bar
and you walk up to the ﬁrst person you meet and
propose marriage and if that person won’t marry you,
you walk down the singles bar to every single person
until someone says I do. Thats a stupid way to get
married. A better way to get married is to go on a date.
If it goes well, go on another date. Wait to tell them
on the third before you tell them you’re out on parole.
(laughter) Then you meet their parents, they me your
parents, you get engage, you get married. Permission is
the act of delivery. Anticipated, personal, and relevant
messages to people who want to get them. I have every
record Ricky Lee Jones has ever made including the
boot legs that she sells. Rick Lee Jones should know
who I am! (laughter) I have bought many of them
(pause) well her agents, her people [should know who
I am]. I’ve bought many of them directly from her site.
I desperately want Ricky Lee to drop me a note telling
me when she is going to be in town. I want her to ask
me, “should I do a duets album with Willie Nelson, or
should I do one with Bruce Springsteen?”. I want to
have these interactions. And I want her to say, “I’m
making another bootleg, but not until I get 10,000
people to buy it as patrons before I make it”. Because
I’d sign up. I’d buy ﬁve if it would help, but she doesn’t
know who I am. She doesn’t know who I am, she
never talks to me. And then every once in a while her
record label tries to yell at me, but I’m not listening
because they’re yelling at me in a place where I’m not
paying attention. And so we look at these phrases,
“paying attention”. That’s what you’ve wanted people
to do all along. “Pay attention to this artist”. Paying is
a weird word isn’t it? You want me to pay you
something-my attention. And if you’re wrong, I get
nothing back. I had to listen to the Backstreet
Boys…AHH! I want those three minutes back. So, it’s
a weird relationship.

The “tribal” concept of fanbases:

The next idea is this idea of liking. There is a lot of music I like. There is not so much music I love. They didn’t call the show, “I Like Lucy”, they called it “I Love Lucy”. And the reason is you only talk about stuﬀ you love, you only spread stuﬀ you love. You ﬁnd a band you really love, you’re forcing the CD on other people, “you gotta hear this!”. We gotta stop making music people like. There is an inﬁnite amount of music people like. No one will ever go out of the way to hear, to pay for, music they like…back to this tribal thing. It’s really important to people to feel like they are part of that tribe, to feel that adrenaline. We are willing to pay money, we’re willing to go through huge hoops, trampled to death in Cincinnati if necessary, in order to be in the environment where we feel that’s going on.

Then “The Seinfeld Curve”

The next thing is what I call the Seinfeld curve. The
Seinfeld curve shows us Jerry’s life. If you like Jerry
Seinfeld you can watch him on television, for free, in
any city in the world two or three times a day. Or, you
could pay $200 to go see him in Vegas. But there is no
$4 option for Jerry Seinfeld. This is death. You can’t
make any money in here. Because if you’re not scarce
I’m not going to pay for it because I can get if for free.
And one of the realities that the music industry is
going to have to accept is this curve now exists for you.
That for everybody under eighteen years old, it’s either
free or it’s something I really want and I’m willing to
pay for it. There is nothing in the center-it’s going
away really fast.

Take these concepts together and its obvious why the NIN model works. Create choice, cater to those who love you, enable the tribe to continue engagement throughout by creating and mixing your music. In the end, win them as lifelong subscribers who are apt to come back and check out what’s next…

Seth Godin put up a PDF transcript of his talk on the future of...

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:43:00 -0400

Seth Godin put up a PDF transcript of his talk on the future of the music business. Good read.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/files/musicbusinesslive.pdf

Music Valuation 101: NIN creates users out of fans

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:57:00 -0400

Music business listen up: Build value and your customers will take the bait. Trent Reznor has just opened a new era in his band’s history.

When Trent Reznor became a free agent, breaking free from his multi-album deal with Interscope, many in the industry waited breathlessly for him to make his next move. After his experiment with Saul Williams yielded mixed results, his project, Ghosts I-IV landed.

The project marks a departure from Reznor’s more poppy past, as this “album” is purely instrumental.

The latest project has been a success by several measures:

1. Tiered offering by market segment. With fewer splits of the revenue Reznor has made his project successful by pricing it realistically for the market.

New fans and casual listeners: Get tracks 1-9 or “Ghosts I” for free.
Older fans and converts: $5 for 320kbps high quality download.
Old school fans with no money: $10 full CD set
Collectors and hardcore fans: $75 box set in fabric slipcover
Hardcore collectors: $300 ultra-deluxe limited edition

2. Creative commons license: Reznor emblazoned his IP with a Creative Commons license. His reasoning? What’s the value of music? Nada. Can you CREATE value by giving your users something valuable? Yes.

3. Reznor has made fans into users. This is not the first time he’s done this. He came out with a remix project even when he was with Interscope. As I’ve argued before the value of music is now ZERO, zip. Supply is nearly unlimited while demand remains constant. Anyone who’s ever taken an econ class will recognize that that means that value of music is approaching zero. So how do you monetize? The combination of 1 and 2 above means you’re hitting the consumer AND the prosumer. The consumer is interested in individuality and self expression for his own personal ego. The prosumer is interested for professional gain, even if the CC license does not allow him or her to profit directly off a commercial release. They’re going to blog their remixes, send to friends and other bloggers, and flood the market with free music that is an expression of their own artistry. Much like a website, NIN fans are now users. UPDATE: NIN has sold out of the $300 limited edition package in only 3 days.

Hahaha this made me laugh.

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:11:00 -0500

Someone needs to tell this to my Grandma…

“Atlantic City is one of the most disgusting places in the world,” said Sean Kalish, a 26-year-old lawyer who visits the casinos to play poker. He was standing in a slender peacoat waiting for the Atlantic City bus at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Wednesday. “It’s like Las Vegas got drunk and slept with South Jersey and this is their bastard child.”

What Stanford Learned Building Facebook Apps

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 09:36:25 -0500

Dr. BJ Fogg and Dave McClure taught a class last semester at Stanford on Building Facebook Applications. In 10 weeks, the 80 students had created 50+ applications and in total had over 20 Million installs - with 5 having more than 1 million users. At today’s Graphing Social Patterns conference, BJ and his two teacher assistants shared 10 tips they learned from the experience. Here they are:

It’s never too late to create a winning app
Simplicity & clarity are key to app success
Aim for speed & flexibility in launch and iterations
Community cooperation leads to success (in other words, the most successful students shared the most)
Individual opinion about apps are worthless, you need to get out there and see what happens
Copying success is a cheap / fast way to succeed
Metrics do matter, but today’s tools are too weak
You CAN learn to create a winning app
Success comes from the CHAOS / CONTROL Cycle
Mass Interpersonal Persuasion is finally here

(via ReadWriteWeb)

"The study showed that the volume of blog posts led to future sales, but that large increases in an..."

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 09:30:40 -0500

“The study showed that the volume of blog posts led to future sales, but that large increases in an artist’s Myspace friends had a weaker correlation to sales. According to the study, if 40 or more blog posts were made before an album’s release sales ended up being three to four times times the average for both indie and major releases. If blog posts crossed 250, album sales rose to six times the average regardless of label.”

- NYU Study from Oct 2007 via hypebot

Just sayin’, music blogs are neat… :)
(via fascinated)

Interview with myself and Abby over at Darrenherman.com

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 09:43:00 -0500

Abby and I were interviewed for the first in a 12 part interview series for Darren Herman’s “CEO and Founders Series”, a special collective leading up to the release of Darren’s new book Coloring Outside the Lines to be released on March 12th.

For those of you who don’t know Darren, he’s an entrepreneur himself and the founder of the in-game advertising firm IGA Worldwide. He’s currently at Media Kitchen, heading up their digital strategy.

I’ve posted an excerpt of the interview here, for the full text check it out on Darren’s blog:

“2. What are you currently up to? If entrepreunering (my word), tell me about your startup.

Well, where Haystack is now and where we started are two different animals. 2 years ago we launched a music social networking site all about connecting passionate music fans to new music, through trusted sources. We called them Tastemakers. We wanted to bring the John Cusack character from High Fidelity, the guy behind the record store counter, to the web. The idea was that if people thought that a guy like Darren Herman (yikes!) had great taste in music, they could go to your profile on Haystack, see what you had in your playlist, and listen to it right there.

As we continued to grow Haystack, we realized that no one destination was going to be able to able to reach the dominance of sites like Myspace. We asked ourselves how we could future proof destination-based music marketing and still allow an artist to reach the targeted masses that so desperately were seeking their music. In our view, the ad supported music model of the future was one that would an enable an artist, brand or label to float with the user. In mid 2007, we created The Haystack Network, which is now our primary product to address that need. To date, we’ve aggregated publishers representing over 42MM monthly unique visitors that provide ad space on their website to serve viral widgets containing music sponsored by advertising. The widgets themselves can be spread to individual users’ Myspace, Facebook and social networking pages and we can centrally control the release of both music and ad campaigns on an asset ID level.

Advertisers love it, because they can reach users in a real way, paired with the music they’re already looking for. Artists are happy because those advertisers sponsor the distribution of their music to sites they would never be found on otherwise. And, the publishers love it because they’re getting paid premium CPMs for the placements.

3. Why are you doing this? You could be doing so many other things in the world, what about this particular idea strikes you?

We’re doing this first and foremost because we love music, love helping others find music, and love the excitement of being young entrepreneurs growing a business. Every single person on the Haystack team has some background in music (both on the business and performance side). Whether or not it’s through the destination or through Haystack’s distributed widget platform, ultimately what we’re doing is helping to bridge the gap between artist and fan, and enabling advertisers to reach users in a targeted way. We believe that distributed models are the future of the web and we’re excited about advances that will bring further portability to the content we’re distributing in the future. That just means we’ll have even more ways of helping people find music in the places that they already exist, on and offline.

4. All startups should be addressing a problem in the market. What is that exact problem and how are you solving it?

Artists spend a lot of time building destinations. Whether thats on Myspace, iMeem, iLike, Last.fm, or even Haystack, they make a very large investment on building out a central home for their fans to find their music and listen to it. But the fans themselves are fickle. Recent news suggests traffic on sites like Myspace and Facebook are declining as users shift from new hot website to new hot website. We want to enable an artist with the means to future proof against that and build portable applications that can live anywhere. That way, when their fans move off of a destination they can take that music and promote it wherever or however they please. And ditto for the advertiser that’s getting the benefit of riding along with an artist.”

Deal Journal: Sprint Nextel: Officially a 'Deal From Hell'

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 08:53:00 -0500

Oh that hurts, Sprint. Despite aggressive pricing cuts yesterday that now place them as the lowest priced carrier - undercutting even T-Mobile, the WSJ has a new story up today detailing something we armchair economists already knew: the Sprint-Nextel merger is a failure.

The company yesterday reported a net loss of $29.45 billion, thats more than the company is worth, they have a market cap of $25 billion. And yes, most of it is due to an additional writedown of $29.7 billion. And I thought I had it bad with LVLT.

Run for the top of the hill Sprint longs, after they have to dismantle all of their cell towers and sell them at auction to Verizon, it’ll be the only place you’ll get service! Deal Journal - WSJ.com : Sprint Nextel: Officially a ‘Deal From Hell’

What happens when you can't count past four?

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:17:54 -0500

What happens when you can't count past four?:

nostrich:

The New Yorker article I linked to earlier made brief mention of the Mundurukú tribe, that Dehaene and Pierre Pica studied recently (2004),

The Mundurukú … have words for numbers only up to five. (Their word for five literally means “one hand.”) Even these words seem to be merely approximate labels for them: a Mundurukú who is shown three objects will sometimes say there are three, sometimes four.

This is something I only briefly looked at when it was news in 2004, but it’s rather an interesting language. (Rather similar to the Pirahã’s language, which Dan Everett did some incredible research on some time ago, in terms of regionality and oddity — Language Log has covered this extensively.)

Anyway, this Guardian article from 2004 provides a nice starting point if you’re interested in the Mundurukú language.

From there, you can read the Pierre Pica, et al., article if you have a subscription (here, if you don’t), as well as a piece by Rochel Gelman and Randy Gallistel, “Language and the Origin of Numerical Concepts” (that one’s free).

Study Sees Digital Music Shakeout

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:47:00 -0500

“London-based research firm Point Topic said that, in a global sector that has more than 498 digital-download services operating in more than 40 markets, digital music services with robust business models are expected to survive by being acquired by the major digital music players while the weak ones collapse.

Among the major digital music companies Point Topic said are expected to embark on an acquisition spree are Nokia, Microsoft and RealNetworks, operator of U.S.-based subscription-funded service Rhapsody.”

Study sees digital music shakeout

ruhi: Haven’t seen a better picture today!

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:58:56 -0500

ruhi:

Haven’t seen a better picture today!

The Top 10 Music Social Networks | Independent Music Marketing Resources at MaxLowe.net

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:49:07 -0500

The Top 10 Music Social Networks | Independent Music Marketing Resources at MaxLowe.net