Kevin Kelly (The Technium) Wagging the Long Tail of Love

Kevin's stuff is always a must-read" Kevin Kelly -- The Technium.  This came in via Chris Anderson

Meet me at Partnerships 2.0 (Edinburgh)

I will be holding the Keynote at this Scottish Arts Council Event on October 23rd: Scottish Arts Council - Partnerships 2.0.

Partnerships 2.0 will explore how to develop audiences for the arts, film and the wider creative industries by maximising (Web 2.0) technology and new partnerships. This event will be hosted by the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen.

10 Excellent Online Tools to Identify Trends | Rocky Fu's Blog

Good stuff: 10 Excellent Online Tools to Identify Trends | Rocky Fu's Blog.

Terry McBride Speaks on Music 2.0 (London Music Tank event) *via Hypebot

Link: hypebot: Millennials Conference: McBride Speaks. Some high-lights pasted, below, directly from Hypebot - Terry is nailing it!

• Fans are the record companies. Ownership of the song does not lie with the artist or the label or the publishers, but rather the consumer.
• Artists are brands. They may not like the word but that is essentially what they are, and in order to succeed you have to focus on ways of building the brand.
• Amazing technology is available and we should embrace it, build online communities and create opportunities within the digital world.
• We should be selling digital tracks cheaper (the tipping point)......possibly 25 cents. This will dissuade people illegally downloading and you end up making more of a profit from selling a lot of cheap tracks than a few higher priced tracks.
• Make use of metadata (search tags). We are now a society of searchers.
• Explore the concept of feels like free and don’t be afraid to try new things.
• Getting fans involved... Make stems of artist recordings available for fans to create their own versions of artist’s songs. Let fans create band merchandise. Allow fans to make videos and have a competition to see which is the best which can be used as the next music video…Getting fans involved builds the brand and the connection with the artist. It’s economical and extremely beneficial.
• Legislation is not the way to solve the problem. Suing consumers wont make the problem go away.
• Understanding the concept of tribes, millennials have their groups or tribes and within these tribes they will like the same music, clothes etc. Getting early adopters in the tribes liking a band will build exposure.
• In China IP is looked at in a very different way. There music is part of their culture and should be enjoyed by all and not guarded by the creators. They have found ways other than selling CDs to make money from music in Asia, such as live shows, merchandise and ring tones.
• Mobile is a big area that needs to be explored. Asia and India are miles ahead in their mobile technology so are able to consume content differently to Europe and the US.

Read more
Check out my new book Music2.0

Twitter New Music Feed: music micro marketing is here (r u surprised?)

I told you that it was only a matter if time until music feeds show up in Twitter ;). Here's a good start: Twitter / new_music.  Pretty cool how it links to the blogs that play MP3s.... talking about engage not enrage!

Is this the Future of Search? Adding rating, tagging, comments i.e. social tools * via Techcrunch

This is a video you must watch, about potential new search options within Google, below. Here is the link to Techrunch. Very interesting stuff indeed. Add 'play song' or 'watch movie' to the mix and then... well, we all knew that already: Search IS Media. Right.

Update: the Wikia guys just emailed me with this link "Google Tries to Copy Wikia Search" Wikia search is here

BPI: We don't believe that society can allow the free consumption of content to persist

From the BBC's excellent coverage of VirginMedia's plan to enforce the bizarre 3-strikes+out plan presented by the French Olivennes commission (and now under consideration in the UK): "BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor told BBC News that the body was prepared to ... take ISPs to court. "There is a phenomenal amount of piracy out there and we believe that the idea that 95% of content on the net is free is not sustainable. We don't believe that society can allow the free consumption of content to persist"

Now here is the problem, Geoff (and I think you know this): a free society does not have the option of disallowing something that is easy to do and undertaken by a majority of the population IF there is a plausible alternative that could make it legal without harming either party, i.e. just because your economic model of selling copies is broken it does not mean the government should protect you by turning the Internet into a police-state. The solution is a LICENSE to everyone that cares to have it, everyone that wants to offer music, everyone that wants to add music to their offerings. A license that RADIO has had for almost 100 years.  Get on with it and make that happen rather than trying to enforce the unenforceable.

Note: on the subject of so-called piracy check out Matt Mason's book "The Pirates Dilemma"

Update: good comment from MillionMedia here

10 ways that Twitter could make money (via The Industry Standard) - what about Media?

Some good ideas here, many of them applicable to other Web 2.0 businesses: 10 ways that Twitter could make money quickly | The Industry Standard.

I think Twitter could also make money by adding MEDIA to the mix. Imagine some revenue-share licensed content that is available somewhere 'in the cloud' that Twitter users could 'send' to each other. Think Google Reader + Rapidshare + RSS. Anyone?

I found this jpeg below somewhere on the Net when searching for Twitter Media... Interesting.

Read this before you send me a PR pitch please: Jeff Pulver on How To Pitch a Blogger

This comes via Pitchengine, the original is here. I, too have been getting a ton of PR emails from all over the place, so please take now: they will all be ignored unless you follow Jeff's solid advise:
Jeff Pulver on How To Pitch a Blogger - PitchEngine.

You may also want to watch my slideshow on the Future of Public Relations

If you are into the Future of Marketing do yourself a favor and buy Seth Godin's "Meatball Sundae"

Image by gleonhard via Flickr

OK, so I read a lot of books (and... RSS feeds and other shared stuff). But Seth Godin's new book, Meatball Sundae, is one of the best marketing books I have ever gobbled up while on some airplane going from one speaking gig to another. To illustrate: I am pretty ruthless with my high-lighter in one hand, and pen in the other, and by the time I am through I can always tell which book really got me going, simply by the amount of high-lighting I have done (or not, in most cases). 

And my copy of Meatball Sundae was YELLOW, all the way thru. Every single page a real keeper, with morsels such as "Coca Cola is no longer the most popular soft drink in the country. The most popular drink is "Other", none of the above. The mass of choices defeats the biggest hits." 

And: "The 'operating system' for marketers is now fundamentally changing. It doesn't matter how big your market share is today. If your product and your marketing are optimized for the older model, you will be defeated by the relentless tide of the New Marketing and the products and services that are designed for it."

Plus I love his writing: easy to read, to the point, structured paragraphs, clear. So, for once, forget the feeds, the tweets, the podcasts... read a book. This book.

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Magnaglobal: We already know everything so don't contact us

Just got this via Critical Distance chief Jonathan Marks.   Magnaglobal seems to have a very enlightened management - not only do the not accept any unsolicited ideas, they also think that their own people have already had every possible idea under the sun!  Wow. Cool. Success is yours, for sure.

"It is the policy of MAGNA and MAGNA Entertainment not to consider or accept unsolicited ideas, concepts, materials, information, proposals and the like. Any such unsolicited materials will be returned and/or deleted or destroyed, at our option. Our own people are constantly at work developing ideas, and as a result, we have found that ideas and other materials submitted by others have generally been used before or are otherwise familiar to our employees."

Want to get wiser, too? Follow me on Dailywisdoms

A final comment on Sonific

This pretty much says it all (and, well, who should know better than him?): "I've come to the conclusion that revolutions aren't profitable." Kevin Kelly on the demise of Suck.com, a hotwired off-spring, 2001 (found here)

Music Industry Quotes

Good collection here: Music Industry Quotes. My favorite: "I think the second you feel you've gotten somewhere, you're nowhere."

Apple iPhone - the new walled garden ?

Techcrunchit has a good feature on this - food for thought, indeed:

"Geeks and enthusiasts.. lined up enthusiastically on Friday to purchase a device that is completely proprietary, controlled and wrapped in DRM. The irony was lost on some as they ran home, docked their new devices into a proprietary media player and downloaded closed source applications wrapped in DRM. I am referring to the new iPhone - and the new Apple iPhone SDK that allows developers to build ‘native’ applications. The announcement was greeted with a web-wide standing ovation, especially from the developer community. The same community who demand all from Microsoft, feel gifted and special when Apple give them an inch of rope. When Microsoft introduced DRM into Media Player it was bad bad bad - and it wasn’t even mandatory, it simply allowed content owners a way to distribute and sell content from anywhere. Apple has wrapped the iPhone SDK in enough licensing, security controls and right management that it would make the Microsoft Acive Desktop team blush. The phone and platform that is certain to soon take second spot behind Symbian in the smart phone market is also the most restricted and closed. Applications can only be installed from a single source, iTunes, and open source applications and distribution is near impossible. How do you install an iPhone application without iTunes..."

It is surely bizarre that we are willing to accept this from Apple but utterly reject it from everyone else. Thoughts, anyone?  Use the comment box below.

Music 2.0: The new indie model (Via TechNews World)

Andrew Burger from e-commerce news interviewed me for this TechnewsWorld feature on Music 2.0 and it came together quite nicely I think. So feel free to Digg it... or do all that other social media sharing forwarding communing stuff to it ;).

Some snippets: "The use of Web 2.0 technologies in the music industry has changed the market forever, with musicians promoting themselves online and interacting directly with their fan bases...."  "Getting the users involved is the No. 1 trend pretty much everywhere right now' (yes, from me... and more:)  "What I call 'Music 2.0' is now very quickly becoming the mantra for the major labels: a Web-native music ecosystem," Leonhard told the E-Commerce Times. "More and more artists will be able to 'go direct' from the start and engage their fans from the get-go; both for creation as well as for marketing. "Once more than 2 percent of the world is on broadband, this kind of 'networked creation' will explode. Much of it won't be that good, of course, but talent will rise to the top regardless. Bloggers are now like DJs: They pick bands to play and talk about, and become powerful super-nodes," Leonhard noted.

Check out my Music 2.0 video here - and of course don't miss my fabulous Music 2.0 slideshow (best ever;) on Slideshare.

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