Yes, it’s been a minute between posts, but I’ve been insanely busy working on projects with my new digital consultancy, Digital Strategy Works.

Netmix has been this pro-hobby, if that makes any sense. I’ve actually been working full time and going to school at NYU for the last 5-years. I graduated in May with a Bachelor Degree in Digital Communications and Media.

While I love writing this blog, it hasn’t been my first priority. I know that shows given the time between posts, but I try my best to update when I can. Given the economic turmoil we’ve faced over the last few years and the demise of the music business as we once knew it, I knew it was important to focus on work first and the hobby second. I always say, you have to have a base from which to work.

Okay, so even though I always say it, I ended up throwing that advice out the window—sort of.

In November, I left my full-time job. Yes, in this economy, I actually LEFT my job! I know. Call me crazy. I’d been working for a web development company in Long Island, but I really missed the New York City digital media and music scene. Long Island just wasn’t where I wanted to be every day. I felt really disconnected from the community. It was time to make a change.

I was passing up so many opportunities making the 3-hour+ commute. I’d been running myself ragged going back and forth. Not only was I missing out on all the nightly Meetup.com events and other entrepreneur and start-up gatherings, I was wearing myself down in the process.

If that wasn’t enough to do, I’d also taken on the side role of Director of Interactive for the National Museum of Hip-Hop. And, along with DJ Ming, Harold Stephan and DJ Chad North, we’ve been running 20dot20, a monthly networking event for the interactive and advertising music industry. Between driving back and forth to Long Island, Netmix, and my other extracurricular activities, I decided to go back to entrepreneurship.

Given my 15-years of web development experience, I thought I might as well just launch Digital Strategy Works and put that knowledge to work. This new addition to the Netmix Media portfolio provides strategy digital media consulting services to individuals, entrepreneurs, start-ups and corporations with a focus on the media & entertainment industry, including music, nightlife, fashion, film and television. We’re building web sites on Wordpress and Drupal, e-commerce platforms on Magento, and mobile applications for Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

It all starts with the planning and execution of a measurable end-to-end digital strategy that makes an impact. In today’s competitive online marketplace, an effective digital strategy is executed across an array of online and mobile applications. This includes nformation architecture and user experience design, creative direction and graphic design, web and mobile development, search engine optimization, e-commerce and monetization, and social media and online marketing. There are so many things to know. Since that’s what we do everyday, we’ve become experts in the field and are passing on that knowledge to you.

Please visit the web site at http://www.digitalstrategyworks.com to read more about Netmix Media’s latest addition. We’re currently offering 2-hours of Wordpress consultation through March 31 for $250.

Just a slight little change this week. We’ve recently added a comment system and moderation tool from the folks at Disqus.com. If you click into a post, you will see the Disqus logo towards the bottom. This should make things more interesting on the pages of Netmix. We’re going to try it out for a few weeks and see how it helps and then post our findings.

In the meantime, any times you see something on Netmix, now you’ll be able to comment on it in an easier and more efficient way. Your participation is integral to the growth of this blog and we hope you’ll contribute something back.

I just came across this blog post on Boston.com’s Metro Desk: Defendant’s lawyer puts on a show in illegal downloading case. Globe staff writer, Jonathan Salzman, describes the courtroom antics, he writes, that “Charles Nesson, the flamboyant Harvard Law School professor defending a college student accused of illegally downloading and sharing music online,” has used to make the case that his client is not responsible for copyright infringement. At the time of this post, there were over 40 comments to the original article. I wanted to share my two cents on the subject, which I posted in the comments section earlier tonight. I’ve fixed a few errors and added a few words to this, but it remains pretty much intact from my original comment.

When someone says that music is not a tangible thing, I tend to disagree. When you can take digital bits of information and move them using a USB drive from one computer to another, although it seems as if you’re moving air, you’re actually migrating a process that thousands of man hours went into creating.

Digital music is a “physical” product. When we think of the CD, we think that is the physical product, when in all actuality, it is simply the transport mechanism, not unlike an MP3 device is today. I believe that if I make a song and it is converted into digital format, then it is a product that is my property. If I choose to share that property with others as “open source,” then that’s my choice. If I choose to restrict access to my product, that’s also my choice. The copyright laws in this country protect that choice.

What most people don’t think about is this: One day you download someone’s music file and then place it on your computer. You allow open access to your computer through a file sharing network. Others then come and take and share that file through their computers. All of a sudden, that file has been downloaded a million times, usurping the ability of the content owner to generate revenue based on their production of that music. The next day, you write a blog post about that music, then someone copies your blog post and puts it on a hundred web sites, which they are monetizing with Google’s Adsense program. You get angry and say, “that’s unfair! I wrote that article about that song that I downloaded…for FREE!” And, the cycle continues.

What happens then? How do you generate revenue? Well, most people think today that the creative process is really just a driver for sales of tickets to the live performance and a piece of your life in the form of merchandise and other stuff that people will buy, and therefore support your life. In today’s world, if you’re a musician and you’re not monetizing your life in other ways than just through the sale of your music, then you’re not very entrepreneurial.

Sell the right to have dinner with you and talk about music with one of your most ardent fans. Provide inside access to a recording session and sell the right to be there to a fan. Let that word of mouth about how cool you are translate into more people who are interested in you and then watch that word of mouth, viral marketing strategy take off. Get innovative.

Stop depending on music sales, which were NEVER your bread and butter anyway. The less we sell music, the more we sell access to our world. We’ve always given music to radio and they’ve profited handsomely by only paying ASCAP and BMI, but not the other entities that are arguing they should be paid today. If you want money, go after radio, who play your music and play commercials in between every song, or go after a file sharing networks profits from advertising around your music. But once you start suing your constituency, you tell them they are not valuable to you. That they can be tossed into the cesspool at any time for simply wanting to support the music by freely sharing it unencumbered.

It’s tragic that the major labels continue to sue their way into oblivion. All that money gone to lawyers, when it could have gone back into the business of music and generating new pathways. I can totally understand the desire for control, but haven’t we learned that there will always be leaks? Haven’t we learned that it’s so hard to control human behavior? You can try to kill all the mice in a house, but one always gets away, only to start a new family somewhere else.

There is surely another way to embrace and not destroy your audience. A way to give them what they want, when they want it, and find other ways to profit from their use of your copyright. Look at companies like Wordpress. They have found a freemium model of giving away the software, but providing fee based support services around that model.

I know some labels are starting to become more like boutique agencies that are hired by their artists, instead of artists being signed to them. The better they do, the better the artist does and everyone wins in the end. The new paradigm that being a label isn’t really being a product provider, it’s become being a service provider. That’s where the world is headed and these stupid lawsuits are just postponing the inevitable demise of the old model.

If you took all the money and invested it into the service model, which is what Live Nation and Ticketmaster are sort of doing, that could be (a decent) solution. Hire your label, not the other way around. Say, I don’t want to be signed, I want to hire you to be my label and work for me. If they don’t, then you can fire them and move onto another group more to your liking.

There you have it! My take on what ails the industry and a possible other way of looking at what it means to be a recording artist today, and why you have to change they way you think about the label system. The old way is dead. There’s no looking back. The new paradigm is “software as a service.” or SAAS. Giving software away for free and providing services around that. Music companies need to think about how software companies are giving away the product, while providing value on the other end. If Wordpress, Movable Type, Jomla!, Drupal, and a ton of other Open Source companies can do it, why can’t we do it in the music business?

– by Tony Z.

In these troubled economic times, it’s a great opportunity to save some money and be green at the same time. Instead of driving to the airport, I figured taking the Westchester Bee Line bus service to the Westchester airport would serve to accomplish both.

The bus stop is actually just across the street from my apartment, so convenience played a big part in my decision making process.

Taking the bus also gave me the opportunity to upgrade my Wordpress iPhone application, which is how I posted this blog entry.

It’s amazing to be able to publish on the fly. I can’t wait til the iPhone gets video, which will make it possible to do more with video updates while mobile. I’ve become my own media center of sorts. An amazing thing when it used to be you had to have a camera crew and broadcast signal to do what you can do today for a fraction of the cost.

This week I am finishing up a final paper for my last credit at NYU. I decided to write about how Wordpress has changed the game in Web publishing and the impact i have felt since migrating Netmix onto the platform.

On the way to Winter Music Conference 2009, but first, a little discussion on video blogging.

Beatportal.com, the daily blog journal run by the folks at Beatport.com, where kind enough to run my latest Netmix Global House Podcast in the Community feed section. You can check out the posting here.

Many companies are now looking to users to generate content for their blogs. Hiring bloggers is an expensive proposition against revenues. If you’re traffic doesn’t cover the cost of the hosting and content production, then it’s smart to look to the user community to develop content for a web site. We may be doing that ourselves very soon!

On another note, we’re moving away from Podpress for Wordpress as a Podcasting plug-in. It seems the developer is no longer supporting the application since 2007. As far as we can tell, Podpress has become extremely problematic, conflicting with more recent plug-ins, to the point that it breaks the plug-in repository in your Wordpress admin. We found the new Podcasting plug-in. When used in conjunction with a Feedburner_Feedsmith plug-in, we think it works quite nicely.

Podcasting supports iTunes, but it does not have links to the other podcasting web site featured through Podpress. It also does not host a download link with its player, nor does its player show the number of downloads. A bit disappointing, yes, but do I really need to tell people how many podcasts have been downloaded? Or, is that just a bit of ego on my part? I’ll go with the ego and forgo displaying the number for now. As long as I know what it is and that number is in overall subscriptions, I’m going to say that’s more important to Netmix growth over the long term.

That being said, my workaround was to simple. I added a text link under the Podcasting player provided by Feedburner to allow anyone to subscribe to my podcast feed. That way, it will ping users who have subscribed to the podcast with updates, in the same way that Podpress functions.

In a nutshell, I think we’ll be better off for the time being. Feedburner is quite a powerful way to organize and distribute feeds. For Netmix, that’s another great analytics tool, which compliments our Google Analtyics and GetClicky accounts.

If you’ve stumbled across this post, Netmix Media is the parent of Netmix.com. The company consults to media & entertainment organizations on web strategy, including blog and site development, rich media application development, Internet marketing and promotion and a host of other services. Contact Netmix Media if you need help with your web site or blog.

Many of you may be wondering why I’ve been so quiet over the last few weeks? The answer: lot’s of reasons!

Okay, let’s start with the fact that my Wordpress blog broke. That’s right, it broke after I tried using a plug-in from a 3rd party developer to backup my blog’s database. After I ran the backup program, I couldn’t (for the life of me) login to the admin to post anything new. Oh, I tried upgrading again. When that didn’t work, I started my online search for an answer. One I actually never found.

I spoke to php/mysql guy and he wasn’t sure why I was getting “500 Internal Server Error” warning from my server. He suggested I simply add an asterisk after the file name of a plug-in in the plug-in folder to see if one was breaking the site. Sure enough, the first one I changed, “database backup,” was the culprit. Well, at least I thought so. It did allow me to finally log into the administration tool to look around and see what else was wrong.

I went to check the plug-in administration tool, which quickly returned another 500 Server Error. “Huh?”, I thought. Maybe there was another plug-in acting up. I perused the window of my Fetch FTP client to see which one would I choose in the hopes that it would bring everything back to life. I added an asterisk at the end of the filename for the Podpress folder and voila, entry was granted! Podpres is an important plug-in that handles podcasting on the site. I’d received a recent email from someone on Going.com looking for a mix, which said that they couldn’t download from the URL. Now I know why.

While I was trying to fix the issue, my 2 GHZ MacBook Pro–the one StarStyle kindly gave me as a parting gift when they LAID OFF OUR ENTIRE MUSIC DIVISION in December (we’ll get to that later)–went on the fritz after installing OS X 10.5, also known as Leopard. Over the course of the last three weeks, I installed Leopard approximately 10 times after experiencing delays, crashes and other problems. I backed up (very important) and wiped my drive to reinstall. I tried archive and install. I tried everything! You can’t even imagine the frustration. So much lost productivity, especially in the middle of a job search and working on my school projects.

In the middle of the last install, the computer froze at 19 minutes remaining. I shut it down, which was a no no. When I booted it up, the screen showed me the dreaded flashing question mark and folder. A few choice words later, I finally gave up, jumped in my girlfriend’s Honda Accord, and rushed it down to the Genius Bar at the Apple store in the Westchester Mall. Passing off my problems to one of geniuses, I was hoping they’d have some magical solution, but that was too ambitious. I had to settle for sending the computer to Cuptertino for an Apple Care tech to have a look-see. They may have to swap out the the drive he told me.

My optical drive was on the fritz anyway, so I agreed to have that replaced at the same time. Fortunately, to do so is about $300, which is far cheaper than purchasing a new computer altogether. I’m also hoping they grant me some kind of credit for having this problem occur AFTER I installed Leopard, which I’d purchased only three weeks earlier. And, after I called into Apple Tech support and NEVER received a return call from Reggie (ext. 7390). Reggie told me he’d call me back as he’d heard there was an issue with MacBook Pro 2Ghz machines. He said he needed to check in with the engineers to find out more. After four phone calls and left messages, I gave up on Reggie and decided the store might be a better option. Reggie, if you’re reading this, thanks for your excellent customer support.

Now, I have my fingers crossed that I’ll get my work machine back and leave my music computer, which is running absolutely fine on Leopard (it’s a 2.16 Ghz) to my mix show production. Being a technology enthusiast has its ups and downs. Believe me, I’m well aware. Especially, after purchasing Adobe CS3 Design Premium so I could start on building out my new consulting site, Netmix Media. I don’t want that package or Office 2008 on the same machine as my music apps, so I’m biding my time until everything is back to normal.

As for the blog issues with Wordpress plugins, I’ve figured that out too. I learned that there are a few plug-ins that are not playing nice with the latest Wordpress upgrade. Those plug-ins are as follows:

• WP Stats
• WP Stats Widget
• Adsense Manager
• Wordpress Database Backup
• AMM – Amazon Media Management Extension
• All in One SEO Pack
• WP Ajax Edit Comments

Now, these plug-ins may be working for others, but they’re not working for me. I’m going to try to delete and reinstall each to find out which ones have serious issues. For the time being, I’m going to steer clear of these plug-ins, unless someone has any information to the contrary.

With things finally getting back to normal, I can start blogging freely again without worrying about “500 Internal Server Error” issues and the like. Stay tuned for more.