This week, Billboard Magazine reports J/RCA is set to release London's X-Factor winner, Leona Lewis' debut album, "Spirit," next Spring in the U.S.
Author: Tony Zeoli
Tony Zeoli is Founder and CEO of Netmix.com and Radio Station by netmix.® Originally launched in 1995, Netmix was was considered by Billboard Magazine to be the "innovation and advancement of dance music on the Internet." Tony had launched the world's first Internet mix show website featuring the most influential DJs from around the globe. After two-and-a-half decades, Netmix has since evolved into an online station directory and powerful WordPress plugin, Radio Station, for broadcasters and webcasters to manage their statioon's show schedule in WordPress. Tony has been an innovator at the intersection of music and the Internet for the past thirty years in project management, product development, and digital strategy,. He is also the founder and CEO of Digital Strategy Works, a WordPress web design and digital marketing agency. And, Executive Producer of the Asheville House Music Society, an online House Music mix show. Tony is located in Asheville, NC where he loves to mountain bike, hike, and play golf with his son.
The New Deal: Band as Brand
Jeff Leeds from the New York Times reports on "a new type of business relationship based on labels looking past the latest CD sales figures". My concern here--and it's a point the the article makes--is that major record labels are ill equipped and inexperienced to handle an artist's business beyond music sales, marketing and PR and music video production. As record labels based their business on tomorrow's chart numbers, managers and artists realize the labels may not have their best interests at heart. In my experience, when a label is approached by a brand to work their products into a music video, the label is seeking to meet some bottom line, quarterly number. On the other hand, manager's take great care to discuss the appropriate brand partnerships with their artists.
Web triggers Wall Street retreat in music sector
Wall Street is taking record labels to task for lackluster Web sales, spiraling CD revenue and the defections of marquee acts, such as Madonna and Radiohead. Two analysts downgraded Warner Music Group last week, leading to a sharp drop in the company.
If It’s Retail, Is It Still Rock?
As many of you may know (and for those of you who don’t), I spend my days as VP of Music at StarStyle.com, building on of the first, successful efforts to allow fans to identify, bookmark and purchase the products and merchandise they see in music videos. It’s everyone idea, really. We were just the first to bring it all together. With the help of a dedicated music staff who have a wide degree of insight into the music video production process, StarStyle has enabled commerce opportunities for over 50 music videos. In just a few short years, we will have accomplished what many others set out to do, but did not have the tools, technology or vision to accomplish.
This article that appeared in today’s edition of the New York Times (online) talks about the emerging symbiotic relationship between artists and brands. It’s especially important for the dance music industry to take notice, as the genre has been one of the last to adapt relationships with brands. There are a number of reasons for this. Mainly, the dance music industry lacks a coordinated focus to raise its profile in the United States. As the genre continues to support track-based releases instead of artist and song driven music, mainly because its cheap to produce, market and distribute, there are no stories to tell, no artists that transcend the genre, no organized effort to tap into today’s media culture.
Why is this? I don’t have all the answers, but from experience I know that most dance music industry folk lack the business knowledge to develop comprehensive, long term, revenue focused business plans. As a matter of fact, I’ve rarely even seen a dance music company produce a business plan. This gives the genre an air of disorganized organization. A chaotic message to say the least. It’s something that individuals such as I have to bring back to the genre, after stretching out arms into the larger world of pop music and online media. That’s hard to do, when many of the owners of these dance music organizations don’t care to understand where the bigger opportunities lie. They are quite content to control their market share and although they may support others who want dance music to grow and prosper, they’re sitting pretty and would hate to change the status quo.
I hope you’ll take this article as a sign things are changing in the music industry. In order for dance music to benefit, serious conversations and change in business philosophy must take place.
IE users beware: RealPlayer zero-day flaw under attack
Hackers are actively exploiting a zero-day hole in RealNetworks’ RealPlayer media player, a software program installed on tens of millions of Windows computers worldwide.
Moving to new look soon!
So, if you’re wondering why the blog doesn’t look the same as it did in the past, it’s mainly because I accidentally deleted my WordPress Theme that had all the new changes in it. Of course, I didn’t have a back-up, so I have to start from scratch.
I was trying to upgrade my Kubrick WordPress Theme, because there were some incompatibilities with the new WordPress 2.3 release. I found that a group of developers created K2, an upgrade to Kubrick. As I was configuring the K2 theme, I selected it in my administration panel to view how it would change the look of this blog. When I went to select my current theme, I accidentally hit delete. Of course, there is no “warning” that pops up to ask you if you really want to delete, so my theme is gone forever. I called my hosting company, but they won’t retrieve anything from a backup unless they caused the problem.
So, I’m just going to wait out the week, because soon, there will be an entirely new look and feel to the Netmix blog! I’m hoping that the developers I hired to work on it will have it this week for me to enable. It looks really cool and is a step forward. So, stay tuned! Hopefully, we’ll have it up this week.
CNBC Video Report from Digital Music Forum West
Watch this CNBC video report from the Digital Music Forum West. The piece focuses on iLike.com, one of the first music recommendation engines/services to be making money in the Web 2.0 economy.
Microsoft unveils new generation of Zune – CNET News.com
Changes include a complete overhaul of the device’s software and a redesign of Marketplace, which will offer 1 million unprotected songs.Photos: Round two for Zune
Habbo fine-tunes the Superstars of tomorrow with Traxmachine
Virtual world, Habbo Hotel launches Traxmachine, a downloadable software for kids to remix tracks using the samples and loops provided, then enter the remix/mashups in a Habbo contest. Pretty cool use of digital audio production in a virtual world. It keeps kids interested while creating exciting content. I know that there are a few nightclubs in Second Life, where DJs produce mixes externally then stream then into the virtual environment. I think you’re going to see many of these virtual environments use music blended with DJ culture. It’s a perfect fit, whereas DJs are always leading technology as early adopters often do. Pretty cool stuff.
How Engagement Can Add Up
MediaPost’s Video Insider writes about a world beyond cost per click. Cost per engagement (CPM) will be the new metric measuring response in interactive environments. How engagement is measured and what value it delivers is discussed. StarStyle, the company I work for, has been proactive in shaping the cost per engagement methodology. Although we’re an advocate for while leading the field in CPM, it’s still difficult to measure off-site–when your products go viral. There are certain tools in place meant for more traditional CPM tracking that are being hacked together to measure CPE, but reporting products in tools like Google’s Adsense have yet to catch up to new content delivery systems. Doubleclick’s DART Motif advocates for one solution, but it’s cost prohibitive for most small web publishers. There will be other tools available soon, but it’ll take a minute for someone to figure out all the variables and for brand agencies to be confident in the reporting.