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.
Category: Biz
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.
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.
Web Video Viewers Logging More Hours
This story is from the market research firm, eMarketer.com. It is a very interesting look at current web video viewing habits. The poll measured web video viewing habits for July ’07. Notice that 45% of the respondents polled watched music videos, which is an increase from metrics previously released by other research organizations.
U.S. Web video ads seen up to $4.3 bln in 2011: study
NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. spending on Internet video advertising will grow at a fast clip in the next four years to an estimated $4.3 billion as users make Web video a regular habit, research firm eMarketer said on Wednesday. That compares with an…
My Digital Life Conference at the Jacob Javits Center
I checked out the My Digital Life expo at New York's Jacob Javits Convention Center today. It was pretty cool if you're a video game fanatic. Companies ranging from Microsoft, Dell, Electronic Arts, Toshiba and Gateway were on hand, all with their high powered PC's running a wide range of game systems. I'm not much of a gamer, but I did take a bunch of photos just to show some of the intense game systems that are out there right now.