http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/02/15/sites-that-will-help-save-you-money/?awesm=tnw.to_1DLbE

http://mashable.com/2012/02/13/grammys-social-tv-stats/

THAT’S the power of music!

Enough with the hogwash about how the Internet killed the music business. People care more about music than even sports, which are supposedly all about participation.

Read this article, look at the graphics, it’s brief and easily comprehensible.

The bottom line is we’re sitting on a gold mine. People are engaged with music, they’ve got opinions, they care. The Internet has allowed fans to become ever closer to musicians, the gap has closed.

The public has turned the music business topsy-turvy. It hasn’t eviscerated it so much as realigned it. Doesn’t matter what the fat cats say, nor traditional media, it all comes down to what the people think.

P.S. The Grammys may have forgiven Chris Brown, but not the public, most of the comments on social media were negative! Meanwhile, he appeared on the telecast twice. Shows that Ken Ehrlich and CBS are out of touch.

–
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
–
http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz
–
If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter,
http://www.lefsetz.com/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1

Excerpt from Bob Lefsetz about what he learned from the Grammys on Sunday night:

So what did we learn?

1. Have a social media presence. Just like Twitter and Facebook drove up the Grammy ratings to 1984 levels, their second best ever, interacting where your fans are will enhance your career.

2. Ignore the haters. They come with the territory. If you’re too afraid to be beaten up online, close your account, don’t play, go to your psychiatrist and cry. Behind a cloak of anonymity, without knowing the people they’re tearing down, the hoi polloi is vicious. If you take it personally, you’ve missed the point. See it as jealousy. The want what you’ve got, even if you don’t think what you possess is so damn hot. They’re angry where they’re at and you’re the scapegoat. Laugh about it.

3. Make it easy. If the Grammys had been simulcast throughout the U.S. the ratings would have been even higher. I felt left out during the east coast feed. My e-mail was aflutter, Tweetdeck was raging, and I couldn’t play. Furthermore, the whole damn world’s a spoiler alert. We live online. If you think people can avoid the results, you live in a vacuum.

4. Don’t put money first. That’s why CBS insisted on tape delay. Believing only during prime time could they charge premium prices for advertising. It’s all about the franchise. Build it and they will come. Do you think advertisers complain that the Super Bowl is aired in the afternoon on the west coast and they want a discount? Of course not! They know everybody’s tuned in.

5. There are a limited number of franchises. There’s only one Grammys and one Oscars. Forget about competition, build it and buff it and they will come. The Grammys should add another event. Maybe a nomination special wherein what the public votes for gets a chance at winning a Grammy. Instead of being beholden to CBS, the Grammys should pull the ancient TV network into the future. Music leads online, don’t expect a TV network worried about theft of its content to get it. The more viewers you’ve got, the more money you’ve got.

6. All publicity is not good publicity. That guy in Foster The People looked like a dork and sang even worse, I felt positively towards the act before, now I can see their talent is limited. As for Adam Levine… If you can’t sing, stay off the stage.

7. Fight for your right to do it your way. The Civil Wars got a minute, but doing their own song acoustically paid more dividends than those garnered by anybody playing by the rules, agreeing to do a medley with an act they had little in common with, if anything at all.

8. Less is more. Who made a bigger impression last night, Adele or Nicki Minaj? Who sold more records? It’s about music. It goes in the ears, not the eyes.

The old paradigm is gone. History. Public policy may still be driven by corporations, but entertainment is owned by the public. If you think you’re above the audience, you’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’.

I had a great time watching the Grammys last night.

But it wasn’t the show.

But the behind the scenes conversation. Not with some dressed up airhead interviewing celebs spouting vapidities, but with the vast unwashed online. Some hating, some loving, some with perceptive insight and all spreading the word, retweeting thoughts to the farthest reaches of the Internet, to the point where no one was unaware of what was happening at the Grammys.

And this is a good thing.

Not just a few things, but everything about the book and the book business is transformed by the end of paper. Those that would prefer to deny this obvious truth are going to find the business they love disappear over the next five years.

The book itself is changed. I’m putting the finishing touches on a manifesto I hope to share soon, and I found myself writing differently because I understood that the medium that was going to be used to acquire, consume and share the book was different.

The first change in the creation of the ebook is that there is no appropriate length. Print books are bounded on two sides–they can’t be too short, because there’s a minimum price that a bookseller needs to charge to make it worth stocking. At the same time, a book can’t be too long or ornate, because there’s also a maximum price that readers are willing to pay (and a maximum weight we’re willing to haul around).

None of these boundaries exist in ebooks. As a result, we get blog posts, (which are a form of writing that was virtually unknown ten years ago–personal, short, helpful non-fiction that’s serialized over time), 1000 page zombie novels, beautifully illustrated and interactive apps and everything in between.

[Aside: how come we don't call blog posts, "really short, free, ebooks"? I'm not being facetious--what makes something a book? The length? The paper? The money? I don't think we know yet.]

We’ve gone from a very simple taxonomy of classifying (and thus creating) the thing we call a book to one that’s wide open and undetermined. This is unsettling to anyone in the media business–we know how long a movie is supposed to be, how much music goes on a record, etc. And now, because the wrapper is changed, so is the product.

The second change is that ebooks connect. Not so much on the Kindle platform (yet) but certainly in PDF and HTML, we see that it’s almost an insult to the reader to create a non-fiction ebook that fails to include links to other voices and useful sources. Not only are the links there, but the writer needs to expect that the reader will actually click on them. A little like being a playwright while knowing that in the middle of the performance, the audience may very well pick up the phone and chat or tweet or surf based on what’s going on onstage.

Beyond these two elements of what makes a book a book, there’s a fundamental change in the way ebooks are being consumed. Paper meant that a book was very much a considered purchase–more expensive, more time consuming, involving shipping or shlepping, together with long-term storage. With a ninety-nine cent ebook (or, as is the majority–if we count the web, with a free one), not only is the ‘purchase’ an impulse act, but the number of titles consumed is going to skyrocket.

The consumption of free (or nearly free) ebooks is more like browsing through a bookstore or library and less like purchasing and owning a book. As a result, there will be significantly more unread titles, abandoned in mid-sentence. Think blogs, not Harry Potter.

As soon as paper goes away, so do the chokepoints that created scarcity. Certainly we’re already seeing this with the infinite shelf space offered by the digital bookstore. Hard for the layperson to understand, but for decades, the single biggest benefit a publisher offered the independent writer was the ability to get the book onto the shelves of the local store.

The entire sales organization at the publisher (amplified by the publicity department and the folks who do cover design and acquisition) is first and foremost organized around getting more than its fair share of shelf space. When my mom ran the bookstore at the museum in Buffalo, there were sales reps in her store every single day. And of course, for every book that came in, one had to go out, so it wasn’t an easy sale.

Publishers cared so much about shelf space that they made bookstores a remarkable offer: don’t pay for the books. We’ll bill you and if you haven’t sold the book in two months, don’t pay the bill, just send the book back. In other words, books were (and still largely are) a guaranteed sale for bookstores. That’s how Barnes and Noble got to build such big stores–they were financed by publishers who took all the risk.

Of course, if there’s infinite shelf space (as there is for ebooks), ALL of this is worthless.

Previously, I’ve written about the economics of substitution and the inevitable drop in the price of backlist non-fiction and fiction and just about anything for which there is an acceptable substitute. Since bits aren’t scarce (remember, this is a post about the death of paper), it’s extremely difficult to charge a premium for an ebook that has a substitute. The vast majority of books published do have substitutes, of course, so the price is going to fall.

Summary: flip scarcity with abundance and everything changes.

Article by seth godin

Seth Godin is the founder of The Domino Project and has written twelve books that have been translated into more than thirty languages. Every one has been a bestseller. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything.

I’ve seen too many people I care about die from them. I walk on eggshells around friends who abuse them because I want them to stop eating pills like skittles and risking death so easily and carelessly (it’s not just the amounts that kill but the mixtures).

Somehow in rap it became cool to mix pills–chemical cocktails. My guess is when it became too risky for the d boys to sell coke and crack, they switched to weed, pills, and lean so it became easy and cheap (accessible) to get high.

I remember being close to BG when he had a full blown heroin addiction. I remember climbing in his Mercedes with him when he was rocking back and forth needing a fix as we hurled down I-10 dodging in and out of traffic at a speed that humbled me. I thought for sure I was going to die that day.

I remember watching a friend of Tupac’s, at my loft in NY, eat a handful of pills like candy and having to explain to David Banner (new to the rap industry) the ugly side of the industry and his heroes. That sucked.

I sat on a tour bus with Proof in Atlanta and listened to him almost cry about how he felt everyone around Eminem was draining him and how he (Em) turned to Vicodin and Oxycontin to cope. I guess I’m not giving up any secrets here, the tattoos on Em’s arms speak volumes to his past addictions. Hopefully passed. It sure upset Proof. I had no access to Em at that point to know what he was going through, just hoped his team would step in and solve the problem if he was unable to do so himself.

I’ve lost so many industry friends to drugs. By the time they die, we’re no longer speaking because we’ve fought so much over them going to rehab. With BG, I was willing to catch a kidnapping charge to get him into rehab–a Judge beat me to it. A Judge didn’t beat me to Pimp C. Death did. We hadn’t spoken in 3 months when he died over an argument about his drug use…wish I caught a kidnapping charge over dragging him to rehab. I just couldn’t take the 5am phone calls from him anymore, high as a kite. And he was publicly acting a fool.

So when Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, and Whitney Houston died, I saw it a bit differently than the rest of humanity. I saw it as senseless and sad, but blamed those around the stars for not doing more, the way I blame myself for not doing more. I know how hard it is. I see the industry facilitate stars’ whims daily. I’ve seen labels, lovers, and family members buy drugs for artists. I’ve seen and heard the excuses. Hell, I’ve made excuses for my artist friends. It’s our fault. When we see them spiraling out of control, it’s up to us to help stop it. We won’t be able to every time, but at least we can try.

My newest artist just said to me “all they wanted from Whitney was to get money and eat off her.” It’s so much deeper than that. How do I explain to a new artist that he’s going to feel what she may have felt if he’s lucky enough to ever get that famous? There’s something to look forward to…

And then there are the outsiders….how do I explain to my Mom why Whitney died? Why her entourage may have put more time into cleaning up her room after her death to protect her image than was put into cleaning her up and fighting her demons with her? If her demons could even be conquered….

I guess I am anti drug. But it’s because no one in my world seems to be able to do them recreationally. And it’s the mixing of them that’s scary…. And it’s such a preventable death. At least when the stars pass, they are finally at peace. Problem is, the rest of us are left here to deal with the loss.

Wendy Day
Rap Coalition
www.WendyDay.com
www.About.me/WendyDay
@RapCoalition (follow me on Twitter)

My newest eBook THE KNOWLEDGE TO SUCCEED: HOW TO GET A RECORD DEAL can be found at Amazon and iTunes. Click here: http://ow.ly/6KKi3

“Who I am is who I want to be!”
“Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”

http://bit.ly/zfi12X

Apparently, he was chosen by Sean What’s His Name of Napster fame to paint a wall mural at the Facebook offices in the early days of Facebook. He hated the idea of FB, but was so impressed with Sean that he agreed to do it.

He was given the choice between FB stock or $60,000 and even though he says he needed the money, he chose the stock. His gut told him Sean was onto something….

The recent IPO puts David Choe’s net worth somewhere between $100 million and $500 million. Anyway, he was interviewed on Howard Stern on 2.7.12, and while I’m not sure I believe EVERYTHING he is saying to be true, it’s a very interesting interview….

http://bit.ly/zfi12X

It’s 6 parts. I got through all 6 last night…something I NEVER do….it was that interesting.

This isn’t something you want to pull up at work or with young kids around you. He kicks it off talking about jerking off in a Japanese prison and goes on from there….lol

Pretty amazing interview of a guy with a fascinating life. Made me feel stupid about all the time I spend at home playing on my iPad or watching TV….

Wendy Day
Rap Coalition
www.WendyDay.com
www.About.me/WendyDay
@RapCoalition (follow me on Twitter)

My newest eBook THE KNOWLEDGE TO SUCCEED: HOW TO GET A RECORD DEAL can be found at Amazon and iTunes. Click here: http://ow.ly/6KKi3

“Who I am is who I want to be!”
“Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”

“Despite the reproduction of press releases in mainstream media, despite the reviews of said album in same, no one really cares. That’s the dirty little secret of being a classic rocker, you’re done, you’re toast, only people your age have any desire to hear your new music, and most of them don’t either. Which is why you’ve got to make it easy.”

This is true for the older rappers as well! The ones whose careers peaked in the 90s. Kids today (the majority of music consumers) aren’t buying their music, and fans like me want to hear their hits from the 90s and remember the great era of rap that was then….not now.

So while you read Bob Lefsetz’s blog (reprinted in the previous post on my blog), know that while he’s talking about McCartney, it’s ditto for rappers whose careers have already peaked and are now declining. You have fans, find them. Stop hitting the mainstream. That’s no longer your niche. You’re wasting your money and your time. You’ll find some new fans, but it won’t warrant the expense…

I’m just sayin’!

Sorry if this was an “ouch!” moment….

Nobody gives a shit about his standards album anyway.

Despite the reproduction of press releases in mainstream media, despite the reviews of said album in same, no one really cares. That’s the dirty little secret of being a classic rocker, you’re done, you’re toast, only people your age have any desire to hear your new music, and most of them don’t either.

Which is why you’ve got to make it easy.

Somehow, these acts still put money in front of exposure. When their problem is just the opposite. Believe me, McCartney’s grosses are not going to go down if his music is on Spotify, just the opposite. People know the legendary cuts and want to hear them live. But they don’t want to hear the new music. That’s time to pee, to get popcorn, an indulgence by the oldsters that they tolerate, just as long as it’s only a couple of songs. And how do you change this? By making good new music and making it available to people.

Hell, if I contacted BigChampagne I’d probably find out no one’s bothering to torrent the McCartney covers album, desire is just that low.

But some might give it a spin if it was easily available to stream on Spotify, which is not like forcing me to go to a site I’m unfamiliar with because you made an exclusive publicity deal with them to use an antique player to hear the songs. The advantage of Spotify is everything’s in one place. So people go there and take risks.

And what’s great about Spotify is it kills piracy. Isn’t that what got us into this mess? But by putting your stuff behind a pay wall, by making people buy it to hear it, you’re hanging on to an old model and encouraging those who care to steal. We don’t want to buy anything without checking it out first. Kind of like buying a car, would you do so without a test drive?

You’ve got to look to endgame. Not the tiny streaming payments of today. Not only is Spotify the first service to negatively impact piracy (it doesn’t pay to take the time to steal to check out new albums anymore), as we move to a mobile world more people will pay for the service, as it is, uptake has increased.

I give a shit about music. I think artists should be paid. I think that recording revenue is just part of the total pie. I think the more artists rail against Spotify the more they demonstrate their ignorance and greed. What, do they all use BlackBerrys and refuse to use iPads too?

The public embraces the new when you make it good and easy. Convenience is something people pay for each and every day. Hell, that’s what blew up MP3s to begin with! The ability to hear what you wanted whenever you wanted in your digital jukebox, ultimately in iTunes which synched with iPods. All those millions of iPods sold, if you think they were filled with paid tracks, you’re dreaming.

Can we all get our heads out of the sand and live in the present? Can we all agree that the only path to the future is to get ahead of the consumer and corral him? This is how the iPhone killed the BlackBerry. Four and a half years ago, only Apple zealots needed iPhones, now everybody needs an app phone.

Many customers don’t even know they need Spotify yet. The service is still growing. Isn’t that great! Because once everybody knows about something and no longer cares you’ve got Nokia, or Palm, and you’re toast. Spotify’s got room to grow. But if Luddites like Paul McCartney keep crippling the service they’ll make good and sure that music is free in the future.

P.S. For the umpteenth time, I’ve got no financial interest in Spotify, I own no shares in Apple, I’m just championing what I think is great, the same way you trumpet a band you love. And Apple’s sales have proven iPhones and iPads are not niche, and neither are streaming music services. We’ve all got to start somewhere, whether it be Google or Facebook. The way acts are going they’re gonna push back the future of digital music consumption for years, sheerly out of ignorance.

Spotify hits 3m subscribers to improve conversion rate: http://on.ft.com/ymlT4l

–
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
–
http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz
–
If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter,
http://www.lefsetz.com/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1

The Power Of Music. By, Bob Lefsetz

“An In-Depth Case Study on the Pretty Lights + BitTorrent Partnership”:

http://bit.ly/wcvMss

In a world where SoundScan sets a minimum price to appear on their chart is the most valuable perch number one at the Pirate Bay?

Let’s start with what everybody seems to be interested in, money. What’s the best way to make a lot of money?

The major labels knew how. They controlled radio and retail, not allowing anybody else to play. And they reaped all the rewards.

To this day it’s almost impossible to get your record on the radio if you’re an indie act, and in the days of physical retail, if you weren’t aligned with a major, you could never get paid, no matter how many units you sold.

This is the game the content industries are trying to cement in stone with SOPA/PIPA. It’s got nothing to do with theft/copyright infringement. That’s a smoke screen. They want control.

And online, they’ve lost it.

Pretty Lights, an act with no label who answers only to himself built an empire on giving his music away for free.

So what would you rather have? The revenue from sales of an album or a career where you could go on the road and make millions, over a hundred thousand bucks a night?

This is what the Web has empowered, this is what the content industries want to stop.

Read every word of the above article.

And when you’re done with that, read this press release from the Pirate Bay:

http://bit.ly/yA6A42

I’m not saying I endorse the Pirate Bay’s position, but it does raise the question of the cleanliness of the copyright holders’ position but more importantly it asks whether it is truly possible to shut the operation down.

I’m not saying we should shrug our shoulders and give up fighting piracy, I’m just saying we should fight infringement with business solutions. It’s hard to argue against piracy when one has to wait months to rent the DVD or stream a file of a film now playing in theatres. Why? Why not allow me to pay for the privilege?

And allow me to pay for streaming music services, where I can hear what I want on demand instead of having to find a BitTorrent seed, download the file, decompress it and then import it into iTunes just to find I don’t even like it.

In the old days, Pretty Lights would have to sign with a major label, where he would be beholden to their release schedule and creative input and would get a tiny share of any revenue accumulated.

But in the old days, a major label never would have signed Pretty Lights. Because radio didn’t play electronic music, there was no market for it.

But the Web demonstrated that there’s a huge market for electronic music, that’s what blew the scene up, the easy availability of files and the rabid discourse about the music and concerts.

This is the new world.

And if you don’t think it’s better than the old world, you’re one of those rich media companies as opposed to an individual, who has no trouble paying for what he truly wants if it’s delivered in a fashion that accommodates him.

Also, you’ve got to know where in the food chain to charge!

Like that old joke goes…

The baby bull says to the papa bull, “Let’s run down the hill and screw one of those cows!”

And the papa bull replies…”Let’s walk down and screw them all.”

Don’t be blinded by the old model. The greater riches for the greater number of artists and people is in the new world, undeniably.

–
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
–
http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz
–
If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter,
http://www.lefsetz.com/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1

“Just consume, don’t produce, don’t share.”

The content industries don’t want a distinction between what’s legal and illegal, that bit them in the ass already, with the Home Recording Act of 1992, wherein it was declared legal to make your own mixtapes, even share them. That horrified them. So they changed their game, they decided to go after the sharing itself.

That’s what SOPA and PIPA are all about.

And the way they’re going to achieve their goal is to put the burden of policing upon Google and Yahoo and the other portals/search engines that provide links. If the cost of policing is high enough, they’ll just outlaw the practice. Entirely.

There’s a great analogy at the beginning of this clip. A story about a bakery in Brooklyn that allowed customers to bring in their kids’ drawings so they could be imprinted upon cakes. Only one problem, kids like to draw cartoon characters, the ones they see in movies and on television. And this is copyright infringement. So what did the bakery do? Instead of having someone make a judgment as to the legality of each drawing, they outlawed the practice entirely. Now you can still get an image on your cake, but it has to be one of the authorized ones the bakery provides.

But maybe your kid drew a fish because he likes fish and he’s never even seen “Finding Nemo”. He can’t get his fish on a cake because the bakery is afraid of infringement, they’re not even gonna make that judgment. Google is gonna outlaw links to all sharing because it’s just too damn expensive to figure out what’s legal and what’s illegal. So you’ll just consume pre-approved content, manufactured by the usual suspect music and movie companies. You can’t create your own because it might infringe and Google doesn’t want to make the wrong decision and it takes too much money to make a decision, so you can create your music, but it won’t be findable, the search engine can’t take that risk.

And if you think the above is blown out of proportion, you don’t understand how the content companies think.

They want control. The Internet is their worst nightmare. It allows anybody to create. And under the rubric of preventing you from mixing up your content with theirs, they want to outlaw sharing completely, they don’t want you making music and movies, they just want you to buy theirs. This is the concept of scarcity that made them so much dough, this is the past they’re trying to jet us all back into by crippling the Internet. As Clay Shirky says in this video, they want to “raise the cost of copyright compliance to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs.”

They think we’re dumb. They’ve got no idea the Internet is all about smart. They want us to believe in the nincompoops on “The Jersey Shore”, not some egghead with degrees who’s actually thought about all this and isn’t in it for the short term money and fame.

TED talks are a burgeoning resource. The brand stands for intelligent insight. Take the time out to watch this presentation, you’ll get it, you’ll be horrified, you’ll send it to all your friends.

P.S. You might be unable to do this under SOPA. For fear that you might be sharing copyrighted material, your ability to share at all could be crippled, because it would cost too much for the linking service to determine whether it’s legal to share the content or not.

P.P.S. Read this story: http://bit.ly/z7NLLZ This is what they want, guilty until proven innocent.

–
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
–
http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz
–
If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter,
http://www.lefsetz.com/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1