ethank

Los Angeles. You buy a house and its a trade off between commute and cost per square foot. I HATE LIVING HERE. Often.

I spend 90 minutes in a car every day, and while I love my house, my commute, gas cost, lack of public transportation, etc sucks. It also forces everyone to be so insular. No one socializes outside of work because we have to drive forever to get home.

I had a glorious three years where I lived .75 miles from work and it made the town better.

How pervasive is Lady Gaga and Justin Beiber and Foster the People, Gotye, Fun., etc, etc.

In summary: very.

OK, I was waiting for a moment to dig up budget sheets.

As of 2010, these are the line items on a budget to release a major label record. The same (minus a few things) applies to indies.

PROMOTION:

Indie promo (paying someone to promote to radio)

Tip sheets (newsletter advertising)

Radio promo contests (those win-it-before-you-can-buy-it and fly-aways)

Radio marketing (ads)

^ the above breaks down by format. Formats are:

Alternative, Active/AOR/Rock, College, AAA, Specialty Format (ie, Urban).

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MISC PROMOTION:

Radio shows (including artist travel, accommodations, etc)

Promotion CD's

Tip sheet design and prep

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SALES:

Advertisement placements (ie, circulars, endcaps)

Retail Marketing

Outside retail marketing

Retail merch admats

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ADVERTISING:

Print

TV

Radio

Online

Outdoor/sniping

Circulars

Prep and art production

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STREET MARKETING

Merch

Promotions

Outside street team

Samplers

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MISC MARKETING:

Advances, DJ advances

Remixes

General merch (ie, those funky things artists do to promote records)

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PUBLICITY

Indie publicists (if the artist doesn't use the staff)

TV appearances (travel, etc)

Photo shoots

Press travel

Tour logistics (aka Artist Development)

Prints, bios, misc (copywriters, etc)

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VIDEO:

Video production

Live footage, EPK cuts

VIDEO PROMOTION:

Video indies

Video promotions

Video duplication

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TOURING:

Tour support

Tour marketing

Promo tours (including setup, crew, backline, travel)

Ticket buys (from the venues, these aren't free!)

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ONLINE

Marketing

Website tech cost

Website design

Other tech (Facebook, widgets, games, Lee Martin)

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PACKAGING

Art

Production

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INTERNATIONAL MARKETING

Tour support

Promo tour

Publicity

Production

Misc

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* Some of these aren't done. Some are much more expensive than others. Anyhow, a lot to be said about this but that's worthy of a blog post.

Also this has likely changed a bit recently.

OK Go would still have to register with a publisher and a PRO if they wanted to see any residuals at all. If they just wanted to bypass music and be a "video" band they'd still have to manage the music bed in some fashion, even if through Tunecore or someone like that.

These "the labels must die" discussions get tedious because not many know what they do. I quit being at a label, but not because I think it should die, just because it was anyhow.

Assuming Spotify signs artists (or Apple for that matter), will they be willing to upfront costs against touring, recording, production? How would they structure recoupment? Apple could structure a better deal because they can cover mechanical royalties through download purchases. Spotify would be streaming only. The economics would be very, very tight.

It'd be hard for them to do a 360 deal to get revenue from the money making aspect of music (sponsorships and live), unless they also staffed up artist development (touring) and sponsorships/partnerships/biz dev.

Its not as easy as just "signing an artist"

If it was, we'd have already been disrupted by the indies.

Depends on their streaming royalty rate. The death of mechanical as a revenue model is not going to be pretty for anyone.

The real Ari is on our board of directors. It doesn't help recruiting. Telling and believing a great story and treating your culture and team as its own product does.

Yeah, I got a nice visit from campus security.

I did a project in college where I scanned networks for IPP ports and would print agit prop to them

The printer panopticon. Oh art school.

Ticketing is weird in that the supply chain exists post wholesale. I have worked on both the live and recorded side of the business. I know most of what could be tucked into a "service fee" from recorded.

You do realize these takedowns are automated? No one at a label sat there and clicked "report"

I don't think you realize the power Rio has with a JV with Universal. Nor the power that Lucien Grange has with the UMG roster and catalog. Plus YouTube is the only Google property with licensing deals for all four majors, but not all four are in Vevo.

I'm popping popcorn. These Youtube/Google/Music negotiations are always entertaining (if not consumer friendly).

Still filing some radars against this, including the lingering text formatting issue in Mail.

If this follows the typical pattern there will be some sys update right after public release.

Freedom Communications was making money in aggregate.

Right? I don't think so. I didn't mention the Craigslist "We will never sell classified space online!" diatribe either.

The point was: THEY WERE on the forefront of new technologies. OCR was the 5th newspaper online (after Mercury News, SF Chronicle, NY Times, Detroit Free Press).

And I don't think you understand the cost of print journalism. Print journalism might be more profitable if you have an economy of scale to support is infrastructure, but even in 1999 the display ad and classified business was waning to the point where it didn't break even on a single property. Only in aggregate for OCR's parent (Freedom Communications).

And lets not even talk daily subscription numbers, which were on the decline starting around the same time.

Newspapers followed a similar, albeit slower arc that the music business has, especially the recorded music business. A lot of the same hubris included.

To be clear my mom was on the right side. The publisher was on the "threat" side.

Newspapers are finally accounting for their assumptions of necessity throughout the last 15 years. My family was involved in what at one time was the second largest paper in CA (the OC Register). My mom was the CFO and I started there at 15 as their first webmaster.

My mom would always bring home things for me to test as "threats" to the paper rather than opportunities. Delphi, Prodigy, Aol, compuserve, eworld, Microsoft blackbird, cd-I and finally a BRI ISDN PPP account.

Threats. Not opportunities. When they finally put the entire newspaper online it was in PDF. I left in 2001.

And then went into the music business in 2005. Hah.

The division I co-run at my company was created partially to ship product to market, and partially to ship culture as its other primary product.

We treat our culture as something akin to a shippable technology product, complete with user stories, implementation, measurement, learning, reiterating, etc.

Anyhow: http://www.blackrimglasses.com/2012/02/16/culture-is-a-produ...

Do you disagree that they have abandoned their native Mac client?

Personally I don't think the "Discover" tab is worth its real estate in the menu.

The sad part of this is that Twitter was going in this direction:

http://blog.twitter.com/2010/05/twitter-platform.html

I don't think the reaction would be nearly as bad if Twitter was better at making clients for their own service. They aren't very good at it. Twitter for Mac (née Tweetie) is dying on the vine.

TweetBot is 10x better on iOS than the native client, and Osfoora on the desktop.

Why not meet the challenge of an ecosystem in conjunction with ad revenue rather than just blanket rule against it?

I run a least six miles every day to force myself away from computers, phones and everything else.

It's calming.

You do realize the trade groups (riaa, mpaa) exist to prevent collusion? Aka mafioso tactics?

Not saying the represent a valid continual business model (currently, we can hope for evolution) but lets leave the hyperbole at the door.

Maybe they should have done this in 2001 when the classified market collapsed and newsprint prices skyrocketed?

Disclosure: I worked at a metro daily (the orange county register) as their first webmaster from 1994-2001.

I was there for the first collapse.

Yes, it is backed up by law. Still, same type of issues, just legal breakage.

http://www.soundexchange.com/2011/09/15/soundexchange-aftra-...

Reminds me of SoundExchange, ASCAP, BMI and Sesac and other PRO's. "Not our fault if you don't claim the money we collected on your behalf!"

Ping was a concession to the labels who asked for an alternative to MySpace with a revenue model. It was never given much attention by Apple internally, nor was it a source of "pride" for anyone really.

I remember when it was first introduced, a good number of us at labels were thinking, "great, another marketing platform to update for a bit, then have go stale."

Plus it was supposed to have Facebook integration, which was pulled quickly after launch.

A much better iPhone application. I think there was a whole article about that.

Shouldn't Yahoo focus on the products they are neglecting (i.e., Flickr) rather than introduce more products to then neglect?

What was happening in SK was that the hardware of the device started mattering more to consumers than the content on it. They tried to duplicate this in the US with Helio and failed. Unlike in SK, the bandwidth doesn't' make up for the crappy device, since our cell network is so far behind.

South Korea made content owners supper optimistic about things like "Comes with Music" (from Nokia) and the "dead-before-launching" Beyond Oblivion. Lock in via cell hardware was their last hope.

People get so caught up in existing paradigms and the resultant hegemonies which enforce them that they become blind to the obvious.

This journalist is not alone in this. Examples permeate both media history and just criticism in general. For anything that is "obvious" there is always a contrarian who seems unable to see movement which we see as obvious.

Anyhow, the iPhone announcement in 2007 was interesting from my viewpoint being in a major record label because of how it portended the complete and utter end of control. It brought domestically something that was already happening in South Korea, where "ownership" of content meant little to the average consumer.

Of course the label folks thought it would mean more money from ringtones, and were bitterly disappointed that it didn't support custom ones out the gate.

Basically people saw what they wanted with the iPhone announcement, not what was actually there.