Jazz Odyssey

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Pew has just published a new study on consumer purchasing habit,s and the impact of the Internet as well as traditional media on their decision making. Clearly, the digital arena continues to grow in importance but it is […]

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“Sixtyone is different from most read-submit-vote-comment sites because it has an elaborate point system…When you sign up, you get points; each time you vote up a song, you spend 5 points, but if others vote for the song and it gets popular, you earn your points back. Furthermore, you can earn free points by listening […]

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Jon Pareles offers his take on user generated content in today’s New York Times:

It’s on Web sites like YouTube, MySpace, Dailymotion, PureVolume, GarageBand and Metacafe. It’s homemade art independently distributed and inventively promoted. It’s borrowed art that has been warped, wrecked, mocked and sometimes improved. It’s blogs and open-source software and collaborative wikis and personal […]

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Music itself hasn’t gone out of favor – just the opposite. There has never been a better time to be an artist or a fan, and there has never been more music made or listened to. But the traditional model of marketing and selling music no longer works. The big players in the distribution system […]

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ExtremeTech has published a roundup of 8 music recommendation sites/services, including:
* MusicStrands
* Liveplasma
* UpTo11.net
* Audiri
* Pandora
* Mercora
* Yahoo LAUNCHcast Radio
* Last.fm
They […]

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The AP reports this morning that Warner Bros. will use BitTorrent as a distribution mechanism for movies and TV shows that can be purchased online. While they’re still not jumping in with both feet as the downloads aren’t playable on standard DVD players, it is an important step forward in thought process. Essentially, […]

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It seems like video sharing websites like YouTube have mushroomed overnight, consuming bandwidth and productivity in offices and college campuses across the country. With a vast array of choices in this seemingly endless online marketing landscape and a giant vault of unrecouped music videos getting larger by the minute, what’s a music marketer to […]

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There’s a good article in today’s San Mateo Daily Journal that offers a good summary of where things are between Steve Jobs and the major labels regarding the 99 cent price point for digital songs. The labels continue to make their case for variable pricing, with new and superstar music positioned at a higher […]

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This article discusses a research initiative in which an artificial music market was created in an effort to figure the impact of social influence in driving the popularity of a song or an artist. Two groups were created and presented with music…one group was presented with music without any indicator of how others in […]

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Music business analyst and blogger Bob Lefsetz takes a strong swipe at MySpace in his recent blog posting, complaining about MySpace stability, usability and questions whether the #1 social networking site is really breaking bands. Mr. Lefsetz raises many good points, as the popularity of the site has grown faster than their ability to […]

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Business Week reports that AOL is creating a social networking platform based on the populer AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) service. AIMspace (which is the codename for the project and not expected to be the official name of the platform) is set to launch in March 2006 and will “blend all manner of AOL content […]

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An article in today’s New York Times discusses the different types of recommendation systems. Recommendation systems are programs which attempt to recommend products a consumer may be interested in using combinations of explicit data (such as user solicited ratings) and implicit data (such as a record of the consumers previous purchases). The […]

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Reuters (via CNET) reports that Universal Music Group announced plans to digitize 10,000 out-of-print European recordings.
This is exciting news–the vast library of unreleased recordings rotting in label vaults has been the subject of prior posts here, and represents a largely untapped source of revenue for both label and artist. But the big winner […]

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The podcasting craze of 2005 continues into 2006 due largely to the enormous amount of iPods sold during the holiday season, sparking a flurry of subscription activity to podcasts. My thought this morning as I was reading the installation instructions on my new Sirius was that an authorized Howard Stern podcast from his new […]

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Taste Sharing is increasingly driving the music business according to a new study released by the Harvard’s Berkman Center:
Drawing from an early-adopter survey conducted through Gartner, report co-authors Derek Slater, a Harvard senior and Berkman student fellow, and Mike McGuire, a Gartner Research Director, find that consumer-to-consumer recommendation tools, like playlists, enable consumers to actively […]

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Here are a few articles worth noting as you head into the weekend:
Wired continues their series on digital music formats with A Music File by Any Other Name, an article comparing the most common lossy formats, and discussing which ones are the most future proof. As I mentioned in yesterday’s posting, the only truly […]

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More details on this later (I’m blogging from a mobile phone which makes typing a chore), but this is an important development in the evolution of social networking. MySpace has replaced Friendster as the social networking hub du jour, but Yahoo is putting together a framework that goes beyond Myspace with their recent acquisition […]

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Here’s a fantastic article from Wired discussing the explosive popularity and effectiveness of MySpace. From a label perspective, getting a feature at MySpace carries weight–its the kind of exposure that resonates through the industry as well as the online music communities. The power of MySpace cannot be overstated….debuting a video on MySpace vs. […]

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Bertlesmann announced that they will launch a file sharing service in Germany before the end of this year, with a rollout to other territories planned throughout 2006. The service will be called GNAB (which is the word “bang” spelled backwards…illustrating the Spinal Tap wisdom that there is indeed a “fine line between clever and […]

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The WB network has partnered with Yahoo to make the debut episode of their new series Supernatural available online for one week prior to its television premiere. This effort to reach their target audience (viewers age 12 to 34) coincides with an offline branding campaign with promotional messages on coffeecup sleeves, on cocktail napkins […]

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