Jazz Odyssey

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

The New York Times has a superb article on the evolution of music video. From the birth of MTV to the rise of online video to the possible future of a video iPod, music video remains a crucial part of the label marketing mix, but are labels starting to optimize the content and financial [...]

[Read more →]

This article from Wired on the marketing setup for the Fantastic Four movie is a must read.  I’ve long been a proponent of tapping the expertise of a passionate fanbase and continue to believe that superserving those fans is a good long-term investment in an artists’ career.  But no investment is a sure thing, and [...]

[Read more →]

The release of iTunes 4.9 instantly made millions more people aware of podcasting. For consumers, it was a sudden flood of new content available for the asking. For podcast creators, it created a sudden and dramatic increase in the podcast audience, catching some podcasters by surprise. In this article, Wired takes [...]

[Read more →]

An excerpt from today’s CNET Anchordesk:
“Social networking is laboring under the inescapable weight of the dot-com curse: you have to find the money. No matter how cool your idea is, it’s dead on arrival without an actual business plan. At least, that’s the theory. If that’s true, though, why has blogging, which seems like a [...]

[Read more →]

On October 18th, the pilot for the new Battlestar Galactica premiered in the U.K., 3 months before it was due to premiere on the Sci-Fi Channel in the U.S. in January. Within a couple of hours of the U.K. broadcast, copies of the pilot began to circulate through various BitTorrent networks. This "piracy" [...]

[Read more →]

Wired is running an article on microtransactions:
"New car: $1. New helmet: 5 cents. Flashy new warrior’s sword: 50 cents. Bigger baseball bat: three for $2. Magic spell to help defeat that tricky warlord on level five: 10 cents per use. Welcome to the online store of the future — the one embedded in your [...]

[Read more →]

Guitarist extraordinaire Steve Kimock has taken audience requests to a whole new level. While he’s honored the occasional shoutout from audience members, this time he’s playing an entire show based on fan requests at his 5/5/05 show at the Fillmore. Fans can submit their suggestions here. Kimock makes his live shows available [...]

[Read more →]

The volume of new music being added to the iTunes music store is pretty daunting, and there hasn’t been a great way to keep up with it without checking every few days to see if an artist or song you wanted had been added to the store. That issue has become moot–meet Tunestracker. [...]

[Read more →]

Digital Music News brings us statistics this morning indicating that Yahoo Music edged out AOL Music in traffic during January as the top online music destination. In addition to covering traffic data on the rest of the top ten music destinations, DMN also provides some demographic stats, including the interesting statistic that the 35+ [...]

[Read more →]

"It’s wildly, glorious excessive, indulging the prog-rock impulses that are simply too ecstatic for rock to leave behind." — John Pareles @ the New York Times offers his take on the new Mars Volta album.
"…the result is a homogeneous shitheap of stream-of-consciousness turgidity." Sam Ubl over at Pitchfork has a slightly different viewpoint than [...]

[Read more →]

"iPodder is the bastard offspring of the blog and the Apple MP3 player. It
combines the hyperactive talkiness of blogs and the hipness of iPods into
something utterly new: the podcast. iPodder uses the blog syndication tool RSS
to automatically download homebrew radio shows, podcasts, directly into a
portable MP3 player."
Wired explores the explosion of podcasting and talks to [...]

[Read more →]

This article which was published a few days ago in the Washington Post covers a lot of ground about the various (possible) futures in the acquisition and consumption of music. The variety of possibilities makes one thing very clear–the splintering of the mass market is creating an array of consumers who have different motivations, [...]

[Read more →]

The folks over at Digital Music News report that Motorola is preparing to offer a new service it calls IRadio:
"Motorola is planning to make the mobile phone the center of a new music
experience, combining high-speed internet access with Bluetooth
technology to offer music “anytime, anywhere”. The new service, called
iRadio, will allow consumers to easily beam radio [...]

[Read more →]

Here’s a terrific article on creating and optimizing one sheets from Bob Baker’s Indie Music Promotion blog. While one sheets have traditionally been more an "analog" tool in the setup and promotion of a new album, digital versions also proliferate, and whether analog or digital the tips in this article are valid. Many [...]

[Read more →]

Wired magazine has this to say about a new study on teens and websites:
"If you’re designing a website aimed at teenagers, you’d better not make
the text too small. That’s not because teens have bad eyes, but because
teenagers tend to lean back in their chairs when they’re at their
computers.

That advice and much more about how websites [...]

[Read more →]

ChangeThis.com brings us a worthwhile read from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. In a manifesto that is long on smarts but a quick read, Craig discusses the elements he believes make Craigslist such a success. Inspirational quote: "Unless we listen to our community very carefully,
they’ll find another site that works better for them."
Craig’s points-of-view [...]

[Read more →]

Wired reports on a film inspired by rabid fans of The Lord of the Rings:
"After the 2004 Academy Awards, the filmmaking team behind The Lord of the Rings headed out to celebrate. That’s no surprise — they had just won 11 Oscars. What was unusual was the party — it wasn’t the one put [...]

[Read more →]

Tivo has launched an open source development initiative for its DVR. Tivo has made an SDK (Software Development Kit) available as a free download at the Sourceforge Open Source software website. This allows applications to be developed and collaborated upon by users with ideas and Java programming skills.
By creating a platform [...]

[Read more →]