Digital Distraction

What’s the hottest digital service around?
Which new technology is going to change the playing field?
What are the nuances of Web 2.0- when will Web 2.1, 2.2…3.0 emerge?

Arguably, we’re obsessed with a self-perpetuated speculative practice; a practice which sees technology as the driver of change. Businesses, journalists and entrepreneurial individuals are fighting to keep their heads above the sand as our media industries are bombarded by continuous iterative improvements to technology, and the emergence of ever more creative services.

This is all very well, but where do we draw the line? Is there a point when this tech-speculation becomes a distraction to effectively conducting business as usual? Change never ceases, fair enough. But when one adopts a stance of humanism i.e. one acknowledges that human agency plays a significant role in determining whether a service/platform/technology is commercially viable, technological neurosis can be replaced with a balanced approach- one which appreciates progress, but views such progress from a perspective that acknowledges that users- people- and their practices, don’t change as radically.

I recently completed an critique based on this subject- a respectable blogger proposed the emergence of a ‘new’ kind of web, based on the proliferation of wi-fi networks and smart devices. If you are interested in broadening your perspective on such issues, then please have a gander!

Whats happening with Sam’s Clients?

I said earlier this week that would do a quick update, detailing what’s happening with my clients recently, something I want to do more regularly!

So, here goes… (in no particular order)

Daniel O’Donnell – he’s back with The Ulitmate Collection, which charted last week at #7 in the official album charts! After we created his official precense on Facebook via a migration, his fans seem to be enjoying the interaction!

The Soldiers – Performed at #10 Downing Street this week for Dave Cameron,(watch the video) with their track “Message To You” – which is the official poppy appeal song – great stuff! Things a really cooking on their facebook page!

The Office – Available for the first time digitally, ever this week, the complete selection went straight in at #1 in the iTunes TV chart, which was great! It was really good fun coming up with posts and building The Office (the proper office, not imprints) and getting the legendary show a place on Facebook from scratch, 183,000 likes and growing!

Chicane – I went to Dubai with Chicane and we did some live audio streaming, it was awesome, so awesome in fact, we’d doing it again tomrrow in Leicester (more exotic than Dubai) with MixMag and Ministry - big shout out to Mixlr for providing an awesome service! Also, Big awesome box set coming before Xmas – stay tuned!

The Subways – still on their mammouth tour (over 60 dates)!! We’ve used TopSpin to the max and created a few stores to sell their products, on Facebook, Website, Standalone, and even now on YouTube!

Us3 – Amazing Album, Great Tour – been a pleasure to work with! Head to Us3.com to get a free track (feat. Akala and Oveous Maximus), see the video, get involved!

Thats it for now!

Cheers! Sam
More regular rants and rambles on twitter (@McGregorSam)
So, who’d like to hear from David on what he’s been up to?

Approaching the Neoliberal Ideal

The fluidity of monetary transactions via the internet and apparent adoption of new digital payment mechanisms has provoked this post.

A study commissioned by Visa Europe confirmed (at face value, and not considering bias) that ‘Contactless Cards‘ were preferred by 58% of respondents compared to traditional cash/card payments. Contactless cards allow for the automatic processing of payments up to the value of £15 (think Oyster in stores).

Coupled with this, we have the proliferation of digital currencies, and phone payment solutions such as ‘Google Wallet‘. These technologies are removing friction from the consumptive process, and could potentially make high volumes of micro transactions more serviceable.

So here’s the deep bit: when micro-transactions become realistic to (impose?!) implement en-masse, is there a possibility that every interaction we have with businesses, individuals and generally speaking, within ‘the market’ as a whole, could become monetised?

Here’s a quote which summarises the Neo-liberal ideal:

“A general characteristic of neoliberalism is the desire to intensify and expand the market, by increasing the number, frequency, repeatability, and formalisation of transactions. The ultimate (unreachable) goal of neoliberalism is a universe where every action of every being is a market transaction, conducted in competition with every other being and influencing every other transaction, with transactions occurring in an infinitely short time, and repeated at an infinitely fast rate. “ (Paul Treanor, 2005)

So in respect of media offerings, it could be said that the only limitation to monetising content (whether that be physically tangible assets, or experiential, intangible assets) is our own ingenuity. The technological barriers are being removed.

Perhaps even more importantly, is this an opportunity to abolish queueing? To liberate vast expanses of time from the profound mundanity of standing motionless (or worse, unconsciously jigging or humming to the sound of the in-store radio, only to realise it looks as though you really are enjoying that new Olly Murs tune)?

(The opinions shared in this post do not represent the views of Good Lizard Media, especially in respect of musical preference.)

A *Brief* discourse on Media Convergence

The Music Industry was one of the first industries to experience transformative change as a result of the emergence of the internet. Likewise, the significant growth seen in the publishing industry shows this industry is now having to come to terms with the same challenges and opportunities digitisation brings to traditional business models.

US Trade Wholesale Electronic Book Sales:

(Chart from IDPF 2011 available at: http://idpf.org/about-us/industry-statistics)

As the book publishing industry becomes increasingly digitised (consider the growth of Kindle and tablet devices), authors are beginning to do more than replicate analogue experiences (i.e. reading a book) in the online space. J.K. Rowling’s ‘Pottermore’ is a perfect example of how the networked, social and multimodal online space can be utilised to offer fans compelling consumptive experiences.

The implications of leveraging a single brand across multiple media types results in the formation of an aggregate experience which is potentially far more valuable than a stand alone asset eg ebook, MP3 or photo.

As media converges in the online space, businesses and creators are afforded the opportunity to build environments of activity around their creations. In this way, the brand becomes the context and monetisation occurs either at the macro level via subscriptions to the entire gamut of offerings, or at the micro level via micro transactions for chunks of content (just suggestions mind you!).

If the book publishing industry can learn from the precedents set by the music industry whilst negotiating its impending overhaul, then …well…it could save a lot of angst to say the least.

The Profanity Of Music Retail

Having meandered around the store for what seems a reserved eternity, I descend upon what appears to be a member of staff. In half-mocking hysterics, a string of words to the effect of “where’s the music department” encroach upon the ears of this unsuspecting employee.

You know things have turned sour when you go into a music store, and re-emerge with more clothes on than you started with, and a copy of Chaucer in hand. The same could be said for Waterstones, which has gone from selling books, to selling overpriced stationary and leather-bound flim-flam.

With the brokerage of a refinancing package, Simon Fox is under pressure to radically adjust HMV’s existing business strategy. And by-George, has he got a plan:

“We need to continue to invest in our stores. We want to continue to grow our share in games. We are going to increase in-store space for technology products such as iPads. We need to build our online and digital presence” (CMU, 2011)

This is course makes perfect sense, when you consider:

A. Argos posted a 9.6% decline in like-for-like sales over the last 13 week period, three quarters of which was attributed to poor consumer electronics sales. Video games specifically, were down 25%.

B. Electronics retailer Comet is planning to offload 22 of its stores (top performing ones at that) in a bid to reduce rent payments by approximately £5m, helping to bolster poor sales performance.

C. Game Group posted an 11.3% decline in sales across the 19 week period to June 11th, announcing a continued downward trend in the global PC and video games market.

The only growth market the retailer appears to be aiming at, is the tablet market. Will this alone, be enough to ensure HMV meets the terms of its financing package?

There’s actually a comedian named Simon Fox, who’s recently experienced an unattributable influx in ticket sales.

The industry will lament the day the inquisitive pooch with the Gramophone is turfed off the high street; one can only hope the strength of the brand will allow a new incarnation of the business to resurface.

Here’s a video of Simon Fox playing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony ‘Ode To Joy’ on a banjo…a suitable analogy of HMV’s decline into a bumbling hybridisation of its former glory…

Losing Control in The Cloud

‘Music free at the point of access’, ‘Music flowing like water’, ‘Music as a service’, the list of slogans goes on, and trust me, it is happening. We’ve read the catchy lines from the likes of ‘Music Futurist’ Gerd Leonhard, we’ve all said them in meetings and on industry panels, but recently alarm bells have started ringing…

Let me get one thing clear before I start, here at Good Lizard Media, we’re all Spotify Premium users, and are very much advocates of their service. To put it bluntly, we Love it!. However, a few things happened recently, and it got me thinking. Firstly, the disappearance of a couple of my favourite albums from Spotify, and I’m left with no explanation as to why they have been removed, no marketing reasoning, nothing. Secondly, all this whilst I’m burning my physical CD collection to HDD and selling them to Music Magpie.

With these online albums suddenly not available to me, the tracks no longer appearing in my playlists, it left me questioning the subscription service future we’re all waiting (hoping) for.

(Well, if you’re asking the albums were “Remains” by Alkaline Trio, “White Crosses” by Against Me, and “Strictly Rude” by Big D and The Kids Table.)

How can I possibly be excited about a future where the chance to hear the tracks I love can suddenly be taken away from me at any moment?

The emotional attachment to tracks is something that I’ve rarely seen discussed. In the eyes of subscription services, people just love listening to and sharing music, sure, that is true, but what about those tracks that you absolutely have to listen to, now!
The track that you had on when you first got a walkman (Travelling Without Moving – Jamiroquai), or when you first drove a car (Superman – Goldfinger), your first dance (No Woman, No Cry – The Fugees). As Terry McBride, from Nettwork calls ‘Our Musical Bookmarks‘.

How much would you pay to keep the memories of those songs? If someone said, you can never hear those songs again unless you pay me some money right now, how much would it be? It would definitely be more than 79p!
I’m sure the number would vary hugely but, the ‘emotional demand’ for a particular track is definitely a considerable market force, even as simply as nostalgia complications!

So where does that leave us, in a world where all our music is in the cloud (someone else’s cloud), we’re suddenly no longer in control of what we can hear (legally). If checking out new music, and it’s not available, you may simply just listen to something else, but for those big tracks that you absolutely need to hear, its only a short internet leap, across to YouTube, or perhaps even Grooveshark… However, suddenly then, we’re outside the subscription service pay structure for artists (YouTube ad revenue is very hard to account back to artists) and the ‘music as water utopia’ is over.

In a recent campaign, an artists catalogue was made available digitally “for the first time”, and it slotted nicely in to the marketing, however in order for this to happen, it had to be pulled down months earlier. Anyone who had downloaded it previously, via iTunes would have been unaware, however, the Spotify users would have been going nuts for a few months!

Right now, I’m not sure what the answer is, but I know what it isn’t (for me anyway) – I’m not about to go back to downloading, or buying physical product again, I love the cloud too much. Perhaps an ‘extra premium’ service should be made available, where it costs a higher fee per a month, and artists music is held with the subscription service for a minimum of. say, 5 years, kind of like a digital music ISA…and the user is guaranteed access to all the music for that time, without interruption. Transferring some of that control back to the listener, they are paying for it after all!

Lets not forget that it is still early days, and the bugs are being worked out, but I really do believe that this issue needs to be addressed, if the future is to live up to the music ‘free at the point-of-access’ dreams we’re all having!

NB:
Really wanted to call this post “Cloud Control” but there is a band who stolen the name, dammit.

Breaking The Broken

A lot has been made of the changes occurring in the music industry. The striving to organise and negotiate the internet super highway into a rich vein of income from recorded music. ‘Saving’ the recorded music industry by negotiating streaming rates, distribution agreements and expensive government bodies and private companies employed to police those who circumvent the ‘solution’.

Across blogs and industry websites the ‘solution’ to saving the industry is framed in terms of finding better revenue models, looking at ways to make paying for music palatable to consumers. What this discussion does though is mask one of the last and certainly biggest opportunities to actually save the music industry.

Digital marketing gives us all the possibility to reconnect music fans and consumers to a love of music. Through years of neglect and abuse, the recorded music industry has looted and razed the goodwill and interest of people who like music. It baffles me that an industry based upon a voluntary and appreciative consumer base would go so outrageously far to alienate them.

The opening of Topspin’s digital marketing tools to a mass market and the abundance of useful and incredibly good value for money services like Rootmusic, Fanbridge and nextbigsound enable every artist to communicate and reward fans simply. The act of every artist striving to create a good relationship with their fans and listeners will be the single biggest contributor to saving the music industry.

As ‘digital music revenues’ diminish to nothing in the near future, there will be more artists than ever before and only a handful of less important indicators of success than record sales. The big problem we face as the music industry though is not that there will be no money in it; it will be that there is no interest… Imagine if you will that it’s 2017. 20 million artists in the world all online in some shape or form and people no longer care; music is just another thing that exists in life, like fruit… who cares who makes it?

This is where we are heading… Spin back to 2011 and the land grab occurring at the moment where artists see the big ‘direct-to-fan’ goldmine, where fans become figures and figures become equations ending in big $ signs. Emailing a fanbase twice a year to flog another shit bit of merchandise, ‘become a roadie for the day’ for £400 or vastly inflated postage costs. This is killing the music industry at a time when it should be being protected and nurtured. So what should we be doing?

In my opinion, let’s just stream music for near free. Then spend the rest of our time engaging fans, treating them with respect and reverence and aim to make every interaction as targeted and personal as possible. With every artist striving to create a good impression and relationship with fans, music will become something that people will immerse themselves in once again. That’s how we save music… one fan at a time.

Designing With Screen Resolution In Mind

If you’re designing a website or a splash page, basically anything that will be viewed in a web browser, it’s important to keep in mind that different visitors will have different screen sizes and resolutions.

The W3Schools website tells us that, at the time of writing, 13.8% of internet users are using a screen resolution of 1024×768 and 85.1% are using a screen resolution higher than that.

While 13.8% may not seem like a lot, if 1000 people visit your website, that’s 138 people.  Surely it’s worth making sure those people are catered for?

With these figures in mind, we can work out approximately how much of the page we can safely say will be visible without any scrolling.  If I open my web browser with a screen resolution of 1024×768, the browser viewport (the space available within the browser window for displaying a web page) will be approximately 960×600 pixels.  These numbers are approximate because they will vary depending on which browser is being used as well as whether or not the user has any toolbars installed in the browser that will decrease the size of the browser viewport.

So when you design your pages, make sure that the important content appears in the top 600 pixels of the page and is no wider than 960 pixels.

Have You Got Your Domain?

In this day and age,  you’d think that every band, artist, musician, songwriter, producer, tom, dick, and harry would have purchased a domain name.  But you’d be surprised how many haven’t.

Even if you’re not at the stage yet where you can afford to hire a web designer to build you an awesome website, it’s still worth securing the domain that will eventually hold that site.  If you don’t, someone else might!

Domains are cheap (£9-10/year for a .com) so, unless you are literally living on the street, the cost shouldn’t be an issue.  You never know, you may discover that one of your friends knows a bit about web design and is willing to put together a simple holding page for you in return for a pint down the local.  That way, at least you will have some kind of online presence while you’re applying the finishing touches to that debut album that’s going to sell a million copies.

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter provide plugins and widgets that make it really easy to show off your social activity on any web page, which could be a simple way to add some content to your holding page.

There are plenty of domain registrars online where you can purchase a domain.  Here are a few of the more popular ones:

Go Daddy – www.godaddy.com
Namecheap – www.namecheap.com
123-reg – www.123-reg.co.uk
1and1 – www.1and1.co.uk

Some of the registrars (e.g. 1and1) will offer a discount if you purchase a bundle containing a selection of TLDs (Top Level Domains) for the same domain.  The TLD is the bit at the end of the domain (i.e. .com, .co.uk, .net, .org, etc).  For example, you could purchase:

yourname.com
yourname.co.uk
yourname.net
yourname.tv

and get them cheaper than if you had bought them individually.  This is not essential but might be worth considering if you have some spare cash to use up!

How would you save MySpace?

Barely a day goes by that we don’t see a blog post or article condemning MySpace, begging for them to just cut their losses and call it a day.  But let’s be honest, they’re not going down without a fight.

The thing is, the MySpace brand is still worth something.  It may not be the most popular brand at the moment, but with a big enough makeover – and I mean BIG – there is still a chance that the brand could once again represent something valuable, especially to the music industry.

The MySpace platform is currently going through some fairly significant changes.  It’s becoming easier for non-geeks to create a decent looking page and, as such, we’re gradually seeing less and less of the 90s-style acid-trip-flashback-inducing monstrosities that MySpace has become famous for.

So the question is, if you had a few million to spend on MySpace (try to forget the fact that if you had that much money you probably wouldn’t spend it on a sinking ship!), what would you do with the platform to turn it into something that would be truly useful to musicians and their fans?

To kick things off, here are my thoughts on the subject:

First of all, let’s make one thing perfectly clear… “MySpace the social network” is dead.  I don’t think anyone would disagree with the fact that Facebook is the reigning king of social networks and we should all just accept that fact and work with it.

Which basically leaves us with MySpace as a platform for artists/bands/musicians to create a space online where fans (and potential fans) can find out the latest info and check out some media (audio, photos, videos).

The problem with MySpace, in my opinion, is that it tries to be “the place” for everything.  It tries to be “the place” you visit to listen to a band’s music.  It tries to be “the place” you visit to check out a band’s photos.  It tries to be “the place” you visit to read a band’s blog.  The fundamental problem with that is the fact that there are people doing each of those things much better than MySpace.

For photos, we can use any number of photo storage and sharing solutions; Flickr, Picasa and SmugMug, to name just a few.  For videos, again, we have a whole host of options, YouTube being the common choice, but there’s also Vimeo, Muzu.TV, Dailymotion, Metacafe and many more.  For music storage and sharing, there’s plenty of choice.  I think I speak for the whole Good Lizard team when I say that SoundCloud is our favourite.  For blogs, there are solutions that suit every need and level of ability; WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and Posterous all do what they do very well but, again, there are plenty of other options.

My point here is that, when there are so many great tools out there for doing all this stuff, why is MySpace trying to provide a sub-standard amalgamation?  Forget that.  MySpace should build a platform that allows all these tools to be plugged into it.  Imagine a page that features a blog feed from Tumblr, a photo feed from Flickr, a video feed from YouTube, a SoundCloud player, a Facebook widget and a Twitter feed.  Creating a MySpace profile like this would simply involve supplying the details of all your various accounts and specifying a few simple design preferences (maybe uploading a background or header image).  Once those initial steps were completed, the profile would maintain itself.  All the content would be automatically updated whenever content on those other platforms was updated.  Imagine only having to post your latest blog entry once.  Imagine only having to upload your photos, music and videos to one place.  How cool would that be?

You may be thinking, “But if I use MySpace, I can upload all my stuff to one website and be done with it.  If I use all these other platforms you’ve suggested, I have to go to several different sites to make all my stuff available“.  My answer to that would be, are you not using all these sites already anyway?  Are you telling me you don’t have a YouTube account, or a blog/website, or a SoundCloud account, or a Facebook page, or a Twitter profile?  Seriously?  Shame on you!

If you already have all of these accounts setup (and if I haven’t already made it abundently clear, YOU SHOULD!!!), wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to upload everything twice?

So what about looking at this from the point of view of MySpace as a business?  MySpace needs to make money, sure, and they do that by selling advertising space.  The site layout that I have proposed would involve a single page profile where everything is on that one page, i.e. no visiting another part of the site to read a blog post or watch a video.  So obviously that means fewer page impressions, which in turn means fewer ad impressions, which ultimately means less money for MySpace.  This is true.  My response to this is simple: MySpace as it stands will not last much longer.  That’s obviously just my opinion but one that I doubt many would disagree with.  With the kind of revamp that I am suggesting, MySpace would at least stand a fighting chance.  So, Mr MySpace, what would you prefer: A smaller amount of money or no money at all?  I know which one I’d go for.

What about you?  Do you think you could save MySpace?  Share you thoughts in the comments!