And Miles To Go Before I Sleep

Seriously? Another social stat for me to obsess over. How about instead I email stats to Tumblr each day with the number of people who use Blogger and Wordpress. Seems fair.

The music companies that are successfully shaping the Internet era are recognizing that the real value is in making it easier to buy music than to steal it, helping consumers find other people who share their music tastes, and serving as a trusted source for discovering new music.

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—	Peter Rojas

Music is not like water but it's sure starting to remind me of a flying car »

I’m not sure I agree with Anthony, but it is an interesting read.

fascinated:

by Fingertips Music

This is the the best essay I’ve read on the “future of music” in a long time.

Intercommunication in the Music Industry Sucks

Publicists/Labels to Blogs

At Melophobe we receive hordes of emails each day from publicists trying to get our attention. Nearly all of them fail. Why? Because the deluge is too much for any one human to read, compounded by the fact that inevitably the emails are sent to every member of our team. This “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach is strangely reminiscent of spam (although we signed up for most of these emails at one point). It’s a low-conversion method for getting your information out to the music blogs.

There’s got to be a better way. We genuinely want to develop relationships with publicists. They genuinely want relationships with us. How can we raise the discourse from its current pathetic state of them mass emailing us and us bombarding them with requests for passes so we can cover their shows?

Blogs to Publicists/Labels

Blogs want access to the latest music and passes so they can cover concerts. As a blog, Melophobe’s strategy is to email people at the PR company or label until we find somebody we can work with. Once a relationship is established, we generally try to stay with the same person until they inevitably leave for the next job. Time consuming and not efficient.

Understandably, publicity people need filters to sort the blogs that can generate real exposure for their bands from the blogs just interested in the latest freebie. Tools like Quantcast, Compete and Technorati(?) are blunt tools for guestimating a blog’s influence but it’s unclear if PR people even take the time to look at this information. I suspect they respond to the most aggressive people who want passes. Again, not efficient.

Blogs to Bands to Blogs

MySpace? Horrible. Twitter? Better. For those bands not on Twitter though, it’s pretty difficult to get a genuine connection with somebody in a band. This is unfortunate since we’re trying to promote their music and they probably want to talk to us.

Email seems like the only solution for all these problems so far. Is there a better way?

The newspaper industry can’t say it didn’t see its demise coming. As early as 1981 they were experimenting with Internet technology. That’s a lot of time to “modernize” and all the chatter about Amazon’s new Jumbo Kindle isn’t going to save them either. (Maybe they shouldn’t have agreed to lifetime job guarantee clauses.)

I think Amazon’s smart enough to see this and that the new Kindle is actually a first step aimed at the lucrative textbook market. There’s a lot of money to be made in selling textbooks to students and if Amazon can do it cheaper while reducing the weight of a backpack, they’re going to find success.

I am reading Dan Ariely’s fantastic book Predictably Irrational and was struck by how adding irrelevant choices can influence consumer behavior. Take, for instance, the above chart which offers consumers three subscription choices. Which would you choose? Not surprisingly, out of 100 MIT Sloan students a total of zero people chose “Print Only.” 84 chose the “Print and Electronic” subscription, while 14 chose “Electronic Only.” So why even have the dumb “Print Only” option?

Here’s where it gets interesting. If you reduce the choices to just two: $59 for an “Electronic Only” subscription or $125 for a “Print and Electronic” subscription, a staggering 68 picked “Electronic Only” and only 32 went for “Print and Electronic.” At work is the mind’s preference for comparing two like objects and having a deep attraction to getting something for free. (That “Print and Electronic” subscription looks like an absolute steal compared to the “Print Only” subscription).