Digital Media MBA

The music biz and the internet

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/technology/start-ups/28music.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=music%20lables%20cut%20friendlier%20deals&st=cse

I wanted to post about an interesting article that just came out in the New York Times. It describes how major music recording labels are forgiving music-hosting sites like Imeem the considerable amount of debt they are owed as a result of licensing fees. This is yet another interesting development in the continuing saga of the transformation of the music business as a result of the internet.

Coming from a music background and as an owner of a Brooklyn recording studio, I am fascinated by how music will eventually be distributed and/or sold over the internet. While legal downloading has helped bring in some revenue, it has not nearly closed the gap that the music labels are facing with 20% year over year declines in CD sales. I believe the idea of music being sold on physical media such as CDs is over. It appears that the labels are finally starting to accept the fact that they have no future without internet companies like Imeem and Pandora to help advertise and distribute their product.

However, I wonder if the subscription business model being used by sites like Imeem and Rhapsody will be sustainable in the long run. My feeling is that in the end people feel very personal about the msuci that they love and they want to OWN IT, whether it is stored on a physical medium or not. The idea of paying for a subscription to get access to a large quantity of music isn’t quite the same because there is always a ‘gatekeeper’ like these sites who have to give you permission to access it.While this deal make allow sites like Rhapsody to sustain themselves, in the long run people will want to be able to access their music at any place and time. Having to log on to a site in order to do so will not be possible in a car, in a plane or other places where consumers might want to listen to their iPods. While I also disagree with DRM (digital rights management, where songs sold on sites like Itunes can only be played on the host computer and not shared), I still think a new business model will have to emerge for the music business to once again find a value proposition that customers are willing to pay for…

-Doug

Picture This

One of the most recognizable earmarks of the Web 2.0 revolution is the endless opportunities for and inclination towards UGC (user generated content). While we have discussed the endless benefits of this type of approach to executing and managing information in the digital world, we have yet to touch upon what helps drive the success of such an approach; the fact that individuals all have the deep seeded desire to express themselves. However, in a world where information-share reigns supreme, and the self-expressions of others are only a keyword search away, artists run the risk of losing control over exactly how and how and where their work is used. Recent advancements in online photo-sharing provide a good example of this phenomenon. We have discussed how websites such as Flickr allow users to browse through photos to find specific images using only a key word search. Sites such as the impending Fotopedia are taking this idea to next level by allowing users to turn their photos into collaborative photo albums on specific topics:http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/31/fotonauts-offers-a-sneak-peak-at-its-upcoming-fotopedia/Such tools are useful not only for individuals wishing simply to contribute to an online visual database, but also for aspiring photographers to garner exposure for their work. However, a recent trend has started to emerge where advertising agencies are starting to bypass stock photography sites (e.g. www.gettyimages.com) in favor of more Flickr-esque resources when searching for images of specific subject matter. This behavior has resulted in photos being lifted off these sites and published without the photographers’ knowledge or consent. Moreover, because the business model of a site like Flickr does not focus on monetizing the distribution of the photos being displayed (compared to a stock photography website where that is the number one objective) resources are not devoted to monitoring for and preventing this type of behavior. Click the link below for a specific story regarding this phenonena:http://thomashawk.com/2006/09/did-major-advertising-agency-ddb.htmlNow, there is an argument to be made that this type of episode is simply the risk that must be assumed on the artists behalf in return for the increase exposure generated by posting work on a Flickr or Fotopedia. You be the judge.

Google and Baidu

It is no doubt that Google is the best internet search engine in the world. But in China, Google doesn’t play well as it only occupied 27.1% while Baidu, the Chinese local search engine, had 61.8% market share in 2008. I’d like to compare the difference between Google and Baidu from marketing strategies and functionality perspectives to analyze why Baidu run better than Google in China.
Baidu focused on search engine for Chinese language and get advantage compared with Google’s search engine in Chinese. That’s one of key reasons why Baidu played better than Google in China. But after Google improved its technologies, the tech gap between Google and Baidu is more and more small. The current difference between their searching results is more caused by their different perceptions than by their technologies. The search result of Baidu are more entertainment and Google are more formal. For example, when searching 纽约(New York), the content of the first page in Google are all about Wiki, news and embassy of New York while in Baidu are not only Wiki but also Gangs of New York, New York travel, and Hailer New York life insurance. Thus, more young people and students use Baidu while more write-collars use Google.
Baidu provides many successful products, such as Baidu encyclopaedia, Baidu TieBar similar with BBS, which attract lots of users. It seems Baidu plan to develop network community business in terms of its huge number of user base. But Google still focus on improving its core business, search engine in China.

Lost Ad Revenue

In defense of traditional media companies…

Let me start off by saying that I do believe traditional media companies (print, tv, broadcast) need to stay the course and continue to move online and innovate.

In the future, what’s important will be the brand and message, not the medium in which it is delivered. Media companies need to become platform neutral and have confidence that if people are turning to their brand for information (whether it’s in print or on a mobile device) they will be compensated.

However, these traditional companies should not be overly criticized for treading water a bit of late as the latter part of that equation fails to materialize. As the economy tightens and profit margins are disappearing, can we really fault media executives for falling back to what they know best and what actually makes money? It’s a lot to ask of them to continue to invest and innovate in a medium which is adding very little – and in many casing taking away a great deal – from their bottom line.

Having come from a print background myself, perhaps I take it a bit personally. The critics have the luxury to simply criticize without having to come up with any real solution. Traditional media executives are constantly being portrayed as slow, backward thinking, etc. To be fair, in many ways this is the case. However, they are also charged with keeping their companies profitable and growing. It is admittedly short-sighted, but for now, they have chosen to hunker down and focus on the advertising sources that add to the bottom line.

In better times, investment in digital (which lost money, but promised great returns at some unknown time in the future) was easier to stomach. But today, when jobs are being cut and budgets tightened, what would you suggest they do?

The value of content….

Publishers of original content are in a difficult position. On the one hand, they want bloggers and smaller websites to reference their articles (though a brief heading or link) and drive traffic back to their sites. In theory, the more sites that pick up on their content and spread it around the web, the more return the original publisher will see in terms of visitors and ultimately advertising revenue. However, what happens all to often is the raw text that is posted by many magazine and newspaper sites is simple copied as a whole and repurposed, which results in a loss of revenue to the original publisher. (The key here being that it’s not simply a headline or small bit of text)

This is an especially difficult pill for traditional media companies to swallow. They are, in many ways, still adjusting to the idea of putting their content on the web for “free” and hoping the advertising revenue will come. (And when it does, it’s almost always less than they’d get though traditional channels.) Add to that the idea that someone else is getting paid on thier content and you have a lot of unhappy campers.

New problems, however, often breed new innovation.

Forbes.com recently highlighted two promising new companies — Scribd Store and Attributor. Scribd attempts to correct the problem by having publishers post content though a secured widget. Those wishing to reuse the content must go through the widget to do so. The second, and in my opinion more interesting company, is Attributor. They act as sort of a content cops for thepublisher. Essentially, publishers give Attributor all the content they are posting and Attributor is monitoring the web for repurposing of that content. If it’s found, Attributor lets the company know and they can, in turn ask for a fee or tell the ad neworks supporting the other site that they want a share of the ad revenue.

To me, this is a more optimal situation because it does not stop the flow content (which really is in the interest of the publisher), but it also allows them to have some way of being paid as their content is used by others. As internet consumers, we often forget to think about the costs of producing content. In many cases it’s actually fairly expensive. If the producers of such content continue to feel they are not being adequately compensated, or worse, that someone else is profitting at their expense, we run the risk that they will either stop producing it altogether.

Advertisement performs a play in videos?

Innovid (http://www.innovid.com/), a venture company in Israel, might innovate video advertisement. The company invented the technology to emerge virtual products into video which is still going on, or other interactive communication tool. I think those technology may get video ad much more effective in near future.

Honestly, the clickable advertisement doesn’t make me surprised much. But the technology to put product into product itself was really amazing for me, even though the sample video( http://www.innovid.com/gallery.php) which the company provided was not impressive at all.

The stream video advertisement which is played before, during or after the video is sometimes boring for watcher, and they wish to skip if possible, because those videos, in other words, feel like being oppressed to watch by advertisers.

However, more interactive video interactive advertisement must attract consumers’ attentions in effective. On the consumer side, they watch product’s advertisement which emerged on the video with hassle-free, because if they don’t want to watch it, only go through it. If the technology is able to be combined with technology to distinguish users like Cookie, the advertisement would yield more desirable effect to take into account consumers favor.

Advertisement performs a play in videos?

Innovid (http://www.innovid.com/), a venture company in Israel, might innovate video advertisement. The company invented the technology to emerge virtual products into video which is still going on, or other interactive communication tool. I think those technology may get video ad much more effective in near future.

Honestly, the clickable advertisement doesn’t make me surprised much. But the technology to put product into product itself was really amazing for me, even though the sample video( http://www.innovid.com/gallery.php) which the company provided was not impressive at all.

The stream video advertisement which is played before, during or after the video is sometimes boring for watcher, and they wish to skip if possible, because those videos, in other words, feel like being oppressed to watch by advertisers.

However, more interactive video advertisement must attract consumers’ attentions in effective. On the consumer side, they watch product’s advertisement which emerged on the video with hassle-free, because if they don’t want to watch it, only go through it. If the technology is able to be combined with technology to distinguish users like Cookie, the advertisement would yield more desirable effect to take into account consumers favor.

Move Over Google Docs…

As a big fan of Google Docs, I was excited to learn about the announcement of Google Wave at the Google I/O Developer Conference in San Francisco earlier this week. According to the conference, a “wave” is defined as: “equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”

Although I’m not entirely clear on all the specifics, Google Wave seems to be an efficient combination of various services that Google already offers, including Gmail, Gchat and Google Docs. The demonstration of Google Wave at the conference reveals how you and a group can be in separate locations editing a Google Doc or adding/sharing photos, videos, etc in real time, and at the same time and in the same application you are also chatting with the entire group or just with individual members. According to Lars Rasmussen’s post on the official Google Blog, Google Wave is “concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave.”

When I look back at how often I used Google Docs for projects just this past year, and how long these assignments would take even WITH access to these applications, it makes me cringe to think about how only two years ago students had to complete those same projects without having these tools (not unlike high school, where students would wonder how on earth people did math without graphing calculators). And I can only think how damn lucky and efficient the next generation of students will be with this new arsenal of Google web applications at their disposal.

It also makes me think of Rob Hof’s article on “New Google Search Features”, where he describes the “fine line” that Google must follow when announcing a new application such as Google Wave, and hoping these developments don’t provide Christine Varney and the Justice Department with the ammunition for an antitrust suit. But talk of monopolies aside, I’m still counting all the free time I’m going to have once we figure out how to use Google Wave for our future group projects.

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