Posts from April 2005

I got a few comments questioning the wisdom and ethics of posting MP3s on my blog.

I’ve been doing this at least once a week for well over a year and I’ve thought a lot about these issues and have come up with the following policy:

1 – Encode the MP3s at 64kbps so that they’ll load quickly and the songs will be listenable.  This also means that if the MP3s are downloaded, most listeners won’t find the quality acceptable enough for repeated listens.  If you listen to the MP3s on my blog, you’ll almost always hear the "swirls" that are associated with low bit rate audio.

2 – Always provide a description of the song and band and a link to a place to buy the music.  I have linked to iTunes in the past but because not everyone has the iTunes client, I’ve recently been linking to Amazon instead.  I don’t normally go to the trouble of configuring the link to compensate me via Amazon Associates for this, but if there were an easy way to do that, I would.

3 – Do not make the music play automatically.  I thought about this and decided that it would be annoying to readers.  So you have to click on the link (or the new flash player) to hear the music.  I have no idea how many readers do this.  I hope the new flash player makes it more common.

4 – Don’t post too many MP3s.  I always post a song on Mondays.  Sometimes its a new unsigned artist.  More often its a signed artist.  Those posts are always titled MP3 of the Week.  Every once in a while, I’ll post another MP3 or maybe even two during the week.

So that’s my policy.  I realize that people think its wrong to play music like this.  I don’t share that view obviously.  I believe that I am introducing my readers to music that they’ll like and the result will be more music sales.  If I felt otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing it.

• Fractals of Change: It’s Time to Go Nuclear
  Tom Evslin on why the US has to go back to nuclear power
  (tags: energy nuclear)
• Taste of Chinatown 2005
  (tags: nyc food)

My new friend Sean, who Clay Shirkey introduced me to, worked this up for me.

It’s so cool.  I am going to use this for all the MP3s I post on my blog from now on.

This song is by The Rolling Stones.  If you dont’ own it, you should buy the record.  It’s on the Top 50.

Tom Evslin gave a very provocative speech at VON Canada recently.

The powerpoint is here.

If you are interested in the future of the voice business, you really ought to read this.

Tom hinted at the theme of his talk with two really excellent blog posts.

The Meaning of "Free"

Legacy Access Charges

The Meaning of Free is worth reading no matter who you are and what you are interested in as long as you use the Internet.  Free isn’t free, as Tom points out, and its useful to understand why that is and what it means for all of us.

The bottom line to all of this is that the phone network and the email network are the same network going forward.  The economics are largely the same.  The issues are largely the same.  So look at email and all of its issues and opportunities to understand the future of voice.

Great stuff Tom.

I was meeting with an old friend yesterday.  We were catching up on his career and the stuff that I’ve been doing.  We got to talking about old media (books, music, newspapers, etc) and the issue of cannibalization.  He’s an experienced online executive but he hears this all the time from old media people – the fear that the online channel will "cannibalize" their old media channel.

I want to say this loudly and clearly, so loudly that the old media people will hear this. 

Online does not cannibalize offline, it turbocharges it.

Here are my proof points:

1 – The South Beach Diet.  The book was doing ok.  Then the publishers cut a deal with Waterfront Media where Waterfront paid for the rights to create subscription based online newsletters with diet tips.  Waterfront then went into the paid search market and bought a huge amount of keywords around the south beach diet theme and drove a ton of traffic to the South Beach Diet website where they sold these online newsletter subscriptions.  Guess what happened?  Sales of the book took off.  It turns out that all this online advertising, which the publisher was not paying for and in fact got paid for, were having a huge crossover effect on the sales of the book itself.  The Wall Street Journal did a very good piece on this story several years ago.  I am not going to take the time to go back and find it, but I assume if you are a subscriber, its in the archives.

2 – Seth Godin’s Books – Seth regularly puts his books in pdf form on the web for free months before his publisher releases them in print.  Sounds crazy, right?  Wrong.  The viral spreading of the pdf version of the book creates buzz, word of mouth, and thought leadership for Seth’s book.  When he releases them in print, they go to the top of the charts for business books.  Read Seth’s books and blog for details on how this works.

3 – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – This story has been told a thousand times, but I’ll tell it once more.  Wilco recorded this album and its label, Reprise, decided they didn’t like it and didn’t want to release it.  What did Wilco do?  They released it on the Internet.  For free.  Then they went shopping for a new label.  They eventually found one, Nonesuch, and they released the album in CD format at the normal price.  What happened?  The record sold more than any record they had ever released at the time.  It was a huge hit for the band and took them to a new level.  Now Wilco will do that with every album they put out according to Jeff Tweedy.  It’s smart marketing.

4 – The New York TImes.  I hear rumors all the time that the New York Times is rethinking its policy of having a free web site.  They worry that it is cannibalizing sales of the paper.  This is wrong thinking.  I don’t know the statistics, but I am certain that the New York Times website gets more readers than its paper version.  That it reaches more people.  That its online ads are seen more than its paper ads.  That its journalists have larger online audiences than offline audiences.  And if I am wrong about any of this, I won’t be in five years.  I am certain that across the US and in foriegn countries, The New York Times is reaching vast new audiences that it would never have reached in paper form.

5 – Catalogs.  Another friend of mine runs a catalog business.  I was talking to him yesterday.  I mentioned that online is now a bigger commerce channel than catalogs.  He said that’s not a meaningful statistic for him except that it means he takes less phone calls and more orders are processed by computers.  It’s like going from bank tellers to ATMs.  It’s been great for his business.  And he’ll still put out his catalogs every month because its another form of marketing that works for him.

I could go on and on about this with more proof points.  They are all over the place for old media people to see if they’d just take their heads out of the sand and look and think and realize that online turbocharges your opportunities.

I was inspired to write this post by Jeff Jarvis’ rave review of Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat book which I blogged about a couple weeks ago.  In that review, Jeff says the following:

Well, Tom, here’s a suggestion: Take giant swaths of your book and put
them up online — using Dan Gillmor and Cory Doctorow as your models —
and I guarantee that you will find your theses and writing and name
spread farther faster than the best damned publishing PR campaign in
the world. And you’ll sell more books (and audio downloads).

That’s the right advice.  Put your content online.  Let it go where it wants to go.  It won’t hurt your offline business, it will help it.

Another great resource on tagging and del.icio.us are Charlie’s three screencasts on RSS, Firefox, and del.icio.us.

Check them out.

In 1982, my friend Bob convinced me to go on a road trip with him and some friends to some place in upstate NY (from Boston where we were all at MIT) to see Peter Gabriel.  I wasn’t really a fan at the time but Bob was and it sounded like a fun time.  So I went along.

It was the greatest show I had seen at the time and certainly one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen.  When Peter Gabriel jumped into the crowd singing "Lay Your Hands On Me", I was blown away.

It was artist meets audience in its most fundamental form and it was amazing.  It wasn’t a cheap trick to get the audience going.  Gabriel was living out his music and he meant it.

That tour was for Gabriel’s fourth record, called Security.  It is a brilliant record, many say his best.  And I love it as I do all of Gabriel’s records (and his Genesis work before he went solo).

But it’s not my favorite Gabriel album.  I’ve gone back and listened to all of them this week.  And the one that makes my skin tingle and brings tears to my eyes is Gabriel 3, also called Melt.

What a record this is.  The drumming, the bass, the singing, the lyrics, the sound, everything about this record is stunning.

There is a part of this record that may be my favorite song sequence in rock music.  No Self Control into Start with its haunting sax solo, into I Don’t Remember, then the devastating Family Snapshot, and finally And Through The Wire.  Wow.  Music like that just doesn’t get made very often.

• alarm:clock: No Exit – Malware Is A Bad VC Investment
  (tags: spyware vc)

I was listening to Mass Hysteria on the way to work today.

They have a new podcast dated Wednesday, April 20th.

I have to say that they are my favorite podcast these days.  I listen to all of the podcasts listed on the left column, but Paul and Janine just do it better.  They share a lot about themselves and their family in addition to playing great music.

So the second song they played on this week’s podcast was the new single (called Hey Man) from the new, and as yet unreleased Eels album, titled Blinking Lights and Other Revelations.

The Eels are it as far as I am concerned.  We have four of their records, Daisies, Electro Shock, Beautiful Freak, and the Top 50 candidate Shootenany!

This new record is already in our Amazon shopping cart.

So as I walked up Fifth Avenue toward a breakfast at the Coffee Shop a big smile crept onto my face.  The Eels are back and I have high hopes for this record.

Thanks to Paul and Janine for playing the Eels and also for the mention of this blog at the end of the podcast!  I guess I’ve been sending them some traffic.  Cool.  They deserve it.