Posts from January 2006

I love the Kinks.  And it appears that many of the new bands out there do as well.  I often hear the Kinks influence in songs, particularly by young british bands.

This song, Emily Kane, by Art Brut, off their debut album, Bang Bang Rock & Roll, is awesome and if you told me it was written by Ray Davies, I’d believe you.

Check it out and let me know what you think

I have had literally dozens of emails from people I know, people who read my blog, friends in the venture business, all recommending Pandora for music disocvery.

Pandora was created by the music genome project and you tell it about some music you like and its starts playing music.  Kind of like a personal radio station on your computer.  Sounds great right?  Well everyone seems to love it but me.

I tried it when it first came out, I even paid for a year in advance (something you don’t have to do anymore).  I killed it within 10 minutes.  It just wasn’t coming up with stuff I wanted to listen to.

About every five emails I get suggesting I try Pandora, I give it another try.  But it’s always the same.  I just can’t get into it.

Contrast that with Last.fm.  I absolutely love Last.fm.  I started out using last.fm (in its incarnation as audioscrobbler) to spy on my music listening habits and report them to me and others.  You will see some of that data on the left sidebar of my blog in the big red badges.  They show what I listened to the most last week and the music I have listened to the most since I started using last.fm.

Then slowly but surely I got sucked into the system.  First it was the social networking.  I found some friends of mine in the service and connected to them.  I check out what they are listening to via last.fm.  And I’ve found people I’ve never met in last.fm who have similar taste in music to me.

For some reason, I was never compelled to download the last.fm player.  I have iTunes, Rhapsody , and emusic and that gives me a fair amount of leeway to sample whatever music I want to check out on my computer.  But several weeks ago, I downloaded the last.fm player.

You can listen to personal radio which is based on the music you have listened to.  You can listen to neighbor radio which is based on the music your neighbors (people with similar taste to yours) listen to.  Or you can listen to "loved tracks" radio which is based on the music you’ve tagged as "love this track".

I generally listen to neighbor radio and I have been blown away by this service.  I get music I really enjoy all the time, but its often music I have never heard or music that I have heard and really love.

Last.fm is great.  It requires a number of things from you.  First, that you listen to a lot of music on your computer.  If you don’t there is no way for last.fm to capture your music listening data.  Second, that you download the plugin so that they can in fact capture your music listenting data.  And third, that you are interested in an online social experience for discovering music.

Pandora is a lot simpler and maybe that’s why people like it so much. But for me, last.fm is a lot better.  I don’t want a computer recommending music to me.  I want other people, people who share my taste in music, recommending music to me.

Business 2.0 picks up on the myware theme that I mentioned in my initial Spying On Myself post and runs with it.

The story includes some great quotes from Seth Goldstein who coined the term myware (at least he’s the first person I heard use it).

We took off last week to go skiing and so this is only the second podcast of the year.

We talked a lot about basketball and skiing.  We also reviewed Mario Batali’s new restaurant Del Posto which The Gotham Gal and I ate at last night.  Josh also ate there last week with his friends Benno and Leo so he gave us his take on the place.

Here is the song list:

Josh’s Song – Sweet Home Alabama – Lynyrd Skynyrd
Fred’s Song – We Are The Sleepyheads – Belle and Sebastian
Emily’s Song – Mudfootball – Jack Johnson
Jessica’s Song – Let It Rain – Tilly and the Wall
Joanne’s Song – Dancing With Joey Ramone – Amy Rigby

Listen Live Here

To listen in iTunes or on your iPod, get iTunes version 4.9 or above, then select Advanced, Subscribe to Podcast, and then enter this into the box:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Positively10thStreet

A little over a year ago, I proposed a hedged trade that I did not actually make.

I proposed going short Sirius and going long Clear Channel because I felt, through my involvement with iBiquity (I am an investor and board member), that HD Radio was going to get its act together and start to give the traditional radio broadcasters the tools to fight back against satellite, just as cable TV went digital and fought back against satellite television.

Specifically, I proposed selling Sirius short at $6.90/share and using the proceeds to go long Clear Channel at $33.92/share.

So how has that trade worked out so far?  Pretty boring actually.  The long bet on Clear Channel is down $3.50/share and I proposed buying 15 shares so that works out to be a paper loss of $52.50.  But the Sirius stock is down as well, $0.62 per share.  I proposed shorting 75 shares, so that is a paper gain of $46.50.  Basically the two even each other out.

But Clear Channel has an enterprise value of $24bn and revenues of almost $10bn and trades at 10.5x EBITDA.

Sirius has an enterprise value of $8.9bn and revenues of $187 million and posted an EBITDA loss of $500 million in the past 12 months.

So I like my chances on this hedged trade.  It just seems that Sirius’ valuation is hard to justify while Clear Channel’s is pretty rational.  Unless you think broadcast radio is going to have its lunch eaten by satellite.  And I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Neither does Business Week which had a really good piece on the challenges facing satellite radio last week, which include a big broadcaster push on HD radio.

And this investor isn’t particularly bullish on Sirius either.  He proposes a hedged trade of a different sort.  Go short Sirius and go long XM.

I like mine better, but either one seems like a good bet.  Sirius’ valuation just makes no sense.

I have had it with comment spam.  I’ve tried policing it after the fact, but I can’t beat it that way.

I’ve asked TypePad to allow me to put up a captcha, but they won’t do that for every comment, at least I can’t find a way to do that without requiring comment authentication which I don’t want to impose on my readers.

So I’ve opted to approve every comment before it gets posted.  That really sucks for me because its just another thing I have to do every day.  But its either that or see my comment section filled with crap from assholes who I believe are about the lowest scum on the earth.

So if you don’t see a comment get posted immediately, I am sorry.  I’d like to put a captcha in to see if that solves the problem, and maybe TypePad will do that someday.  Until then, this is the best I can do.

Tom Watson is in agreement with Andy about Friday night’s show.

Sounds like I missed a gem.

James Governor took my iTunes 6 sucks post and goes one step further and proposes a boycott of the iTunes music store.

I’ve basically done that since I wrote that post.  I buy my mp3s from emusic and if its not available on emusic, I buy the CD from Amazon and pull the mp3s.

I don’t share my mp3s with the file sharing networks and I only post mp3s to my blog in degraded 96kbps with a link to buy the music. 

But I need the ability to put my music, the music I’ve bought, on any of my multitude of devices and DRM just won’t allow that.

So I’ve joined James in his boycott.  It’s not too painful so far.

I am not a great public market investor.  I like markets that are less efficient and reward long term patient and activist capital.

But in light of my posts on Yahoo! and Google, I couldn’t help but post this chart.

Clearly we are witnessing a correction in the stock prices of Google and Yahoo!, driven I suppose by the market’s dissatisfaction with Yahoo!’s Q4 earnings report.  Google will report on January 31 and so its stock will probably be weak until the Street can see its numbers.

The fear is that search advertising is slowing and Google can’t possibly meet the lofty expectations that are inherent in a PE ratio of 90.

I suspect that Google’s Q4 numbers will be a lot better than Yahoo!’s.  Yahoo suffers from being a weak number two in paid search and they have way less advertisers and they generate way less revenue per search than Google.

But I also feel that paid search as a percentage of the overall online marketing budgets will decline in 2006.  Many big marketers are moving significant dollars online in 2006 and you simply cannot throw money at search.  Paid search only consumes money when people click on CPC ads.  You can buy more ads, more keywords, on more search networks, but its going to be a lot easier to spend 50-100% more money online by purchasing CPM advertsing than CPC. And so I suspect that Yahoo! may have a "banner" year in 2006 with banners.  I doubt that Google will be able to make a big move in CPM any easier than its competitors are finding competing with them in paid search.

So what would I do if I owned both stocks?  I honestly like YHOO at 26x earnings a lot more than GOOG at 90X earnings, but I think that Google will have a better Q4 than Yahoo!

And its a lot easier to sell GOOG after such a huge runup in the past year.

Tough call.  And since I am not a good public market investor, I’ll avoid making it.