Metastar

Freesound Project

mthart — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 11:51:00 -0700

Freesound Project:
The Freesound Project - a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds.

HOWTO make a VC pitch in PowerPoint

mthart — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 19:37:00 -0800

Cory Doctorow: Courtesy of Marc Hedlund's Emerging Tech talk, VC Funding for Geeks; or, How to Get Your Technology to Emerge the VC Way: a fantastic article on how to create effective PowerPoint venture capital pitches, written by a VC who's sat through too many made ones.

Following are the questions to address.

1) WHAT IS YOUR VISION?
- What is your big vision?
- What problem are you solving and for whom?
- Where do you want to be in the future?

2) WHAT IS YOUR MARKET OPPORTUNITY AND HOW BIG IS IT?
- How big is the market opportunity you are pursuing and how fast is it growing?
- How established (or nascent) is the market?
- Do you have a credible claim on being one of the top two or three players in the market?

3) DESCRIBE YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE
- What is your product/service?
- How does it solve your customer's problem?
- What is unique about your product/service?

Link

Cherrydisc Records Reformulates as All-Digital Label

mthart — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 18:18:00 -0800

Cherrydisc Records Reformulates as All-Digital Label

Got a press release from Cherrydisc Records, announcing its reinvention as an all-digital label that is giving away its first release: Siren Sounds by The Spaceshots. The 10-track collection is freely downloadable in MP3 (256k—nice!) by track or the whole shebang zipped. The hope is to build some loyalty with which to “enter the market” (with a paid product or live show, presumably). They are shooting for distribution of 50,000 virtual copies. Why not? Get yours here.

[The Digital Music Weblog]

mthart — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 11:46:00 -0800

Does "the Long Tail" mean we need longer copyrights?

I'm posting this in full because it's important.

Cory @ Boing Boing Blog

Does "the Long Tail" mean we need longer copyrights?

Chris Anderson's brilliant Wired article, The Long Tail, talks about how indie, obscure and midlist/backlist material is more valuable, in aggregate, than all the glitzy, mainstream top-forty stuff is.

However, when Lawrence Lessig argues for shorter copyright terms, he bases his stuff, in part, on the fact that old stuff is all out of print and can't be brought back into print because of the cost of clearing the copyright to the work.

Are Lessig and the Long Tail irreconcilable? Anderson says no:

Many of those extracting new value from old content are not the original creators or rights-holders. Some of them are repurposing older material, and others are aggregators who have found ways to find new markets for material that's fallen beneath the commercial radar. Either way, they typically aren't the original record label, film studio, publishing house, TV production company or any of the other names that might be on the copyright declaration. They are someone else, probably someone entirely unexpected. This is, after all, the dawn of Remix Culture.

What's changed is the presumption that the primary rights-holder is the best at extracting the commercial potential of creative material. Instead, anyone can do it: the advertising company that remixes an old movie to sell a car; the Linux t-shirt done Warhol-style, or just plain old DJ magic. What you need to encourage this multiplicity of commercialization potential is tiered alternatives to one-size-fits-all copyright, from allowing derivative works (good marketing!) to shorter terms for the sake of the remix-culture social good. I can't think of a better example of that than Lessig's own Creative Commons, which has already become the license of choice for the right side of the Tail, where the commercial imperative is less all-consuming.

Link

(via Copyfight)

Another way to look at this is to look at the marketing cost of promoting some piece of content. It is nearly impossible for someone to sustain a marketing campaign for most content for the lifetime of the copyright. In the past, it is likely that old content would get lost in the archives or disappear all together. With digital technology and remix culture, new creators can discover old music and bring it back. This is what Disney has done with many of their stories. When Disney takes an ancient myth or story and spends money to animate it, it's building on the past, but involved a great deal of creativity. In the same way, many of the people who dig into the tail and discover lost songs and books and are tuning them or putting them in context often add a great deal of creativity in the process. The notion that there is an "origin" of an idea or work and that the creativity stops there is silly. Most creative work is a process of people passing ideas and inspirations from the past into the future and adding their own creativity along the way.

Also, I'm not against businesses making money. I just believe that the cost of marketing is going to increase and the cost of delivery is going to decrease as the Net gets stronger and mass media gets weaker. In a world where discovery is more important than delivery, it's the people who find, remix and direct attention to old stuff that should be rewarded, not the people who deliver it or sit on it waiting for someone to show up.

Comment - TrackBack [Joi Ito's Web]

Videora

mthart — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 13:39:00 -0800

Videora:

David Pescovitz:
From BB "band manager" John Battelle's Searchblog:

"Via PVR Blog, I see that Videora, a BitTorrent RSS reader, has launched. Om noted it here.

So why do we care? Well, I've long theorized that video over IP will come from the bottom up, as opposed to the top down, much as it has with blogs, and with music before that. This feels right along those lines."

Link (to Searchblog entry), Link (to Videora)

Rumblefish and Magnatune, music licensing and music publishing

mthart — Mon, 03 Jan 2005 00:20:00 -0800

Rumblefish and Magnatune, music licensing and music publishing:

Recently I met with Rumblefish http://www.rumblefish.com/ founder Paul Anthony. His not-evil music licensing company who has managed to crack into the big league (with licenses to The Sopranos, Adidas, JCPenney and Fox Sports). I admire his commitment to not being evil, and his successful focus on high-end licensing.

Rumblefish and Magnatune will be cooperating on a number of fronts, specifically:

Rumblefish will be able to sell Magnatune's music through its licensing business Magnatune will develop a version of its online licensing system for Rumblefish, so that Rumblefish will have an all-online music licensing site Magnatune will be contracting to Rumblefish to do the "Publishing Administration" for our about-to-be-launched new business "Not Evil Publishing", which is a music publishing business for self-owned musicians. More about the publishing business as that site goes live...

How to do Media RSS right

mthart — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 08:51:00 -0800

How to do Media RSS right:

Now I hate to say I told you so - but the hack-spirit of Podcasting just pissed me off - and now I have somewhere to point to - to show what I mean by proper architecture, well thought out designs and heaven forbid - an RSS namespace spec - which we can all hang out hats on - and move forward with.

It's called Media RSS.

Jeremy Zawodny clued me into this - and I just wanna say "RIGHT ON!"

Yahoo has started an effort to get folks to upload RSS files of their video - which means that Yahoo is jumping in - head first - into the space of open standards.

Wallah!

See that wasn't so hard?

Assuming that it's OK to call Yahoo 3rd (after MSN and Google) it's not hard to see why they're doing what they're doing.

Google is off pushing some propreitary solution onto our GODD friends down in Hollywood - I'm sure promising them a solution to that dreaded "bit torrent" download "problem they have".

Microsoft is being Microsoft - tying all their search stuff into their DRM solution - and so that leaves it to Yahoo to support and think about US.

So right on to Jeremy et al. Now the work begins.

This all leads to a bigger strategy for Yahoo - supoorting ALL SORTS of open standards. There are 50M people who use Yahoo groups. Those Groups have image galleries, events, on-going discussion threads.

Why not open those up?

And Yahoo is the leader is personalzied 'portals'. In fact they invented it! Thet started the whole My thing.

Does this mean that Yahoo will be helping us to define what Digital Lifestyle Aggregation is - moving forward?

I sure hope so!

Steve Rubel seems to grok the significance of this. This is about end-user participation. A transparent attempt at Yahoo to start over again - from scratch - just like they started out in their humble beginnings - acknowledging the importance of US attaching meta-data to our video.

So it's not JUST about the end-user content. If that content ain't indexed with meta-data - we'll never find it. I know we'll chew the shit out of this for our ourmedia.org efforts.

So there's a working site, a Yahoo group set up, a namespace spec proposed and a blog blogging about it. Please join and help us welcome Yahoo into this grand chess game we call open standards.

Musicians Sing Different Tune on File Sharing

mthart — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 00:49:00 -0800

Musicians Sing Different Tune on File Sharing:
Aside from the few who speak out publicly, musicians typically sit out the debate over file sharing. Now, a new survey has found that most artists don't view unauthorized swapping as a threat to their livelihood. -washingtonpost.com

Recognize!

mthart — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 13:40:00 -0800

Recognize!:

BBC Science -- Scientists believe they have worked out exactly how we recognise a face when we see it. Experts have known for some time that there is something special about faces that draws us to look at them, even after the first few hours of birth. A brain region called the fusiform face area (FFA) has been pinpointed as key. Now a team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology say in the journal Neuron that they have figured out how the FFA processes this visual information.  To find out what was going on in the brain, the researchers asked volunteers to take part in an experiment. The volunteers were asked to look at pictures of different faces and also pictures of an inanimate object - a house. At the same time, the volunteers' brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which shows up which areas of the brain are active at any given time. Some of the faces that the volunteers looked at were completely normal, while others had features that were spaced differently or had features that were replaced by those of different faces, such as a different nose or mouth. Similarly, the pictures of the houses were manipulated in the same way - differently spaced windows or different doors.  From these experiments, Galit Yovel and Nancy Kanwisher were able to confirm that it was the FFA that processed the visual information. The FFA was not activated when the volunteers looked at the pictures of houses, suggesting that it is indeed specific for faces. They also worked out that it was the face as a whole that was recognised, rather than the individual features or the relative spacing of these features. (12/06/04)

Your favorite band's website sucks

mthart — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 13:06:00 -0800

Your favorite band's website sucks:
Your favorite band's website sucks. I can't count the number of times I've wanted to share a band's great new tracks with friends over email and had to give them detailed instructions on how to navigate the flash popup (ok, first click on the band's launch panel, then look in the popup for something marked "sounds" then click that and click the stream button...what? you don't have the latest flash?), or if I love a band's music, I can't seem to find their tour dates even though I know they're on the road. Merlin drops the five golden rules for bands that do too good of a job keeping their fans from their music.

Sales summary for 2004: CD sales set to overtake downloads, licensing up, consumer sales flat

mthart — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 12:55:00 -0800

Sales summary for 2004: CD sales set to overtake downloads, licensing up, consumer sales flat:
As you can see here:

CD sales continue to increase as a percentage of total sales, and now represent 45% of Magnatune's total consumer sales. CDs are set to overtake downloads in the coming weeks. This is good, as it indicates that our customers prefer CDs, so they should be happier customers now that we offer them physical CDs to purchase.

However, the increase in CD sales comes at the expense of downloads, and so overall consumer sales (cd+downloads) has not grown, as you can see here:

The good news is that licensing has more than doubled recently, as you can see here:

We're doing a large number of music licenses to indie films (10 to 20 films per month), at the bargain rate of $44 for a festival license. The upside is if any of these films showing at film festivals get "picked up" for worldwide distribution, additional license revenue comes in, and with the number of films we're licensing to, odds are good this will start kicking in over the next 2 years. And obviously, films with our music exposes the music to ever larger audiences.

artistShare

mthart — Sun, 04 Jul 2004 23:27:00 -0700

artistShare

At ArtistShare we firmly believe that the true value is found in artists and their creativity. The creative process ...

CD Baby

mthart — Sat, 22 May 2004 09:10:00 -0700

Music: La Semana
Mood: amused

Also, OL, I found this picture around online...where is it from? http://www.cdbaby.com/covers/o/t/ottmar.jpg - Adam Solomon ...

A Grand Unified Theory of Filesharing

mthart — Tue, 13 Apr 2004 17:35:00 -0700

Recently we've seen several studies of the impact of filesharing on CD sales. We have enough data now to draw ...