New Media Economist

I was perusing MySpace last week for new music, when I stumbled across a catchy electropop group called Ultraviolet Sound. After deciding I wanted to buy their album, I was surprised to discover it wasn’t on iTunes or Amazon, nor was it available on CD. Instead, the band had a widget on their MySpace page powered by a company called TrueAnthem that allowed me to download their entire album for free. But like all things free, there is a catch. Or several.

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Gary Vaynerchuk may have proudly declared that you are your own brand, but it is important to realize this is a double-edged sword. Use your personal image for your brand, and you can get a lot of attention and be recognized personally for your business accomplishments. But if you find yourself sacrificing quality for money, as many companies need to do at one time or another, your own image and reputation could be at stake.

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Amazon currently has over 3,000 songs available for download totally for free at their MP3 store. Most of the stuff is either old or independent, but there’s definitely a lot of good stuff to be had. The thing that interests me the most about this is how poor the advertising on this is. Finding that “free” page is kind of difficult, when Amazon should be plugging it left and right to try to attract customers. There are a few other bizarre things about these tracks, but for now just go grab yourself some free music.

The current leader of the retail-advertising-via-plasma-television market (do we have a better name for this yet?) appears to be RippleTV, an El Segundo-based company that has over 1500 locations nationwide, with the largest concentration of displays located here in Los Angeles.

While they certainly have more of the local market than Danoo, a competing company I have previously written about, their choice of locations is just such that I haven’t run into them as often. Until they invaded my favorite coffee shop.

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A good way to watch your company die is to bite the hand that feeds you. In order to protect my integrity as a lowly bit player in this industry, I will change the names of the offending parties to which I refer.

The Bleinstein Company, no stranger to disappointing revenue, now plumbs its reputation as a champion of independent cinema and the voices behind them in press releases for their DVD distributions banner, Third Rail Releasing (not an offending party). That reputation, however, was earned back when the Bleinsteins ran Bliramax. Now, with their chips relatively down and no Oscar prospects on the foreseeable horizon, they’re quick to regard their straight-to-DVD acquisitions as mere cash grabs, and Third Rail’s work as “a good way of differentiating between what we really believe in, and what has been for ancillary value.”

I am quick to respond.

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Last October, Radiohead gained a good amount of fame when they decided to release their album, In Rainbows, online for whatever price you felt it was worth — including $0.00 if that’s what you decided to put in. So effectively, you could download the entire new album in MP3 format, immediately, for free. So then, why in the world did millions of people opt to download it illegally via BitTorrent anyway?

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I love the iTunes Store. Well, most of the time.

The easiest way to buy music online can also be a massive headache if you’re one of the people out there who care about DRM. We already know that music purchased through iTunes is riddled with it, but what many people don’t know is that iTunes Plus — Apple’s pricier alternative to their DRM’d music — has a dirty little secret: Your personal information.

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Here in Hollywood, you can’t walk to any of the major shopping or entertainment areas without being bombarded by a handful of musicians attempting to sell you their burned CD’s. It has been this way for a while, but in this day and age, I have to wonder why they still exist… and why they haven’t figured out that spending an hour putting their stuff on the internet will reap more rewards than standing out on the street corner for a solid month.

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For a long time, advertising on television was a no-brainer. It was as if the technology was invented solely to plug the full, rich tobacco flavor of Winston cigarettes. Entire game shows were branded by coffeemakers. The good lord Kraft smiled and all was well.

I still think it’s a viable resource for advertisers, but some of them are starting to sweat the advent of DVR culture. To them, that’s thousands of potential consumers, breezing past entire pods, catching only a glimpse of the last spot before Heroes resumes. As usual, sea change in response to new tech is just not an option. Small, petulant resistances are the order of the day.

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As most of you may know, the long-awaited iPhone 3G was released today, with much fanfare, long lines, and a painful activation process. Once mine was fully operational, I headed straight for the App Store, which is where iPhone owners can [finally!] download and install programs, both free and commercial. The thing that surprised me the most when looking at the list of available applications was the amount of new media integration — and the amount of large companies that are finally getting aboard the new media train.

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