Before I begin, I should acknowledge that “Whither the Music Video” is not a complete sentence, yet has come to gain legitimacy through years of misuse in cool titles for articles about the sorry state of [insert dying/in-transition art form].
Branching off of Dan’s recent entry re: Coldplay’s videos, it seems to me that this has been the sad standard for some time now. The more artists that leave record labels to galvanize their own fan bases however they see fit, the more that the task of the music video falls into the hands of a friend or assistant who records some blandly candid backstage footage, which more often than not winds up buried in the band’s MySpace page. And even when the suits do throw a little Thanks-For-Not-Doing-Heroin-This-Era money at their bands, the videos just look like the same low-budjy turds, only polished. Shake the camera a lot to cover up the lack of a set, overexpose to cover up the lack of a set, pack the thing with tight close-up shots of the singer’s face to cover up the…well, you get it.
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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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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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Everyone’s favorite1 burger joint is getting some interesting publicity today. First it was the guy who lost 80 pounds eating nothing but McDonald’s, but now it’s something a little more related to new media. McDonald’s is holding a public contest to write the jingle for their next television commercial. According to the website, there’s really no rules other than the inclusion of the following Grammy-winning lyrics: Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.
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If you know me at all, you probably know that back in high school, I co-founded and taught Video Productions, an award-winning filmmaking program. To this day, I still help out, and still work on the site and keep the YouTube page relatively up to date.
Not too long ago, Video Productions got its first copyright claim, this one coming from UMG. However, instead of the video being taken offline, given a cease and desist, or being sued, we received the following:
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I’m a big fan of RSS and of giving people the ability to build web services around your data. One of the things I’ve been hoping for was for the record labels to start offering RSS feeds of their tour data.
EMI has gotten all their labels to do it (see Capitol’s artists page), and it appears that Suretone has as done it, too. Suretone is a subsidiary of UMG, and as far as I can tell, unlike EMI, Universal has not implemented this across any of their other labels. If there are others out there that I’m missing, let me know.
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So eMusic has been around for quite some time, but has it changed over the years? How does it fare against iTunes and Amazon? I hadn’t used it for some time, so I went over and grabbed myself a subscription.
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So, we all know that Coldplay released their single Violet Hill as a free MP3 download. What I did not know was that when you gave them your email address, they automatically subscribed you to their newsletter without a disclaimer and without giving you the option to not do this.
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