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.

What’s it worth anyway, when these days the largest window you’ll ever see the video play on is about the size of a burrito?

But it’s not just the money disappearing or the format changing. The faith has been lost, if only temporarily, in the power of a music video to brand a new artist or transform an established one’s perception. Maybe people collectively think of music as a barrage of emotion-information, instantly available and meant to be processed at speeds approaching ADHD, but that’s a little cynical. My guess is that, now, always and forever, people only get out of music what they put into it: They can tire of a hit single after digesting the catchy hook enough times and move on quick, but should they choose to really apply what a group’s saying to their life experiences, they connect with it more and start looking up show dates or blow all $25 of their remaining retirement savings on the hoodie.

See, it used to be enough to buy the record on the release date and throw a listening party with your like-minded friends. But I think the era of the more passive listener now has to share room with the new breed of consumer, who wants to vote for the next American Idol, who wants to download the song on Guitar Hero and interact with the chords, who wants to chop and screw their own versions of the song/video and put it online for their friends/one guy in Michigan who hates it/family to see.

As expected, the next wave of artists, bred to appeal to the next wave of young fans, are establishing that kind of interactive presence. Soulja Boy is a self-made man and Paramore lent their name to promotional segments for the Rock Band launch – as seen, coincidentally, on TRL, a once-humongous music video show soon to be cancelled. (Unfortunately, Paramore, your rock advice to video-game band Carrie Me Home was in vain! Muahaha.) Bang Camaro, in a daring bastardization of the last bastion of musical integrity, invites members of the audience to come onstage and sing all the lyrics to their songs, the clearest synthesis of Artist and Consumer there is. Of course, that kind of sharing has been going on since Green Day was first putting their fans on bass in packed stadiums, but never before has the presence of the audience been invited to overtake the identity of the band with oppressive gang vocals.

Remember when bands used to get pissed at your for stealing the spotlight by stage-diving? Not anymore. They really need you to like them these days.

Twenty-somethings see hardly any of the bands they grew up with getting promoted (except maybe Weezer, which continues to produce the sound of an empty pistol clicking against their collective temple, album after album). The reason: We had our chance to absolve a long time ago when the labels successfully ass-punished Napster. Instead we retreated into the untold glories of Morpheus, Bearshare, Limewire, and other P2Ps, because we seriously, seriously thought music should be free all of a sudden. So with radio all but dead and the industry moving on to new, youth-skewing forms of promotion, we’re left to our own devices and the blogs of many a well-meaning hipster to figure out what the hell we want to listen to next – oh, and this new bone we’re getting thrown in the form of iTunes’ Genius App and Pandora. Not sure how those will work or evolve yet.

Point is, it’s all about the next demo now, and the next demo doesn’t care about music videos. They only knew them as Disney Channel commercials, or as locations for singers’ boyfriends to hang out and wind up in the gossip pages of OK! Their relevance has diminished because the community that once touted videos as art (that’s us if you’re not keeping track) dove into torrents and ditched the support of artists to save cash on their albums – and visionaries like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry gotta eat too, so any ambitious, creative voices simply traded up for film or went home.

Those and similar video directors’ collected works stand, in my opinion, as the last great gasp of music videos, an important series of artifacts that occupy the screen at dorm room parties as a reminder of how we used to process the identities of bands we liked and how, even in the act of commerce, they could excel at art. It’ll take a lot more than the next set of fresh video ideas to bring it back; we’re going to need to come to the conclusion as a generation that we ourselves are not nearly as clever or talented at interpreting music for ourselves as we currently think we are, and that we need both the help of the directing wunderkinds to do it and the labels to put it in front of our faces enough times.

So essentially, we’d have to get over ourselves and spend money doing it. Yeeeah. That’ll happen.

TrueAnthem is a relatively new company that believes music should be free to download, artists should still get paid for it, and that advertising is the way to allow both of these things to happen. While I tend to agree with most of that in theory, the way it worked in practice left me wishing I could just pay my $9.99 to get the album on iTunes.

In order to download the Ultraviolet Sound album, I first had to register for an account, which is annoying all by itself. (Take a lesson from Radiohead: Because it’s free doesn’t mean people will come running.) Once I did this and logged into their somewhat-buggy MySpace widget, I attempted to download the album. It was hardly seamless. You are forced to download every single track separately, and it asks you for the download destination each and every time. It took several minutes to actually acquire the entire album.

They also weren’t kidding about bringing in advertisers.

Each MP3 on the album begins with an advertisement for Adidas Originals, with the exception of one track on the album, which isn’t a song at all, but a giant ad in MP3 form. Annoying? Yes.

Furthermore, the MP3’s themselves are encoded in low-quality 128kbit, and also lack album art or complete metadata. I don’t get that part. It’s super easy to encode music in a higher-quality format. If TrueAnthem really wants to compete with paid music by providing a similar experience at less cost, they need to at least give us decent-quality music.

Perhaps the worst part about working with TrueAnthem is that you need to sign an exclusive contract with them. For a period of about a year, you cannot sell or distribute your music in any other fashion than through TrueAnthem. No CD’s, no Amazon, no iTunes. Regardless of how forward-thinking TrueAnthem thinks they are being by providing music totally free of charge, exclusivity undermines the spirit of music distribution on the internet, which is about choice. Consumers of music have the option right now to buy music on CD in stores, or from whatever online music store they prefer.

In fact, the whole reason why the music business is in the mess that they are is because of exclusivity. Rather than giving consumers the power to choose how they wanted their music, the business forced it upon them until the consumers revolted. It’s 2008, and this does not fly.

While I have to applaud TrueAnthem for finding a way to get paid while giving music away for free, listening to an album of low-quality MP3’s with an ad at the beginning of each one is annoying, and I would much rather have paid $10 for the same album with no ads and higher quality.

Would most people? Perhaps not the majority, but many people would — which is why you shouldn’t be forcing the artists into exclusive contracts.

TrueAnthem is attempting to infuse traditional label business practices into a new distribution method, rather than recognizing that this is a whole new ball game. The rules have changed — not just the players. They also are providing a record label experience without providing their bands with much marketing assistance, which is the one thing that traditional labels still excel at. In addition, there are various technical hurdles with their MySpace widget and the resulting files that make it even harder to use their distribution system. They are a record label in sheep’s clothing, and while I admire their intentions, I hope to see them change their ways.

If not, then I await the day their contract with Ultraviolet Sound expires so I can pick up their album elsewhere.

Glenn Wolsey is a young blogger from New Zealand who has gained quite a following with his own blog and web show, as well as Desktop Vibes and various projects he works on. I have personally worked with him. But lately, his reputation on the internet is slowly being chipped away at, due to the very dilemma many of us have — mixing your personal life with business.

Already having public relations issues thanks to a failed practical joke and the absence of good content on his site (a problem I myself battle, I will admit), now would be the correct time for him to take a look at his image — his brand — and take the measures necessary to restore it.

How has he done this? Well, after spending a couple months writing relatively off-topic blog entries to keep his content stream flowing, he has used his personal blog to plug a celebrity website he now works for.

It’s by far the longest entry he’s written in a while. The worst part about it is that it is misleading. Rather than explaining that he works for them, he makes the post sound as if he just “stumbled upon” this celebrity website and loves it. Only after his readers [rightfully] get upset about this does he admit it and address the fact that he is now employed by them. (He does quite a lot there, it seems.)

There’s a lesson here, folks, and that’s what I’m attempting to get at. We’ve all been in situations where we need money or a career advancement, and it requires doing some… interesting jobs. Hell, I work in Hollywood, I know a thing or two about working less-than-noble jobs for less-than-noble people.

The problem with Glenn’s situation is that his company and his persona are one and the same. If his personal blog becomes known for garbage, then Glenn himself becomes known for garbage. And since that reputation is personal, it transcends the blog itself. Any new endeavor that Glenn might undertake or become apart of will be painted with the same brush. It is a situation from which a person might never recover.

Of course, the celebrity website knew this before hiring him. They probably said to themselves, “Hmm, this kid already has people watching him. Instead of building our brand from scratch, why not get a leg-up by buying this kid’s audience?” It can be a smart business move. It’s just not good for the potential employee.

The moral failure occurred when Glenn accepted, and allowed himself — and all his projects — to become the face of something that his readers and fans don’t give a damn about.

The problem is not that he works for a celebrity site. I certainly would if they paid me enough. The problem is that he was willing to sacrifice the online persona that we know of him — his website, his Twitter account — in order to become the public face of this new endeavor. He is not merely working for them. He is transforming his image into theirs.

Please, Glenn, fix this before it’s too late.

And to those of you getting into the new media world, don’t sacrifice your own image. Because in a world where your business, your image, and your persona can essentially be the same thing, you only have to destroy one to destroy them all.

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.

Look, I get it. Every burgeoning outlet for struggling independent filmmakers gets laughed at, almost as a point of necessity. Most people who watch movies on their iPhone aren’t necessarily quick to admit it. A Craigslist post looking for editors on a “dramedic web series set in high school circa 1980” is like the professional kiss of death to smug freelancers. We remain in love with the thought of a theatrical premiere. You won’t find searchlights and red carpets at Mooviez4Phree.com, or near the monitors of an upscale Starbucks. You’ll just find eyeballs, watching your work for what it is. And who wants that, since everyone’s a comment box critic these days, and meaner too? I’ll take Michael Rosenbaum, Jan Stuart and J. Hoberman, thank you.

Those who are opposed to their life’s work beaming out of unvarnished digital screens to a crowd of disinterested Chipotle victims (and one or two attentive young viewers in the back) have taken to self-distribution, a method so fantastically rebellious and astonishingly ill-advised that it just might work…that is, if you have a cast that includes Alan Rickman, Bill Pullman and Eliza Dushku. Not to slight the makers of Bottle Shock, the film which I reference and haven’t even seen, but casting Severus Snape and the president from Independence Day can’t help but grease the wheels at a few LA art houses here and there. If director Randall Miller settled for faceless, summer stock mannequins instead, I would think it hard just to finance a living room screening in Des Moines.

But that’s another rant devoted to the commercialization of indie film. It must be said: the accomplishment involved in designing, approving, and financing the rollout of your own film is genuinely impressive.

However, it seems the drive to do that stems from the disgust indie filmmakers nurture by falling in love with their art, to the point that they can’t stomach releasing their baby through DVD outlets or streaming it for ad space pennies. The way I see it, if you have a property so genuine, exciting and fresh, there’s no harm in opening the source and letting Netflix vultures eat it up like so much carrion. I’m not suggesting one has to devise the killer business model and direct the best movie they can at the same time, but even if it just means piggybacking your way into Old Media, the first person to approach new methods of distribution with confidence and swagger is going to make a killing. My worry is I won’t get the script for my violent barbarian action flick ready in time to be at the frontline.

Third Rail, you know my name.

According to statistics from BigChampagne, In Rainbows was traded via torrents over 2.3 million times within one month of the album’s internet release. While the actual number of legal downloads of the album from Radiohead’s website are not public, it is still generally believed that in the end, the album was still pirated more times than it was legally acquired.

Especially interesting is the fact that these numbers — 400,000 downloads on the first day and 2.3 million over the first month — completely dwarf illegal downloads of albums by huge artists such as Gnarls Barkley and Panic at the Disco, even though they weren’t giving away their music and thus piracy was to be expected.

Believe it or not, though, this all makes sense, and I will break this down for you now.

When something is free, more people hear it, and more people share it. Giving away your music is generally accepted as a way to get it out to more people, even if that means you can’t profit directly off the sale. We must remember that when something shows up on the torrent trackers, it had to start from somewhere. Someone, somewhere had to buy, steal, or leak the original CD in order to digitize it and get it onto the torrent trackers. In this case, since anyone could go download it, essentially anyone could also be the “seeder.” Thousands of people were downloading and creating their own torrents of it, resulting in not only the most blazingly fast download ever, but also the fact that you couldn’t go onto any torrent tracker without seeing it. It was everywhere.

The bigger issue at hand here, though, is that the torrent platform has done for piracy what iTunes has done for music sales — created a well-known and respected brand that is also incredibly easy to use. It’s pretty easy to download files from the torrent trackers. You just go somewhere like The Pirate Bay, search for what you want, and click a single button. Done. It’s easy. In order to legally get the album from Radiohead, you were required to give them your email address, navigate an overloaded server, etc. It could take several minutes and required too many steps.

This is exactly why iTunes is so successful. Even though you can get the exact same music with better quality and no copy protection at lower prices at Amazon, iTunes still wins. It’s easy, it’s a brand, it’s respected.

It is also comparable to a band trying to run their own website rather than use MySpace. While you have more control, the sad fact is that in order to sell things to the masses, you must now to go where the masses congregate — they will no longer come to you, in most cases even if the content is compelling. And right now, those masses congregate on MySpace, iTunes, and The Pirate Bay. It is therefore interesting, but not surprising to me, that Radiohead’s album was pirated more than it was legally acquired despite being free.

But in the end, the band still wins. They still made a good amount of money from the pay-what-you-want approach and for the special edition versions of the album. Their concerts will sell out. They won the public opinion, and made themselves a beacon to the rest of the music industry.

The big winners in the music distribution space are always going to be the ones that balance price with ease. And when the price is $0.00, so much the better.

After you get past the obvious hilarity of this contest (the MySpace page features an overflowing Big Mac with the phrase “You So Want One” above it) we end up with an idea that a lot of companies have been adopting lately. The question is whether or not it will pay off for McDonald’s.

Why have companies been outsourcing their commercials to the public, anyway?

1. It’s cheaper! This is the most obviously explanation, of course. Even though it may seem like costs for running a contest like this would be quite high, they pale in comparison to the production and distribution budget for a “real” commercial, which would be in the millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars.

2. It makes your customers feel involved. The whole reason YouTube took off wasn’t because of theincredible quality of available content. (Can you sense my sarcasm?) It was because it gave everyone a voice. Anyone can create content. Other companies have since found that giving your customers some sort of a voice keeps them happy.

3. It markets itself. All these kids writing songs for this contest will be putting them online, sending them to their friends, putting them on their blogs… By the time this contest is over, hundreds of thousands of people will have seen/heard commercials for McDonald’s, and since McDonald’s has specified the lyrics of the song, their marketing message will have been absorbed by them all.

So will this work? That depends on the definition. I am highly skeptical as to whether things like this will actually cause huge numbers of people to flock to the burger place, especially the people who will end up seeing this on television. Also, no offense to McDonald’s, but there aren’t too many companies with aworse reputation amongst young people.

But among the kids who submit entries for this contest, I think there’s actually a pretty good chance they’ll feel like heading over to McDonald’s for a burger. Wouldn’t you, after spending that many hours marketing someone’s product for free?

Will McDonald’s profit from this little competition? I doubt it, but I could be wrong. And hey, there’s something to be said for the power of new media if even companies like McDonald’s are starting to believe in it.

¹ not at all

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:

Your video is still live because UMG has authorized the use of this content on YouTube. As long as UMG has a claim on your video, they will receive public statistics about your video, such as number of views. Viewers may also see advertising on your video’s page. 

Advertising? This is very interesting, because this basically means that UMG can now insert ads onto our page and take any revenue that this video would have earned. While this is probably better than a bunch of minors being sued, I wonder to what extent this could be taken.

For instance, if I were to create a long, very popular film that used only 15 seconds of copyrighted music, could the label still take control of all revenue and traffic? Could they effectively be given distribution rights over any piece of content that uses their property, even if the violation is minor in comparison to the work as a whole?

Obviously in this situation, the filmmaker would be best to get an original score or purchase licensing rights to the song used.

But I still find the concept of the media companies hijacking content and injecting ads into it rather fascinating. It’s almost an argument against doing any in-house new media marketing. Just wait for some kid to upload your song/movie/show and then go claim it.

The irony is that the video in question is a fake commercial for Pepsi. Perhaps we can get them as a sponsor and license the song from UMG. That’ll be the day…

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.

Why is this important? Why do nerdy things like RSS help people who like music? The truth is, this is huge. For one project I’m working on we want to be able to show you all upcoming tours from your favorite bands, without having to log into a different website/MySpace/whatever for each band. The RSS feed is how we would get this data.

Basically, once more labels start doing this, you’ll start seeing tons of exciting new applications that make use of this data in ways we still haven’t imagined yet.

I’m not going to go crazy with this entry, so I will just tell you what you need to know. eMusic’s catalog is pretty large. If you like independent music, you will love eMusic. If you intend on buying music from any of the major record labels, go elsewhere. This part hasn’t really changed over the years. Their catalog is growing, but only as other independent labels get onboard.

With their most basic subscription, songs only cost $0.35 each, and they are DRM-free MP3’s at ~200kbit VBR. Definitely awesome. For whatever reason, though, they do not offer album art still. However, if you have an account on the iTunes Music Store, you can just use iTunes’ album art grabbing feature to fix this.

And I think that little detail kind of summarizes the whole service — you should use italongside a service like iTunes; the catalog is not good enough to be your only source of music unless you don’t like anything by any of the big labels at all. But if you consume a lot of independent music, eMusic is still a great service, and will save you a lot of money for the songs they offer that you want.

Yet I have now been getting email from Coldplay with things like how to win tickets to shows and why I might want to pre-order the album.

Of course, they do give you the option to unsubscribe to this newsletter. But in 2008 when privacy concerns are the highest they’ve ever been and spam is absolutely out of control, it is simply not acceptable to sign up anyone to any kind of mailing list without their knowledge or consent.