Author: Clinton Forry

As I sit listening to a real CD, I am made sad today about where the music industry has tread.

Two announcements passed before my eyes:
1. Def Leppard art debuting their new single in video game “Guitar Hero III” [thanks Shiny Shiny]
2. Hip-hop producer Jermaine “JD” Dupri has partnered with P&G, makers of “Tag Body Spray” to create TAG Records. [via Trendcentral]

While my own loyalties hew to the old model of the business, however outdated they may be, I can see why they are doing this.

Things are different from the days when I was working for Capitol Records, an independent record store, the college radio station and the local public radio station. [At the same time.] Capitol has moved further down the ladder in importance in the industry, becoming yet another barely defined brand in the EMI Music behemoth cache of holdings. That record store closed its doors. The public radio station was absorbed in a statewide consolidation. All that is left is that tiny college station.

The crossover between video games and music is nothing new, but taking it to the point of debuting a single from a diamond-selling band within one is. This is a band that used the old outfit to sell an astounding 12 million copies of a single title. As store after store reduce their inventories of CDs and DVDs to make room for video games, then that seems to be the best place to show up. Fish where the fishes are, yeah?

I think the TAG collaboration is a bit more strange. Aside from the easy jokes [“Our records don’t stink.” Or, “Our records sometimes stink, but we cover it up.” Or…] it seems like less of a natural transition from one to the next. TAG has tread near this before, with an item highlighted one year ago this week by yours truly. That has worked well for TAG — they have had 26 million people see that video, and by extension their logo. And more importantly, there have been 26 million views of the dreamy Pete Wentz using the TAG product.

If nothing else, it will be interesting to see how the TAG brand is expressed in this new record label/deodorant relationship.

My wife is a fabulous cook. She gets her ideas from all over the place — family, friends, cookbooks, and, most recently, the Internets. for years she has been a frequent visitor of popular site epicurious.com.

Epicurious has been one of those places that was ahead of the social media curve in the same sense as Amazon. They were both doing social media-type things before folks were even calling it that. People were posting their recipes, posting comments, and reviewing. I have eaten well as a result, many times.

CondeNet, owner of Epicurious, announced investment in a new venture in October 2007. It was dubbed “Tastebook.” Created by the originators of Ofoto in February 2007, it takes some of the concepts of the Ofoto photo service [now known as Kodak Easy Share Gallery]; taking the digital and making it tangible in the form of prints.

Here is what Tastebook is capable of, from their press release:

Registered Epicurious.com members can now instantly import their My Epi Recipe Boxes to TasteBook. In addition, by logging onto TasteBook, users will have access to more than 25,000 editor-tested recipes from Epicurious and may upload their personal recipes. With TasteBook’s simple drag-and-drop interface, making a personal cookbook is as easy as creating a “playlist” comprised of recipes. Details like cover art and title are also customizable.

Anyone can create a TasteBook today by visiting www.tastebook.com or www.epicurious.com to get started. Using the TasteBook service is free, and a personal cookbook filled with up to 100 recipes costs only $34.95.

Those two paragraphs cover what blogger Kevin Kelly speaks of in a post titled “Better than free.” Whether Tastebook is aware of it or not, they have provided about five of the “Eight Generatives Better Than Free.” In a nutshell, Kelly posits that in the world of free things, creators/aggregators/distributors need to offer value to people.

Epicurious users have access to those 25,000 recipes already, for free. Users have also always had the option of printing a page out of Epicurious as they would print any web page, but those loose pages tend to accumulate in unusable piles on counters, waiting to be painstakingly indexed and filed.

What they haven’t had up to this point is this:

• a copy they can immediately pull off of the shelf
• user-selected content
• easily accessed content [via index & tabs in the book]
• findable content [as opposed to those print-outs]
• a hard copy they can happily dust the flour off of [as opposed to a keyboard]

They may have had a couple of those, but the more you have in one place, the greater that value proposition appears. Tastebook is making this downright irresistible for net-savvy cooks.

The name may or may not have been a clever play on the white-hot Facebook. If you ask me, their idea is hot enough that they didn’t even need to bother. Perhaps the name was an update on the standby name of ‘cookbook;’ that term is still functional if not overly workman-like, for sure, but Tastebook lends an air of, well, taste.

I saw an ad on the TV this morning that ended with an uncommon call-to-action.

Special K, that Kellogg’s diet standby, asked me to go to Yahoo to search for “Special K diet.”

I have seen this before; some years ago Pontiac pointed people to Google to search for ‘Pontiac.’ They did the same thing that Special K did in this most recent ad — instructed folks to go to a specific search engine and enter a term, circumventing the need for a special URL or landing page that might be hard to remember.

Blogger Cabel Sasser noticed this same phenomenon in Japan on a recent trip; this post details what he saw as a major shift away from URLs toward suggested search engines and terms.

Digging further into the Kellogg site, you will notice that the second item on their left-side navigation is an invite to join them at their Yahoo Group. I went there to find a lavishly branded Group, easily navigable even by those unfamiliar with Yahoo Groups. Newsgroups have come a long way, and this is no exception; there are social functions built in, maps, etc. This is an extensive project, not just a social media tag-along. Props for that. [I am just waiting for a Facebook app…]

The hardest part about trying to integrate this sort of partnership into ad campaigns is yet to come. Folks are pretty well set in their ways when it comes to search engine loyalty. There needs to be an appealing value proposition to make a switch from something as ingrained as Google in their browsing habits. Especially in light of the fact that tons of people are typing URLs into search engines instead of their address bars.

Feeling both lazy and insolent, I went to Google rather than Yahoo to do the search thing. I did the search in my Firefox search field, with Google as the default. Their helpful little ‘suggestion’ feature brought up ‘Special K diet’ after I finished the ‘K.’ Since this feature is based on common searches as entered by other people, I discovered that I was not the only lazy/insolent one. So much for following instructions!

Word on the street is that Yahoo, proud owners of one of the most prominent photo-sharing sites on the Internets, Flickr, will be offering video hosting.

This is interesting to me, in particular, as I downloaded the Flickr Uploadr for photos just this morning. [Soon I will have a great need to share photos, and this looks to be one of the easiest ways.]

There are some truly odd restrictions, though. According to this article, only Pro users [those paying the $24.95 annually] will have access, and even then they will only be able to upload videos with a duration of less than 90 seconds.

The other option is for folks to put their videos on YouTube for free. Videos up to 10 minutes in length. For free.

I don’t know that the value proposition is great enough for folks to pay the $25/year to have their videos next to their photos. As long as those videos are less than 90 seconds. There are more benefits to the Pro membership than this new video hosting, so perhaps those already paying will see it as an added benefit.

I would image that Yahoo’s reasoning behind the project is this:
1. Most videos that people want to share are less than 90 seconds
2. Most people are not interested in your video past the 90-sec mark.
3. Bandwidth cost savings.

Maybe I’ll go pro and report back. Who knows?

The March issue of Paste magazine offered an interesting dichotomy. A full page promo on page six, right after the table of contents offers a glimpse of what is available on their site. There is a specific URL pointing people to the issue-specific version, so if you get the magazine second-hand, like me, then you will be getting the content they mention.

Readers are lured with mp3 from artists in this issue, music videos, a video podcast, and a “react” section where you can voice your opinion or add yet another list to the world of rock-n-roll. Film trailers, blogs, and 10+ daily updated news stories round out the bait.

When you visit that URL, pastemagazine.com/issue40, you are presented with an even more vanilla brochure of links than was in the paper magazine. Only after you click those links, things get interesting. I would imagine that they are using a separate URL in order to track the effectiveness of what amounts to a large piece of real estate in the printed edition.

I understand what they are up to here; having teases for the web content after each story may not present enough of a benefit to readers. Having the content all in one place [closely following the table of contents in the print edition] gives readers a stronger value proposition. “I can get all of this if I go to the web?” That may be enough. I would be

Item No. 2: a few pages later, we are greeted by another full page of names in about 8 point font. These are not the names of best guitar solos on some rock list, but rather the names of those that paid more for their subscription to the magazine than the offered rate. “Paste” asked their readers to pay what they felt was a worthy amount for a subscription. If you paid more, you got nothing but your name in this special section. [And the magazine, of course.] Someone was a show-off and paid $70!

If you are like me, then you are following all things that are related to the iPhone and music.

If you are not, then you might be surprised to hear the rumors that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, is having some discussions that would have some interesting repercussions for the European iPod market.

Following the lead of Nokia, Jobs is allegedly offering a fee paid to record labels to open up an all-you-can listen music buffet on the ubiquitous iPod.

While Nokia may have already negotiated a deal like this in the Euro market, they don’t have anywhere near the product saturation Apple enjoys. Jobs may be using this to his advantage; while Nokia’s fee paid to record labels is $80 for that all-you-can-listen-for-the-life-of-the-device plan, the Apple man has offered all of $20 for the same arrangement [allegedly]. I am sure a myriad of reasons are behind his $60-per-device discounted offer — the aforementioned market share, an unwillingness to tack on any more Euros that won’t end up in his shareholders’ pockets, and so on.

This is all fine and good, but as blogger and Inside Radio founder Jerry del Colliano says, don’t get too excited. This is for the European market, not the U.S. Given the intractable Mickey Mouse copyright laws and Draconian royalty schemes, this will not be happening anytime soon here. del Colliano argues that this isn’t even how people are looking to consume music, anyway.

I don’t think he or I are able to gauge what the the internet generation will prefer as their chief mode of music consumption. As quickly as things are changing, perhaps stating that things will go one way or another is a moot point; formats have come and go for 100 years, and consumer habits have changed along with them at every move. Technology, bandwidth, and royalty/copyright will always do battle. Laws will always be behind the curve, and the hurdle.

Should all of this prove to be untrue in the end, or partially true, as Apple rumors often are, we will know why all of the hype reached a fever pitch. This is kind of exciting. Major companies thinking in a way that takes into account what the users are already doing. All of the people engaging in file-sharing are already doing the all-you-can-eat deal. Deals like this make it monetized & legal, above ground & advertise-able. With the iPod’s ubiquity, that could be a big deal.