736 fashion tips

Does anyone really care about the 736 fashion tips for spring--the tips you see shouting from the cover of fashion magazines in every newsdealer’s window? Who reads this stuff? Who lines up to find out exactly what they MUST have for the coming season? And who needs 736 of them?

These are serious questions. I am the material girl, after all, a Taurus who lives to own and cultivate and touch and feel. I’m the sort who has matched my scooter and scooter helmet to my 27-speed road bike--a bike purchased especially for the hills of Palo Alto (the center of Silicon Valley, for those not in the know), a bike that I didn’t ride much in the South of France where I was exiled for 5 years recently, hoping in vain to escape the excess (even for me) of 6 Hummers in every 6 square blocks during the startup follies. I am serious...

Anyway (bref, we say in French), this is all leading to something quite serious. I haven’t written a blog for a very long time and I am somewhat embarrassed to admit to the challenges I am trying to overcome for fear of being laughed at (that is part of my superficial nature speaking, the side of the brain that I would like to erase but that is stronger than me and not curable by any self help program). My serious side wants to dig all the way down, to understand everything and to be understood. The other side just wants to be pretty and appreciated. Back to the blog. [Read More]

Posted at 01:06PM Jan 02, 2008 by Shelley Taylor in Music  | 

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Hold my tongue?

I wish I could. In school I was a good student but I always got bad marks for talking too much in class. It must be genetic. I see the same things on my mom’s yellowed report cards.  And I unintentionally passed the gene to my son, who transformed curiosity and love of conversation into an even higher art form: class clown. Fortunately, he has put this gene to good use in his chosen career as actor/writer. And I often take advantage of this gene for mouthing off. Ranting is the perfect outlet for me! But sometimes I regret it. I hope this time I won’t.

What is wrong with the entire music industry? Are they all suffering from collective insanity? My office was abuzz last week with the news of the RIAA “victory” against a file sharer, a 30 year old woman who was fined $220,000 for sharing 1700 music files. How completely ridiculous! Where is the RIAA case against Newscorp, the publicly traded company that has been endorsing and profiting from illegal filesharing for two years?

I want to hold my tongue. I should hold my tongue. I’m working with major and independent record labels, doing my bit to resuscitate an ailing music industry, standing up proudly for copyright protection and against piracy, yet here I am about to tell them in black and white that they are all stupid! I must be the stupid one! [Read More]

Posted at 11:03AM Oct 09, 2007 by Shelley Taylor in Music  |  Comments[8]

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Riffs…

I love that word! Riff, “a short rhythmic phrase, especially one that is repeated in improvisation.” Improvising. Another great word. Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to since my last blog post: improvising around a theme.

If you have read any of my infrequent (and often long) posts, then you’ve probably noticed that I am very passionate about a few things and don’t hesitate to rant about them. I missed a few opportunities to rant over the last few weeks… like the site lala, lala land, who opened and closed a certain “too-good-to-be-true feature” of letting users stream their favorite songs to their computers for free--in less than one month! I wanted to slag off this silly venture that launched without any clear revenue model and dubious user benefits, but I was distracted by my own work. And then I thought that maybe I should be a little more circumspect. I’m about to launch a site with amazing user features, what we hope is a strong revenue model, and I remembered that old adage: “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” Or the other one, “Actions speak louder than words.” Or, “Put your money where your mouth is.” One of those, you know the ones. So back to the riff, so to speak.

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Posted at 05:40PM Aug 17, 2007 by Shelley Taylor in Music  |  Comments[2]

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Rips, ripoffs, and rip tides

… for Rip van Winkle

You gotta wonder. YouTube was the startup that entrepreneurs dream of, or maybe don’t dare dream of because it seems just too good to be true. Seems? Well, most things that seem that way… often are… too good to be true. I don’t know if it’s true, but this is what I heard on the grapevine…

Three adorable, young, brilliant entrepreneurs, all ex-PayPal employees, founded YouTube 2005, and then sold it for $1.65 billion in Google stock in 2006. At best they can be accused of having accidentally created an adolescent shell game; they were brilliant and naïve. But at the scary worst, they can be seen as playing the greatest confidence game ever played on Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists. In addition to the fact that one those adorable founders has a dad-in-law who is a Silicon Valley legend, I heard from a fly on the wall that the eventual purchase of YouTube was planned in advance and orchestrated by some very sophisticated investment mavens.

YouTube was groomed for the perfect marriage like a first daughter. Google was the ideal candidate; deep pockets and blinded by love. Just in time. Just when hosting costs ($1 million a month) had eaten up the latest round of funding and just before lawsuits for copyright infringement began, and certainly way before there were any signs of serious revenue. If the good news bears ever do materialize, if advertisers ever do decide that it is good business to put ads on the back of the truck being used to sell stolen goods, and if someone convinces content creators that there is no value in copyrights and that they should just produce their music and film for free, then maybe Google got a good deal.[Read More]

Posted at 05:56AM May 30, 2007 by Shelley Taylor in Music  | 

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D is for Disaster

Everyone is talking about the demise of the music business, but it’s really just the demise of big business in music. We’ve all read about the disastrous results in physical sales of CDs. And digital has not, and will not, become the cure for what ails us. Some are resigned to the situation. The recent and short history of these megomaniacal and monolithic majors was profitable to some but ultimately concentrated power in the hands of very few (the labels and mega star artists). But there are too many layers of management between the artist and the consumer. Not enough sustainable value is being created by their involvement. In the past labels discovered artists and acts; without their efforts many of us would never have experienced the wonderful cross-genre love affairs (the emergence of country rock, for example, that Bob L talked about this week). But Wall Street has been controlling the mega majors in the music industry for maybe 20 years. And with the exception of a few, mega stardom and royal riches were not part of the entitlement plan for musicians. [Read More]

Posted at 10:01AM Apr 25, 2007 by Shelley Taylor in Music  |  Comments[4]

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Smoke and Mirrors

Hats off to William Dyson for his recent post in "The Emperor has no clothes"! He asks us to question the real value of all the many recent Snocap announcements. So far, Snocap is a superstar at PR but to date has had very little success in building out its store inventory. There may be a few reasons for this. I've asked several independent artists and labels about their MySpace/Snocap experience and they have unanimously said it has been painful, mostly because of such a poor user experience and lack of clear instructions as to how to get the store working on the MySpace page. Further, the inventory is exclusively independent -- and music lovers, even those who go to MySpace, want choice. This means they also want major label content. The Snocap store, as far as I can tell, has not done any "deals" with major labels to sell their content in the MySpace store (albeit DRM protected). Is all of this anti-major label, or anti-mainstream artist, or anti-establishment, perhaps just anti-consumer? [Read More]

Posted at 02:28PM Mar 18, 2007 by Shelley Taylor in Music  |  Comments[3]

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Last Rites, Last Supper and Last.fm

It’s all about death and dying this week. I read today that several social networks are on a killing spree: “MySpace’s YouTube Killer – Killing Will Begin Shortly,” by Pete Cashmore.  And then the day before, “Virb.com, Possible MySpace Killer, Goes Live” And there were more, many more just like this in the social network arena. Gladiators face off. One giant reality TV show. I’m not sure who is killing who (or is it whom?) but it seems there is plenty more room for death, since users are still not getting the best experience.

Digital music is also in imminent danger of death. Who will pronounce the Last Rites. Or shall I say, Last Rights? This week’s decision by US Copyright Royalty Board to set new royalty rates for the internet may very well mark the beginning of the end for rights owners. This very near-sighted decision means that internet radio and all other relatively new business models (the only hope of this flailing industry) have been put at even greater risk. It’s not enough that labels and publishers haven’t figured out that when compared to free, 99 cent (or 79 pence) tracks are not going to appeal to 40 times as many people who download from P2P sites unless there are tons of other services and other benefits bundled into the mix. This new decision will affect Internet radio and subscription streaming services, or music on demand. Radio is the way people have always discovered music, this encourages listeners to go out and buy! And the new music subscription model is the greatest thing since sliced bread, another fabulous discovery mechanism that can bring revenue to the industry. But both discovery mechanisms have been sentenced to, yes, Death! [Read More]

Posted at 02:59PM Mar 08, 2007 by Shelley Taylor in Music  |  Comments[2]

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The Curse of Categories

Like many bloggers here, I have disparate musical tastes.  What could be better than screaming down the highway to Led Zeppelin's 'Rock and Roll'  and then later that evening chilling out to the dulcet tones of Nina Simone?  What about getting ready for work in the morning listening to Kasabian,  and then singing away to the guilty pleasure (although one may not want to admit) of Ronan Keating's latest hit?  And of course, we must not forget the classical choices.  What about driving down the highway at top (legal) speed to Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries'? Or getting ready in the morning to Mozart's Piano Concerto  No. 23?  Or chill before bed to Rachmaninov's Vespers?  All the choices.  All of the categories into which our musical choices are divided.
 
Who decided it would assist our search if we divided music into categories anyway?  Does it help us find Rachmaninov or Razorlight any easier?  The bigger question is, who invents categories into which music is placed?  Is there any subjective tool is used to define the category?  Marketing research?  Charts and sales?  Public opinion?  The guy behind the desk? [Read More]

Posted at 10:17AM Feb 19, 2007 by Tristen Hennigs in Music  |  Comments[1]

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It's About Time

...it’s about space, it’s about the prehistoric race…

FADE IN:
INT. DRM FREE REALM – DAWN
WOMAN with dark hair sits reading something on her computer screen. She strums her fingers on the dining room table. She grabs her coffee cup, takes a quick swallow and begins typing…

Lost. Lost in Space. Steve Jobs is lost. He may give the impression that he found the plot yesterday when he wrote “Thoughts on Music”, but I would suggest he has lost his edge. He is playing a game of catch up, suddenly jumping on the DRM free bandwagon, making it his cause. This is really a game of dis-information, one that would be the envy of benevolent dictators world over (if they could but follow his devious plot). Steve is so tricky that even one of his critics, Fred Wilson, wrote in his blogpost this morning that he may have been wrong about Steve’s intentions: “I thought Jobs was using DRM to build a monopoly on digital music. Either I was wrong or Jobs has changed his mind. Doesn't matter.” Slippery, our friend Steve. [Read More]

Posted at 01:20PM Feb 07, 2007 by Shelley Taylor in Music  |  Comments[1]

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Much ado about Nothing (at MIDEM)

Nothing much to report, except that as always, randomness ran riot. I loved stumbling onto people accidentally, those I really wanted to meet, or needed to meet and didn’t even know it. But the digital entertainment industry is very, very ill. Don’t know what it will take to revive it.

The much touted Spiral Frog is already dead (but the emergency rescue team is still trying to revive it). Last week we read about how the entire management team was sacked. Guess who showed up as the replacement speaker on the panel at MidemNet? Their lawyer. The entire panel was to be dedicated to the great white hope, this very Spiral Frog! The title of the panel was “Sounds Like Free --Ad Supported Music.” Those of you who know me know that I thought their business model was terribly flawed from the moment I heard about it. For those of you who don’t know what it was, here is a brief recap:

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Posted at 01:08PM Jan 30, 2007 by Shelley Taylor in Music  |  Comments[3]

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Show Me The Money!

If you want to make money in the music business as an artist, then you must treat it like a business. Or else consider living in a Socialist country (or perhaps in France), where some people still get paid for doing nothing. There is no divine right to earn money on creative content. Content may be king, but only the truly creative rules. Those with the right to wear the Golden Crown create what people want to consume, especially on the Internet, where virtually anything can be found for free. So how can artists make money? In addition to their art, where else should they apply their creativity?

There are actually many ways for artists to make money: live performances, selling albums, selling merchandise, selling synch rights, etc. And then there is digital distribution, although selling downloads is a bit iffy. We all know that Apple makes most of its money selling its iPods--not selling tracks on iTunes. The percentage of tracks sold on download stores relative to those pirated from p2p sites (or even sold in the brick & mortar world), is small. It may not even be possible for most artists to make money through digital distribution. [Read More]

Posted at 03:55PM Jan 18, 2007 by Shelley Taylor in Music  |  Comments[7]

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Fair Use or Fair Share?

The most important limitation to the writer’s exclusive rights is the public's right to exercise a "fair use privilege" regarding copyrighted works. Fair use refers to an individual's right to use copyrighted material in a reasonable manner without the consent of copyright owner.

OK, fine. But lets be realistic.. Ripping your CDs in order to put them on your portable player or recording a concert and sharing it with friends is fair use. Right? Or perhaps it is fair use in the new world of cyber space when a bunch of entrepreneurial students come up with something great and then deal with rights issues once they have proven concept or can afford it to pay the rights holders. But, when huge corporations make millions of $ from streaming music without paying rights holders a dime? This is NOT fair! (Whether or not they are profitable is their god damn problem.) [Read More]

Posted at 12:00AM Jan 15, 2007 by Tommas Arnby in Music  |  Comments[7]

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2 good to be true? 2 million tracks for $10 (or £10)!

I love Napster. I never purchase CD’s or buy individual downloads. I don’t enjoy using P2P networks and I don’t own a stereo or CD player.  All of my music consumption is non-physical and I am not caught up in the iPod hype. All mp3 players sound the same to my ears.

2 million tracks for $120 a year! You pay more than that for cable or satellite TV in a year, and with far fewer hours of quality entertainment.

Music subscription services like Napster are hammered by both the media and our own music industry, but when you look at the numbers you can see a trend taking place.
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Posted at 05:13PM Jan 11, 2007 by Scott Cohen in Music  |  Comments[2]

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The Great Train Robbery

“The Great Train Robbery,” released in 1903, was one of the most popular and commercially successful films of the pre-nickelodeon era, establishing the notion that film could be a commercially-viable medium. Inspired by a real-life robbery by the Butch Cassidy gang, the film was copied repeatedly in future westerns. Art imitating life. The film shows a train holdup with six-shooters, a daring robbery accompanied by violence and death, a hastily-assembled posse's chase on horseback after the fleeing bandits, and apprehension of the desperados after a showdown in the woods.

Fast forward 100 years. MySpace is the most popular and successful user experience ever -- this generation’s equivalent of a movie theatre. But will it establish the reality of commercially viable social networks? The jury is still out. There is no doubt that MySpace is being copied by dozens, if not hundreds, of social networks every day. They all hope to make it big like MySpace, which created tremendous wealth for its founders (Tom and Chris) and owners by translating massive number of eyeballs on a page into share value.

What is the connection between MySpace and the title of this blog -- or, rather, the key word (robbery)? If my awkward metaphor is unclear, stick with me while I give it another go… [Read More]

Posted at 05:07PM Dec 31, 2006 by Shelley Taylor in Music  | 

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