David Emery Online

Put your sunglasses on

I think I may have used up my colour quota for the year; everything else is going to have to be monochrome.

We’ve just launched the new Basement Jaxx site: Crazy Itch Radio

Where to even begin on this site; boy does it have a lot packed in! It’s based on Textpattern which powers both the News and also the Shoutout section (which is all based on Textpattern’s comment system). There’s liberal use of javascript, for the player, the ticker (which also uses Ajax so it stays up to date with the latest shoutouts), the News which is also all Ajax-ified (so that you can sit and listen to the music, which is about an hour and a half long, and still navigate the site) and also the little jingle knobs as well.

Needless to say, it’s a pretty complicated site, with lots of little bits like the mix (which was done by Basement Jaxx), the quicktime player and the flash animations at the top all being done externally and then all coming together at the last minute.

It all worked out quite nicely in the end though…

Honesty is the best policy

At work this week we received an email from someone that had just purchased the new Thom Yorke cd from our online store. No strange thing – we receive quite a few feedback email from our stores, but the contents of it really bowled us for six:

“Hi there. I’m a big fan of Thom Yorke so I’ve already downloaded the album – don’t bother sending me the cd. Thanks.”

The guy went to the record labels store, bought and paid for the cd and then kindly asked us not to send it.

This pretty much directly ties in to what Jason Calcanis of AOL has been writing about – if you pre-order a cd, does that give you the right to download it? After all, you’ve already paid for it.

It’s a tricky point – I’d be inclined to say yes, there’s no problem with that (it’s mostly just a form of format shifting) but it really makes you think about what you’re actually paying your money for – is it the music, or is it the actual physical disk and packaging (as well as the music). If it’s the former, then downloading it before hand doesn’t seem to present a problem....

Pesky White Lies

Lies in marketing don’t work anymore (unless your customers are stupid).

Stupid enough to not realise that you think they’re stupid, at least.

With this rather important fact in mind, if you want to use lies in your marketing, you’d better hunt out a stupid audience first. Not an internet user, that’s for sure; even if your lie isn’t a big-whopper, but more one of those pesky-white-lie types someone somewhere will pick up on it. Of course, if one person picks up on it, and makes it sound like a big deal…

Boom. It is.

The audience for lie tellers is getting rapidly smaller.

Even stretching the truth a little is getting pretty difficult.

What’s maybe more important though, is that people are savvy enough to realise when they are being lied to, but also when they are not; “the most effective xyz in the world”; “Proven to be more effective then abc”; “More reliable then foo” – they just don’t cut it any more.

“We like our product”; “We think it’s better because of x”; “This is our story, we hope you like us” – it’s the only way to effectively target an audience that’s been marketed to for a hundred years.

People always moan

The best festival in the world – bar none – happened a few weeks ago; the Truck Festival in Oxfordshire, England. Truck is a small festival, and all the profit goes to charity (after the considerable costs are paid for – it may be small, but it still costs a shed load to put on a festival).

This year, they raised the price of the tickets by a huge 30% – from the bargain price of £30, to the – err – bargain price of £40. That’s £40 for a two day festival, including camping. Just to put that into perspective, V festival – also a two day festival – costs £120. You could quite easily pay that much for a single gig, let alone a weekend festival.

Not a bad deal, then.

It’s also worth taking into consideration that Truck is massively over subscribed – the tickets sold out within a week of them going on sale.

So, what do you think happened when the price raise became public knowledge?

If you said that a large number of people moaned, bitched and generally sulked on assorted online forums and other public outlets; well done! You either a) successfully read the title in rather large...

Mail Usage

I have noticed recently that – compared to everyone else at work, at least – I seem to organise my email completely differently to the rest of the world. Whether this is just a personality thing or influenced my my email environment over the years I don’t know.

The long and short of it is that I don’t file email. At all.

I keep everything in my inbox – bar junk mail, or course. I also never delete mail, either; I just don’t get that – why would you want to? They hardly take up much space. Anyway, this seems to be completely at odds with how the majority do it, which is to keep their inbox empty if at all possible; either filing away read items or deleting them.

Now, in a work environment I can just about understand the need for filing things in folders; but I think this behaviour stems from how older email programs worked. With Mail.app on Mac OS X 10.4 the search is brilliant – not only is it brilliant, though; it’s also reliable. The search on the latest version of Mail good, but to be honest it’s always been good – back since version 1...

Viral, but still funny

As a neat follow on to my post on music videos below is a rather amusing promo video for the rather excellent Tapes ‘n Tapes.

Now, this video is not a music video in the traditional sense – it features only small snippets of music, and brief bits of an interview – but I’m sure it will get much more traction and generate much more “buzz” then the forthcoming video for their next single will.

Maybe this is a potential solution to the selling music videos problem; more and more what are called “electronic press kits” are produced for an album, which are typically made up of a filmed interview of the artist. For Thom Yorke we released sections of the EPK over time as a video podcast (which worked out really well) – a combination of this along with more humour based short films (obviously different approaches work with different artists) may hold more interest then the traditional music video.

Anyway, enough rambling – enjoy:

Critical

No doubt you will have seen all the furore about the latest exploits of the “evil” terrorists, and the subsequent crippling of the countries airports.

In my eyes, this is one step by the government too far.

Granted, it appears that they have credible information which has lead to the arrest of around 20 people that were going to attempt to blow up 10 planes on their way to the US. That’s of course assuming that the information is credible (they don’t exactly have a good track record…). But what are they trying to gain by the hugely increased security measures at airports?

For a start, they have stopped the “terrorists”, so why the need for security? One reason I’ve seen is that there could be other terrorist cells that they are unaware of that could perform a similar attack – but surely that’s no different then any other point in time; there could always be terrorists planning attacks (and there probably always are).

Also, the measures they are taking are to be completely draconian. According to reports the plan involved the use of liquid explosives, so stopping people taking liquids on board would seem to be a reasonable precaution (although obviously traditional policing...

YouTube killed the iTunes star

Apparently, in a further move to show how outdated modernise the UK singles chart music video sales are going to count towards chart position. Read more on NME.com

I’m of the opinion that this is a fundamentally stupid move; but doesn’t surprise me in the least. The music industry’s current drive towards monetising video is fascinating in the contradictions it causes. Music videos have always historically been about promotion; obviously if you don’t have a video then the multiple music tv channels won’t play your song – and if you have a really good video it’ll help build buzz about both the song and the artist.

Now, contrast that with trying to sell music videos. Firstly, we’re still not really seeing proof that demand is there for music videos in their current purchasable state. Secondly, how do you convince people that something they have always got for free, and continue to get for free on tv, is now magically worth something?

Then of course, is the YouTube dilemma. YouTube, now one of the most trafficked sites on the internet, is almost certainly the most important place you can put your music video. Front page coverage on YouTube is now probably more...

BarCamp London

Ah, it’s been a while since I’ve been to one of these “geek” events, but BarCamp London in September looks like a good one.

For more info, go to the site: BarCamp London

It’ll be nice to check out the Yahoo offices, and the whole participatory aspect sounds very interesting to me. What I’m most excited about, though, is that it’s going to be the first public unveiling of the project I’ve been working on in my spare time.

It’s all very interesting!

I am however, not going to say anything about it till then…

The hype starts here!

WWDC Followup

Well, I have to say that was more interesting then I thought it might be – more for what wasn’t shown then was, however.

With Steve saying that they were keeping some major features under wraps – ostensibly to keep Microsoft from copying them, but with their current problems with Vista I imagine it’s really because they’re not finished – I’m even more sure we’re going to get a complete visual refresh with 10.5, and probably a whole new Finder as well (as that seemed to have no improvements either).

So, lets see how I did then?:

I was pretty much dead on with the Mac Pros, and very nice they are too. The all quad line-up is a nice surprise, and the almost Dell style online configuration is interesting too – makes a lot of sense for the Pro models, but I wonder how that’s going to work at retail?

Cinema Displays: nope, I was wrong here – although they do get a price drop. Maybe the Paris Expo in September (although that’s probably going to be all about MacBooks Pros + iMacs).

10.5: only 1.5/7 here; pretty close with the new Mail and iCal improvements, which look really great (To-Dos in Mail! RSS...