David Emery OnlineHow Social Media Is Hurting Your Ability To Obtain New Fans
Using Google+ as a marketing tool is EXACTLY THE SAME as using Facebook or Twitter; while they’re might be small differences with the interface or how to specifically do something, the actual value in using them only comes from exactly how you use it. Do you post interesting an engaging content? Do you thank fans and respond to them? Do you make being a fan or follower a rewarding experience? Awesome, your doing the right things.
The problem is, most musicians are not doing this. Nope, they sign up for each and every new thing thinking that JUST BECAUSE it’s the new thing, thinking it’s going to help them. So they post songs, spam friends with events, do the whole “wave my hands in the air look at me” typical bullshit, and then sit on the porch and pout because they don’t have any new “fans”.
I do love a good rant, although he does lose the point a bit when he starts talking about Digg and Reddit – those places are great for getting lots of traffic, but it’s not necessarily the kind of traffic you want.
Visit ➔Beirut Pushes Up Digital Release Date
Beirut's new album, The Rip Tide, is out August 30 physically via bandleader Zach Condon's own Pompeii Records. If your music collection largely consists of ones and zeroes, though, you can hear it a lot sooner: the album's digital release date has been moved up to next Tuesday, August 2.
This sort of thing really frustrates me; there’s no doubt this is just a reaction to the record leaking, and actually it does far more damage then a leak could ever do. Firstly, it’s a pretty good advertisement that the record has leaked but more importantly rushing the digital release just screws up any change of the release making a big impact when it properly comes out. Beirut – I would have said – is in a prime place to establish themselves as a serious band, and a good chart entry would have done a lot to aid that; by doing this, the album will look a lot less impressive when it does finally come out properly.
And sadly, chart positions do matter; I don’t think – unless you’re in the top 5 – they make a huge amount of difference to fans, casual or not, but they make a massive difference to the rest of the industry; a good chart position opens doors, a bad (or lower then expected) chart position closes them.
A leak only really impacts people that probably weren’t going to buy the record anyway – rushing forward a digital release can – in some cases, not all – destroy your campaign.
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Web Typography for the Lonely aims to excite designers about the possibilities of cutting-edge web standards and javascript through beautiful and inspiring typographic explorations.
All of this is awesome.
Visit ➔Ninja Tune on Leaks
It was with considerable disappointment that we learnt in the last week that two records we have been working on have been leaked, despite the use of watermarked CDs. Toddla T's Watch Me Dance (Ninja Tune) and another upcoming release were both leaked from copies sent to the journalist Benjamin Jager at the offices of Backspin magazine in Germany.
For my non-music industry readers, most releases these days are distributed to journalists, radio DJs and other folks that need the music before an album release either via watermarked CDs or digitally via watermarked downloads or streams.
Watermarking does actually work – it’s a pretty advanced technology, and you really can trace things back as shown by this Ninja Tune post. The thing is, though, is that it actually doesn’t do anything at all – technically speaking, at least – to prevent an album leaking; it’s not like the days of copy-protected CDs that would only play in certain CD players if you looked at them in the right way (on a Tuesday. When it’s sunny.). You can take a watermarked CD, rip it to MP3 and upload it anywhere you like unrestricted.
Watermarking is protection by fear.
Fear that if you did leak it the person who sent it to you would find out and there would be repercussions.
Figuring out what those repercussions actually are is pretty difficult, however. Obviously you stop sending them music, which is you’re a freelance journalist could be an issue I guess, but it’s hardly the end of the world. I have heard of people suing, but most of the time that’s going to be a bit of an extreme measure. So, naming and shaming as Ninja Tune have done seems like an effective solution – if they didn’t do anything, their social copy protection goes out the window.
Although as Darren from PIAS mentions on Twitter, they better be really sure they know who leaked it…
Visit ➔The Liberated Camera
About a year ago a young photographer came to me with a question I'd never heard before. What did I think about "face detect" autofocus?
Probably I sighed. Then said something about how modern cameras left us with so little to do that any half-competent photographer just might want to decide where to focus on his own.
There was one problem with this expert advice—I'd never used the feature, not for a single frame. Every photographic instinct told me I was right. But then ignorance is a splendid way of maintaining our pet prejudices. So I resolved to give face detection a fair shake.
You know those articles you read where it feels like a lightbulb has gone off above your head? This is one of those articles for me as a photographer.
Like most ‘photographers’ I’ve been pretty snooty about things like Face Detect autofocus, but that’s pretty ridiculous really considering I spend a lot of my time trying to make sure faces are in focus. In practice it may well not work well enough for what I want, but it’s just the fact that I haven’t even tried that’s the kicker.
In short: don’t forget what the goal is (taking good photos); it doesn’t matter what tools you use to get there.
Visit ➔Watch these kids play Star Wars on a giant touch screen
Coolest thing ever, right? The world needs an iPad version of this, stat.
Visit ➔Internet angered by website redesign
With radical features like black text typeset in Helvetica against a white background, a traditional blog river, bold headlines, faster load times and a fashionable 8-bit style logo, there are .. wait, there's nothing crazy at all! So what on Earth are its readers complaining about?
I like the focus on readability, the reduced clutter etc but – like most people, I hazard a guess – the problem I have with the new TechCrunch redesign is it doesn’t look very nice. It’s just not very aesthetically pleasing.
Just because the mob is up in arms about every redesign (or even slight tweak) doesn’t mean there’s not some truth to it every once in a while.
Visit ➔'How I Met Your Mother': Your Face Here
The news is this: thanks to groundbreaking technology, it is now possible to sell ads in old episodes of TV shows by digitally inserting things like TV screens in bar scenes or billboards on sidewalk scenes, and having those digital screens carry timely ads, for example, as EW noted, for the release of 'Bad Teacher' in an episode that was shot in 2009.
Great technology and all, but do advertisers seriously think they get a return on investment from taking the time to insert a product into the background on a rerun of a TV show?
I mean, really?
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