David Emery OnlineFun with social APIs: a pair of mini-apps
I’m very happy to say that we’ve recently released two free mini-apps meant to let artists do some fancy social network building on their own sites. They’re both simple PHP/Javascript apps that work with native APIs. One offers tweet-for-track capabilities for Twitter. The other encourages people to become fans on Facebook by offering a free download for all fans using Facebook Connect.
First off, let me just say I really admire what the guys over at CASH Music are doing; it’s great that there’s room on the internet for the intersection of Open Source and music, and that someone’s doing it.
However, am I the only one that has a great distaste with the whole ‘Tweet for a Track’ model? The premise is simple – to get a free MP3 download (or any other content, really) you have to let them post a promotional tweet using your twitter account.
The short term promotional benefits are obvious (lots of people tweeting about you or your content), and it seems like an easy shortcut to “viral” success but that’s just the problem; it’s a shortcut, not the real thing. A real viral success is something that people want to post to their twitter and tell all their friends about, and hence contains the authenticity of a genuine recommendation.
However, forcing someone to tweet (and often with a predefined message) just isn’t going to carry that same authenticity; it’s just going to feel like marketing to anyone reading it (and no one likes to think they’re affected by marketing). Not only that, the person you’ve forced to tweet isn’t going to feel great about inflicting it upon their friends either.
It turns something that should be exciting (getting a bit of content for free) into something that feels, well, icky.
Visit ➔House Season Finale Filmed Entirely with Canon 5D Mark II
The season finale of the popular TV show House, which will air on May 17th, was filmed entirely with the Canon 5D Mark II.
Very interesting – what with the occurrence of RED One video cameras being used to shoot magazine covers, these two once separate industries seem to be converging pretty quickly.
I do love the look you get shooting video with a DSLR (not that I have any interest doing it myself – it’s all about the stills for me).
Visit ➔Popular Science+
In December, we showed Mag+, a digital magazine concept produced with our friends at Bonnier.
Late January, Apple announced the iPad.
So today Popular Science, published by Bonnier and the largest science+tech magazine in the world, is launching Popular Science+ — the first magazine on the Mag+ platform, and you can get it on the iPad tomorrow. It’s the April 2010 issue, it’s $4.99, and you buy more issues from inside the magazine itself.
BERG seem to be doing some incredible work of late, and this is no exception. Unlike some of the iPad magazine demo videos that have been going round in recent weeks this is grounded in reality; no crazy custom video elements, just the existing magazine content repurposed brilliantly for a touch based, animated environment.
Visit ➔It's Not the Pay, It's the Wall
...the issue I’m interested in is whether it’s possible for a news site to exist behind a wall of any sort. Anyone who runs a relatively well-trafficked website will be able to tell you that it’s typical for the majority of traffic to be fly-by visitors from search engines and organic website referrals. A relatively smaller percentage of visitors arrive at your site by purposefully navigating directly to it (keying the URL, hitting a bookmark etc).
Drew hits the nail on the head here; there is nothing wrong with paying for content online, but putting a block between you and most of your visitors is never going to work on the web.
It’s not so much that people will actively choose to go elsewhere, more that they won’t be driven there as no-one will link to it.
Contrast that with the App store (which will soon be an Apps+Magazines+Newspaper store) where links don’t matter; what matters is popularity and familiarity. Existing print offerings have both of these in spades.
Visit ➔Under Great White Northern Lights Box Set Pitchfork Review
In the final scene of the White Stripes tour documentary Under Great White Northern Lights, Jack and Meg sit on a bench in front of 88 black-and-white keys. Jack starts to play the piano and sing his ballad "White Moon". Meg starts to cry. It's a heartbreaking, out-of-nowhere surge of intimacy that briefly lifts the curtain on one of the most fascinatingly private bands to ever reach arena-rock ubiquity. It's also one of those revealing moments that raises more questions than it answers.
I don’t think this documentary has really received the fanfare it deserves; while obviously I’m a big massive White Stripes fan so slightly biased, it’s one of the best music documentaries I’ve seen. Incredibly compelling, and a stark reminder that while Jack White is still about and playing in band after band, it’s the White Stripes that made him famous and for good reason.
Also, this review is a lovely bit of writing (not that that’s out of the ordinary for Pitchfork album reviews, though).
Visit ➔Times and Sunday Times websites to charge from June
The Times and Sunday Times newspapers will start charging to access their websites in June, owner News International has announced. Users will pay £1 for a day's access and £2 for a week's subscription.
I just can’t see this working – how can you charge when more competitors then have ever existed are giving it away for free?
On the flip-side though, I can completely see £2/week working for an iPad version – the medium is important, as is the payment and distribution model.
Visit ➔LCD Soundsystem new album reviewed track by track
So what next, when you’ve nothing left to prove? Prove it again, differently. Usually when a band tells you their latest, yet-to-be-aired effort is “the best album we’ve ever made” it’s code for “we’ve lost it completely, but at that mega-volume playback in the expensive studio it felt like we’d got away with it”. This isn’t one of those records. The third, still-untitled LCD Soundsystem album contains a run of heavyweight hits that compress the best elements of their previous work, topped and tailed by some intriguing slow-burners.
Of course as soon as I post something that says we can’t hear any new LCD Soundsystem music yet, what appears on the internet? New LCD Soundsystem music:
DRUNK GIRLS!
Visit ➔The Re-Designer
My name is Bryan Veloso, and I am a re-designer. I do not create, I improve. I do not envision what is new, I envision how something that already exists can be better.
I can relate to this a great deal; I think I’m best as a designer when working with pre-existing elements, illustrations and the like.
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Designing for the Web. On the Web.
Last week, after a lot of thought and a heap of work, we released my book, Designing for the Web, online. For free.
Well worth a read.
Visit ➔The Orchard
I like this because it encapsulates the journalistic narrative on the music industry perfectly: yet another nail in the coffin of the music industry. Pretty much any story on music is shaped around that narrative, regardless of what the story is and regardless of the truth of the narrative.
In many ways (instruments, publishing, licensing) the music industry is doing better than ever. It is only the record industry that’s dying, just like the wax cylinder industry before it and the mass market for sheet music.
Can we stop the “it’s the record industry that’s dying” narrative as well? From my point of view it’s doing pretty well; it’s different and changing but in no way dying. Although certain chucks are (cough-EMI-cough) that’s nothing to do with the viability of selling recorded music.
Visit ➔NPR, WSJ plan Flash-free Web sites for Apple iPad
In addition to new App Store software, National Public Radio and The Wall Street Journal also plan to create specific versions of their Web sites completely devoid of Adobe Flash for iPad users.
This week Peter Kafka with MediaMemo revealed that both NPR and the Journal will convert at least some portions of their Web site to load properly on the iPad. The custom-built sites will feature the same content and run concurrently with the traditional and iPhone/mobile-friendly versions of each Web site.
I wonder if this is going to be easily available to non-iPad users, and also whether they’ll be the normal website with the flash elements replaced, or some form of iPad specific version with a different UI.
Considering the apparent rise of flash blockers, it would be pretty smart to have a version without flash that gets fed to those users (iPad browsers included). Of course, that begs the question: why have the flash version in the first place?
Visit ➔Interview: David Emery, Head of Digital Marketing, Beggars Group
In his role as head of digital at Beggars, David Emery has worked on digital campaigns for albums such as Radiohead’s In rainbows, Vampire Weekend’s Contra, and most recently the debut album from The xx. Sandbox picked his brains on the full gamut of digital marketing, starting with artist websites.
A brief glimpse into where my head’s at currently with regards to things like artist websites, Facebook, apps et al.
Visit ➔6music and why I don't care
I have never really seen the appeal of radio. I get my news from the internet, the papers, the television. I get my music from any one of the 'cater to your exact needs' online music services like last.fm or spotify or any of the unfairly overlooked podcast and online radio stations. FM/AM radio belongs in cars with tape decks. It does not belong in the age of bluetooth and iPod connectivity as standard.
As previously mentioned I’m a fan of 6music, but I will admit I don’t listen to it very often; occasionally on the weekend at most. I thought it was worth bring attention the other side of the fence – not so much against 6music, but more about the relevancy of radio when we have this whole internet thing.
I don’t agree with this article, but I wonder if many people under the age of 18 actually do.
Visit ➔Ambilight for video tag
At first it looks like an average video player, the kind that loads standard HTML5 video. As the video plays, you very quickly notice what’s happening at the edges. The plugin automatically grabs the average colour in each area, and spreads it across the bounds of the video.
Incredibly cool – makes me very excited about what the possibilities are for doing crazy things in HTML and JS with video.
Visit ➔MTV channel idents
MTV International (ie MTV in every country bar the US) rolled out a new identity and idents created by MTV's world design studio in Milan in collaboration with Universal Everything last year […] More recently (and potentially confusingly) we reported that MTV (in the US) has tweaked the logo in a separate (and for now localised) rebrand - although that logo tweak WILL impact in MTV International (non US) territories by the end of next year. Now MTV International has added to last year's rebranding exercise by rolling out brand new idents designed specifically for its separate, genre-based channels
Nice ‘brand harmonisation’ you’ve got going on there MTV.
I can’t help but feel like this raft of changes-for-changes-sake – most notably, from my point of view, the rebrand of MTV2 to the vomit-inducing MTV Rocks – is a last ditch attempt to become relevant again when it comes to music videos. It’s not going to work though; music video has found its true home on the internet, and it’s not going to be on TV in any meaningful way for much longer…
Visit ➔Steve Lamacq on 6music
The cultural hole it would leave if scrapped, would have terrible repercussions for everyone from small promoters to indie labels to bands and to music fans of all ages. We’d be denying people the chance to hear music which could – even in just a few cases – alter their life, as listening to John Peel changed mine.
I’ve held back from writing about the proposed closure of BBC 6music as I don’t think I have anything to add to the debate that hasn’t already been said, and by better writers to boot.
Steve hits the nail on the head here, of course. None of the arguments hold any weight when examined with any thoroughness; it’s just politics, plain and simple.
Visit ➔Foals - Spanish Sahara
Enter your email to receive an exclusive remix of 'Spanish Sahara'
Lovely new song from Foals – I’m not quite sure though why they’re only giving away a remix of it; I’m a fan of Foals, not whoever has screwed with a song I don’t really even know yet…
Visit ➔Condé Nast reveals initial list of iPad magazines
Condé Nast's editorial director, Thomas Wallace, noted that there's an experimental aspect to releasing these publications for the iPad. These titles will be used to test pricing and advertising strategies. It won't be easy, as distribution will be handled via iTunes, and Apple doesn't share reader data.
Lets hit this ‘ooh Apple doesn’t share reader data, how will we cope’ thing on the head now, before it gets out of hand shall we? Firstly, you don’t get reader data from non-subscription copies of physical magazines anyway which – if they follow the model they’re already pursuing with the GQ iPhone apps which have an app-per-issue – is a more accurate comparison then looking at subscriber copies.
Secondly – and more importantly – Apple isn’t limiting this in any way. If they want to get reader data, just put a step in on first launch to get reader data; they’re writing the app, so they can do anything they want. If we were talking about an Apple created eMagazine format with specific restrictions that would be a different story, but we’re not; we’re talking about the App Store, which actually lets you do pretty much anything you like.
Visit ➔Continuous publishing through Live Editions
One of the biggest challenges of technical publishing is that sinking feeling you get a few moments, days, weeks, or months after you first see a book in print: it's obsolete. No matter how much hard work you put into a book, you can only do so much future-proofing. Sometimes obsolescence comes slowly, but often, especially for popular topics, books have a depressingly short shelf life. Readers want to be able to use the latest and greatest, and blame books quickly when something no longer works.
What if there was some way, maybe via a computer for example, to publish something digitally and then keep updating and editing it afterwards?
Would be pretty clever, that.
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