Snowcrashing

Dympol: Paid To Play, Where Music And Brand Marketing Meet.

Posted on 21. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

What can save Recorded Music? Is it the magic of Free? Fans funding their artists? 5-cents downloads? A new slate of start-ups is emerging with radically innovative solutions.

Fan-funding seems a fascinating alternative, but the scalability of the model raises serious concerns. Sellaband, Slicethepie, the just announced Pledge are just a few names in the category.

Dympol, a New England based start-up, is advocating a different and unique proposition. Get paid to pay is the tagline of the company: by working with sponsors that believe in the value of music, Dympol is able to offer discounts that help fans buy more for less, while helping recording artists and labels earn more.

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Music Videos New Frontier: Augmented Reality

Posted on 20. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Music and Innovation hardly get together and, when they do, the War of the Roses is a more likely scenario than Star Trek. Not always though.

Augmented Reality might be a peaceful exception. A new wave of music videos is indeed emerging, with the promise to enable new creative ways for artists to interact with their fans.

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Spotify To Napster, Like Amerigo to Columbus?

Posted on 12. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Columbus – which America celebrates today – was a disruptor but he didn’t really know to what extent. He dared challenge the ocean for 36 days, and landed on what he thought was India. He lived with that belief. And changed history forever, for the better or the worse.

It was supposedly Amerigo Vespucci, who realized that it was a new land, and the German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller, named it after him: America.

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The Book Industry And The Music Industry. A Deja’vu?

Posted on 29. Aug, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Ancient civilizations believed that time was not linear but circular and postulated the theory of the Eternal Return.

Fast forward to the 21st century: the era of time as progress. Still, sometimes, it feels like ancient philosophers might have been up to something.

Take the history of the Music Industry in last 10 years and compare it against the “evolution” of the Book Industry in most recent months. You look at the facts and then tell me if I am the only one disoriented in time and space. The phenomenon of this displacement is what we today call deja’vu.

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R.I.P. Kings, Story-Tellers and Pirates.

Posted on 01. Jul, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

A tough week for the music industry. A quick Death Toll:

THE KING

With Michael, an era is gone. The ‘golden’ era of Super-Stars who can (could) move millions of hearts and dollars…

Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age has an entire chapter dedicated to Thriller, the album that saved record labels from crashing, back in 1982, when sales were drying out in the post-disco age.

The dialogue that follows is between the then-chairman of  CBS Records (then morphed into the now Sony Music Entertainment) and Michael Jackson.

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Crowd-Sourcing Kills Art

Posted on 22. Jun, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Christopher R. Weingarten (@1000TimesYes) – Music Writer, RollingStone.com and Village Voice on Twitter and the End Of Music Criticism.

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Weekly Digest on the Music Industry – June 21, 2009

Posted on 21. Jun, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

BREAKING NEWS

Music Labels Win $2 Million in Web Case [NYT]

Record Labels’ $1.9 Million Win in Thomas Retrial Constitutional?[EFF]

What’s next for Jammie Thomas-Rasset? [Ars]

BUZZ, COMPANIES & TRENDS – MUSIC

Music Charts Won’t Recognise Free Streams Yet [Moconews]

-The Economy of Digital Music- A Harvard Study

• Yet Another Study Shows That Weaker Copyright Benefits Everyone [TechDirt] Download the Full Study here
• Read also Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society [MichaelGeist]
• Harvard Paper on P2P Flawed But Worth Reading [BillBoard]

Virgin Unlimited

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What do Kindle and Lala have in common? #DRMFail

Posted on 09. Jun, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Those stories aren’t “new”. But it is always good to remind us of where we still are….

1) The KINDLE is a DRM locked device (said with a lot of disappointment)

2) LALA’s Propietary Network DRM Threat

KINDLE RELATED STORIES

-Kindle owners find out about DRM’s ever-present threat

-Amazon Uses DRM To Turn Kindle Into A Very Expensive Paperweight

-Is the Kindle one massive DRM timebomb?

-7 Reasons Why TechCrunch’s New Tablet Can Crush The Kindle

-Over 160 O’Reilly Books Now in Kindle Store (without DRM), More on the Way

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Vinyl Rules!

Posted on 07. Jun, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Forget about home theatre surround sound, iPod docking stations and the new-wave all-in-one music systems. It’s time to get ready for the next revolution, the return of the vinyl record – the favorite physical format of indie music collectors and audiophiles.

December 2008’s issue of Rolling Stone revealed vinyl sales are up 60 per cent from 2007 in the United States alone. Nielsen SoundScan reported 15 percent year-over-year growth in 2007 and 89 percent in 2008, making the 1.9 million vinyl albums purchased last year the most since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991.

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TRVSDJAM Mixtape And The Fan-Casting Era

Posted on 06. Jun, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Last week, TRVSDJAM, the combined force of Travis Barker and DJ-AM, released their newest mixtape via Twitter, offering a free download of their newest mixtape in exchange for a tweet.

By tweeting “Download the new #trvsdjam mixtape ‘Fix Your Face Vol. 2 – Coachella 09′ in exchange for one tweet! http://twitter.trvsdjam.com/”, tweeters receive a free download via an application built by Culture Jam Labs.

As you can see in the pre-populated tweet, a special hashtag – #trvsdjam – is included in the twit, with the goal of making it a top trending topic on Twitter.

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