We’ll return to our regularly scheduled series of ‘questions I keep getting asked about music online‘ after the weekend. In the meantime, I just wanted to follow up this thread of video services. I tried all the ones that were suggested to me - and a couple of others too. I’ve ended up at blip.tv.
I like the interface, I’m happy with the video quality, it has some nice podcast-friendly applications - but it’s also very simple and very user-friendly. I’ve grown to like the idea of the 90-second “long photograph” of Flickr - but for my purposes, this will do me. And besides - quite a few readers reported problems with the image embed in RSS readers.
And to those who’ve asked “why not Vimeo?” (the closest contender): It’s the typography. The font they put over the videos themselves is kind of ugly. Until something better comes along (or unless this proves to be a feed-reader unfriendly move to make), I’m hitching my video blogging wagon to blip.tv.
I’m looking forward to putting some whole seminars up there. Next addition is the tripod and a decent mic to attach. Recommendations?
You may have encountered talk online about Billy Bragg complaining that musicians aren’t getting money from the $850m Bebo payday. If so, the talk you’ve most likely encountered is that of TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, who pretty much denounces Bragg and barely stops short of calling him a greedy and deluded fool for wanting artists to earn money for the inclusion of their work on social networks.
It’s quite easy, from the perspective of a musician or the music industries to dismiss Arrington as an idiot on this basis. Not only is he morally and ethically in the wrong for supporting the idea of Bebo making millions without compensating the artists whose work drove so much traffic to the site in the first place, he’s actually opposed to artists making money from their recordings at all.
On the other hand, Bragg is going around saying things like ’social networks are stealing from artists in the same way that music fans are‘. Which, if you’ve ever encountered this blog before (or, actually, if you’ve ever encountered common sense about music online before), you’ll know I consider to be an outrageously ignorant thing to assert.
I’ve been on the go quite a lot recently, and so the way I’ve been keeping the internet updated is through my mobile phone (that’s cellphone for non-UK readers).
And while I’ve been doing some consultancy for a couple of people who are putting their whole record label business into their laptops and shutting down their office entirely (really) — I don’t think we’re anywhere near at the point yet where we can then miniaturise that a step further and put the whole thing in our pockets (though the iPhone is a step in that direction).
I haven’t been updating this site in the meantime much either - but that said, there is a lot you can do from your phone. I know people who are uploading their gig photos directly to Flickr. I’m using Twitter to make mini-blog posts and I’m just starting to use Utterz to post audio comments up online.
It might not be blogging, per se, but it’s certainly getting your stuff up online with the kind of regularity and quality that you need if you’re dealing with the sort of organisation that has a fan base to negotiate.
It’s been brought to my attention that some of the submissions from people wishing to blog about the online music environment in different parts of the world have ended up being labelled as ’spam’ and some of these have been permanently deleted in error.
I apologise for this. Normally my spam filtering systems are pretty robust - but in this instance, they’ve identified a few false positives, and so there are at least three people that I know of who have met this fate.
I go through the Spam folder every few days or so with a quick scan before doing a complete dump. My quick scans have become really cursory because the spam filter has been so accurate until now. For some reason, if you say where you’re from (particularly if you’re in South American countries, African countries — or Canada) then you end up in the Spam folder.
Could you please do me a favour? Resend your application. And this time, please use the following subject line:
The New Music Biz
I’ve set up a filter to redirect anything with that title into a particular folder, so it can’t get misfiled or inadvertently deleted. I’m sorry for the hassle.
"Music futurist", "Music thought leader", "Music business innovator". Whatever jargon you might want to use to describe Andrew you'll be using the word 'Music' and wanting to know what he has to say about the subject.
