First up, two bits of exiting news for us. Our old friend John Kieffer is joining us as an associate and we're going to working with John on an important project with Glyndebourne, helping them scope out the development of their digital offering. More on that as it develops.
In the meantime, a few things we've been keeping an eye on.
"You ain't seen nothing yet": music & media theorist/advocate Gerd Leonhard at MidemNet, talking about ways creators can be compensated for all their wares flying around the internet:
Of course, he talks about The Pirate Bay in there; you hardly need us to tell you about the Bay going to trial in Sweden currently. It's worth taking a peek at the site they've put live to follow the trial.
In a similar vein... Spotify is running into all-too-expected problems with the majors.
Meantime, Bob Lefsetz has been bigging the service up, with his usual mix of insight and, well, certainty:
"When Spotify hits the U.S., the story is going to be gargantuan. Instant uptake will take place. You see we’re moving towards the future, it’s almost here."
The Guardian's This Much I Know caught up with Clay Shirky. We've pointed to this anecdote of Shirky's before, but, well, it's important:
"Someone asked me, "Where do people find the time to write Wikipedia?" But it has involved an estimated 100m hours, against the 200bn hours Americans spend watching TV each year. I think of me as a child sat watching every Gilligan's Island, Brady Bunch and Partridge Family on TV as a lost opportunity poured down the sink of the worst sort of media."
We're preparing a presentation about the relationship between IPR and the arts for IT4Arts right now. In the course of his archeological digs, Justin turned up this wonderful 2007 Jonathan Lethem essay in the Harpers, on the importance of influence - indeed, of plagiarism - in art. If you follow no other link from this post, follow this one.
The New York Times' David Pogue introduced Twitter to tech-unaware/averse; not the most incisive piece, but given his audience, it's pretty insightful, not least about the fact that there is simply no one way to deploy it.
Now then, the Carter report has promised, er, 2mbps... meanwhile Korea is looking at 1gbps for urban areas over the next three years. Sigh.
Chris Anderson talked to the Wall Street Journal about his "Free" theory; this is obviously going to build and build over the next few months.
We liked this little observation of generation-i songwriter Jonathon Coulton's:
"Skip the cookie-cutter MySpace stuff and get a full-fledged content-management system like WordPress or Drupal, which will allow you to build your empire as you go: a blog, forums, photos, videos - all in one place that you control."
Already overwhelmed by music apps? Yes, us too... So we probably don't need to sign up for Twisten, which allows you to stream songs being tweeted about. But we probably will, if only to write about it here.
We often talk to our clients about reputation management. This audio clip of Christian Bale dressing down the DOP on the set of T4 - a clip now heard by hundreds of thousands - is a pretty neat example of the axiom that you can't keep anything quiet.
Irish ISP Eircom has bowed to pressure from the major labels to adopt a similar "three strikes and your out" for persistent file-sharers that the French have in place.
Nice little transcript of an NPR show looking at how the Japanese use their mobiles for email and browsing.
It's pointless to point to all the coverage of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger; pointless and a bit beyond our remit, to be honest. But here's The Register on it.
Oh, and here's The Reg again, this time on the demise of the BMG- and Universal-backed music streaming service Totalmusic; can't say I didn't gulp a little at this:
"TotalMusic failed because it had the visionaries of the caliber of [TM exec] Jason on board: people comfortable with the phrase "business model" but with no experience of business, particularly selling something people want. Pseudo-technologists who don't really understand technology, swaying from fad ("compete with free!") to fad (social networking), have nothing to fall back on."
Simon
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