Changes Is Good

I spotted this on the Ad Land blog under the caption ” ‘ah, that’s subtle’ award of the day.” Its an ad for the Manix condom brand, which is sold in Europe. It took me a while to figure it out and when I did I was disappointed. Then again I spent at least 5 [...]

There are some folks, Andrew Keen comes to mind, who are easy to dismiss not because of the sensational and contrarian nature of their ideas but because of the lack of thought and discussion that surrounds them. Contrast this with Kevin Kelly who wrote 1,000 True Fans back in March and ignited the [...]

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Hip Hop veteran and habitual scowler, Harry Allen, has an “exclusive” video of literary sensation Margaret B. Jones on YouTube, she discuss her upbring on the mean streets of LA and her new book Love and Consequences. The video is excellent as it is one of the few were we get to see Margaret Seltzer [...]

Last week the RIAA was cheering the destruction of million CD and DVD taken from flea market vendors and church swap meets across the country. This week it put out the numbers of CD’s shipped from its client record labels to music stores and they arent good. The ailing music industry shipped 17.5% fewer CD’s [...]

Over the last few weeks I havent taken the time to put mention any of the research reports I pilfer from various and sundry sources. That ends today. Here are a few of the more interesting reports I’ve read in the last couple of weeks as I boned up for different client assignments.

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Apple’s ubiquitous iPod was built to ensure that listeners could not easily pass their music between devices. The iPod and iTunes combination leads to a very solitary musical experience with users only able to share music by jumping through technical hoops. The annoyance factor with sharing digital music was intentionally high. However, where ever there [...]

Last year marketers and many web pundits were buzzing about the potential of Second Life to change everything from education to brand development. Much ink was spilled on the transformative value of 3-D avatars and millions to be made within the Second Life ecosystem. Alas, the buzz didnt last and Second Life receded into relative [...]

Yesterday I got an email from Michael Robertson of MP3tunes, personally asking me for help (yeah were that close). You see, MP3tunes is being sued by EMI music for making it easy for people to store and access legally purchased music online. The labels are arguing that ripping a CD and uploading it for storage [...]

There has been a ton of talk about Bubble 2.0, it started with Fred Wilson back in March of ‘05, was picked up by Vulture Central in Oct of the same year and has since since spawned everything from an official blog to a Wikipedia entry. However, the only sure sign that Bubble 2.0 is [...]