Musician’s Tools: iPhone 4 + iMovie = More Video Blogs

I love the first day of Apple’s WWDC. This is the day where I geek out while eating lunch, refreshing Macworld as they live blog the keynote address by Steve Jobs and drooling over the latest products. A while back, I wrote about the innovate product from Square that allows you take debit & credit card payments through your iPhone. During today’s keynote, Apple announced a noteworthy iPhone app that could make musicians’ interaction with their audience a bit easier: iMovie for iPhone. Why, you ask? With the iPhone 4, you can shoot 720p HD video and, using iMovie, you can edit the video right on the phone.

So? OK, lets make this a little more real: while driving to your next show, you diligently shoot video for your band’s Youtube channel, but you keep running out of time to upload the video your computer, edit it, and publish it for your fans. So you don’t do it. Now you’ve got all this old footage that’s no longer relevant to your fans weeks later when you finally have the time.

Now imagine the same situation, but using an iPhone 4 with iMovie. You shoot the video, but you edit it right away instead of just staring out the window. By the time you arrive at the venue, you’ve shot, edited, and uploaded a new video blog entry for your fans. You could even create promo videos for that night’s show on the way to the show!

Add this to Square and you have damn good reasons to get an iPhone – just wait until June 24th when the new ones come out! :)

Long Tail Fans

 Long Tail Fans

A few years ago, Chris Anderson from Wired wrote an influential book called The Long TailOwen Kelly, from the The Indie Digest, put together this great chart showing the Long Tail concept and how it applies to your fans.  I’m a sucker for cool graphics, especially ones that use typography in a fun way. My favorite part of this is how he uses each section to describe the fans and where they are in relation to you.  The goal is to move everyone into the far left column, true fans.  Unfortunately, this is more difficult than ever.

Chris Anderson recently released a book called Free, which explains how “free” works as an economic model.  I’m still working my way through it on my iPhone version.  I recently read a blog post on Union Square Ventures that stated value comes from scarcity.  When information was scarce, it was more valuable.  One example: encyclopedias used contain vast amounts of expert-based knowledge and were expensive, but Wikipedia allowed anyone to share their expertise and knowledge and everyone gets it all for free.  So information is no longer scarce and, while still useful, it’s not as valuable.  What is and always has been scarce is attention.  We only have 24 hours in a day, so our attention is more precious and valuable than ever, which is what advertisers have always known and constantly vying for with an ever-increasing amount of annoyance.

Our challenge as artists is to make what we do valuable enough for people to spend some of their precious attention on us.  The keys are truly simple: make good music, play it extremely well live, and connect with fans.

Spotify

I’ve been hearing for months about this music service in Europe called Spotify and how it’s simply amazing.  They say it will be the death of the MP3.  They say it will rival iTunes.  They’ve said that about alot of stuff and none of it came true.

However, I just saw the demo video of the Spotify iPhone app and I have to say I’m pretty impressed.  I can see how this will make buying songs obsolete.  Why would you store songs on your iPhone when you could just stream them, anywhere, anytime, nearly instantly?  Plus, you’re not limited to the songs you own, you get all six million+ songs in their catalog.  That doesn’t even mention the fact that you can sync it with your iPhone to play them when you’re not connected to the Internet.  I know Elliot Van Buskirk at Wired really likes it.  Am I a new believer?  Yep, call me converted!

Recent news says that Spotify is coming to the US, but I’m sure our greedy labels and the RIAA will find a way to screw it up and/or make it ridiculously expensive.  Let’s also hope that Apple doesn’t get a case of the stupids and reject the app.

Check out this video.  You’ll be blown away. I’m thinking this is exactly what The Future of Music described. This IS the future of music.  If you’re an artist, you gotta find a way to get your stuff onto Spotify!

Song Recorded on iPhone

I’m a total tech geek and gadget freak.  I refresh MacWorld and Engadget every 30 seconds to get the latest pics and tidbit of info when Apple has major announcements.  I geeked out when Google recently announcement Google Wave (soo looking forward to using that!).  When I found out LA Band The 88 recorded their new single entirely on the iPhone app Four Track, I had to check it out.  The results are impressive and the song is really catchy!

So, my fellow artists, if you have an iPhone, you have no excuse for not having recordings of your songs.  Four Track is only ten bucks.  I use it and it’s well worth the price.  You can get The 88′s song, Love Is the Thing, from iTunes, check out the making of video:

Why Myspace is Ultimately Going to Lose

From Hypebot:

To: “MySpace.com”
Is it true I can no longer listen to music on myspace unless I have FLASH 10 installed. fyi, for Mac users, you must have OS 10.4 installed in order to install FLASH 10, a $100 upgrade if you’re under 10.4; should I consider myspace no longer a valid website to listen to new music if I cannot afford this upgrade?
Thanks in advance,
Johnny

From: “MySpace.com”
Reply-To:
Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2009 04:45:28 +0000 (GMT)

Hello,
Thank you for contacting us to get your MySpace question answered. The answer to your question is yes.
Thank you,
MySpace.com

It’s this kind of stupidity that kills a company.  You simply can’t cut off users like this.  Myspace has already lost its luster and is hemorrhaging users who favor Facebook’s neat design, flexibility, and user-centered attitude.  Not that I think Facebook can’t improve a thing or two, but Myspace has always been a pain to use, a pain to customize, and a pain to browse.  If it weren’t for the fact that many people in this industry still consider a Myspace page a necessity, I would drop it and never look back.

On a related note, here’s a graphic from http://songaday.co.uk/ that I found inspiring and insightful.  It confirms what I’ve always thought – keep your website at the center of all you do on the web.  All those other places are like renting an apartment, but your website is like owning a house.

musiciansflowchart Why Myspace is Ultimately Going to Lose

Garageband Artist Lessons

I just read through all the live blogging notes for the Macworld keynote that happened this morning. Of course, every music blog on earth is going to mention the variable pricing that was introduced to iTunes. Fine, not a problem. The thing I noticed: artist lessons available for download in Garageband. So what, you say? They’re $4.99 each. My question is: how much of that goes to the artist and how does one submit material to this mysterious store?

I’m thinking like this: do you have to wait for Apple’s invitation or can you film your own and submit it? If so, how does the revenue get split, same as the iTunes store (70/30)? This could be a huge profit center for artists in the future. Your casual fans could buy the mp3s, but your hardcore fans could buy your lessons.

The Phone, the Post Office, and the Postpartum Depression

Two years ago, I heard the announcement that Apple was planning to release a phone.  Having been a Palm phone guy for years, this excited me.  I’m a totally Apple fanboy, I admit it.  I nearly crapped myself as I read the live bloggers posting pictures of the first iPhone and transcription of  Job’s announcements.  My wife and I switched to AT&T in anticipation.  Unfortunately, the first-gen iPhone was priced out of my reach.  A year later, they announced the iPhone 3G.  I could easily save up and purchase this one.  Right about the time I had the money saved up, I got a job at Belmont, who offered to provide a cell phone for me…and uses AT&T for their service.  After some wheeling and dealing, I got my first iPhone.  I tried to hide my giddiness as I opened the package and turned it on.  I began to find uses for it in my daily work: taking pictures of error messages, downloading to-do apps to keep track of what I had left to work on, etc.  I used for personal stuff too: music, pictures from vacation, & addresses for eBay sales.  Thus begins my folly.

Saturday, I went to a foreign post office to mail a wah pedal I sold.  Not foreign, like in another country (I’m in Nashville for Pete’s sake!), but foreign like, it’s not the one I normally go to, foreign.  There was no one in the room when I entered, but I could hear the postal workers jabbering the back.  I used their automated machine to print the shipping label, but it requires that you write the sender’s name and address.  Woodbine is apparently the ghetto in the burbs because all the pens were missing.  So I fetched one from the car and when I got back to the counter, I set the phone down and copied the address.  This is where my nightmare begins.  I put the pen in my pocket, picked up the package and put in the mail tumbler, and walked out the door.  I got in the car and started driving to my parent’s house for my birthday dinner plans when Anna mentioned something about her phone and I panicked, realizing I didn’t have my phone.  I immediately threw the car in reverse and zipped back into the parking lot.  With my eyes glued on the front door, Anna began calling.  No answer.  Parking in front of the front door, I ran back inside… no phone anywhere.  She kept calling.  I didn’t hear any vibrations or her ringtone.  Nothing.

We called at least 20 times, sent multiple text messages with offers of cash to return it, begging, pleading – all to no avail.  There was only one person in the post office when I returned and I asked him at least twice if he had seen and he said no.  The grumpy backroom guy said he didn’t see it in the mail bin (I thought maybe I had dropped in with box by accident).  It was just simply gone.

The most horrifying thing about it is that the phone didn’t belong to me.  I already had images of my boss screaming at me and sending me home crying over a lost phone and a lost job.  By the grace of God, she wasn’t upset.  She wasn’t sure I’d get a replacement phone, but there was no yelling, no screaming, not even a red tint to her face.  She just called the AT&T rep to check on a replacement.  He called back the next day saying there would be no free replacement and the phone would be full price ($600 – ouch!).  I work for a specific college too, so the dean would have to pay for it since she paid for the first phone.

Having used an iPhone for two months, it will be difficult to use anything else.  Sure, other phones can do all the same stuff, but after driving a Porsche for a while, do you really want to go back to your old Toyota?  I haven’t heard the dean’s answer yet, so there’s still hope.  If they say no, then I’ll probably have to hold out.  If the school provides a cell phone, it would be stupid to pay for another cell.

More For Wireless?

In case you’re not a big Apple nerd, like me, the new 3G version of the iPhone is rumored to be launched in the next few weeks (June 9th last I read).  Along with it, Apple would like to have more content available for it’s iTunes Mobile store that allow users to download music over the cell network directly to their iPhone.  Ideally, users would also be able to use these tracks for ringtones.  As usual, the major labels are scraping the bottom of the barrel for more profits and demanding that these wireless purchases be more expensive.

I’m with John Gruber on this one, they want more money for files that cost nearly nothing to produce, are hosted on someone else’s servers, using someone else’s network?  That’s plain greed, pure and simple.  They should take whatever money they can get from recorded music and quit trying to screw everyone like they have for the past 50 years.  Get over it.  Your time is through.  You will not win, we will not let you.  The power has been given back to the people and you need to find a way to make money again.  Start by giving fans what they want at a price they can afford and you’ll make more money than you can dream.  But you need to follow your consumers, not dictate.

Universal uses eco-friendly CD packaging

I read this story this week and kinda shrugged about it. So what? Then I got a copy of Apple’s Leopard and discovered it had this very same packaging. Apple’s discs normally come in a CD sleeve, which I then remove from the box, label, and stick in a file folder for that computer. This packaging was built right into the box, so it presented a small challenge. Small, since I just cut the CD holder part away from the box and viola, problem solved. I do really like the new packaging though. It’s just efficient enough to hold the CD in, yet allow me to easily pull it back out, without any broken plastic tines or cracked cases, and its only slightly thicker than a sleeve (good for filing).

I read the story on hypebot and I opened it up again today to post the link (above). Overall, while it’s great that Universal is moving to an eco-friendly packaging, I fully agree with a commenter on the hypebot article. If Universal was truly interested in “being green”, they’d do away with additional CDs and only offer digital downloads, which are the greenest form of music distribution anyway. However, since some people have to have a physical copy, this at least presents a convince-the-suburbanites-we’re-eco-friendly way of packaging a disc. It could have actually helped if they had made this move ten years ago though. Either way, if I ever print a physical CD, I’ll check into using this packaging too.

eMusic to sue if iTunes goes buffet

eMusic says they will sue Apple if they decide to try buffet-style access with the purchase of a premium-priced device.  One of the options Apple could offer in the future would be this: if you buy their premium device (like an iPhone with a crazy add-on fee), you get all the music you want from the iTunes store.  Sounds good for the consumer, right?

According to eMusic, this would be the definition of tying, that is, ” the practice of making the sale of one good (the tying good) to the de facto or de jure customer conditional on the purchase of a second distinctive good (the tied good)” (Wikipedia).  This is from the Sherman Anti-trust law, enacted in 1890, which says, “Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony”.

To sum up, if someone buys an iPod, they are tied to major label content (potentially shutting out independent sources of entertainment).  Which would be tying to a tee.  As much as I would love to have the buffet-style access to iTunes, it would be not be in the best interest of EVERYONE if this were allowed.  Indie artists like myself get screwed (once again by major labels), because the largest music market (iPod owners) would be almost unattainable to reach.

The only hole I see in this case is: would iPods/iTouches/iPhone be prevented from loading music from other sources (like CDs or other distributors)?  If so, this would clearly be tying and would not be allowed to continue, by law.  If Apple retains their current policies of allowing any MP3 or AAC to be played on their players, then this suit could have issues, but should still be brought, if anything just to bring all the details to light.

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