Can't Stop The Music

Hungry

In these challenging economic times, Seth Godin published a “deep” blog posting. I recommend reading it. I was made aware of it as I read Shaun Groves’ “Schlog” blog – “It’s a crisis. Oh, look, an iPhone!” I recommend them both.   

Twitter Tips

Several people commented online and offline on the Twitter article last week. To those “veteran” Twitter users, the question has been raised, “Where do I go to get advanced ideas regarding Twitter?”  Michael Hyatt sent out a link in his Twitter feed this weekend that led me to a winner… TwiTip. Edited by ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse, TwiTip is a wealth of ideas and software tools for Twitter aficionados. I reviewed several suggestions that have appeared here and found TwiTip to be a great inspiration. Check it out.

Darren is a writer with ProBlogger. For those of you looking for professional blogging tips, you will find ProBlogger to be one of many great resources.

If you have other great sites for Twitter tips of professional blogging tips, please leave a comment below.

Attack of the killer lady bugs

Since moving to Franklin, Tennessee we have had many guests come to visit from all over North America. Susan has an incredible gift of hospitality and we do love to have friends and family over. Our home has even more room now that our children are off to college and beyond. Yet one guest, until recently, was a surprise visitor and came with all her friends every year… the lady bug.

When we first moved in, we were welcomed by hundreds of lady bugs. They were all over the house and even came inside through any possible entry point. Susan and I alway thought them to be beautiful and friendly. Until this week. We learned that one must carefully distinguish one’s friends from wolves in sheeps’ clothing.

As we had our regular pest control treatment to ensure the warm Tennessee summer had not bloomed any bugs inside the nooks and crannies of our home and that the wood remained pest free, we received a startling education: all Lady Bugs are not kind. It seems that the bright red lady bugs are, as we expected, aphid eaters and fun to have around during their brief visitation period each year. However the orange lady bugs are bees in disguise. Or at least their bite would have you think you were stung by a bee. (They are actually Japanese Beetles in Lady Bug disguises.) Yes, the orange ones also like aphids. Just don’t assume they wouldn’t also like a piece of you!

All those times we’d gently held them as they landed on us and we gave them flight and freedom outside our home… and we simply thought of their color differences as interesting. No more. Close inspection is required. Now the annual migration of lady bugs to our home feels more like “Attack of the Killer Lady Bugs” than a scene from a pure and delightful children’s video. I posted our surprise finding in a Twitter update and found that others had experienced the same surprise. Yet, feeling no one would believe them, they kept the orange lady bug’s nasty side a well kept secret. No more! We will brave this killer. And keep our doors and windows closed during their next visit. Consider yourself warned. Choose your friends carefully.

Back to Blogging. Continuing to Tweet.

I have been experimenting with Twitter and other social networking tools for some time now. And I have not been a frequent blogger for many months. In fact, Twitter serves as a “micro-blogging” tool, so I suppose I have been blogging… just nothing more than 140 characters at a time. Yet some thoughts require more than this, so here I am again.

With Facebook and MySpace and Plaxo and other social networking tools linked to my Twitter feeds, true “one stop” micro-blogging makes an update from my cell phone available moments later. At first I had a hard time getting my head around why one “tweets”. To those who feel the same I have one suggestion: use Twitter for one month and commit to tweet updates at least once a day. You’ll then be able to best decide for yourself if tweeting is for you or not. I am a convert.

To those wanting to know more about the experience, I recommend Michael Hyatt’s guide to Twitter. Michael is CEO of Thomas Nelson. He is also an active blogger.

When Michael started Twittering he highlighted four reasons to do so:

1. It allows family, friends, and others to follow your activity throughout the day and keep up with your life. You can even get these updates via your cell phone, as a text message. It's kind of like the Truman Show meets instant messaging.

2. It allows you to meet new friends, who tend to be on the cutting edge of technology. I am following several people that I would have never met otherwise. These are relationships-or potential relationships-that may prove very fruitful for the future. We'll see.

3. It allows me to experience first-hand a new technology that almost 1 million people are using. It may be a complete waste of time but it is free and the investment of time is miniscule.

4. It allows me to think consciously about my life. What am I doing now? What kind of story is my life telling? Is this really what I want to be doing? Could I-should I-be choosing something different?

Reason #1 has helped me keep in close touch with our children and with Susan when I travel and even throughout the day. I feel connected with our children even though we are often thousands of miles apart. This is especially true of late as Susan and I became empty nesters this past month. Jenn and Amanda are living in the Seattle area now. Sarah is studying in Australia. And Jonathon is at MTSU.

Reason #1 has also applied to our extended family and friends. I have been able to catch up and keep up with family and friends better than ever before. It’s a blast seeing photos more rapidly and more often than ever before as families and friends share their life journey.

And I personally like reason #4. It is a worthwhile question to ask… “What story is my life telling?”

If you want to "follow me," you can do do my joining Twitter.com and officially following me. You can follow Michael on Twitter here. It’s time to micro-blog!

Advice for Indie Bands

Benjamin Brannen has been working the indie band since since he was a teenager. It started when the indie band was his band! Then he started helping other bands. After graduating with a finance degree and working with Disney, Benjamin returned to his first love. Benjamin has personally managed Jonah 33, Bullets and Octane and others and has provided advice to those taking the time to ask. Check out the “About” information below. Benjamin is an impressive guy.

Benjamin has been a giver ever since the first day I met him. He shares information and, as a result, he has benefited from his “pay it forward” approach to life by also receiving great counsel from others along the way. Now he has decided to join the blogging world with advice for indie bands, smartly titled “IndieBandAdvice.com” – check it out!

Many blogs are dissertations. On Day Two of his blogging, Benjamin is already engaged in a dialog with over 8,000 visits to his site and many questions and comments coming in just a few hours following the first posting. Benjamin’s goal is one we share: benefit artists and fans. This is one to add to your RSS feed list.

About Benjamin Brannen

Benjamin Brannen is founder and owner of both BCM and Ares Records. After working as a financial analyst for The Walt Disney Company’s corporate operations and real estate department, Ben took a leap into a creative position at BMG Music Publishing. At BMG, Ben quickly moved from an assistant to Manager of A&R in 2 short years proving his talent for artist acquisitions and copyright exploitation. He was an integral part in building BMG’s Rock roster, developing new talent, and placing songs with recording artists; one of which received a Grammy award nomination. Ben successfully provided the guidance and insight that led 3 unknown acts to major label record deals. Passionate about artists’ careers, and noticing a void in their development, Ben left BMG to form Brannen Creative Management and Ares Records.

 

Bring Him Home Santa

Speakerheart is featuring a new song, Bring Him Home Santa, sung by a six year old. It is rising up the Billboard charts and is touching hearts around the world. It is also being featured on radio across the country and is now being mashed up on YouTube. Half of all proceeds raised go to help St. Judes Children’s Hospital. Enjoy!

The Future of Music (Electronica)

Microsoft recently demonstrated their new surface computing initiative. Microsoft Surface interacts with items you place on a table. The table is effective the display for a computer and has multiple cameras so it can “see” and interact with items placed on it. Apple’s iPhone let’s you move and manipulate pictures and web pages with simple touch and finger commands. Mny HP computers now integrate touch as do Microsoft’s ultra mobile computers. “Minority Report” has arrived! This week my cousin Jarome blogged on one of the newest electronica music creation tools… Enjoy “Music meets surface computing”!

The Amazing Slow Downer

This blog is for everyone who plays an instrument and who stands in awe of the great players. I play guitar and appreciate great guitar music in many styles and genres. I am awed by masters of the craft like Phil Keaggy, Eric Johnson, Steve Vai, Brad Paisley, Brent Mason, Stanley Jordan and so many other guitar greats.

How many times have we heard a new sound or a riff that defies the rules of nature as we knew them up to that moment? Learning the riffs of guitar greats can be quite a chore when their “normal driving speed” is 120 mph and yours is 55.

I know that, with practice, I can get there… the challenge is how to break apart the amazing riff and teach my fingers how to work up to the speed of light. Back in the turntable days, whether we were trying to decipher Les Paul or Eric Clapton or Dicky Betts, we could put a thumb on the 45 or the LP to separate the notes. The pitch would drop ridiculously, of course, and there was the risk of ruining the record by gouging the needle across the grooves. When music moved to tape and then to CD, we lost even the thumb trick.

Enter “The Amazing Slow Downer” by Roni Music on the Mac and PC and “Slowblast!” by PG Music for the PC. Both “The Amazing Slow Downer” and “Slowblast!” let you take a digital music file and slow it down, maintaining the key of the music even at the slower rate. They also let you loop a section of the music, enabling you to work on that one special riff over and over and over. There’s also an open source solution called “Audacity”, available at http://audacity.sourceforge.net, packs in many features including the ability to slow down a song. It’s great to have a tireless teacher at your side.

Isn’t it great that the wonders of digital media now extend beyond the pure listening enjoyment of music to software that can help you grow in your own personal pursuit of the craft? I’d love to hear of any software discoveries you have made that are enabling you to learn and grow as an artist.

Non-DRM versus MP3

Steve Jobs recently announced with EMI that he is making EMI’s entire catalog available in “non-DRM (digital rights management) format” and is doing so for the low extra price of $0.30 a track. So for $1.29 you get a song at iTunes with no DRM on it. The announcement implies that this change is a benefit to the consumer. You need to fully understand the difference between Steve’s “non-DRM” and MP3 to see that Steve Jobs is not doing you any big favor here.

 

Steve’s version of “non-DRM” is a file formatted with the AAC codec. This codec is supported by the iPod, the Mac, and few other devices. Odds are good that if you use a PC or have a mobile phone capable of playing music it doesn’t play AAC files easily, even though it does play MP3 formatted files.

 

MP3 is the most portable format across devices. I took a quick inventory of my travel bag -- my MP3 player, my Mac, my PC, my mobile phone and even my Garmin GPS can all play MP3 files. Anyone can copy an MP3 file to any of these devices, often just by dropping it to a flash memory card. Seconds later, the music is there to enjoy.

 

Let’s compare this with Steve’s “non-DRM” AAC files. Of all those devices in my travel bag, only my Mac and PC would easily play the AAC files. In fact, one can make the case that for $0.30 more you received no additional benefit over the $0.99 file you bought with DRM at Steve’s shop – at least no benefit that you are likely to realize. Unless you have software that transcodes AAC  files to MP3 (and few regular consumers do), you’ll need to burn an audio CD of your music and then rip it back into your computer as MP3 files to get interoperable files. In fact, you usually have to re-type all of the Artist, Album, and Song data, unless your CD was the full album and you burned it in exactly the same track order as the original album.

 

So what did you get for the extra money you paid? You received a song that can be burned an unlimited number of times. What did you lose? Space on your hard disk and your iPod , because the non-DRM file is larger than the DRM file Steve was previously selling you.

 

When we offer “Non-DRM” files at PassAlong Networks they are MP3 files. They play everywhere, including your iPod, Mac, PC, Garmin GPS, your mobile phone, your MP3 alarm clock, and many more devices. It’s music’s Esperanto, if you will – true “interoperability” in music means MP3.

 

We in the music industry do consumers a disservice when we represent or imply a value only to disappoint the consumer when they run up against the truth behind the rhetoric. For digital music to achieve its full potential, we need open honest communication on the issues  -- not marketing rhetoric.

 

Mark Knopfler’s famous words defined a previous music generation. Today, if you want true interoperability, you’ll sing “I want my MP3.”

“Drinking from the Fire Hose of Life”

We hear the casual question often from family, friends and even casual acquaintances: “How’s it going?”  My answer of late is “I’m drinking from the fire hose of life!” And I mean that in the best possible way. The same can be said of PassAlong Networks. We are in a very busy, and very exciting time!

 

A lot has happened on the home front and at PassAlong Networks since I last blogged just a few months back.

 

Here at home:

• My daughter, Jennifer, graduated from college.

 

 

• My daughter, Amanda, completed three months of study in Italy.

  

At PassAlong:

• We switched our entire independent catalog of music to MP3 format. Now the music we sell for 2 million songs is playable on you iPod, your PC or Mac, your phone, … truly interoperable for our digital lives!

 

• We launched 80 stores on our StoreBlocks platform! This nationwide rollout included all f.y.e and Sam Goody locations.

 

• We announced our Connected Consumer division. This work is bringing our StoreBlocks platform to all types of consumer electronics devices. We even worked with partners to demonstrate a 7 Series BMW with access to the complete catalog of 3 millions songs right in your car. This was shown last month at the International Car Show in Geneva, Switzerland. We also demonstrated our Connected Consumer technology at the National Association of Broadcasters convention.

 

• We ran over 300 promotions with major brands from MTV to American Red Cross to Pepsi to Scotties Tissue, and more, offering over 7 million songs free to consumers.

 

• We announced a variable pricing pilot program with Digonex and Nettwerk Music Group that will let us learn how the market responds to true dynamic variable pricing that is driven by demand.

 

• PassAlong Networks was recognized as one of the Top 100 Private Companies in Media and Entertainment by AlwaysOn at the OnHollywood event this month in Hollywood, California.

 

• OnTour® won Billboard Magazine’s “Best Use of Technology by an Artist” award for the release of OnTour® by Canada’s Bare Naked Ladies.

 

• We launched freedomMP3™, enabling digital resellers to sell MP3 files and ensure the artist gets paid as the songs are shared. freedomMP3™ also enables new advertising models.

 

• PassAlong Networks was named a “Music City Future 50” winner.

 

And, back at home:

• And we welcomed a new puppy, Riley Grace, to our family!

 

 

Those are just a few sips from the “fire hose of life.” It truly is a good thing, and it shows no sign of slowing down.

We are readying new versions of OnTour and StoreBlocks. We are launching Speakerheart, our platform for independent artists. And we have a new advertising model coming to market this summer! More on these and other new announcements soon…

 

So rather than wait for a break in the action, it’s time to get the blog machine fired up again. There is so much to talk about in this ever-changing industry. The team here at PassAlong invites your feedback on our products and services, and on the innovations coming to market in the months ahead . We want to connect artists and fans and the companies that serve them, so please let us know: What would make your digital life easier?