Pennywise, Poundwise: MySpace Free Experiment Pays Off
Major labels have been fighting against free content distribution for years. But a number of established artists are embracing the gratis giveaway, and driving dollars into more controlled areas.
The biggest players in this discussion are Radiohead, Trent Reznor, and most recently, Coldplay. But others, including Pennywise, are also pushing gratis concepts and helping to define best practices in the process.
In March, Digital Music News reported that the band attracted 500,000 takers on a free album giveaway driven by MySpace Records. That figure eventually notched to 640,000, according to MySpace, though 400,000 actually completed the process to secure the MP3s. "On top of the 400,000 downloads, we've scanned over 20,000 albums in the US and another, roughly 25,000 overseas," MySpace Records executive J. Scavo told Digital Music News on Friday. The giveaway officially ended in April.
The campaign involved a sponsorship tie-in with Textango, a mobile-based billing and download delivery platform. Scavo also noted that the band was paid for their participation, a move that helped to allay fears of traditional product cannibalization.
Now, the band is seeing some meaningful results, boosted by the MySpace project. That includes a well-charting single, and according to Scavo, significant jumps in concert tickets, tour guarantees, and merchandise sales. After playing sold-out dates in Japan and Australia, the group is now hosting shows in the United States through mid-June. And the band is being factored into the Vans Warped Tour this summer. "If you ask them, their career has been revitalized far beyond their expectations," Scavo said.
Unlike the Radiohead and Reznor campaigns, the Pennywise initiative did not include a paid option, closing off potential recording revenue from willing buyers. And looking forward, the next steps are somewhat uncertain. Scavo could orchestrate another pet project with similar parameters, though broad-scale participation by major labels in MySpace Music could complicate future initiatives.
MySpace is now planning to premiere the video for the lead single, "The Western World," on May 21st. The album, Reason to Believe, comes roughly twenty years after the band first formed in Southern California.
Reformed, Ad-Supported Deezer Grabs Universal Catalog
Is ad-supported content the answer to monetizing music online? Interesting question, though testing the hypothesis requires serious capital, lengthy licensing negotiations, and an unhealthy dose of litigation.
Upstarts like Qtrax, Spiralfrog, and We7 are leading the charge, though others are also bubbling. That includes Deezer, a Paris-based, ad-supported startup that just secured the licenses to Universal Music Group content. According to the company, the deal is international in scope, and boosts the catalog total by one million.
The deal may have carried elevated licensing costs, thanks to a checkered past. Deezer, formerly known at Blogmusik, was unceremoniously shut down following a swirl of infringement charges. The revamped service was launched last year, and also carries content from Sony BMG. In total, Deezer claims a catalog total of 2.5 million, and an active user base of roughly 2 million.
Amazon MP3: Freshly Portable, Totally Widgetized
Like many other heavyweights, Amazon is pushing outside its traditional walls. Last week, the company announced the availability of its Amazon MP3 Clips Widget, part of a broader multimedia portability push. The widget allows site owners to embed clips of songs into their destinations, either hand-picked or dynamically selected by Amazon.
That boosts an existing affiliate program, one that gives site owners a 10 percent cut on referred sales. Among the early takers is the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, which is tying the widget into its concert listings. Others are already directing ecommerce action towards Amazon MP3, including Last.FM.
Other Amazon widgets are tied to Kindle-compatible ebooks and video content from Unbox.
[articles written by Digital Music News, Daily Snapshot, Monday, May 19, 2008]
2008-05-05 Wrap up from CommunityOne conference
Session: Open Sourcing Music
Summary: The panel discussed java-based music development. It noted that overall bandwidth is up, the demand for multi-media is rising, and the complexity of implementing functionality is down. It supports an open source approach, because more people contribute, it is easier to capture new ideas, and source code becomes stable quicker. Drawbacks mentioned included legal issues w/playback, and reliance on other projects.
Resources of interest: jFrets
Session: Website into OpenSocial Container
Summary: NetBeans is supporting easy widget implementation and deployment. It is possible to drag a widget into a live webapp. A widget can be implemented in both JSP and PHP. There was a "Project Socialsite" demo that illustrated some of the main concepts.
Resources of interest: OpenSocial RO; Apache Shindig (incubator.apache.org/shindig); socialsite.dev.java.net (release planned for October)
Session: PHP/RIA
Summary: Discussion about AJAX development challenges, including the reduced latency (RIA's usually require lots of asynchronous web requests), lack of a 'push' model on the web (e.g. for stock price applications), and that traditional web servers are not designed for these kind of operations. Outline of the Comet model and Bayeux protocol (using the Dojo ajax toolkit) as a possible solution. Current issues encountered are that there is no de-facto standard, that the HTTP connection can be cut by firewalls (i.e. after long idle times), and that the browsers/servers are not optimized for this model.
Resources of interest: Zend (php)
Session: Async AJAX for Revolutionary WebApps
Summary: Panel focused on development of Web 2.0 applications, specifically using so-called 'AJAX push' models. It mentioned frameworks and technologies such as NetBeans, Comet, Dojo, DWR, ICEfaces (combining JSF and AJAX), and GlassFish (a webapp server). Web 2.0 was described as "by the people, for the people", where content is mainly provided by users. It could also be called the "participation age", with examples given the development of open source software, eBay auctions, Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube. Typcial signatures of Web 2.0 are a collaborative environment, interaction, and a powerful UI. One of the speakers announced that "AJAX is a state of mind".
Most web applications are still typically synchronous, where user events are given preference, and browser lock-ups (page-loads) are avoided. A fully asynchronous model would allow updates to be pushed from the server at all times. This is called "AJAX push", or "Reverse AJAX". AJAX Push is responsive (event driven; no frequent polling), and usually low-latency. Example applications are Meebo, jotLive, KnowNow, 4homemedia, and Gtalk. The main models are standard Ajax (polling), Ajax Push (long polling), and Ajax Push (streaming). Looking at the network level, Ajax Push basically waits for an event on the server side after a request has been made, before sending the response.
The idea is to keep an open connection, i.e. not to respond to initiating requests, and wait for events on the server-side. Polling means that the connection is keep-alive. There is no JavaScript-threading, so polling might timeout. This is also called "the long response" from the origninal 1999 push model. Long polling can be understood as HTTP message-flow inversion, where a 'GET request' is followed by a 'wait for event' and then returns a 'Response with update'. A different approach would be using the JSON publication/subscription model, which would offer good performance, but less security.
On the server-side, one of the main questions is , can push scale? Connections are basically in a waiting state, which means that additional memory is consumed by each blocked thread. Having the JVM to scale to 10k threads is not efficient. A technology solution would be a new I/O (NIO), which supports non-blocking sockets.
Server-side AJAX push would require functionality, such as asynchronous content handlers (R/W), suspendible request (suspend/resume), and a support delivery guarantee mechanism (i.e. which pushes data from one connection to another, and aggregates data before pushing it).
A future standard for these challanges is currently under way by the JSR-315 expert group.
Resources of interest: ICEfaces; GlassFish; Grizzly; Dojo; Servlet 3.0, iSpaces, WebMC, Jetty, Resin, jMaki demo, DWR