social-creature

I’m super excited to share the launch of the first in Espresso’s series of thought leadership pieces I’m helping research and co-write: “Connect or Die: How to survive in a Music 2.0 world.”
Having worked in the music industry for the better part of my career, with concert promoters, music festivals, and musicians, this is [...]

(photo: Mick O )

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“They say the music business is in trouble. No! The business of selling CDs is in trouble; this is a religion.”
- Michael Rapino, CEO, Live Nation

I was in the weekly Southern California marketing meeting at House of Blues the morning it was announced that Tower Records was going out of business. [...]

A quick interview with the Podcast Asylum done at AdWeek’s  Social Media Strategies 2009 conference a few weeks back. Hilary Read, EWI’s VP of Creative adds her thoughts as well.

If, sometime circa 2004, you were out and about at certain underground parties in the Los Angeles Circus scene, and saw someone wearing a particularly striking pair of pants (male or female), created from asymmetrical strips of leather sewn in a twisted, impeccably tailored way, like the trappings of some Mad Max forest nymph biker [...]

Just getting around to some bits of music housekeeping I’ve been meaning to mention:
1. Mos Def Sells New Album on T-shirt
About a year and a half ago I wrote a post called Sell Music On ANYTHING! where I suggested that since digital technology had recently liberated music from its previously contrived confinement on things like [...]

Beatles fans Vs British police.

Right after writing about how cool I thought it would be to bring fictional characters to life on social media, I discovered that the employees of Sterling Cooper, the Madison Ave. advertising agency where the characters on AMC’s series Mad Men work, were all up on Twitter. For anyone unfamiliar, Twitter.com [...]

A quick little break in the travelling silence just to mention that Post-War Trade, the “democratic future of merchandising” dreamed up by Amanda Palmer of The Dresden Dolls, and produced by Katie Kay–indisputably two of the savviest, sassiest lasses I know, whom it was my pleasure to introduce a few years back–is now, finally, up [...]

This whole thing Radiohead’s doing, encouraging remixes of its songs is way clever.

Radiohead, iTunes and GarageBand are giving you the opportunity to remix the band’s new single “Nude”.
To make remixing easy, the separate ’stems’ from the song are available to purchase from iTunes. The ’stems’ available are bass, voice, guitar, strings/fx and drums. You can [...]

it used to be that the only way to sell music was on completely useless crap. like weird tape, or dumb plastic discs, or even clunkier vinyl discs. whatever it was, it was something that served absolutely no other utilitarian or aesthetic purpose than simply to host music. then, of course, digital media came along [...]

you know, i didn’t even used to care about the music industry. i could vibe on its culturally-relevant aspects, but the industry of the music industry was never all that interesting to me. it was always just this thing…over there. somewhere else. the concert industry, which i have been involved with for a while, is [...]