The music business has always been infamous for its rate of change. Styles come and go, what’s hot today is not tomorrow, flavor of the month, other similar cliché entertainment jargon. Recently however, the rapid changes in the industry have had just as much to do with the business side as with the artistic side. Pretty much since the advent of the Internet, music has been at the forefront of the online business frontier, whether or not the industry as a whole was ready for that position.
Today, the frontier seems to have stabilized in many ways. Piracy is less of an issue—a study conducted earlier this year found that music has dropped to the sixth most popular target for Internet pirates, below PC Games, Software, TV shows, films, and…I’m sure you can surmise what is still number one—and though the industry is still less than pleased with its current revenue model, there is at least a decently standardized one in place.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the system behind this model is vast, complicated and constantly shifting. This presents problems for everybody in the industry, but most acutely for independent artists and labels. Where in the days of yore, an artist only had to find ways to sell his physical merchandise and a label had to worry about getting the material onto the radio and into record stores, now artists and labels have to manage a veritable empire of outlets to distribute their music. Have a song you would like to sell? Great! Put it on Spotify, Last.fm, Rhapsody, Beatport, iTunes, 7digital, Amazon, Medianet, Napster, Pandora…you get the picture. There is a lot out there to keep track of.
Well, there is added value in saved time, and the Amsterdam technology company Independent IP wants to save you time in your dealings with the laundry list above with FUGA. FUGA is a digital distribution technology that aims to simplify the digital operations of everybody in the music business, from the independent artist to the major label. FUGA allows digital content owners to manage their content from the point of creation to the point of consumption—housing, organizing and distributing digital assets through their user interface. You deal with them (a constant) and they deal with the rest of the inconsistent frontier. You save time. You save money.
The music industry will always be subject to change, that’s just the nature of the beast, but at least now the business side is better organized, leaving the artists more time to worry about their art.
Tags: Independent record label, iTunes, Music, Music industry, Napster, Rhapsody, Spotify
Today in Helsinki, 15 of the hottest Nordic and Baltic startups will be making their pitch to press, investors and other entrepreneurs at Arctic15. The startups will be competing not only for the attention of the crowd, but for 10,000 euros in prize money and 5000 euros in advertising money on ArcticStartup.
Here are the 15 companies pitching at the event:
Tribe Studios, Finland
Stagecraft is luxurious social stories for busy gamers.
@Tribe_Studios
Conferize, Denmark
Conferize is a “LinkedIn for conferences.”
@Conferize
Transfluent, Finland
Transfluent is a human-translated social media platform.
@Transfluent_EN
Campalyst, Latvia
Campalyst measures whether social media helps brands sell.
@Campalyst
46elks, Sweden
46elks is a cloud communication platform, which makes it very easy to integrate Voice, SMS & MMS into your applications.
@46elks
Mancx, Sweden
Search for any business information and pay to get the best answer from another individual that has the information.
@MancxAndMore
Streamtainment Systems, Estonia
Streamtainment is developing a software platform that enables realtime streaming of interactive applications into variety of low-powered end-customer devices over broadband connection.
@Streamtainment
300mg, Estonia
Real-time team information sharing.
@300milligrams
Fishare, Finland
Fishare is a social fish diary application to easily capture, add data and share your catch while you are right there in the wilderness.
@Fishare
Kiosked, Finland
Kiosked will disrupt e-commerce by enabling online content producers, such as publishers and bloggers, to monetize on any purchase impulses they create.
@Kiosked
Meetin.gs, Finland
Meetin.gs helps you to organize better, no password meetings over organizational boundaries.
@meetin_gs
Graduateland, Denmark
Graduateland brings together students & graduates, employers and universities across Europe by creating a unique trinity of international job searching, SaaS recruitment tools, and plug’n'play job portals for university websites.
@Graduateland
Holvi, Finland
Holvi is a revolutionary new online finance service that does away with the pain of managing and collecting money for your creative projects and group activities; it replaces the need for a normal bank account.
@HolviCom
Achoo, Estonia
LinkedIn meets Path. It’s a space for sharing achievements, showing your skills and discovering those of others.
@achoo_it
Mepin/Meontrust, Finland
Mepin is making Internet more secure and usable by getting rid of passwords.
@mepinman
We wish all 15 luck today and look forward to hearing more from all of them in the future!
Tags: ArcticStartup, Denmark, Entrepreneur, Estonia, Finland, Helsinki, Latvia, start up
Michael Rheaume worked at a marketing firm in Boston until it went the way of many businesses at the beginning of the Great Recession. Now, he is applying his marketing acumen elsewhere, as co-founder of the wedding photography directory, SnapKnot, where he is showing that marketing savvy and a willingness to bootstrap can take you a long way.
In February 2010, Rheaume and co-founder Reid Warner launched the site, the idea for which came form Warner’s own experience planning his wedding and the particular difficulty he had finding a good wedding photographer.
Warner posited that the problem with other, larger wedding sites is that they are overwhelming, lack focus, have too much advertising, and leave a lot to be desired in their photography section. Shockingly, many sites don’t offer anything more than thumbnails from which to choose. So, Warner and Rheaume set out to provide the wedding photography resource that was so clearly missing, and SnapKnot was born.
SnapKnot endeavors to simplify the search for a wedding photographer by literally simplifying the search. Search by location and price range and get accurate results—easy. Then, browse high definition pictures to find photographers you like and go through the provided links to their website, social media, contact info, etc.—easy.
People like easy, and so, thanks in large part to a strong social media push, SnapKnot is doing quite well. At this point, Warner and Rheaume still have not taken any money, but are in the process of scaling up. The usership and roster of photographers are growing exponentially, they are working on a few potential industry partnerships and have just released a new iPhone app. SnapKnot is proving once again that clean design, a smart, simple idea and intelligent use of social media can be a recipe for success.
Tags: Boston, Business, Photographer, Photography, social media, Wedding, Wedding photography
With all this talk about the future of TV and how video will be getting from publishers to consumers (at events like IBC 2011 among others), we figured it would be a good time to speak to somebody whose job it is to keep up with all these changes and see how they are adapting. Head of Marketing at Videoplaza, Katy Turner was kind enough to sit down and let us know a bit about her perspective on New TV.
Tattletech: Videoplaza has a slogan “Helping media companies to monetize the New TV.” How exactly do you define New TV and is it killing Old TV?
Katy Turner: What has been called “online video” has been our business since we started almost four years ago. We’re dedicated to helping publishers monetize their video content and we first thought our role would be in an almost exclusively in the web environment. But this is changing. We’re entering a time where the PC is just one of many devices where IP delivered video is consumed. We have to look beyond putting pre-rolls on Flash-based video players in the browser and realize we’re building a new category. This is not a new online buzzword or a feature of the web; this is about the evolution of moving images. We are in the middle of the biggest and most disruptive change the world of moving images has ever seen. The “New IP Delivered TV” is here and it has already begun to change all the rules.
We’ve been working hard to push our business and product towards delivery across multiple devices and platforms. We are looking beyond online video and are making all IP delivered video our business. And now we’ve arrived at the point where we’re serving ads on all major devices and platforms including PC (Flash, HTML5 and Silverlight), mobile (iOS, Android, etc), tablets, IPTV (SFR and Free in France, for example), games consoles (PS3), and connected TVs from Samsung and LG amongst others.
Our client M6, France’s leading broadcaster, is a perfect example of the adoption of the New TV. Not so long ago, their content was only delivered to PC via a couple of web-based platforms. Now though, they are present on a wide range of platforms from mobile to PC and tablets. And, with France having almost a quarter of all global active IPTV subscribers (10m), we are now serving ads on their SFR and Free IPTV platforms.
Around a third of our clients are present on multiple devices with some exclusively on non-PC devices and, to judge by what our clients have planned and the volumes we’re seeing today, we expect ten percent of our traffic to be on non-PC devices by the end of the year, and at least doubled by end of 2012.
This all points to a bigger shift that is happening now and “online video” has become a redundant term. With more and more opportunities to distribute and consume video over IP, it is our business is to help publishers monetize those opportunities.
So, is the New TV killing the Old TV? The New TV is really a much wider category, where there are multiple access points to enable the user to consume different types of content in whichever form they choose. Different types of content work better on different platforms–for example, short-form content on the mobile vs. long-form content on the IPTV. Traditional TV will still be a part of this mix, but publishers and broadcasters need to realize they inherently limit their reach if they do not evolve to take into account the multiple platforms that are now available to them, and the changing way that consumers are viewing content.
Tattletech: As attention shifts from PCs and TVs to non-PC devices, how must publishers and broadcasters adjust their content? How does this shift limit and how does it expand their options?
KT: The definition of a “media company” is now quite different from what we understood it to be in the past. Media companies used to be TV broadcasters, or print publishers for example. Now, with the reach of the internet and mobile, almost any business can be a media company and push their content out via a variety of mechanisms.
Now that content can be delivered over IP, the broadcast model doesn’t work on it’s own. Media owners need to monetize their content by delivering ads dynamically and on-demand, rather than to schedule. So media companies need to consider not only how they operate in a multi-device world (what platforms will they target, where and how their audience consume content), but also how to adjust their content strategies to work with current consumption patterns. For example, I am less likely to view a long video on my iPhone, but I would sit down to watch a longer program in front of the IPTV in my living room.
We believe the IP delivered world presents huge possibilities for broadcasters and publishers, as long as they figure out their strategy around content–delivering it and monetizing it. Where a partner like us can help is in delivering a strong monetization strategy, while reducing the technical complexity of managing multiple platforms, and critically delivering a medium like video–which has its own challenges. Platforms like Videoplaza have been built specifically with video (vs. ‘flat’ display content) in mind, so they can handle the concept of time and aim to empower the publisher or broadcaster to do whatever they want to do, while hiding the technical complexity in the back end rather than on the client side.
You can follow Katy Turner on Twitter @KatyT.
Tags: iOS, IPhone, IPTV, Katy Turner, monetization, Personal computer, Television, TV, Videoplaza
Posted by Tattletech on Sep 6, 2011 in
Weird things,
Wise philosophical words 
Ode to Butter cream frosting: your heavenly sweet scent caresses my memories from our last coupling. You sat gently on my tongue as I took my first bite into your gossamer, silky crown, feeling you melt on my lips. Your whiter shade of pale softens my soul and I lean into your web of confectional bliss and feel the undulations of your softness fill my mouth.
#poetryslam11
Tags: Buttercream, Ode
At the end of September (28-30th), the key players of Nordic digital media head to southern Finland and the city of Tampere for their annual get-together. For three days they enjoy a selection of seminars, academic sessions and competitions. What sets MindTrek a part from your usual digital media or startup events is its unique combination of commerce, science, research and citizens guaranteeing lively conversations.
One of this year’s interesting picks from the conference program is track titled War Stories: Future Female. Speakers include Julie Meyer and Karima Serageldin from Ariadne Capital, Ulla-Maaria Engeström from ThingLink and Katri Lietsala from Gemilo. This track is hosted by Krista Järvinen, who is one of the co-founders of Future Female, a network for women working in ICT. Goal of War Stories track is to share experiences of running your own business or building services from female entrepreneur’s perspective.
MindTrek is also a great place to meet cool Finnish stratups. Many of which will be participating in the event competitions. The main competition, MindTrek Launchpad, will award the most innovative and promising Finnish digital media companies with prize packages totalling 20 000 €. Winners will also get access to internationalization and growth services provided by MindTrek partners.
The event organisers are expecting 800 visitors this year marking the 15th edition of MindTrek.
- Hanna Manninen
You can follow Hanna on Twitter @HannaManna
Tags: Digital media, Entrepreneur, Future Female, Julie Meyer, startups, Tampere, Web 2.0
It has been less than a month since I decommissioned my Nokia C6 as my principle business phone. After many years of carrying three devices, it felt a weird but slightly liberating to consolidate down to two—my personal iPhone and my backup “warhorse” BlackBerry. Having been a hardcore Nokia user for the better part of *gulp* 20 years, finally letting it go has made me come to a few realizations. Not only have I not missed my Nokia one bit, this will quite possibly be the last Nokia I will ever own. Moreover, I feel no sense of loss whatsoever (I achieved final closure while disposing of the drawer full of now defunct Nokia chargers amassed over the years).
In spite of the many endearing “come as standard” Nokia device attributes (reliability, great signal quality, battery life, camera, maps, general indestructibility etc.), looking through the current Nokia range, I do not know whether to feel depressed, incensed or a little of both that currently there is not a single device that I would be excited to buy. How can this be?
Next to the dazzling array of big-screen smartphones on display at my local Carphone Warehouse, Nokia definitely seems to be the ugly duckling. But are my negative feelings towards Nokia motivated by the quality of the product or something else? Am I just prejudiced? Have I become one of the ever-swelling population of “app addicted” victims of Apple’s Ministry of Spin, smitten with the glitz and glam of the iPhone and all the wonders of the vast iTunes universe? I am really starting to wonder.
Ordinarily I consider myself to be a creature of habit and I do not normally switch brands without a pretty good reason. The problem with Nokia though is that as much as I wrack my brain, I cannot really put my finger on a defining moment when it all went wrong for me. But, obvious ecosystem limitations aside, the fact remains that my love affair with Nokia fizzled out a long time ago.
Thinking back, when I unboxed my C6 a year ago I did get that same kind of sinking feeling you get when you buy an expensive pair of designer jeans, only to discover that the particular brand or cut went out of style five minutes earlier. The feeling got worse every time I used my C6 around my iPhone and Android totting peers.
So maybe my emotional shift away from Nokia is purely an image thing. Is the Nokia brand itself just uncool? If so, Nokia is in big trouble because, like the demise of flared trousers, being uncool is a brutal, unstoppable downward spiral. Being an industry insider, it really has become impossible to ignore the abundant positive media glam surrounding the iPhone and Android. It stands in stark contrast to the overwhelmingly negative media coverage of Nokia’s fall from glory, the demise of Symbian and the huge question marks hanging over the value and viability of the Microsoft collaboration.
It seems Nokia will need a nuclear powered marketing and branding team to reverse their negative image and to reinvent the winning brand needed to restore Nokia’s street cred to its former glory. So until the likes of Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and major tech circle influencers start being photographed using the latest Nokia Smartphones as their principle devices and lauding its praises on Twitter, I fear Nokia will continue to slip further into mobile B-List celebrity status.
In the meantime, I will be counting myself among the impatient masses fervently awaiting the launch of iPhone 5.
You can follow Geoff Casely on Twitter @geoffcasely
Tags: Apple, BlackBerry, Carphone Warehouse, Geoff Casely, Innovation, IPhone, iTunes, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Marketing, Nokia, Symbian
