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Striking writers in talks to launch Web start-ups - Los Angeles Times

Dozens of striking film and TV writers are negotiating with venture capitalists to set up companies that would bypass the Hollywood studio system and reach consumers with video entertainment on the Web.

This has been expected since the strike began. The writers are frustrated with the system and realizing that they can own it all. The musicians have been living this for a while, but it takes a bit more people to produce a tv show than an album. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Look at all the episodic stuff on the web these days. Let a million small studios bloom!

Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context, a Presentation for Some Music Industry Friends at FISTFULAYEN

I’m sorry I didn’t post a link to this sooner. This is a nice perspective on the whole digital music landscape from the boss over at Yahoo Music. We’ve heard from the major labels and we’ve heard from the retailers, but Y! has a different view which is interesting. I’ve followed this since the beginning. I started Unit Circle Rekkids right near the start of the Internet’s explosive growth period. I saw different digital solutions emerge and fall by the wayside. After getting burned on Liquid Audio (if you can imagine, back then you paid them (A LOT) for the software to encode your music so that they could sell it and take a cut).

Over the years, digital distribution has changed from an interesting idea to I think the best solution for indie music. If we can get the majors to get over themselves, I think the days of manufacturing CDs are at an end.

Once in a while I would notice cdconnection popping up as a customer in my sales at cdbaby. After seeing it again this morning, I decided to check out who the heck they were. It turns out that all of the albums from my label are listed there, for sale, at nearly double the price that they are available elsewhere.

So, what cdconnection is doing is listing my albums in their inventory and when a customer buys from them, they buy from cdbaby and then mail it to their customer. This is incredible. Not that cdconnection is doing this. I mean, kudos to them for thinking this scheme up. What amazes is me is that people are buying these overpriced albums from them when they are available much cheaper even at Amazon.com, cd baby or direct from unit circle.

I just did a search on a random unit circle album and I see that cdconnection is paying for #1 placement on google for my artists and albums. The first “real” search result is Amazon. I mean how dumb do you gotta be to not notice that?

This is sort of the genius/evilness of web 2.0. With the magic of technology you can suck in the entire All Music Guide and use it to populate a database for your on-line store. Then you can go find the cheapest prices for your “inventory,” mark it up %200 and fulfill on sales only. The customer is happy, they got the record they wanted (little do they know that they are way overpaying for it), the on-line distributor is happy (a sale is a sale and they’ve already got their mark-up), even the label is happy (a sale is a sale, as long as they don’t do the math and realize that cdconnection is making more money off this sale than ANYONE else including the label/artist/whatever), cdconnection is happy (they don’t have to warehouse anything, they just resend whatever they receive, so it is a nearly pure-profit operation).

Yow.

a couple references:

• Puppies, Flowers, Rainbows and Kittens: Dear Radiohead and the rest of the music industry
• The Long Tail: Radiohead Economics
• The Long Tail: Everything in the music industry is up! (except those little plastic discs)

We’re entering a new phase of the industry and it seems like things are starting to take shape where things were very unclear before. The writing has been on the wall for a long time for the CD. Download is just easier. The CD itself spelled its own doom by downplaying the fetishism of the original vinyl albums: people used to stare at 12″ album covers, if people look at CD booklets once, they almost never look at them twice.

The question has been more about DRM and pricing since iTunes, and it still is, but the future is written on the wall. The bigger question is about the eventual structure of the music business.

Are record companies still relevant? Sure, as promotions vehicles. As talent identification agencies, not so much anymore. That is something they brought onto themselves, though. The way forward for the record labels could have been as the talent scouts. They could have taken advantage of the lowered barriers to entry and lower costs and let a lot of artists bloom. Some of these artists would become mega-stars, some would be marginally profitable and some would lose money (but less money that they would in the old days). Overall, the labels would have probably ended up more profitable and more relevant. Instead, they went the other way. They circled wagons around their big money makers and only signed artists that sounded exactly like their big money makers. Now their money makers are wondering why they have these leeches attached to their earnings when they can do it themselves and the labels are in a true pickle.

The piece of information I’m desperate for as various artists do these experiments around digital pricing is the question that isn’t asked. “Why did you chose to pay what you did?” We can all speculate, but getting the average amount someone willingly paid for a download is one thing, but knowing why they paid that is just (if not more) interesting.  Some more data points not collected: did people download the InRainbows record off bittorrent because they didn’t like giving personal information to the Radiohead store, or did the store not work for them, or was it too slow, or was it just easier since they already used bittorrent all the time anyway?

I hope that future experiments along these lines will ask some questions and tell all of us the answers.

Shawn Fanning’s Snocap Prepares for Fire Sale - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

The great thing about the internet is that it is really quite inexpensive to set up a global music download retail site. So inexpensive that everyone is doing it. Snocap had made the MySpace connection, but it is unclear how many downloads they actually sold. With Amazon, coming in very strong and iTunes still capturing the majority of the market, it isn’t surprising that Snocap couldn’t make a go of it.

Bloomberg.com: U.S.
NBC Universal, General Electric Co.s entertainment division, began selling television shows for download at Amazon.com Inc., days after ending a similar agreement with Apple Inc.

Is it about the content or is it about the technology? Is it about the content creator or the content consumer? Amazon is really good at on-line retail, but their download strategy is as stupid as Apple’s strategy is smart.

Will Heroes be strong enough to drive people from iTunes to Amazon, right after the Google TV debacle? Not me, ’cause Amazon’s DRM is extremely lame. But maybe most people don’t care?

I guess we’ll see?

A friend was recently asking if they should invest in a HD DVD or Blu-ray player. My answer was that there was no clear winner: wait if you can, or don’t invest too much if you can’t. I think a lot of people are feeling this way, “Why wade into a new format war?”

In an attempt to get people to get-off-the-couch-and-over-to-the-store-to-buy-some-HD-content, the proponents of the formats are opening their wallets and firing off the press releases:

First, Target and Blockbuster go Blu-ray only (after getting some promotional consideration by Sony?)
Now, Paramount and Dreamworks go HD DVD exclusively (after getting some promotional consideration by the HD DVD consortium?)

My favorite live blogging is always from Engadget.

My summary:

• New Final Cut Digital Asset Management/Transcoding Server: $999/10 users or $1999 for unlimited users (available summer)
• Final Cut Studio 2
  • Final Cut Pro 6
    • ProRes 422: compression for HD (1TB -> 170GB “at same quality”)
    • Support for Sony’s new HDCAM SR 1080p60, Silicon Imaging’s Red Camera
    • Aja-built IO-HD input box for encoding ProRes 422 in real-time on external box ($3495)
    • Open-format timeline: mix formats, resolutions, framerates
    • Smooth-cam camera shake elimination (from Shake)
    • Better Motion integration
  • Motion3
    • Match-moving
    • more 3D
    • Paint
    • Audio-driven animation
  • SoundtrackPro2
    • Better 5.1 support
    • 5.1 and stereo in same project
    • frequency spectrum editing (ripped off from Audition/Soundbooth)
    • Video HUD for better synching
    • “conform” feature (not sure what that is yet)
  • Compressor3
    • Faster
    • More codecs
    • Preview overlays and watermarks with a before and after slider
    • Integrated chapter markers
    • Better multi-threading
  • $499 upgrade, $1299 new, $699 to upgrade from FCP
  • Available May
• Color (new application)
  • Color grading
  • looks like this what at least part of the Shake team is doing now (my guess)
  • Same UI for 3-way color correction with
    • RGB and luma curves
    • lift
    • gamma
    • gain
    • visualization of color in 3D space
  • Mattes from chroma, luma, saturation, custom vignettes, hue and saturation curves
  • Color effects — string them together with a node tree
  • Geometry
  • included in Final Cut Studio 2

Wow, so FCS 2 was expected, but a lot more was also expected in this announcement given that Apple announced the 8-core MacPro a couple weeks ago with crummy video cards and no new iLife for ‘07 and lappys and iPod designs getting a little stale. Wonder what else would have been announced today if Apple hadn’t announced the delay of Leopard earlier this week?

I just realized that there was no update to DVD Studio Pro. Hrm, wonder why…

[added links to the apple website and comment about DVD Studio later at 3:51 pm]

This article about moms growing their own businesses as photographers thanks to the new generation of inexpensive high-end digital SLRs got me thinking again about the opportunities. Not just the ones for the moms, but also the businesses mentioned in the article, BluDomain and BigBlackBag who are small start-ups catering to the DIY-folks and have their own interesting (and inexpensive to start) business models.

Finally, this article on advertainment (also from NYT) reminded me how the driving force financially behind most creative businesses is the advertising agency. This is a bit of a tougher market to get into for individuals, but little studios can get attention for themselves, starting small, and get into this business eventually.

Then again, why do work for hire if you don’t have to?

Change this to independant media creators and it still makes sense in these days when you can do it all yourself if you are willing to do the work.

[via This Week In Media]