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.

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.

The last part is my favorite part of course!

via Aral Balkan

Skill: Intermediate

Discover a new language for image and video processing (developed by Adobe Image Foundation) that will soon be available on Adobe Labs. In this session, we will demonstrate tools for writing and testing the language, explain how to write efficient algorithms, and share examples of the possibilities for development. We’ll also show how these tools were used to create some of the video processing effects shipping in Adobe After Effects CS3.

• Wednesday, October 3, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

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?

What I like about these new web-based media tools isn’t just that they make it easier for normal people to do media editing, but they really show the power of Flash/Flex in a mind-blowing way.

wow, this is a great resource

This is an associated website for the new Nine Inch Nails album. They are soliciting propaganda in multiple media and then distributing it. So far it looks like the submitted work is mostly posters. The work on the site is fairly high quality. Could become a nice resource for design ideas when you are stuck.

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?