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Προβολή αναρτήσεων από 2010

The Singularity Is Near

"The Singularity Is Near" is a great intriguing book by futurist & inventor Ray Kurzweil. I will not go into details on his main arguments, about the not so distant era when machines & humans will merge as a basic condition to survive, in a world ruled by artificial technological means & exponential trends, surpassing the limited (linear) biological human intelligence. For a closer look into his theories, watch the attached video below. While reading his book, I also found his short analysis for the music industry and how it is affected by the digital revolution. As the old business models of charging the consumer with high fixed prices to purchase CD's have gone astray, intellectual property as an information system strengthening the value of music products & services in the digital world, is gaining more & more importance. At the same time, the barriers of breaking into infringement territories are narrowing down because of increased piracy phenom

Filling the media space or too clinical ?

Very interesting lines from Tool's mainman Maynard James Keenan, for your personal introspection... "Back when Nirvana opened a door, a lot of the bands got popular that had a more idealistic view of the way things should be for music, 'no you don't have to do this and you don't have to do that'... and they stuck to their guns about it. Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against The Machine, Tool - all did things their way. The only downside to that was that they didn't fill in the space - 'No, you don't need to do a record every year'. Well, Limp Bizkit and those kinds of bands are willing to do that, so they've filled up the space, and because we weren't around and because people's attention spans are short, they kind of took over. It's all mediocre, and they're all willing to do things that have nothing to do with art - all posturing and shaking hands and hanging out at the Playboy Mansion. It has nothing t

Distribution Games

When music labels search for trustworthy distributors in various countries, aspects of  negotiation theories  swirl around my mind. Think about this example for a minute. Major music label by the name X happens not to be that satisfied by cooperating with their main distributor - label Y - in Brazil. After years of ups and downs in retail sales by the label Y in distributing X's business & products across many music customers, troubled economic times disrupt the natural flow of sales revenues to label X. How much valuable time, it will take for label X to search (search costs), find, consider, contact & negotiate their enormous artist catalogue, and eventually trust a new business partner? New titles or scheduled releases will have to be postponed. This major event has occured quite a lot of times with independent labels desperately searching for new distributors. Should label X stick to its weak partner's future recovery plans, hope that the bad climate will van

Financial illiteracy

Do you have a rational way of managing your finances during our troubled economic environments? I found an article by James Surowickie which is ideal for posting here some interesting parts based on his views for the dangers of modern financial illiteracy. Your credit - card debt: "It’s like we’ve opened a faucet, and told people they can draw as much water as they want, and it’s up to them to decide when they’ve had enough. But we haven’t given people the tools to decide how much is too much." Your mortgage: "A study by economists at the Atlanta Fed found that thirty per cent of people in the lowest quartile of financial literacy thought they had a fixed-rate mortgage when in fact they had adjustable-rate mortgages." Why things get sh*tty for you: "The Dunning-Kruger effect: people who don’t know much tend not to recognize their ignorance, and so fail to seek better information."

Global vs Indigenous

I have been following online discussions lately revolving around the impact of globalization or globalized forces on local economies. One might use the example of a famous pop artist like Prince who is well known in many countries. At the same time the domestic music of Portugal is not aggressively marketed around the world as happens to be the case with the aforementioned artist. To interpret this, we should assume that a popularized international artist enters as many international markets as possible while an indigenous one usually gets stuck to the barriers of his own language & culture. This critical point raises concerns to some people if domestic cultural production is heavily affected or alienated by the international. It's easy to notice that many domestic pop artists sound as good or bad clones & derivatives of the international music scene (researchers call this product multiplicity ).The counter argument though is that some famous music genres like American P

Give me a "Greek crisis" break!

Now that my country Greece has finally found a way to escape its soaring public debts while negotiations with the IMF and the ECB are still on the table, I wonder how some fellow citizens of mine continue to blame the current situation to exogenous factors that led the Greek economy to marginally taste hell. This cultural trait of always demonizing the unexplainable rather than our own actions (The 12 Capitalistic Gods invoked evil upon us...) has far surpassed a common level of logic on the causal reasons that brought present economic "metaphysical" punishment... give me a break! Because this is an art & entertainment blog space, especially for the Greek public sector, we should consider this: “Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible” - Javier Pascual Salcedo

The downward spiral

Good to be back after a short "blog break"! By using the title "The downward spiral" I am not directly referring to Nine Inch Nails monumental album back in 1994, but I find this album's concept - based on a suicidal man descending to destruction - highly correlated with the theory about a media firm's inherent risk. As has been said before, companies producing media content like books, music, audio & multimedia recordings in general, face a great amount of uncertainty as regard to the demand their products or services will spur. Their investment faces great risk & uncertainty too. When a manager decides on a firm's available budget plan, he should also consider other alternative business plans which could return significant revenues. He should also estimate a possible outcome, as regard to the expectations of the company's capital investors. Managers should flow with the changing pace of technologies which affect the use of communicatio

Interactive media

So what about interaction? Let me begin this entry with expressing a common point that digital age brings people closer to their (american or not) idols, closer to the people that entertain or amuse them. In recent media industry news, Conan O' Brien surpassed Jay Leno's followers in Twitter. What a shame... E-business language: Competing media figures re-establish the digital (infinite) ground of content providers. Before the internet miracle, people would follow limited trails of physical markets leading consumers to record stores of limited product availability. Maniacs of TV reality/format shows were relentlessly being rated. After the 00's, a lot of "connected" people have the option to experience the lives of the famous, 24/7. Raw statistical data (number of followers, etc.) have certainly something to say about the renewed popularity. Maybe you think that your established star is the absolute king of the traditional media, but once he becomes digital

The signs of media times

In a previous blog post I had expressed some concerns about internet sites & platforms that offer free content services like Myspace, that at some bleak point in the future they might stop running their business free of charge. Now the signs seem closer to reality without personally sponsoring a catastrophic prophecy for online users. In recent media industry news, New York Times (one of the biggest and most attractive sites in terms of its readers & visitors) will start providing some articles for free while charging users that want to read more, using some kind of metering system. If you think what this has to do in relation to your favorite music site, I would answer that there in not much of a difference when you consider for example that  News Corporation, which also owns & runs Myspace, includes news sites too in its various media branches These critical decisions could be applied to all of News Corporation's internet business. The free content, the delicate fr

TV formats are here to stay

This decade's rise of TV formats signified the creation of whole series/shows (I also spotted the term "Episodic Television") like Lost, Dexter, The Sopranos, American Idol, etc. which have marked the TV entertainment industry in a way that big networks, are continuously craving for the next new big cash - flow machine, to retain massive audiences around the world. Recently, I decided to start watching & found myself stuck with HBO's multi - nominated & award winning "Six Feet Under" (created by Allan Ball, writer of American Beauty), a black humor - drama comedy, about the peculiar characters of the Fishers, a family that runs a funeral business. The TV formats are here to stay & advertisers are more than happy buying time to let the shows run on the base of a high audience demand which keeps increasing, as ratings show. The media companies will keep searching for trend - setting programmes which increase their revenues, while promising to