concerts.com

Concerts in the Age of Social Media, as Illustrated by Phoenix

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 10:52:22 -0400

Andrew Youssef/OC Weekly

Last Saturday, I watched as French pop/rock band Phoenix dazzled the crowd at a sold-out Hollywood Bowl show (check out the slideshow here, btw). It was a glorious spectacle of the band’s more than decade-long career, wherein they played almost all their hit songs, one after another.
The audience lapped it up; most were transfixed by the light show (which utilized not only the stage but the shape of the Hollywood Bowl), the setlist (most of the songs were from Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, their most accessible album yet), and the dramatic gimmicks.
Which brings us to how the age of social media has changed the live concert experience. These days, it’s not enough that Phoenix gave an unforgettable performance—for most big bands, that’s just to be expected. (And they did, don’t get me wrong. It was an amazing show.)
But because everyone will be Twittering/Facebooking and YouTubing video and footage of concerts, bands (much like reality TV stars) have to play up to the audience so much more.
Does this mean that the live experience is more calculated? Yes. Does it mean it’s better? Usually.
Does it spoil the concert experience to have 10,000 people holding their phones up to record the whole experience so they can’t just tell their friends about it, they can SHOW THE WHOLE WORLD THEY WERE THERE? Er, yes.

via blogs.ocweekly.com

Trans-Siberian Orchestra | Tour Dates

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 15:50:23 -0400

TSO tour dates on facebook.com

Are you Going to see a TSO show this year? Get tickets for an upcoming event and tell all your friends that you are going via Facebook!

TSO tour dates on facebook.com

Johnny Cash - God's Gonna Cut You Down

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 15:27:08 -0400

via youtube.com

Weezer "Memories" Official Music Video

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 11:07:12 -0400

via youtube.com

New Weezer video “Memories”

Linkin Park - The Catalyst (Official HD)

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 15:10:04 -0400

via youtube.com

New Linkin Park video - The Catalyst

Travel industry uses Facebook and Twitter to reach customers - USATODAY.com

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 14:10:21 -0400

Tickets and Concerts are next….

Booking a flight? Go on Facebook. Running late to the hotel? Send a tweet.

Hotels, airlines and other segments of the multibillion-dollar travel industry are aggressively tapping into social media, ramping up their use of online sites such as Facebook and Twitter to build loyalty to their brands.

Airlines are maintaining a presence on YouTube and offering deals through social-mapping networks such as Loopt. Hotels are promoting their properties through bloggers, and they’re using social-networking sites to gather feedback, monitor trends and provide concierge services.

“I definitely think that social media is about to change the way we do things entirely,” says Jill Fletcher, social media and communications manager for Virgin America. “We’re able to admit over social media if we’ve made a mistake or if there’s a weather delay. So we’re able to communicate much faster and more effectively.”

Social media are being incorporated at a rapid rate into every part of a journey, from making the reservation to finding out where to eat. For instance:

•As of August, Delta passengers can buy tickets on Delta’s Facebook page.

•Southwest has three staffers dedicated to monitoring and responding to queries made through social-media channels.

•Marriott is launching its Marriott Courtyard Facebook page Tuesday to issue messages about the chain and related information that might interest customers.

•Hyatt Hotels launched a Twitter account last year to serve as a virtual concierge. Staffers, based in Omaha, Australia and Mumbai, are instructed to respond to requests and questions within an hour, and are fielding queries ranging from where to find good sushi to alerts that a guest will be checking in late. The account has 12,000 followers. Hilton has a similar Twitter account.

Compared with other industries, the travel and hospitality sector is ahead of the curve in engaging social media, says Carl Howe, a director with the Yankee Group, a telecommunication market research firm.

It’s “mainly because there is so much concern about consumer perception,” he says. “There are a lot more choices for hotels than there are for cable providers, and the same is true for airlines.”

Seeking return visitors

A key goal of staking a claim in the social-media space is to build a base of devoted followers who will keep coming back.

“Most travel organizations are actually looking for something more than a transaction,” Howe says. “They’re looking for loyalty, and that means a long-term engagement.”

Still, deals, incentives and freebies offered on social-media channels are a way airlines and hotels cultivate new customers.

United, for instance, has “twares,” fare specials offered exclusively through Twitter, the micro-messaging channel. In July, AirTran introduced its “Facebook Friday Fares,” which give its Facebook fans unique deals.

Joe Palma, a chef at Westend Bistro by Eric Ripert at The Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., uses Twitter to send messages about specials, restaurant news and holiday hours, and to ask fans what they would like to see on the seasonal menu. Last year, he held a contest to select a new fall dessert menu item, and the winner received dinner for two.

LuxuryLink.com and FamilyGetaway.com, which sell hotel packages, have launched “mystery auctions,” in which customers bid for hotel packages at discounted rates without knowing the property’s identity. To increase followers, the sites began issuing clues about the hotels only through their Facebook and Twitter pages.

Travel businesses are seeking out social-media mavens and bloggers to sing their praises.

As Country Inns & Suites By Carlson prepared to open its 500th hotel in College Station, Texas, earlier this year, it offered free seven-day trips to three bloggers active in social-media sites.

Aurora Toth, vice president of marketing for Carlson Hotels, says the bloggers and their families were assigned to drive to College Station in vehicles with Country Inn decals, stop in seven states, blog and post messages on Facebook and Twitter along the way. Country Inn received local news coverage, and the bloggers helped spread word of the new hotel to their followers. “We learned the power of what we can do,” Toth says.

Marriott is launching a campaign in October that will invite loyalty program members with large Facebook and Twitter followings to help spread the word about its SpringHill Suites chain. They’ll get free stays and other incentives in return for positive messages sent to followers.

To replace convention business that shrank during the recession, Westin St. Maarten is contacting wedding bloggers and offering their readers a sweepstakes drawing for a ceremony or honeymoon at the resort. “We couldn’t have found those people any other simpler way,” says Karen Gee-McAuley, whose public relations firm Blaze helped the hotel develop the strategy.

Social networking and mobile technology are a new advertising frontier, and it makes sense for the travel industry to jump on board, some say.

“We’re a traditional advertising company, and looking at venturing out into social media and mobile phone applications wasn’t really something that we were considering,” says Toby Sturek, president of Clear Channel Airports. “But with the needs of the traveler, we felt we needed to continue to innovate.”

Customer relations

Airlines are using the tools and channels to try to ease travel, enabling passengers to book trips and find out if there is a delay without picking up a phone.

Instead of going to Delta.com, where 19 million domestic tickets are booked a year, passengers can make reservations on the airline’s Facebook page. The carrier will also let passengers peruse other websites and still be able to buy tickets by clicking on a Delta banner ad.

“Our strategy is, in channels where our customers are engaging, we want to be there for them and with them,” says Bob Kupbens, Delta’s vice president of e-commerce.

The airline’s website and traditional e-mail continue to be key, he says. But, he says, “these other channels are opportunities to be where the site isn’t. You’re not standing in line in security with your laptop open. But you are there with your mobile phone.”

A social-media presence has become essential for any company that wants to bond with a younger generation that will hopefully remain loyal for years.

“For most of the people in that 18-to-24 (year-old) demographic, e-mail is old school,” says Howe. “That’s something that their parents do. If you want to reach them, you have to communicate in the ways they feel most comfortable, and that’s mostly Facebook and texting.”

AirTran’s “AirTran U” program, which allows 18-to-24-year-olds to fly standby for a discounted fare, has its own Facebook page. One of its promotions, “AirTran U Creeper,” flashes photos submitted by users at midnight. The first person to spot his or her picture and alert the airline wins a prize.

“It does help build the brand,” says AirTran spokesman Christopher White. “We know some people will read our website. Some people will read the newspaper. But this is a unique channel. And the 18-to-24 crowd really is not tuning into the radio ad. They’re living their lives via social media, and if you’re not in that space getting your message out where they can hear it, they’re simply not hearing it.”

Last week, some mobile users who downloaded an iPhone app from the social-mapping network Loopt found out about a special offer from Virgin America promoting its new service to Mexico. If they made their way to the airport in San Francisco or Los Angeles, or to a local taco truck, they had the chance to get two tickets for the price of one to Los Cabos or Cancun.

Jamie Swartz, 29, who is getting married in Cancun in February, says that it’s been tough for some of her guests to find direct flights. When she heard about the Loopt Star download, she sent a message to everyone she knew and headed to a taco truck on Hollywood Boulevard. She and a bridesmaid each snagged the two-for-one deal.

“I totally missed the big Twitter boom,” says Swartz, a marketing associate in West Hollywood. “I was late to join Facebook.”

But she says she was impressed enough by the creativity of the Loopt promotion to keep Virgin America in mind for future trips. “I think it (was) a great idea,” she said.

Where are you?

Hotels are seeking ways to take advantage of the latest twist in the social-media sphere: location-based service software which uses the GPS in smartphones to provide hotels information about their customers’ whereabouts.

InterContinental is working with start-up company Topguest. People who sign up at Topguest’s website can walk into any hotel, restaurant or bar operated by InterContinental and receive a small allowance of the hotel company’s loyalty points. To receive the points, they must alert their “friends” on Foursquare or Facebook Places, two of the most popular location-based social-networking tools.

For hotels, it’s a way to promote their loyalty programs, increase sales during off hours and learn more about which of their customers are the “most influential” members in social-media circles, says Geoff Lewis, CEO of Topguest.

Virgin America’s Loopt promotion helped the airline see its fifth-highest-grossing sales day this year. Hotel executives say it’s too early to tell if their social-media efforts are beefing up the bottom line. But some report encouraging signs.

Vero Beach Hotel & Spa, run by Kimpton, began occasionally issuing codes last summer for a 15% discount on its best available rates. In measuring their redemptions, the hotel learned that the codes generated 270 more room nights this year. “It’s still too early for return-on-investment (analysis). But we’ve seen some benefits here and there,” says Niki Leondakis, president of Kimpton Hotels.

For all the merits of social media, some industry watchers warn that the industry shouldn’t forget about the older generations that aren’t tech savvy and still need to be engaged.

“The Boomer generation … we’re the ones that are going to travel and will have the money to travel, and we’re probably not going to be the ones on Twitter and Facebook,” says Terry Trippler, founder of airline information website RulesToKnow.com.

Jim Black, 58, a data network engineer in Ventura, Calif., who’s on the road about 30 weeks a year, says technology can never replace another person’s input.

“Twitter creates the appearance of human contact but it lacks the actual human touch,” says Black, who barely updates his Facebook page and isn’t interested in any special deals offered via Twitter. “To substitute social media for human contact is incrementally a step down in customer service.”

via usatoday.com

Google to Launch iTunes Competitor this Winter | GeekSmack

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 10:56:28 -0400

Google to Launch iTunes Competitor this Winter

Entertainment, Industry News | Written by Austin Davies on Tuesday, September 7, 2010

According to Reuters; Google will be launching an iTunes competitor this Christmas in the form of Google Music.

Apparently Google are in talks with major record labels, attempting to secure deals that would see labels on Google’s upcoming music service. This would allow customers to digitally download their music or stream them from a Internet connected mobile device, known as the digital song locker.

Currently Google haven’t secured any record deals as of yet. I’m sure though as time passes, Google will begin to start securing major deals, as the music industry looks to make the market more competitive.

According to sources, Andy Rubin; Google Vice President of Engineering has been holding talks with record labels detailing Google’s proposed service.

Apple are currently the titans of the digital music industry as the iTunes store is responsible for 70 percent of digital music sales within the United States.

Google have done a fine job at battling Apple on the mobile front, so it’s expected that Google could mimic its success with their music service.

Source: Reuters

via geeksmack.net

Music Industry Thinks Google Is Coming To Save The Music Industry From Apple

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:59:00 -0400

Google is still trying to hammer out deals with labels so it can start selling music, Reuters reports.
Google wants to have a “digital locker” for people’s music. That just means consumers can buy their music once and use it on every device. Apple was reportedly working on a similar plan, but it has nothing to show for it so far.

We’ll see if Google gets any further. One thing it has working in its favor is that some music execs think Google could provide a balance to Apple’s heavy influence in the digital music world.

Here’s one exec quote by Reuters:

“Finally here’s an entity with the reach, resources and wherewithal to take on iTunes as a formidable competitor by tying it into search and Android mobile platform,” said a label executive who asked not to be identified. “What you’ll have is a very powerful player in the market that’s good for the music business.”

Other executives are more cautious. One notes, “We’re cautiously optimistic because Google has great scale and reach but doesn’t have a track record in selling stuff.” (As in movies on YouTube, or even apps through the Android Market.)

Reuters also points out Amazon is selling digital music but it hasn’t hurt iTunes.

via businessinsider.com

Ask a real musician: 5 classic male metal singers

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:44:23 -0400

Photo by Kristin Hoebermann

…

If you’re a singer, you should be following Claudia Friedlander’s blog. The classically-trained, New York-based voice teacher provides sage advice not only for singers for all types, but also for musicians and people in general.

Although at least one of her students sings metal, Friedlander knows virtually nothing about it. I wondered what she would think of some of metal’s most classic male singers – the foundation of the artform. It’s rare to find someone who isn’t familiar with any of these singers. Her perspective would be a fresh one, free of cultural baggage. I sent her five completely unidentified songs. Her comments are below. I have also included initial reactions she sent me immediately upon hearing the singers.

via invisibleoranges.com

Apple Pings Facebook With ITunes-Based Social Network - Advertising Age - Digital

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:47:00 -0400

Even Apple, which lives in a bubble of its own device-centered success, can’t resist the lure of social networking. Today, CEO Steve Jobs formally thrust the company into the social-media fray with an iTunes-based network, Ping.

Apple’s new music-focused social network Ping will have familiar elements such as friends, photos and privacy concerns.

—> Why would Apple want to get into social networking? It’s where consumers are spending most of their internet time, and Apple has millions of iTunes customers as an instant revenue stream. “We think this will be really popular very fast because 160 million people can switch it on today,” Mr. Jobs said during his keynote, where he also announced a version of iOS 4 for the iPad and a new $99 version of AppleTV, with 99-cent TV and $4.99 movie rentals.
But the creation of Ping thrusts Apple into an entirely new market, one dominated today by Facebook, with Google on the outside and peering in eagerly. Mr. Jobs said Ping will have all the social-networking features we have come to expect, such as friends, photo and video sharing, and of course privacy gradations. But the biggest angle for Ping is the way it’s centered around sharing and shopping for music. With the latest software update, every single user of iTunes — those 160 million customers — could turn on Ping today.
“The ambition for Ping is not to compete with Twitter and Facebook; they just want you to buy more,” said Forrester analyst James McQuivey. “Even if the existing customers buy just one or two more tracks a month because their friends recommended them, Ping is a huge success for Apple.”

Because customers are buying, and Apple isn’t dependent on ad revenue, the tech company is not as concerned as Facebook and Google with how much time consumers spend on the service. “Because Facebook’s revenue stream is based on advertising, the measure of success is the length of time users remain in Facebook,” Mr. McQuivey said. “But Ping’s revenue stream is iTunes, not advertising.”

Built into Ping’s features — among them what you would expect, such as what your friends are listening to, where your favorite musicians are performing — are many “Buy” buttons. This purchase feature is already at least one step ahead of Facebook, which has a fledgling Facebook Marketplace that has not shown much movement. Facebook sells Facebook credits for use in the Marketplace and games, but compared with iTunes, that revenue is spare change.
MySpace has used music discovery and its network of music fans and artists as its last bulwark against obsolescence. If, as Mr. Jobs hopes, artists begin congregating on Ping, it could accelerate MySpace’s decline. Mr. McQuivey says he sees new artist discovery beginning on YouTube, then going on to iTunes or Amazon, bypassing MySpace altogether. For artists that don’t have music videos, they or their fans tend to upload songs to YouTube along with static images. In this sequence of discovery, Ping is more of a competitor to YouTube.
Privacy could also be an issue for Ping, given that Apple has some pretty sensitive information on iTunes customers, including credit-card information, past purchases and, well, what’s on their iPods and iPhones.
Because many users will have already shopped on iTunes before, Ping can be much more direct and honest that it will use this purchase information to try to sell them more product. With the Genius feature, iTunes has already been suggesting music purchases based on users’ music libraries. EMarketer analyst Debra Williamson said she has reviewed Ping’s privacy policy. “It says that you should not opt in to Ping … if you don’t want others to view [your] activity on iTunes,” she noted. “Ping users are automatically marketed to.”

via adage.com

Social Media Networks Are Music’s Curse and Salvation | Epicenter | Wired.com

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:07:24 -0400

This is an older article, but still has relevant points in today’s Social Music landscape.

In the golden age of the record album, friends would gather around the hi-fi system to share the latest music, most of them not paying a cent. Today, music fans do pretty much the same thing — online, in social networks. But now, just about none of them pay.

Downloading music is still a big business, and it pays a lot of bills: Artists and labels have already earned around $4 billion from iTunes sales alone. But the dynamic is shifting to the cloud, where tracks are always available and listeners generally don’t have to fork out money.

These networks represent something of a threat to iTunes, the labels and their record-store-style pay-per-download music sales. But a new report says the same social media sites that threaten the old-school, sales-based approach will eventually save whatever’s left of the music business.

“Social music may not generate much revenue now, but monetization’s effectiveness must — and will — improve,” writes Mark Mulligan of Forrester Research (free summary; $750 for full PDF). “In doing so, it will become an increasingly important revenue stream that helps fill the gaping hole left by lost CD sales.”

The key: On social media sites, users categorize themselves into useful demographics based on media consumption, so music-oriented sites can offer advertisers more value than the ones where all people do is talk.

Picture advertisers as caterers at an online party. It’s easier for them to choose which drinks to serve if they know Early Man is playing. Music helps advertisers figure out who users are, and what they might like to buy — including, according to Forrester, music downloads.

The debate continues about whether streaming services can replace music ownership.

Forrester admits that “increased adoption of mobile data packages and of connected, dedicated portable media players like the iPod Touch are … giving consumers on-the-go access to previously PC-tethered streaming experiences. In this context, ownership becomes less important if the songs you want are available on demand and on the go.”

However, its report concludes that portable on-demand streaming services will not substitute for music ownership — and cannot do so, if they’re going to get along with the labels.

It’s an interesting conclusion. Certainly, Pandora, whose usage is increasing as others plateau (see Forrester’s chart above), is not substitutional for music ownership. But on-demand mobile services like the potential Spotify iPhone app, which would presumably let you play customized playlists from a huge catalog of music, could replace some peoples’ iTunes collections in the blink of an eye — especially considering that phones apps can cache music to bridge data dropouts.

Many companies are focusing on social media according to the report, having more or less conceded the music download space to iTunes. One example is Yahoo, which just turned Yahoo Music into a social artist directory with hooks into Pandora, YouTube and elsewhere, and plans to launch an open app development platform similar to Facebook’s app platform (first reported here).

But will there be enough money to go around — especially for the labels, which control the music everyone wants to listen to and talk about on these networks? Not even frontrunner Google can keep up with the licensing payments labels have demanded, in some cases.

Forrester concludes that once labels and sites acknowledge that for some users, free is all they’re ever going to get, social media sites will generate significant revenue from ads and subscriptions — just not enough to return it to those high-flying days of the late ’90s, when everyone bought CDs to replace their cassettes and vinyl.

The sweet spot for the fans, advertisers and labels, according to the report, lies in the most popular and rudimentary networks. Apparently, sites with more complicated features only appeal to the most sophisticated 5 percent or so of the population.

The report ranks the key social media networks in the following order (in increasing order of popularity and generally decreasing order of complexity): Last.fm with 20 million users,
Bebo 22 million, Pandora 24 million, imeem 25 million,
MySpace 139 million, Facebook 175 million and YouTube — on top — with 344
million users.

YouTube sits in the middle of the mainstream, appealing to the most internet users regardless of age, and Pandora is growing like wildfire on multiple platforms. Maybe that’s why the labels are so concerned with making sure they get the most bang for their buck from both Pandora and YouTube.

via wired.com

MySpace finally plugs into Facebook - Allows artists to share more from MySpace

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:12:13 -0400

(Credit: MySpace)

MySpace has finally made a concession of sorts: that rival Facebook has grown so dominant that not syncing up to its web of social connections would be a mistake. The News Corp.-owned social network, as was rumored late last year, has “synced” its service with Facebook (and Twitter) so that members can cross-post their status updates as well as shared content.

It’s pretty self-explanatory, taking the recently revamped “stream” design of MySpace profiles and plugging in Twitter and Facebook’s application program interfaces (APIs).

The “syncing” applies not only to individual MySpace users, but also bands and celebrities. One of the reasons why this is pretty imperative for MySpace is because it’s in serious danger of losing out entirely to Facebook’s “fan pages.” MySpace gained much of its early traction because it was possible for independent musicians to establish a presence and manage a fan base there, something that lost its luster once Facebook’s open-ended fan pages started to take off even more successfully than many had speculated.

“This is particularly exciting for the millions of musicians on MySpace who can now use this tool as a complement to their MySpace Music presence and share their vast library of content, including full album catalogs, to people who’ve liked their Facebook page,” a release from MySpace explained.

via news.cnet.com

Could social networking sites save the music industry?

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:20:42 -0400

If a songbird sings in the forest and no one is there to hear it, is it really music? Not if you’re a teenager.

Especially among 15- to 25-year-olds, people seem to need their peers to validate their musical tastes, making the Internet a perfect medium for the intersection of MP3s and mob psychology.
The challenge is to draw young people away from file-sharing networks that don’t bother with legal licenses. So “added value” has become the new hook, or as one industry participant put it at a music industry gathering this week, “a better form of free.”
Imeem and Bebo are two Web sites trading on the idea that music is a social phenomenon, and that the Internet is the place to be to gather around it. Imeem asks, “What’s on your playlist?,” while Bebo calls itself a “social media network.”
Imeem draws 20 million visitors a month by specializing in free streaming music and music-video playlists that you can customize. The offerings are surrounded by information about the artists, rankings, related songs, polls, and profiles of other fans.
It pays the record labels to license the songs and brings in money from advertising, claiming that it can aim its marketing messages very narrowly.
“We can target to hip-hop fans in L.A. who are also into indie films,” said Steve Jang, Imeem’s chief marketing officer.
The most successful sites in any category, Jang maintains, are not the ones with the most money or the best technology, but the ones with the best “user experience,” like the simple interface that Google started out with.
The recent wave of social music sites that Imeem is a part of is showing the music industry that a free, open, ad-supported system is better than tying down digital songs with software that limits their playability, Jang said. Just look at radio and MTV, which have been sustained by advertising for years.
But until now, the industry has pursued a philosophy of “scarcity creates value” in digital music, Jang said, by locking down legally acquired songs with hardware or software constraints.
In the past seven months, all of the major labels have consented to loosening their digital rights management systems. Now, “there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle,” Jang said.
Bebo is also building an Internet community around media. Joanna Shields, its international president, believes that music is “very emotive” and young people want a place to share their feelings and thoughts about it.
Like Imeem, Bebo surrounds its offerings with extras: fan groups, artist information, concert dates and charts.
Bebo, which has 40 million registered users and drew 11 million visitors last month from Britain alone, also lets its users bring in music and other media from Web sites like YouTube by using “widgets” that can be dropped on to personal pages.
The company is partnering with media providers like Endemol, the production company that created “Big Brother,” the Ministry of Sound and TVNZ, among others.
Shields acknowledges that teenagers, the age group most attached to socializing around entertainment, do not have the kind of income that many advertisers would like to attract. But they make up for it with loyalty. As a testament to how attached Bebo users are, the average time spent on the site per session is 40 minutes - an eternity by Internet social-networking standards.
As music communities like Imeem and Bebo attract members by being social and free, they could begin to chip away at the file sharers, thus helping the music industry.
But the cause of “free” music took a temporary blow this week, when a company called Qtrax failed to deliver on what it said would be unlimited licensed downloads on the Internet.
Its alleged agreements with record labels were still vaporware when it opened Monday. Ars Technica, the technology news blog, called it “the most jacked-up, disappointing launch in years.”

via nytimes.com

Is Social Media Saving Music? - Spinner

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:18:59 -0400

There’s no doubting the social media explosion of the ’00s had a huge impact on the artist-fan relationship. Short of being a spouse or a roommate, social network sites allowed fans unprecedented access to artists and bands. Conversely, they’ve permitted artists to connect and directly promote themselves, too. But even when it comes to your favorite pop star or rock band, is there such a thing as too much information? For an artist, on the other hand, how much time and energy should be devoted to blogging, Tweeting, loading up your YouTube page and updating Facebook with insightful nuggets?

via spinner.com

Neilson: Americans spend nearly a billion hours a month in social networks

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:35:06 -0400

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Social takes lead:
Social networks accounted for 22.7% of US internet time, or 906 million hours, in June 2010, a significant 43% increase from the 15.8% share of time they commanded in June 2009. Online games came in a distant second with a 10.2% share of internet time in June 2010, or 407 million hours, a 10% year-over-year increase from 9.3%

Email Loses Luster:
As social networking becomes an increasingly popular form of online communication, email is taking a hit While email represented the third-largest use of internet time in June 2010 (8.3%, or 329 million hours), this marked a 28% decline from June 2009, when email accounted for 11.5% of internet time and was the second-largest usage component 1/3 of Online

http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/social-media-games-email-dominate-web-time-13738/nielsen-internet-sectors-hoursjpg/

Neilson: Americans spend nearly a billion hours a month in social networks

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:29:43 -0400

See and download the full gallery on posterous

http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/social-media-games-email-dominate-web-time-13738/nielsen-internet-sectors-hoursjpg/

How Facebook Became the Biggest CRM Provider

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:11:19 -0400

While the tech world obsessed about when Facebook would turn on location and morph into a “Foursquare killer,” the social network has quietly become something else: the biggest relationship-marketing provider for many brands.

BIGGEST FACEBOOK FAN PAGES: While U.S. web traffic to brand websites rarely exceeds six figures, DBMS can already count 37 branded Facebook pages with at least a million fans just among CPG, retail, pharmaceutical and fast-food marketers.

For many marketers, their Facebook fan bases have become their largest web presence, outstripping brand sites or e-mail programs either because a brand’s traditional web-based “owned media” is atrophying or because more consumers are migrating to social media.

via adage.com

Doom Troopin' - The European Invasion

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:54:19 -0400

Black Label Society, is the brainchild of guitar great Zakk Wylde. Having graced the world’s stages for the last 20 years, both as Ozzy Osborne’s right hand man and fronting BLS, Zakk Wylde has established himself as one of the few remaining guitar heroes. European Invasion captures BLS live on their sold out European tour in 2005 supporting their hit album “Mafia” . It contains the full Paris show as well as extensive bonus features. Originally a 2 disc DVD it is now presented in superb picture and sound quality on a single disc Blu-ray.

via eagle-rock.com

Sherri Dupree (of Eisley) -- "Two-Headed Boy, Pt. 2 (Neutral Milk Hotel Cover)"

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:33:36 -0400

Sherri Dupree Bemis

For whatever reason, we’ve been thinking a lot about Eisley lately—maybe it’s the whole all of them being married thing, dunno. More likely, we’re just getting antsy waiting around for new material, which, hey, this post from family band’s patriarch, Boyd Dupree, says is still coming, and soon.

Says the Tyler-based family band’s father: The band is currently mixing its new, still-owned-by-Warner Bros. songs. And, yes, the band still hopes to release the album this fall, just in time for a new tour the band is currently planning. But, says Boyd, there are “Obstacles. Out of our control. Working on resolving.”

In the meantime, the band’s been working on some other things—like some cover songs, just for kicks.

Maybe you remember Stacy Dupree’s cover of “Silver Springs” from back in February? Well, back in July, her big sis, Sherri, posted another cover “for fun” to the band’s Facebook page. And while our sharing of this cover song may lack some timeliness, it’s gets made up for in indie credibility. After the jump, give Ms. Max Bemis’ take on Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Two-Headed Boy, Pt. 2” a much-deserved listen.

Bonus mp3: Sherri Dupree (of Eisley) — “Two-Headed Boy, Pt. 2 (Neutral Milk Hotel Cover)”

Not bad, right?

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