Yes, I’ve referred to Trent Reznor as an intellectual ‘Captain Dreamy’. And I’ve mentioned the alternate reality game (arg) that he deployed for his latest album, ‘Year Zero’. However, a recent interview with him ‘down-under’ has surfaced on the Lefsetz Letter (the email counterpart to the Lefsetz blog) and their are just too many great details not to share. It details a clash of cultural norms brought on by shifts in technology pitting corporations against their customers – with the artist caught in the middle.
It must be an odd time then to have a new album, Year Zero, out?
It’s a very odd time to be a musician on a major label, because there’s so much resentment towards the record industry that it’s hard to position yourself in a place with the fans where you don’t look like a greedy asshole. But at the same time, when our record came out I was disappointed at the number of people that actually bought it. If this had been 10 years ago
I would think “Well, not that many people are into it. OK, that kinda sucks. Yeah I could point fingers but the blame would be with me, maybe I’m not relevant”. But on this record, I know people have it and I know it’s on everybody’s iPods, but the climate is such that people don’t buy it because it’s easier to steal it.
You’re a bit of a computer geek. You must have been there, too?
Oh, I understand that — I steal music too, I’m not gonna say I don’t. But it’s tough not to resent people for doing it when you’re the guy making the music, that would like to reap a benefit from that. On the other hand, you got record labels that are doing everything they can to piss people off and rip them off. I created a little issue down here because the first thing I did when I got to Sydney is I walk into HMV, the week the record’s out, and I see it on the rack with a bunch of other releases. And every release I see: $21.99, $22.99, $24.99. And ours doesn’t have a sticker on it. I look close and ‘Oh, it’s $34.99′. So I walk over to see our live DVD Beside You in Time, and I see that it’s also priced six, seven, eight dollars more than every other disc on there. And I can’t figure out why that would be.
Did you have a word to anyone?
Well, in Brisbane I end up meeting and greeting some record label people, who are pleasant enough, and one of them is a sales guy, so I say “Why is this the case?” He goes “Because your packaging is a lot more expensive”. I know how much the packaging costs — it costs me, not them, it costs me 83 cents more to have a CD with the colour-changing ink on it. I’m taking the hit on that, not them. So I said “Well, it doesn’t cost $10 more”. “Ah, well, you’re right, it doesn’t. Basically it’s because we know you’ve got a core audience that’s gonna buy whatever we put out, so we can charge more for that. It’s the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy it. True fans will pay whatever”. And I just said “That’s the most insulting thing I’ve heard. I’ve garnered a core audience that you feel it’s OK to rip off? F— you’. That’s also why you don’t see any label people here, ‘cos I said ‘F— you people. Stay out of my f—ing show. If you wanna come, pay the ticket like anyone else. F— you guys”. They’re thieves. I don’t blame people for stealing music if this is the kind of s— that they pull off.
Where does that extra $10 on your album go?
That money’s not going into my pocket, I can promise you that. It’s just these guys who have f—ed themselves out of a job essentially, that now take it out on ripping off the public. I’ve got a battle where I’m trying to put out quality material that matters and I’ve got fans that feel it’s their right to steal it and I’ve got a company that’s so bureaucratic and clumsy and ignorant and behind the times they don’t know what to do, so they rip the people off.
Given all that, do you have any idea how to approach the release of your next album?
I’ve have one record left that I owe a major label, then I will never be seen in a situation like this again. If I could do what I want right now, I would put out my next album, you could download it from my site at as high a bit-rate as you want, pay $4 through PayPal. Come see the show and buy a T-shirt if you like it. I would put out a nicely packaged merchandise piece, if you want to own a physical thing. And it would come out the day that it’s done in the studio, not this “Let’s wait three months” bulls—.
When your US label, Interscope, discovered the web-based alternate reality game (ARG) you’d built around Year Zero, were they happy for the free marketing or angry you hadn’t let them in on it?
I chose to do this on my own, at great financial expense to myself, because I knew they wouldn’t understand what it is, for one. And secondly, I didn’t want it coming from a place of marketing, I wanted it coming from a place that was pure to the project. It’s a way to present the story and the backdrop, something I would be excited to find as a fan. I knew the minute I talked to someone at the record label about it, they would be looking at it in terms of “How can we tie this in with a mobile provider?” That’s what they do. If something lent itself to that, OK, I’m not opposed to the idea of not losing a lot of money (laughs). But it would only be if it made sense. I’ve had to position myself as the irrational, stubborn, crazy artist. At the end of the day, I’m not out to sabotage my career, but quality matters, and integrity matters. Jumping through any hoop or taking advantage of any desperate situation that comes up just to sell a product is harmful. It is.
Is the Year Zero ARG something labels will copy now?
Well, their response, when they saw that it did catch on like wildfire, was “Look how smart we are the way we marketed this record”. That’s the feedback I’ve gotten — other artists who’ve met with that label ask ‘em about it: “Yeah, you like what we did for Trent? Look what we did for Trent”. They’ve then gone on to try to buy the company that did it to apply it to all their other acts. So, glad I could help them out. I’m sure they still don’t understand what it is that we did or why it worked. But I will look forward to the Black Eyed Peas ARG, that should be amazing.
Mountain Dew has long been the drink of choice for the geek set. In college we lovingly referred to it as ‘Engineering Green’. It certainly had come a long way from its ‘zero-proof moonshine‘ days.
But rather than slavishly stick with the brand image that has worked since 1973 the handlers behind the yellowish drink are again mixing it up. As described on the Innovative Ecosystems blog:
Pepsico has launched the Green Label Art project for Mountain Dew, marrying the introduction of the first aluminum bottle in the U.S. CSD category with gorgeous, breathtaking, visually arresting designs by an eclectic group of non-traditional designers, including skateboarders, tattoo artists, vinyl toy developers, etc. These designers know their audience and Mountain Dew is leveraging their edgy appeal to create breakthrough, on-brand creative. It’s brilliant and beautiful.
Just having snazzy bottles would be one thing. But Mountain Dew is also backing up the project with a dedicated website. It features short videos of the designers, wallpapers of custom artwork, and a design contest for people to participate in.
It’s this kind of stuff that I love to see major companies doing with their products. Sure, Pepsico probably didn’t have to do any of this and they would have continued to sell truckloads of product. However, by being willing to embrace other interpretations of the brand they make it cool.
Rather than recapping their thoughts I thought I’d open things up. What websites/browser tech/etc. do you use despite hating the experience? Why do you continue to do so?
I’ll start and throw Hotmail out there. It doesn’t have the largest amount of free storage, is decidedly anti-geek cred, and pales in comparison with GMail. So why do I continue to use it? Because there are some people for whom that is the only address they know me by. Sure I could send out a mass mailing letting everybody know what my new(er) email address is but who honestly updates their address book after getting one of those? And, frankly, logging on once a month is easier.
Another technology I hate using but am forced to are Adobe PDFs. It’s bulky, its slow, and up until Firefox 2 leaving a reader document open in a tab would eventually crash a browser. It makes sense to put long, context sensitive information that can’t be devoured in one sitting in a PDF. However, taking a menu and linking to the pdf from your restaurant website rather than just having the contents on the website is extremely dumb.
What other web tech do you hate but can’t live without?
For quite some time (like the last two years) businesses have seen crowd sourced websites as something akin to the Golden Fleece: for nothing passionate users would populate your website with rich content in volumes far greater than anything your own team could do (and they’d work for nothing more than the opportunity to have their account name at the top of a ‘best of’ list).
While some have been warning about the woes these site would suffer if they would bite the hand that feeds them things have worked out pretty well – until now. Digg is a ’social news website’. Users submit news stories and then vote the pieces up or down. In theory this is supposed to create a ‘democratic’ approach to the news.
The backstory: a story including the number got to the front page, but was quickly pulled by a moderator. That led to another user reposting the story with the number in the description – “Spread This Number. Again”. That story was also pulled, at which point the mob piled in.
Clearly, they’ve now lost the fight over the key: almost every single story on the homepage, and 100% of the popular stories in the technology section are links to sites that aim to propagate that number. This key, for those who don’t know, is a series of numbers which will unlock copy-protected High Definition movies. The MPAA hates this of course, and there’s no one Diggers hate more than the MPAA and RIAA. DRM has met its match against a single-minded army numbering more than one million strong.
Late on Tuesday the public face and founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, threw up his hands in defeat on his blog:
after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
A reader of Om Malik summed the situation up perfectly:
I think the real story here is user-generated content biting back when it’s actively censored by the site generating revenue from it.
Does this mean that crowd sourced efforts are inevitably doomed to have the serfs charge the castle? Why hasn’t this already happened with other aggregated news spots, like SlashDot?
Bob Leftsz, in the music world, has incredible reach. His newsletter not only is straightforward and laced with insights but it commands the attention of major music industry movers and shakers. The best posts are those that spur responses from those he’s questioning.
Recently Bob openly asked if online ’stars’ could really sell music. He used Tila Tequila (her MySpace homepage link probably NSFW unless your workplace encourages Pussycat Doll-like ambiance), one of MySpace’s more popular members, as an example (he’s referring to Tila having nearly 2 million MySpace ‘friends’ but only being able to sell 13,000 singles of her new album on iTunes):
Code doesn’t manipulate. And Web statistics don’t lie. Oh, the ones on YouTube and MySpace can be manipulated, but is iTunes hiding pressing reports?
And the fact that social networking numbers can be faked only speaks to the underlying point. Is what is being exhibited any good? So, Tia Tequila is a massive star online. Does that mean she’s going to sell records?
Anybody with the cash can get a lot of “friends” but it doesn’t mean squat if the quality of the music isn’t there. So the next time you visit a page, you have to wonder are these really fans or were they just bought? Somebody with some deep pockets is backing Tila, but they forgot about good songs sung well.
In the following comments was this little gem of an insight:
I recently worked at an indie where interns sat at computers all day, every day, on myspace and “friended” people for the label’s bands. The company didn’t shell out money for it though, since the interns were unpaid! Why pay lots of money when you’ve got an endless supply of people willing to work for nothing doing menial tasks?
That being said, I also worked at another indie where interns managed bands myspace accounts and accepted friend requests, never sending any out. The bands on this label weren’t huge but they had talent and a core audience, and were certainly not at a loss for myspace friends. (The interns were a lot happier there too.)
Other’s posited that it wasn’t a matter of fake friends but poor usage of those friends she did have:
Brian L. Klein:
I was asked to put a proposal in to Renshaw’s office to promote Tila’s single online. It was designed to set up the release in a “super distribution” plan that I came up with. I’ve been very successful with this technique with the artist I manage named Joe Purdy. We’ve sold over 250k single downloads worldwide this past year and a half with no label. I’m doing this with all of the artists I manage. I’ve been working with majors and indies for years. I’m done with them. We are actually making money on record royalties this early in the game and reinvesting it!!
Renshaw’s office decided not to hire me. They f*ked up. With the traffic Tila gets every day and her reach she should have done much better. Her music isn’t amazing but neither is a lot of s*t that sells. They had one tiny buy button on her front page leading to itunes. NOTHING viral besides the video.
The reason I was excited to work on the project was her reach. 1.6 million “friends” should have had a bigger impact if executed properly. It was embarrassing to see what happened. They ended up hiring the same old “new media” marketing company every label hires. Her traffic should have been used to create thousands of front doors to her Itunes page. There was NOTHING forward thinking or exciting about what they did.
The whole discussion raises a slew of mutednoise talking points:
Are ‘management’ an artist’s number of friends manipulative or just necessary way of establishing legitimacy?
Does prove that MySpace is or isn’t a good place to launch a music career?
Is this a validation that it still takes true talent to succeed online? Or was it just botched marketing?
Would any of this have come to light if Bob hadn’t thrown the topic out for debate in a public forum?
Scribd is a website with an interesting marketing angle: they want to be the YouTube of documents. For long time readers of mutednoise that statement is a bit of a puzzler – after all, the web itself was first conceived as a set of linked documents. A quick scan through the comments on a recent Om Malik inquiry about the company’s ‘hotness’ turned up a number of people who are also scratching their heads.
I worked for several years writing software for a document control company. What I gradually learned is that there is a large difference between a document and data. A document represents a fixed set of data at a particular moment in time. Having these fixed ’snapshots’ can be highly valuable: while data is ongoing and without a fixed state a document provides the moors so that comparison and analysis can happen.
On the web data is able to exist naturally. It is constantly being scraped, mutated, appended, rearranged, split up, and recombined. By freezing that data into a state (in this case a PDF document) an authoritative (but not necessarily correct) version of the data can be presented across multiple forums in the exact same identical way. In this way, too, Scribd is like YouTube: they make embedding an entire document on another website as easy as cutting an pasting code. The ’snapshot’ of data maintains its referential integrity.
Is that a subtle benefit? Hell yes. However, its one that seems to be getting lost in the poo-pooing of the service. Scribd is providing some real value. It’ll be worth watching to see just how long it takes the doubters to realize it.
Posted in business, tools at 10:24 am by Matthew Reinbold
Buried in last weeks technology news was Google’s release of a freely available 411 service. I didn’t want to post about it until I had a chance to try it out for myself. And while I don’t have much first hand experience with ‘traditional’ 411 service (because I’m cheap like that) I can completely see me using Google’s 411 service on a regular basis.
First off it is completely automated with some darn fine voice recognition software. Growing up in the Dakotas to decedents of German immigrants there are times when I sound like an extra from the cast of Fargo. However, Goog-411 didn’t have any trouble. And because its automated there’s no fear of asking a dumb question – there’s no human rolling their eyes or stifling a chuckle if you ask a really dumb question (like where you can find a 5-star hotel in central Wyoming). And its fast. When I’ve tried previous voice recognition products there was always that uncomfortable delay while the computer tries to figure out what you mean by ‘got the munchies’. Not so here.
But, probably my most favorite part and something pointed out on a recent episode of Diggnation, is the nature of the automated voice. Sure, the male generated speech is a bit cut up but its like Stephen Hawking is giving you directions for pizza. I couldn’t stop giggling because I expected the service to break out into a passage from A Brief History of Time.
On a side note Google, in one fell swoop, has completely squashed the $7 billion 411 industry. And how they’re going to build a business around this remains to be seen (preferential ranking on the list of results that businesses can bid on?). However, for right now its hard not to be excited at suddenly having such a wonderful service available for free. Between this, Twitter’s SMS capability, and Jott even my cheap phone that came free with the contract is suddenly a very capable little device.
Posted in business, mobile at 8:36 am by Matthew Reinbold
From TechCrunch comes word of a company called Sonopia. They promise to allow you to set up your own mobile network in minutes. As Michael Arrington says:
Sonopia uses Verizon to handle actual calls and data, and is effectively a reseller of their service. Users who set up a network for their affinity group (sports team, church, school, etc.) will receive 3-8% of the revenues generated from their customers (the percentage increases as the number of customers grows).
Users can choose from a few different phones and calling plans and can co-brand their own website to get people to sign up.
Almost as an afterthought, it seems, Sonopia tacked on social networking features to their site as well. Subscribers can add friends, create a profile, upload pictures and video from their phone, etc.
On one hand I think it is incredible that the software interfaces for the wireless networks have gotten to the point where we can clone them, Dolly like. However, I don’t understand how something like this will work. First of all, nearly every one I know enters into long term, draconian cell phone contracts. It’s not like a customer can easily jump from one plan to another. And – because the network affiliate is just piggy-backing on Verizon’s efforts – the plans are doomed to have inferior pricing, features, and phones.
There must be something I’m missing here that will allow customized personal mobile networks to exist; or is this for the criminally vain?
Posted in business, piracy at 7:17 am by Matthew Reinbold
As you might have seen across the web EMI is to start selling DRM free music. The move has long been rumored but today’s announcement does represent a definitive shift in major label strategy.
“Apple’s iTunes Store (www.itunes.com) is the first online music store to receive EMI’s new premium downloads. Apple has announced that iTunes will make individual AAC format tracks available from EMI artists at twice the sound quality of existing downloads, with their DRM removed, at a price of $1.29/€1.29/£0.99. iTunes will continue to offer consumers the ability to pay $0.99/€0.99/£0.79 for standard sound quality tracks with DRM still applied”.
The speculation has long been that once one of the major labels breaks ranks it is only a matter of time before the rest follow. It will be interesting to see how long ‘doing the right thing’ proves to sound economics as well.
If you only read the feed (RSS) version of mutednoise you may not have seen the little Google Reader widget that is embedded on the right hand side of the page. It keeps a list of all the stories that I tag with ‘mutednoise’ throughout the day that I may not have time to comment on at the moment. As yesterday developed it filled up with news about Viacom suing YouTube (through parent Google) for a billion dollars. From Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch coverage (who is quoting the actual lawsuit):
There is no question that YouTube and Google are continuing to take the fruit of our efforts without permission and destroying enormous value in the process. This is value that rightfully belongs to the writers, directors and talent who create it and companies like Viacom that have invested to make possible this innovation and creativity.
After a great deal of unproductive negotiation, and remedial efforts by ourselves and other copyright holders, YouTube continues in its unlawful business model. Therefore, we must turn to the courts to prevent Google and YouTube from continuing to steal value from artists and to obtain compensation for the significant damage they have caused.
Lessig (talking about the breakdown of the safe harbor clause in the DMCA)
Om Malik (who correctly points out that Viacom is playing catch up and knows it)
Fred Wilson (who wants to see someone put in their place for waving the legal stick so liberally)
…and that was just within the first few hours…
What none of these pieces mention is how this is affecting the next generation of policy makers and technology creators. Anyone in their teens to twenties are growing up in a world were these kinds of corporate bombshells aren’t obscure news buried somewhere in the Wall Street Journal. They view these as attacks on services they know and love. And since these services (Napster [the original version], Kazaa, Limewire, thePirateBay, YouTube, etc.) are participatory – meaning that the content found is largely user driven – it is very easy to personalize these legal attacks as not only being against the service but the users themselves. And the users are pissed (volume is a bit loud and the argument is flawed but the sentiment is real):
And on and on and on. We’ve never had a generation watch as the products and services that it really loves are repeatedly drug into court. It is changing the perception that these people have about the corporate world. If things work out they’ll go on to change policy at the government level to better reflect the reality as they see it. More likely, however, is an entire generation that comes to see civil disobedience as a practical necessity in the face of “greedy corporations”. I’m not sure that is a good thing.
Recently Bob openly asked if online ’stars’ could really sell music. He used 
If you only read the feed (RSS) version of mutednoise you may not have seen the little Google Reader widget that is embedded on the right hand side of the page. It keeps a list of all the stories that I tag with ‘mutednoise’ throughout the day that I may not have time to comment on at the moment. As yesterday developed it filled up with news about Viacom suing YouTube (through parent Google) for a billion dollars. From