Why I am against #STOPSOPA.

There's plenty to smart stuff on the Internet that will tell you why SOPA SUCKS.  The best article I have read to date is from Mike Masknick of Techdirt.

However, if you believe that humans that dedicate their lives to creating digitizable stuff like music should have more control over their shit on the Internet, as in the form of on-demand copyright control then read on.  If you don't believe in copyrights, then this post is probably useless to you.

The US Government is certainly ill suited to come up with a way to end online piracy.  The tech sector on the other hand, without a doubt, has the skills and the capacity to solve the problem (invent a solution).  

The challenges with relying on the tech sector are 1) many don't believe in copyrights, and 2) there's a huge disincentive, as in compliance (depending on the solution) could cost certain tech companies truckloads of money.  But I doubt that.  

In the free world, we are only going to get the tech sector to solve the online piracy problem if 1) market incentives magically appear, or 2) the government is about the pull the trigger on a solution that seems to disproportionately favor the other guy, or 3) God intervenes.

From the list above: Online piracy has been running rampant for years, and I'm not going to hold my breath any longer whilst waiting for a free market solution or for God to appear.  The only thing that's going to force the tech sector to come to the table with an offer to slow online piracy is a credible threat that the Federal government is about to act in someone else's best interest.  

So misguided as I may be, to those that support copyrights and STOPSOPA at the same time, you don't seem to know - in America - how to press your foot into your opponents throat until he says what you want to hear?

SOPA never would have passed with all the objections (NEVER).  However If there was a credible threat from the friendly side (that's the pro copyright side), the do-no-evil side (the tech sector) would have met us in the middle.

Moving forward, I can only hope the PRO SOPA people are brilliant enough to repackage the debate into PRO COPYRIGHT versus ANTI COPYRIGHT; this way we can see everyone's true colors.

For the record, I never want to see file sharing stopped (by a government).  Acknowledging the contradiction here, what I want is the ability for any rightsholder to withdraw at will.  Moreover I don't' agree that file sharing harms every rightsholder.  This is a right-to-control issue for me, as in the same right-to-control that Craigslist and Wikipedia just exerted over their intellectual property.

@brucewarila

SOPA Blackout Bullshit

Apparently Reddit, Minecraft, Craigslist and possibly Wikipedia will go dark to protest SOPA on Wednesday the 18th of January.  Fred Wilson (avc.com) is also urging Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Vimeo, eBay, Amazon, Etsy, Tumblr, WordPress and Typepad to go dark also.

For SOPA or against, it does not matter!  Can't these site owners see the irony in the fact that they can turn off and control their intellectual property at will...while songwriters and filmmakers have no such option whatsoever!

If only the tech industry would put the same passion, innovation and energy behind preventing or slowing online piracy.

Special interests are at work on both sides of this argument.  The uproar should have been about creating open, industry-supported intellectualy property protection before the government gets in our grill; let's hope that's plan B.   

Running Effective Music Advertising Campaigns

When it comes to music and advertising, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution.  What works for some artists will not work for others, and vice versa.  However here’s one thing I can tell you for sure: too many artists are using advertising as a blunt force weapon.  Simply dropping a picture of yourself, your band, or your album art into an ad unit and then indiscriminately campaigning nationwide for clicks will rarely generate the advertising ROI you need to justify spending on another campaign.  

Based upon my own experiences and upon the numerous campaigns I have reviewed over the last year, I believe artists should 1) commit to running numerous test-trial campaigns prior to allocating the majority of their advertising spend to a single message, and 2) seriously consider which geographic targeting option (local, regional, or nationwide) will generate the immediate ROI artists need to justify a continuous investment in advertising.

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SoundCloud HTML5 Widget Test

Getting the advertising return on investment calculation correct...

There’s an item missing from the music-marketing dictionary.  What do you call the person that has decided to surrender an email address, follow you on Twitter, or Like you on Facebook?  If the word ‘fan’ is short for ‘fanatic’, or as someone said last week: “a fan is someone that buys all your stuff”, then we need an intermediate descriptor that sits between a potential fan that has yet to learn about you, and a fan or fanatic that is already buying your stuff.  ‘Pre-fan’ seems like it will work, but why bother?

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Def Jam - 'Ladies Love Cool Jams'

Tim Marchman writes about Def Jam Recordings for the Wall Street Journal.  Best line in the article:

"...the fundamental idea of Def Jam: take idiosyncratic avant-garde pop and use subversive imagery to sell it as the sound of black America to a largely white audience that imagined itself to be eavesdropping."

social music and social overload

My instincts about the future of any person's willingness to accept inputs into their social streams tell me that people are becoming fatigued by input overload.

Music and social go great together as long as the person you are getting the social music feed from is a filter that one can trust.  For example, I have zero interest in the music my relatives consume; however I would not mind checking out some of the songs my producer friends recommend, as I believe they have the capacity to point out great new songs.

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