I am not exactly sure what to make of this funkadelic remix by former Disney tween queen and pop singer Miley Cyrus of her “Liberty Walk,” to honor the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Her singing, interspersed with images of the protests all over the world, is more than a little surreal, but it gets an A for effort!

For one thing, once I gave out my new number to a handful of friends, I had this one goofy friend for whom I recorded a custom greeting. Every time he would call, I’d let it go to voicemail and he’d start every message laughing at some silly in-joke I’d leave for him in the greeting. Okay, I grant you not many people would go to the trouble to do that, but if you knew this guy, you just might. Update: A few readers pointed out in the comments that this feature is re-enabled in Google Voice, and they’re correct though it’s not exactly easy to find.

Ever since GrandCentral became Google Voice, it’s been a lot less fun to use. That custom-greeting feature is gone, as are some of the funnier Web calling buttons that GrandCentral had offered. Maybe that’s one of the reasons behind today’s acquisition by Google of SayNow.

Details are scant about what Google has in mind, but a source close to the deal tells us that the intent on Google’s part is to make Google Voice “even better in a world of Skype and Facetime,” which implies that the next step for Google Voice is some form of video calling.

SayNow made a name for itself by giving celebrities like Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers (remember them?) and the cast of “Glee” a phone number for fans to call and hear the occasional message. And at the start of the football season, ESPN used it to send the message embedded below from former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka to some 1.6 million fans on Facebook. Another feature gave celebs a way to hold live conference calls that fans could dial in and listen to. The biggest SayNow client was the rapper Soulja Boy, who racked up 50 million calls totaling some 100 million minutes of call time. If nothing else, Google can learn from the team at SayNow how to promote the service and get people interested in using it.

SayNow also has a serious side, an enterprise application called Big Call, aimed at making conference calls for businesses easy. The company says it was built by an intern in a week.

The deal for SayNow comes on the same day that Google made its long-awaited number-porting feature official, suggesting that Google Voice is going to be the focus of a lot more time and attention in the coming months.

Ditka’s season-opening greeting for Facebook users is below.

Here’s a skit from “Saturday Night Live” this past week that makes fun of the controversy over what former Disney singing star Miley Cyrus was smoking from a bong, seen in a TMZ-obtained video that recently rocketed around the Internet.

In the words of the often-addled Cyrus, it’s pretty cool:

Our little girl has, um, certainly grown up.

In fact, so much so that this music video for a new single–titled “Who Owns My Heart?”–from Miley Cyrus is causing a major ruckus, with complaints from groups such as the Parents Television Council.

That’s due to the racy themes and extreme writhing in dark clubs, I suppose, which seems kind of old hat by now.

In any case, with it, the 17-year-old singer is definitively declaring an end to her Disney (DIS) past.

Most definitely, as you will see here:

Music videos are so popular on Google’s (GOOG) video site, in fact, that YouTube had to break its most watched list into two lists–music videos and everything else. If it hadn’t, then people like you and me, who have only a vague idea who Pitbull and Keri Hilson are, would have been totally baffled.

Speaking of baffling, you’ll note that two of the 10 videos below aren’t actually from YouTube at all, but from France’s DailyMotion. For whatever reason–at this point I’ve basically given up trying to figure out the vagaries of YouTube’s rights and clearances–YouTube still isn’t letting people embed the Susan Boyle clip. And U.S. viewers, at least, can’t watch the Hilson clip at all. Go figure.

Most Watched YouTube videos (Global):

1. Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent (120+ million views)

2. David After Dentist (37+ million views)

3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)

4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views)

5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)

Most Watched music videos on YouTube (Global):

1. Pitbull “I Know You Want Me” (82+ million views)

2. Miley Cyrus “The Climb” (64+ million views)

3. Miley Cyrus “Party in the U.S.A.” (54+ million views)

4. The Lonely Island “I’m on a Boat” (48+ million views)

5. Keri Hilson “Knock You Down” (35+ million views)

The story went up on VF.com six days ago and has generated just under two million page views since then, says executive online editor Michael Hogan. (Disclosure: I’ve been a free-lance contributor to Vanity Fair’s “New Establishment” list in the past and will be again this year). Had Palin not made her blockbuster announcement on the Friday before the Fourth of July, the piece would be doing even better: Vanity Fair generated more traffic on the Tuesday the story was posted than the day after Palin made her news.

Still, it’s a big coup for the magazine’s site. The only way to generate more attention would be to run a slideshow featuring young attractive women.

Which the site can also do: Its story-and-photo package on Jessica Simpson, which ran in May, attracted 5.5 million page views to the site over a two-day period. Vanity Fair has generated 85 million page views so far this year, Hogan says.

And if you really want to generate traffic, run slideshows featuring very young attractive women. Last year the magazine’s 18-picture slideshow featuring a kind-of-topless Miley “Hannah Montana” Cyrus attracted some 18 million page views in a couple of days.

None of that will be terribly surprising to people who’ve wallowed in Web publishing for any amount of time. What surprised me a bit, though, was Vanity Fair’s decision to publish the piece in its entirety from the start. Doesn’t that cannibalize newsstand sales?

Maybe, says Hogan. But “it’s an open question as to what costs newsstand and what doesn’t.” And as the magazine tries to figure that out, he says, it has been experimenting. Some stuff goes up online before the magazine hits newsstands, while other pieces won’t appear on the site until a month later.

In the case of the Palin piece, the magazine had originally prepared to run an excerpt/summary of the story at first, then make the whole thing available by the end of the month after the news cycle was extinguished.

But on Friday, June 26, a few days before the excerpt was scheduled to run online, the magazine rethought its plan, assuming that the piece would be widely quoted and discussed before most people would ever see it. “The PR department started getting concerned that it was going to be controversial, and they wanted people to read the whole thing, and draw their own conclusions,” Hogan says. The final call went to Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter, who, I gather, isn’t really much of a Web guy.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting to read Michael Lewis’s latest piece for the magazine, on AIG’s (AIG) notorious “financial products” division. That one’s only available, for now, in excerpt form online, which means I’m actually going to have pay cash to read it, or wait a few hours–Hogan says it should be available in full later today.

As a longtime music executive and talent manager, Irving Azoff has had to find a way to work with everyone from inebriated rock stars to David Geffen. But he’s never had to placate Washington, D.C., before. But that’s what Azoff needs to do in order to pull off the deal of a lifetime: A merger between his Ticketmaster (TKTM) Entertainment, which dominates the ticketing business, and Live Nation, (LYV), which dominates the live concert business.

When Azoff isn’t busy trying to convince people that the merger doesn’t violate antitrust regulations, or running his ticketing company, he manages the careers of everyone from the Eagles to Christina Aguilera. Note the one thing in the music business he doesn’t spend time on: selling recorded music.

Session Highlights

Live Blog

• Introduction: Legendary Eagles survivor Joe Walsh, looking very much worse for wear, shows up via video to talk about his longtime manager. “Irving is the only manager that I ever knew that said to David Geffen ‘pffft,’ and he’s still here.” Also: “He’s a friend of mine….All the guys in the Eagles love him. He has a beautiful house that we bought him.”
• Irving notes that Joe is now sober.
• Irving rattles off his management empire: 16 management companies, handling everyone from Miley Cyrus to Willie Nelson. Country, classic rock “where the tour money is.”
• Kara: Where’s the music business going? Irving: Obviously, with the “demonetization of recorded music,” everyone got into a woe-is-me attitude, but I’m enthusiastic. “Narrowcasting” of the industry has created new stars, and live business is good.

• Irving: Music labels have always been slow to react to technology, and a lot of people in this room profited from that. Basically the record industry sat around and tried to protect an old model.
• Kara: Could the business have reacted differently? Irving: Yeah, suing your customer is a bad idea.
• Kara: Will there be record companies in the future? Irving: Yes. They have 100 years of content. They’ll be more like publishing companies, where they are a repository of rights.
• Kara: How do you feel the technology business has treated the music business? [Apologies for gap, technical issues]. Eagles have generated about $400,000 in Apple (AAPL) iTunes royalties. Which is about what they get for a couple live shows.
• Irving: Overall, the state of music industry is promising. Was fallow for a bit, but there’s a whole new generation of singers, songwriters, performers. “You never know where it comes from.” In terms of the business, there will be more companies than the four big labels that dominate today. “It will be a great time for entrepreneurs….It’s not over, but it’s warping into 2.0, 3.0.”
• Kara: What does a music executive have to do to survive? Irving: You have to take chances. They can’t complain about the iTunes deal. They have to embrace new technology, and I think they are, and it’s easier to get deals done now.
• Kara: What about these little digital companies like Playlist and iLike, which Ticketmaster owns  a piece of? They can survive, and they’re excellent marketing opportunities. But they’ll have to find other ways of making money. Can they? “I don’t know.” Advertising? “I don’t know.”

• Onto the merger. Irving lays out the case. Everything revolves around live music, and they’re the biggest player in live music. It’s really the promotion piece, and the marketing piece, added to Ticketmaster. Without that, Ticketmaster wouldn’t survive. “Any of you guys can write a program that does what Ticketmaster does….I’ve been there a couple of months and I have gripes myself.”
• People’s gripe with Ticketmaster isn’t with what we do, it’s demand issues: People want tickets to attend sold-out shows, so we have unhappy customers. Plus we’ve been the “collection agency” for a whole bunch of fees. “But the decision is ultimately made by the act.”
• What about criticism to the merger from the likes of Bruce Springsteen? “Everything we do revolves around what’s good for the artist and what’s good for the fan. That’s our new model.”
• Not really an answer, Kara points out. Irving: “I would say that Bruce is uninformed about the potential of what this could be.” [Maybe someone could tell Jon Landau.] For instance, we could be bundling new songs along with tickets. “The business traditionally resists change,” so complaints about the merger are nothing news. And there’s plenty of competition: Phil Anschutz competes with us and he’s worth more than the combined market cap of both of these companies. Warner Music Group’s (WMG) Edgar Bronfman Jr. says he’s in the ticketing business, etc.
• Discussion of TicketsNow, a StubHub-like  “secondary market”/scalping business owned by Ticketmaster. Irving has said that in the past that he wouldn’t have bought it. Would he sell it now? Maybe.
• What are the prospects for the merger? “Very optimistic” that it will get done between now and end of the year.
• Back to griping about prices and availability: “People in the music industry, we’ve had a horrible record of shooting ourselves in the head.” We haven’t done enough dynamic pricing for tickets, and we should, and that will help make people happy. But these issues are fundamentally the artists’ responsibility. They decide what tickets we sell, and at what price.

• Where is the music business going, overall? Who’s your favorite? “It’s like asking what’s your favorite kid.” Internet makes things very exciting, distribution is opening up. What about the industry suing customers? I think that’s a “very small issue.” We do need to protect intellectual property, and the people who make it.
• Q&A: Esther Dyson wants to know what Ticketmaster/Live Nation will  do with all the data they collect about customers, etc. “Any artist that calls up and says I’d like the email list of the people who came to my show, we’ll make that available.” But with regard to pricing, etc., artists and their management are not being sophisticated about how they use data. And we have to keep the press from chastising artists that use dynamic pricing.”
• Q: Not clear what the question is. But seems to be about using an auction model from the get-go. “Auctions are falling into real disfavor at the moment….We’re finding that people don’t want to spend the time to participate in them.” They just want to know that this VIP package costs this much.
• Q: What do you think about subscription services? “I’ve always thought subscription was an incredible model.” But tricky to pull off with labels, publishers, unions, mobile guys all trying to figure out how to split the money.
• Q: Do you have specific advice for classical music artists? The great thing about the Internet is that you no longer have to be popular with everybody to have a career. Classical should flourish in this era. Build a base, get in front of people, have people like you live. “That’s been true in 1966, and that will be true as long as there is music.”
• Do your artists like Twitter? Some do. “Very useful” but other artists “refuse to get a mobile phone.”

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090527/irving-azoff/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20081003/3-d-coming-to-a-theater-near-you-at-a-glacial-pace/ http://allthingsd.com/20081003/3-d-coming-to-a-theater-near-you-at-a-glacial-pace/#comments Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:38:41 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=4761

A billion dollar investment in digital technologies, struck between a handful of Hollywood studios and a consortium of big theater chains, got little notice earlier this week.

Under terms of the deal, the entertainment companies agreed to help defray the costs of rolling out more advanced digital technologies in 20,000 theaters, which will eventually lead to being able to see more movies using technologies like 3-D.

Even though there will be about two dozen 3-D movies released in the next few years–think Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers in concert popping out of screens–a very small number of theaters across the U.S. can handle the advanced technology 3-D requires.

Why? Well, it apparently costs about $70,000 to upgrade a screen. While studios are only paying a small fraction of that cost, one hopes they understand that upgrading theater facilities will be increasingly important in the years ahead.

Because while the gimmick of getting audiences to wear polarized lenses–yes, you still need them–3-D alone is probably not what will prompt most people to up their movie theater attendance (although 3-D movies do attract more people and command much higher prices).

But, even as digital technologies have exploded everywhere, the theater experience has changed in a negligible way over time.

While questions swirl around whether such upgrades pay off, there is no question it will be hard to know without some effort on behalf of the entertainment industry.

One might imagine a much more immersive theater experience or new ideas from filmmakers–I am not creative enough to come up with any good ones–to amplify a movie.

So we’ll just have to wait for Hollywood to come up with something–well beyond Miley Cyrus or Nick Jonas jumping right into the seats.

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