AllThingsD » Radiohead

GoBank: It's a Real Bank, and It's Made by Real Internet People

Liz Gannes — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:52:36 +0000

Green Dot today launches the smartphone-based GoBank, which will have no overdraft or penalty fees, no minimum balance and a “pay what you feel is right” monthly membership fee.

Let’s take a step back to set this up. Lots of startup types go about their lives in search of something they can fix. “Banking!” they think. “Banking sucks! I hate all the fees and unfriendliness.”

But then they realize that banking is really hard. To do it right, you have to actually officially be a bank, which takes years, even if you can find an existing bank to buy. So startups like WePay and BankSimple (now Simple, if that tells you anything) have historically partnered with banks and offered user interfaces layered on top.

GoBank promises that it can fully bridge the two worlds. That’s because prepaid card provider Green Dot actually bought an FDIC-insured bank in Utah back in 2011, after two years of regulatory hurdles.

Then, in March, Green Dot bought Loopt, an early mobile location app maker that never had a ton of usage. But Loopt had a team of mobile developers and a strong leader in Sam Altman, one of the earliest participants in Y Combinator and a significant influence on the famous startup program as a part-time partner.

Altman said in an interview yesterday that he’s seen many a startup apply to YC over the years, trying to be a bank. But none of them were equipped to do it. “This is a product I’ve always wanted to build,” he said, “and it was just starting up when we were talking to Green Dot.”

Altman said it should take approximately four minutes to set up a GoBank account, and it can be done from a mobile phone. Starting today, GoBank plans to let 10,000 U.S. users in for a beta test, and expand from there.

GoBank charges for just four things: Putting a personal photo on your debit card ($9), going to an out-of-network ATM ($2.50), spending money in another country (3 percent), and paying your membership fee (whatever you want, a la Radiohead or Humble Bundle).

But it promises that it has a huge network of fee-free ATMs — 40,000, more than twice as many as Chase and Bank of America.

The iPhone and Android apps also include budget tools (including a silly “fortune teller” feature that makes judgment calls on new purchases), an option to see your balance without logging in, bill payments and ways to send money to people outside the network through PayPal. Savings accounts and mobile alerts are also included.

The idea of allowing people to pay whatever they want for banking is an odd one. It might make sense in the context of thinking about the human appreciation you have for an artist like Radiohead, but this is a bank we’re talking about. Users can pay anywhere from $0 to $9 per month.

Altman said he likes the challenge. “We’re accountable to deliver a service that users think is worth something.”

Dogs and Cats Live Together, and Kid Rock Starts Selling Music on iTunes

Peter Kafka — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 19:57:34 +0000

It’s like the Barack Obama/Chris Christie linkup, except not such a big deal at all: Kid Rock is finally working with iTunes.

Yup: Later this month you’ll be able to buy the rock/rap/country dude’s new “Rebel Soul” album via Apple. If you can’t wait that long, you can get “Let’s Ride,” his new single, for $1.29.

The reason this matters, a teeny tiny bit, is that up until now Kid Rock has been one of the last few prominent acts to keep his stuff off iTunes. The reason, he told CNN’s Piers Morgan last year, was that Apple’s pricing policies — which generally require acts and labels to sell their stuff at specific price tiers — were “un-American.”

Apple hasn’t changed its mind, so apparently Kid Rock has. (For the record, Kid Rock has also said he was an Apple shareholder and a huge Steve Jobs fan.)

The list of iTunes holdouts, which at one time included acts like the Beatles and Radiohead, is now pretty much down to AC/DC and Garth Brooks. (Thanks to Jason Herskowitz for reminding us that now the big digital music showdown is usually with Spotify. You won’t find Taylor Swift’s best-selling new album, for instance, on the streaming music service.)

Note that like the Beatles, Kid Rock appears to be an Apple digital exclusive — Amazon still doesn’t have him.

The Louis C.K. Window

Peter Kafka — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:00:20 +0000

So, yes. You can go to Louis C.K.’s Web site, give him $5 via PayPal, and download his newest stand-up concert.

I bought it Saturday night, watched it on the plane Sunday, and laughed out loud, a bunch. You should do it, and there’s a good chance you have — techland loved this story this weekend. Also, again: It’s very funny.

But What Does It All Mean? Not a ton. It’s an evolutionary step, relevant to a select group of people who make entertainment. With one interesting twist.

The part that isn’t new here is Louis C.K. using the Web and doing it on his own. We’ve seen a bunch of that over the years, mostly from entertainers who have already become famous (or at least semi-famous) with the help of mainstream media. Prince and Radiohead sold their own music only after they sold lots of songs for big music labels. Adam Carolla leapt/got pushed from TV and radio gigs into podcasting.

The new twist here is the way his experiment changes video “windows” — which determine when shows and movies show up on different outlets. By going direct-to-fan first, C.K. doesn’t shut off his chance to end up working the Big Media Companies he says he doesn’t want to work with. He’s just making them wait. So the people who really love him can get it right away, and he can capture almost all of that value in the transaction.

We’ll call it the Louis C.K. Window.

It can run for a week, or a month, or however long he’d like to be the sole outlet for his show. But then, if he wants to get more money for his product and reach a different audience, C.K. can sell the program to HBO or Showtime or Netflix for a “pay-TV window.” And then, eventually, to the likes of Comedy Central or FX. At some point, he can retail discs and downloads via Amazon and iTunes, etc.

The Louis C.K. Window is the most gratifying, because it’s cool, and because he’ll keep almost every penny his fans spend to see him. But it’s also likely to expose him to the smallest number of people.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that a million people pony up for the concert — basically, that is, everyone who watches his (great) show on News Corp.’s FX channel. (News Corp. owns this site, too.)

That’s a wildly optimistic estimate, and it will still be a fraction of the people that HBO, which has some 28 million subscribers, can reach. You can fault Big Media for a lot of things, but it remains pretty good at rounding up Big Audiences.

But that’s the great thing about the Louis C.K. Window. It lets Louis C.K. — and a relatively small group of people with big ambitions, and ardent fans — have it both ways.

Music for Nothing and the Fans for Free

Hany Nada — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:10:56 +0000

Consumers won’t pay for recorded music in the future — but fans will pay for music experiences.

When the dust finally settles between the artists, labels, and distribution companies, everyone will finally realize fans are more valuable than recorded music. As traditional monetization models for recorded music sales slowly fade away, new monetization methods centered on the fan will emerge.

How do we know music will become free? The stats point to this trajectory. Total revenues for CDs, vinyl, cassettes, and digital downloads worldwide dropped 25 percent from $38.6 billion in 1999 to $27.5 billion in 2008, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). The same revenues in the U.S. dropped from a high of $14.6 billion in 1999 to $10.4 billion in 2008.

As the stats show, sales of recorded music are headed one way — down. Sure, digital music sales have been on the rise in recent years, but they have only partially replaced physical sales, so the overall sales figures are still headed south. And it surely isn’t because people are listening to less music. It’s simply because the old adage holds true: why pay for something that you can get for free? In addition, artists, the ones with the talent, aren’t making money off digital sales. Artists get about $0.09 per song sold digitally on iTunes or Amazon. So for a million downloaded hits, an artist earns $90K. Subtract manager, lawyer, agent and other “fees”, and an artist selling one million downloads would barely make minimum wage off of the recording.

Source: CNN, Forrester

Already, there is a deluge of great (and legal!) sites providing free music — including Pandora, YouTube, Spotify, Grooveshark, MOG, Rdio, and other online destinations. This is a big change from the early days of online music, when free meant illegal. Today, music start-ups have caught on to the profit potential in “giving it away.” Companies like Pandora, which generated $67M of revenue in 2011 Q2, and Spotify with over two million paying users, don’t charge for entry-level service. Instead, these music innovators found a way to monetize music indirectly through advertising and other means. Music still comes at great cost — start-ups still pay high licensing fees to labels — but as the economics shift, licensing fees are likely to decline. (Yes, labels will do a lot of kicking and screaming.)

So how will labels offset the decline in recorded music revenue? How will artists capture more value for their creative work? The clear answer is from their fans. Musicians have really never engaged their fans, maybe every three years while they were on tour, but otherwise they just released albums and expected fans to buy them. Myspace was the first experiment with direct musician-fan engagement, and it started a trend that has continued. Now, over 300,000 musicians have BandPages on Facebook. Just about every musician has a Web site, e-commerce site, and a web strategy. Many are putting their music “out there” for discovery and promotion before it’s ever part of an album. Soundcloud has seven million users who upload their music and recordings, for example. YouTube’s most popular videos are music-related. Bands, managers, and labels understand this trend and are finding new and innovative means to monetize fans.

We anticipate a lot of “creative destruction” and changes to the value model based on fan-driven music marketing models. There are ways to make money from the music experience, and those channels — new and old, low- and high-tech — are creating opportunities for artists, labels, and music start-ups.

Here are some of the ways the music industry will make money going forward.

Live Music
While recorded music sales continue to decline, live music revenue has increased in the past few years. The industry has been following this trend closely and focusing more and more on live tours and events. There really isn’t a way to replicate or pirate the live experience. As cellist Zoe Keating joked about piracy at the recent SFMusicTech conference: “Go ahead, try copying me! Just try!”

Source: CNN, Forrester as above

Patronage
In the Elizabethan era, artists were supported by wealthy patrons; we’re headed back toward that world. Two models are possible here, and will probably coexist as supplements to the live music monetization. The first is corporate sponsorship, which is already used widely. Take the OK GO music video “This Too Shall Pass,” in which the band discreetly thanks State Farm for making it possible, or the somewhat distasteful product placements ($500K worth) in Britney Spears’s “Hold it Against Me” video. The Black Eyed Peas have become so intertwined with brands that The Wall Street Journal dubbed them the “Most Corporate Band.”

The other sponsorship model is direct fundraising from fans – also known as crowdsourcing. In 2007, Radiohead released its album “In Rainbows” for free, asking fans to pay as much or little as they pleased. And more recently, Nataly Dawn from Pomplamoose used a Kickstarter campaign to fund her forthcoming solo album. She set out to raise $20,000 but fans overfunded her project by $104,788. This may not seem like a huge sum, but crowdsourcing will make all the difference for indie artists worrying how to pay their rent.
Curation, Discovery and Network effect
MP3 players were around for years before the iPod took them from the technophiles to the masses. Likewise, music services spread when they are easy to use and approachable. Pandora has managed to attract tens of millions of users to its radio service because of the KISS principal (keep it simple, stupid). While this sounds easy, it took them years to develop the music genome and “taste” algorithms that analyze billions of thumbs up/down votes to offer effortless music curation.

Upstart Spotify made access and friends the top priority for its music service, and has unseated Rhapsody as the top dog in on-demand listening. Others like Turntable let listeners do the heavy lifting — letting anyone be a DJ and mix tracks via a competitive, social, cartoony environment. And still others, such as the Hype Machine, rely on the old-school expertise of hardcore music junkies, letting bloggers curate their own selections. The ad-supported model is all about building audiences, and it’s an ongoing cat-and-mouse game where new methods continue to emerge.
Whales
One dirty little secret in the free-to-play online gaming world is that “whales” — to use a Las Vegas term for big spenders — often account for a significant portion of the revenue. In many examples in the free-to-play world, the top 10 percent often contribute 50 percent or more of the revenue for virtual goods, game play, tokens, premium versions and more. In one recent example, one happy gamer spent more than $76K on a single social game buying the accessories he needed to build his fortress. Would “whale” fans of Arcade Fire spend tens of thousands of dollars to sit in on a studio recording session? Yes, and I’m offering!

And beneath the mega-whales, there is a larger base of dedicated fans willing to pay to be a part of the experience, even if they don’t have thousands to spend. “Baby whales” mostly tend to buy merchandise: T-shirts, caps, branded toys, etc. These baby whales are still a small share of any overall fan base, but collectively, an extra $50 each from a small percentage of fans can really add up.
Unique Experiences
People love to engage with unique experiences — things you just can’t replicate — and will often pay top dollar for them. Concerts are one kind of unique music experience, but there are others. Nataly Dawn’s Kickstarter campaign offered big donors rewards, like their choice of a song for her to cover, early prerelease access to her album, and even a private in-house concert. In addition, there are now countless apps that let you be a part of the music, from the T-Pain auto tune app to ShapeMix’s tool that lets you remix songs yourself with isolated melody/bass/drums/vocal stems and post those to your friends. While, selling these extra experiences may not be a major monetization method, such methods do allow indie artists to generate income, and top artists to experiment with new avenues to engage and grow their fan bases.
The Bottom Line
Music is getting closer and closer to free. Distribution is becoming commoditized, so monetization must change. To this end, artists will have to pull out the stops to engage with fans more directly, and actively seek out fans and benefactors willing to pay more than usual for their work. The music startups that will make money over the long term are those that will connect artists with fans, help people filter and discover new music they love, and offer unique experiences. People will never stop listening to music — they’ll just change how they find it, hear it, and pay for it.

Hany Nada is a founding partner of GGV Capital (www.ggvc.com), a $1B venture capital firm with a dual focus on China and the U.S. Some of GGV’s investments include Alibaba Group, Pandora Media, YY, RootMusic, Buddy Media, Tudou, SuccessFactors, Square, and 21ViaNet.

Forge Your Own Guitar Skills With Ubisoft's Rocksmith

Tricia Duryee — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:00:54 +0000

Ubisoft has figured out a way for people to learn to play a real electric guitar using videogames.

The highly anticipated game, called Rocksmith, comes out on Oct. 18. Many are expecting it to fill a void in the music game genre, after big hit titles like Guitar Hero and Rock Band took a nose dive.

The game — which will be available for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 — will cost $80, including a cable to connect the guitar and the console. A bundle including the game, the cable and a full-size Les Paul Junior electric guitar costs $200.

Rocksmith will be sold through all the normal channels and at Guitar Center.

In an interview, Rocksmith creative director Paul Cross told me that Ubisoft’s San Francisco office has been working on the title for about two years, after acquiring a company called GameTank.

The technology allows the guitar to be plugged into the console with one cord, and turns the TV into an amplifier. At that point, everything becomes digital, from tuning the guitar to creating different distortions with various pedals that consumers would normally have to pay for separately.

The game can accommodate users of all levels. To start, there are simple practice games that allow users to shoot ducks by hitting the right combination of strings. Or they can jump right into playing a song. The game will dynamically adjust, based on the number of correct notes a player hits. If they make too many mistakes, fewer notes come down the screen; if they do well, the complexity quickly ramps up.

If some parts of the song continue to stump you, there’s a practice mode option, where the game will break it down note by note. To keep it in the spirit of a game, players only have five chances, or “lives,” to keep from getting frustrated.

The interesting part is that, unlike other music games, there’s no beginner or expert mode — it’s all the same song, no matter who is playing. As players become more accomplished, they get more points, unlock new songs, and the crowd watching them grows in size.

The ultimate achievement is playing in “master mode,” which means you are playing from memory. In that mode, you get double the points.

Cross, who never played guitar until 18 months ago when he first started on the project, says he has been challenged to play Radiohead’s “High and Dry” at the company’s next work party — on stage and without the help of the game.

Despite what some critics say, Cross argues that the music genre hasn’t petered out. If Rock Band 3, which is considered a failure, managed to sell a million copies to the most hardcore fans, that’s still a success. “If we do a million units, and people say we failed, I’ll be OK with that,” he said.

Here’s a video of Cross demonstrating the game by rocking out — fittingly, in a Seattle hotel room — to Nirvana’s “In Bloom.” I do most of the talking, since playing the game, the guitar and talking to me at the same time is asking a little too much.

Who knows? Maybe that will someday be considered super master mode.

[ See post to watch video ]

Money! Pink Floyd Stays at EMI–and iTunes.

Peter Kafka — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 18:33:36 +0000

Remember when Pink Floyd was suing its record label last year? No? Well, it’s resolved: The rich man’s Radiohead is staying with EMI Music Group for another five years.

Phew! EMI says that as part of the agreement, “all legal disputes between the band and the company have been settled.” Which means that if you were worried about the band’s music disappearing from Apple’s iTunes, you can breathe easy.

Of course, it was unlikely that Pink Floyd’s music really was going to leave the world’s biggest music store, even though part of the dispute between the band and the label had to do with online sales: Supposedly, the band was upset that its music was being sold as individual tracks on iTunes, instead of in album-only form.

But that argument never really rang true to me: Sure, it’s great fun to space out to all of “Dark Side of the Moon” in one sitting, but it’s an awful lot to insist that people have to listen to or buy the whole thing. Especially since no one else does that anymore. Not even Radiohead!

In any case, a check seems to have resolved the band’s misgivings, and you can still buy “Money” as a standalone track at iTunes.

Viral Video: Here Come the Facebook Movie Spoofs!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 09:55:47 +0000

It was inevitable, I suppose, that the highly stylized trailers for the upcoming movie “The Social Network” would be ripe for mocking.

The full trailer from Sony (SNE) film unit Columbia Pictures, released last week, uses a creepy Vega Choir version of the Radiohead song “Creep,” and has all kinds of dramatic flourishes–making it perfect for spoofs.

Here are three, from: 1938 Media (in which co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is played by a 2×4 piece of wood); from Australian comic Dan Ilic; and one that’s not exactly a trailer, but is the interview Walt Mossberg and I did at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference with Zuckerberg set to “Creep” (it oddly enough works).

The first full trailer is at the bottom for comparison.

Enjoy:

The Facebook Movie Full Trailer: Creepier, Pokier, Anti-Zuckerbergier

Kara Swisher — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:01:39 +0000

Dear Mark Zuckerberg:

Uh-oh, from the looks of this full-length trailer for the upcming movie, “The Social Network,” about founding of Facebook, it’s not going to be a positive portrayal of you.

One bright spot: The hoodie is just right. And Sean Parker as channeled by Justin TImberlake looks nutso.

Also, apropos of nothing, the “Which part?” query at the end is spot on, having experienced it myself.

There have been two teaser trailers so far, but this is the first look at actual scenes about the social networking site’s origins in the movie.

But it is not pretty and includes the Vega Choir’s creepy rendition of Radiohead’s song “Creep.”

That would be you, Mark, according to the movie, which opens this fall. One possibility: The audience will embrace you as an anti-hero.

For certain from the trailers, the film–from Sony (SNE) unit Columbia Pictures–looks like it is leaving out the well-deserved part about you being a visionary entrepreneur, with an innovative drive on the same continuum of Bill Gates of Microsoft (MSFT), Jeff Bezos of Amazon (AMZN), Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google (GOOG) and, yes, even Steve Jobs of Apple (AAPL).

Maybe you should wait for the Silicon Valley sequel.

Here’s the video, if you dare to watch:

And here’s the real Mark Zuckerberg in action in an interview with Walt Mossberg and me at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference last month:

[ See post to watch video ]

Saved! Terra Firma Keeps EMI Out of Citigroup's Grasp (For Now).

Peter Kafka — Tue, 11 May 2010 15:30:12 +0000

Terra Firma, which made a disastrous bet on EMI Music a few years ago, gets a bit more time to try to salvage things.

Guy Hands’s private equity group has rounded up another $150 million from investors, which will allow it to avoid a looming default on debt held by Citigroup (C), the Wall Street Journal reports:

Mr. Hands’ success in tapping his investors hands him a victory in the latest round of his epic battle with Citi, which lent him the money to fund the leveraged buyout in 2007. With syndication markets closed as a result of the financial crisis, Citigroup was stuck holding more than £3 billion of EMI debt. The two sides have been unable to agree to a restructuring of the business, setting up a high stakes game of chicken.

The cash buys Mr. Hands nearly a year, to the end of next March, to execute on a turnaround plan for EMI, which has been buffeted by a shift in demand for music away from CD sales and the crippling debt the buyout saddled it with. Amid the problems, it has seen a number of big name artists flee the label, including Radiohead and Paul McCartney.

Bigger question: Does it really matter if one of the big music labels is owned by a private equity group instead of a bank? Maybe not. There’s still a good chance that EMI will end up getting broken into parts and sold off to rivals like Sony (SNE) and Warner Music Group (WMG).

Pink Floyd Wins Court Case: Will "Money" Leave iTunes? [UPDATED]

Peter Kafka — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:03:36 +0000

Want to buy Pink Floyd’s “Time” on iTunes but don’t want to pay for all of “Dark Side of the Moon”? You’ll want to make that purchase soon.

A ruling in the band’s lawsuit against EMI Music Group may mean that the band’s songs will only be available online in album form. BBC:

The rock legends, signed to EMI since 1967, said their contract meant their albums could not be split up without their permission.

A judge agreed, saying the contract contained a clause to “preserve the artistic integrity of the albums”.

EMI has been ordered to pay £40,000 ($60,000) in costs, with a further fine to be decided.

…In court, Chancellor Sir Andrew Morritt declared that the contract means EMI is not entitled to exploit recordings by online distribution or by any other means other than the complete original album without Pink Floyd’s consent.

As of this morning, you could still buy much of the band’s output on a track-by-track basis at the online music stores that Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) run.

And just because the band has won the ruling doesn’t mean that’s going to stop–its entirely possible, for instance, that a check of a certain size could allay the band’s concerns. Other album-only holdouts like Metallica and Radiohead eventually held their noses and allowed their stuff to be sold by the song on iTunes, too.

But if you really want to buy “Pigs on the Wing Pt. 1,” but not all of “Animals” (apologies to fans of the album I offended earlier in the week), you might want to buy now, just to be safe.

UPDATE: EMI says it hasn’t been ordered to stop selling individual tracks, adding that this will be hashed out in the courts for a while. Here’s the full text:

Today’s judgment does not require EMI to cease making Pink Floyd’s catalogue available as single track downloads, and EMI continues to sell Pink Floyd’s music digitally and in other formats.

This litigation has been running for well over a year and most of its points have already been settled.

This week’s court hearing was around the interpretation of two contractual points, both linked to the digital sale of Pink Floyd’s music. But there are further arguments to be heard on this and the case will go on for some time.

Almost Famous: Ethan Beard of Facebook

Drake Martinet — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:48:19 +0000

In a feature of “Almost Famous” that we’ve dubbed “Need to Know,” All Things Digital talks with top players inside tech companies–much as we talk to emerging entrepreneurs–who are perhaps not as prominent as their influence suggests, but who should be.

This week: We friended Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook Developer Network, and had a sit-down with him at the social networking company’s Silicon Valley HQ to talk about–of course–the importance of platforms.

Who: Ethan Beard

What: Director of the Facebook Developer Network

Why: After stints in investment banking, Viacom (VIA) music service MTV Networks and most recently, Google (GOOG), Ethan made the move to Facebook almost two years ago.

Where: Facebook Developer Blog (Web site); @ethanbeard (Twitter); Palo Alto, Calif. (analog place)

Who Else: Everyone has been trying to spread social graphs deeper into the Web, but Facebook dominates.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Worst Job: I worked one summer for the United States Postal Service, sorting mail at a post office in Bangor, Maine. Yeah, that was pretty bad. Basically, it was just endless piles of mail that you had to sort into different little holes. And you’d have, like, your timed break, 10 minutes every couple of hours or something. You’d deal with these unionized people who’d been working at the post office forever, who would smoke cigarettes and play cribbage during their 10 minutes and then back to sorting.

Has a Geek Crush on: In the tech world, I’m a big fan of Alan Kay, both because he’s super geeky and super thoughtful.

Gadget of the Moment: Well, when I was at Google, I worked a lot with early Android stuff, so I’m very intrigued by the Nexus One. I’d like to get my hands on one, but haven’t yet.

What Do You Hope the Upcoming magic Apple (AAPL) Tablet Will Do?: Respond to my emails. Or at least delete some of them.

Fails At: I’m a miserable snowboarder. That’s not a good answer though. My wife would say that I never seem to stop working.

Bio in 140 Characters

Hails from Winterport, Maine. Got schooled at Wharton and NYU. He did time at an investment bank. Left for MTV, Google and now Facebook.

The Five Questions

We’ve heard “It’s not just a Web site, it’s a platform” before. What is Facebook offering today that sets it apart?

The Facebook platform is actually very different than many platforms that have come in the past. The app platform is actually a lot more like standard platforms. It’s a development environment with lots of different UI elements you can integrate and build this experience. But really, what we’ve done with Facebook Connect is change Facebook platform to make it cross-platform.

Facebook platform is on Facebook.com, but it’s on lots of other Web sites: It’s on mobile devices; we’re pushing into gaming consoles. It’s less about a place you can build an application and more about features and functions you can add to any platform. We want to give users the tools and technology that allow them to connect with anything they care about, anywhere they are.

What industries haven’t caught on yet, or could be using social connection tools much better than they are today?

I’d point to two things. I think the media consumption space is changing very rapidly, like the TV industry is changing very rapidly. I mean, NBC is being sold not for NBC, but for all the cable assets in it. The printed news businesses is just being turned on its ear. I think there are some really great opportunities for layering in the social graph that could affect consumption habits. It can bring a different lens to what is news. Also, I’d love to be able to go to Pandora and see the stations my friends are listening to. I have some specific friends who are great at picking music. What we want to do with Facebook platform is tie those two together, so I can connect with that friend who always picks great music.

I think the DVR is a good example [of the possibilities]. I would like to be able to see what my friends are watching and interact with them based on that.

Yeah, let’s talk music for a second. I looked at your Facebook profile and saw all these bands and said to myself, “Either this guy has a music-savvy intern in his office who went to college in the 2000s and made this profile for him or he is a legit music fan.” Which is it?

I’m a big fan of music. A huge fan. I don’t really remember what’s on there. Probably Radiohead, the Decembrists, the Killers, maybe Sufjan Stevens. I like to stay current. I just bought a Sonos music player. I love having it all at my fingertips, with a little touchscreen.

Lots of big-time geeks have some strong memories of early experiences with technology. Do you have an “ah-ha” tech moment like that?

Yeah, sure, absolutely. So, when I went to college–this is a couple of decades ago now, pre-Web–my father, who worked at a university, gave me a 1200-baud modem when no one had modems. You’re probably going to read some deep-rooted psychology into this, but he was like, “This is how we’re going to communicate–we’re obviously not going to see each other and don’t expect me to talk on the phone with you. You should be sending me email.” And so, in 1990, I had this modem, and there wasn’t anything you could do with it except like log on to university computers.

There was Telnet and FTP. I didn’t need to go to the lab. I could log into Michigan’s computer from right here in my dorm room at two o’clock in the morning, which is what I tended to do. I’d log on and try to download some random shareware at two in the morning at 1200 baud, which basically meant leaving your computer on overnight, getting up in the morning, seeing that it had failed and trying again.

You’ve seen all kinds of arenas tap into the social space. What has been the sleeper hit for Facebook?

I’m gonna say the games. They didn’t catch us by surprise, but their size, success and the success of the gaming companies wasn’t something that we all saw coming. That was one that, in retrospect, makes a lot of sense, but wasn’t one that we all saw coming. Currently, I’m addicted to Bejeweled. It’s like crack on the iPhone, it’s 60 seconds long, and you’ll look at the score and realize that your mom has a higher score than you. Its not like FarmVille, where you can just say to yourself, “Well, she just has more time to farm.” It’s the same 60 seconds, so its just about how good you are.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

We Are The World! Sony, Michael Jackson's Estate Working With iTunes, After All.

Peter Kafka — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:09:33 +0000

Correction: A Michael Jackson rep says that contrary to the report below, Jackson’s new album will be available on iTunes Oct. 27, though the “rest of the details are still be sorted.” My apologies for the error.

EARLIER: After Michael Jackson died, fans flooded iTunes to snap up his music. But when “This Is It,” the singer’s final work, comes out this month, they’ll have to look somewhere else: Apple’s digital store won’t be selling the album.

So says Digital Music News, citing “confidential information.” The problem, supposedly, is that Sony (SNE) and Jackson’s estate want to sell the entire double album as a set, while Apple insists that all of the music it sells needs to be available as singles.

I’m checking with Sony and Apple to confirm, but the story is a familiar one, because it’s a longstanding dispute between Apple (AAPL) and the music business. The industry, for both financial and artistic reasons, has tried to keep music bundled together, while Apple insists on selling it a la carte.

Apple usually wins these disputes: Even the stubborn iconoclasts in Radiohead eventually bowed to Steve Jobs’s will and turned their precious albums into individual songs.

If there is a clamor for the new Jackson music online, it will reportedly benefit Amazon (AMZN), whose MP3 store does offer album-only releases.

But I’m not sure how loud the clamor will be: As best I can tell, the “new” release contains only a smattering of Michael Jackson you haven’t heard before: Two versions of the title song, plus “a recently discovered spoken word poem.”

The rest? Greatest hits you can already buy, song-by-song, on iTunes.

Radiohead Says No More Albums

Marisa Taylor — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:50:33 +0000

Radiohead said in a magazine interview that it wouldn’t release any more full-length albums, instead focusing on downloadable singles like its recently released “Harry Patch (In Memory Of)” and shorter EPs.

“None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again. Not straight off,” said Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, in an interview with the Believer. “I mean, it’s just become a real drag. It worked with ‘In Rainbows’ because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we’ve all said that we can’t possibly dive into that again. It’ll kill us.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Radiohead Posts New Track, "Harry Patch," Online

Andrew LaVallee — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:40:14 +0000

Nearly two years after it released “In Rainbows” as a pay-as-you-wish downloadable album, Radiohead has posted a new single on its Web site.

The song, “Harry Patch (In memory of),” is in honor of the last known British World War I veteran, who died in late July and was buried today.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Top 10 Online Geekiest Celebrities

Kara Swisher — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:58:24 +0000

At its EconCeleb conference in Hollywood today, ContentNext released its list of the most influential and innovative online celebrities today.

It is an interesting and varied list that includes everyone from powerhouse Oprah (pictured here, of course!) to the bisexual sprite, Tila Tequila.

The list, in ascending order:

10. Martha Stewart (she is actually a closet geek)

9. Tila Tequila (vile, but in a good way)

8. Peter Gabriel (a longtime Web pioneer in the digital music space)

7. Radiohead (innovative band pushing Web distribution boundaries)

6. Stephen Colbert (funny online and off)

5. 50 Cent (the urban rap artist as nerd)

4. Oprah Winfrey (um, she’s runs the real world and could run the Internet if she felt like it)

3. Ashton Kutcher (not just a pretty face, but one who gets the power of viral marketing)

2. Will.i.am (for that Barack Obama mashup video alone)

1. Will Ferrell, Chris Henchy & Adam McKay (FunnyOrDie.com might not make money, but it is very funny)

CES Interview: Public Enemy's Chuck D

John Paczkowski — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 21:21:48 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

CES Interview: Public Enemy's Chuck D

John Paczkowski — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 21:21:48 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

It's Not an Unpaid Endorsement, It's a 'Social Ad'

John Paczkowski — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 18:00:46 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

It's Not an Unpaid Endorsement, It's a 'Social Ad'

John Paczkowski — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 18:00:46 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Exit Music (for a comScore Study)

John Paczkowski — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 12:41:37 +0000

Add top-selling British rock band Radiohead to the list of those who’ve questioned the validity of comScore’s panel-based traffic data. In a statement issued yesterday, the band disputed comScore’s claim that 60% of the people who downloaded its new album, “In Rainbows,” didn’t pay a cent for it.

“In response to purely speculative figures announced in the press regarding the number of downloads and the price paid for the album, the group would like to remind people that, as the album could only be downloaded from the band’s Web site, it is impossible for outside organizations to have accurate figures on sales,” Radiohead’s representatives said in a statement. “However, they can confirm that the figures quoted by the company comScore are wholly inaccurate and in no way reflect definitive market intelligence or, indeed, the true success of the project.”

Quite a rebuke. And one with which it’s difficult to disagree–though comScore did try its best. “For the Radiohead study, we observed the activity of nearly one thousand people who visited the ‘In Rainbows’ site, a significant percentage of whom downloaded the album,” comScore analyst Andrew Lipsman explained in a post to the company’s blog. “We ultimately observed several hundred paid transactions, all of which ranged between $0-$20, representing a very robust sample for estimating the average price paid per transaction. It’s true that any sample has natural variability, so these numbers are, in fact, estimates. However, when you have a relatively large sample falling within a narrow range of values (i.e. there’s a small standard deviation), the margin of error in the estimate is minimized. … We observed the actual online spending behavior from a robust sample of hundreds of individuals in order to produce an accurate estimate. If we didn’t have a reasonable sample from which to extrapolate, we wouldn’t have released the data. But we did, and we’re confident in what the data showed.”

At least until Radiohead releases official download figures for the album …

Could You Repeat That, Senator? I Was Thinking About My Alibaba Stake

John Paczkowski — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 18:00:19 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Hey, You're the Ones Who Said It Was Up to Us …

John Paczkowski — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 07:01:33 +0000

Depending on which side of the music industry you sit, the pay-what-you-like pricing plan under which Radiohead chose to release its new album, “In Rainbows,” is either another not-quite-killing blow to established music-industry business models or an ill-conceived, money-losing gimmick.

According to research outfit comScore, about 1.2 million people visited Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” Web site during the first 29 days of October and many of them chose to download the album. But only 38% were willing to pay for it. Of those, about 17% paid between a penny and $4; 12% paid between $8 and $12; 6% paid between $4.01 and $8; and 4% paid between $12 and $20.

In the end, the average amount paid for “In Rainbows” under the band’s “honesty box” pricing policy was roughly $2.26 per download.

“The stories to date about the ‘In Rainbows’ pick-your-price download offer have been much more optimistic,” said Fred Wilson, managing partner of Union Square Ventures. “I paid $5 and had no reluctance whatsoever to take out my card and pay. It’s a fantastic record, the best thing they’ve done in years. This shows pretty conclusively that the majority of music consumers feel that digital recorded music should be free and is not worth paying for. That’s a large group that can’t be ignored and its time to come up with new business models to serve the freeloader market.”

That’s certainly one way of looking at it. But there’s another as well: 38% of listeners who could have downloaded the album for free paid for it instead. And that’s something, isn’t it?

Hey, You're the Ones Who Said It Was Up to Us …

John Paczkowski — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 07:01:33 +0000

In the end, the average amount paid for “In Rainbows” under the band’s “honesty box” pricing policy was roughly $2.26 per download.

That’s certainly one way of looking at it. But there’s another as well: 38% of listeners who could have downloaded the album for free paid for it instead. And that’s something, isn’t it?

$6.66 Billion? 666 Must Be Larry Ellison's Lucky Number …

John Paczkowski — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:00:36 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

$6.66 Billion? 666 Must Be Larry Ellison's Lucky Number …

John Paczkowski — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:00:36 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]