AllThingsD » Yahoo Music

First Ben Silverman Online Program–"Ready, Set, Dance!"–Debuts on Yahoo

Kara Swisher — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 02:31:46 +0000

Yahoo and Electus, the multiplatform content studio headed by former NBC entertainment head Ben Silverman, debuted its first original, branded entertainment programming tonight with “Ready, Set, Dance!”

The site, which is now live on Yahoo Music and sponsored by State Farm, merges the candid-camera phenomenon with reality television and “aims to tap into the pop culture interest in television dance shows and dance videos on the Web….”

The Yahoo (YHOO) site is relatively spare right now, with only one episode, titled “Magic Sparkle Chunk and Frisky Ris.”

Reads the description of the show: “Will’s ‘Magic Sparkle Chunk’ style is invading the tranquility of Madison Square Park, while Marisa and her moves will do their best to win over the Times Square crowds.”

“Magic Sparkle Chunk” is as described, and it is both riveting and humiliating. Which is pretty much the point.

Even though no one knows about it, there are already 29 comments, such as: “He’s got chutzpah–besides, if it’s all about fun, he’s got it. She was a bit too serious and honestly…just not as entertaining as the chunky shiney thingie wingie.”

Yahoo’s partnership with Electus was unveiled in January at the Consumer Electronics Show by Yahoo execs Joanne Bradford and Jimmy Pitaro, both of whom you can see in a BoomTown video interview below.

Ironically, U.S. sales head Bradford left Yahoo earlier this year for Demand Media, and Pitaro, as I reported today, is expected to leave the company soon from his post as VP of Media.

Silverman left the broadcast-television network under a cloud last year, but immediately announced he had struck a deal with Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI) to form a studio–called Electus–to make multiplatform content that is backed by big brand advertisers.

The move is similar to a new kind of production company started several years ago by former ABC and Yahoo exec Lloyd Braun and his partner, Gail Berman.

Braun has created online programming for Microsoft (MSFT), including an innovative celebrity site called Wonderwall, as well as producing television shows for networks.

Silverman’s take was to focus on an episodic style, although much of what has been done online so far in this genre by many others has been only moderately successful.

But execs at Yahoo believed that advertisers have been looking for opportunities to put their brands near quality content online.

With the deal, which has been touted by CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo is putting big hopes in Silverman, who had been a successful producer of television programming in his early career.

But his tenure at NBC was marked by a lot of negative publicity about him personally and, more importantly, by a sharp downturn in ratings.

Here is the first of 12 episodes:

And here is Bradford and Pitaro talking about the Electus deal:

[ See post to watch video ]

Finally, here is the official press release:

Yahoo! and Electus Launch ‘Ready, Set, Dance!’–a New Original, Branded Entertainment Program Sponsored by State Farm®

· First program launch from the Electus-Yahoo! partnership

· The initiative, created by Notional in partnership with Electus, introduces a new creative format and taps into America’s interest in dance; Available on Yahoo! Music

SUNNYVALE, Calif., September 29, 2010–Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Electus, an operating business of IAC (Nasdaq: IACI), today unveiled the first integrated content initiative of the brands’ previously announced content partnership, bringing a new format of original, branded entertainment programming to the web with “Ready, Set, Dance!” Merging the candid camera phenomenon with reality television for digital distribution, the program, which was created by Notional in partnership with Electus, aims to tap into the pop culture interest in television dance shows and dance videos on the Web and will make its premiere debut on Yahoo! Music today. “Ready, Set, Dance!” extends the State Farm® “Why Agent?” brand campaign and creatively engages its young-adult audience. Electus will have overall distribution rights on “Ready, Set, Dance” for all platforms including television, motion picture and digital.

“Ready, Set, Dance!” (readysetdance.yahoo.com) is a 12-episode program that combines Yahoo!’s reach and consumer insights with Electus’s creative expertise to provide Yahoo! Music’s audience with a quick, smart, and high-energy dance competition series. Hosted by pop star Adrienne Bailon, “Ready, Set, Dance!” will live on Yahoo! Music and will be promoted across the Yahoo! network.

State Farm will be seamlessly integrated into the “Ready, Set, Dance!” experience, with a goal of reaching a young-adult audience through fun and interesting content that drives home State Farm’s brand message.

The show features two contestants who will be selected by a series of entertaining auditions. Once chosen, the contestants will be caught by surprise anytime or anyplace, and must immediately break into their dance routines for a chance at “Ready, Set, Dance!” fame and fortune. Each week, viewers can vote on their favorite dancer, and winners will receive $10,000 in each of the six dance contests.

“‘Ready, Set, Dance!’ showcases the best of online marketing and programming by providing relevant and entertaining branded programming at mass scale,” said Jimmy Pitaro, vice president of media at Yahoo!. “Our ongoing relationship with Electus will not only offer great original programming like this for Yahoo! users, but will also give advertisers like State Farm fresh opportunities to integrate their brand into the next generation of digital programming.”

“We are excited to collaborate with Yahoo! and State Farm on this new format,” said Drew Buckley, Chief Operating Officer of Electus. “Yahoo! is known for executing extremely successful branded programming that consumers and advertisers love, and ‘Ready, Set, Dance!’ will look to expand upon that initiative.”

“Yahoo! Music and Electus brought a great concept in “Ready…Set…Dance!!”, said Tim Van Hoof, Advertising Director at State Farm. Understanding the popularity of dance contests among our target audience, State Farm sees this as an innovative opportunity to connect with young adults in the online space in a fun, engaging way.”

Yahoo! has a long history of partnering with marketers to develop custom programs to help them reach their targeted audiences. Yahoo!’s successes in the original programming and branded entertainment space include: “Primetime in No Time,” the most watched original program online; “Tech Ticker,” the most watched finance show online; and “Who Knew?”, which recently became the most successful original program to launch on Yahoo!, with more than 40 million streams in the first four months. “Ready, Set, Dance!” follows State Farm’s first video series partnership with Yahoo! — “Spotlight to Nightlight” — which launched in 2009 and garnered more than 7.2 million video streams.

Two Yahoo Music Veterans Resurface with DashBox, a Service You'll Never Use (Unless You're a Music Pro)

Peter Kafka — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:21:59 +0000

Digital music entrepreneurs Dave Goldberg and Bob Roback, who built up Launch Media in the 1990s and ran Yahoo’s music group for much of this decade, are trying their hands at tunes again.

This time, though, they’re not trying to convince consumers to pay for music or asking advertisers to subsidize it. Instead, they’re trying to act as a middleman between labels and publishers who own music and advertisers, Hollywood and other folks who want to use the tunes for commercial purposes.

Via Twain Media, their personal investment company, Goldberg and Roback have purchased a smallish start-up called mSoft and renamed it Dashbox, which they describe as a “subscription service that aggregates and manages all of your production music and sound effects.” The idea is to link up people who need to buy music for commercial reasons with rights holders, who are often scattered and hard to track down.

Roback will take the CEO spot at the renamed company; Goldberg, who has a day job running SurveyMonkey, will be chairman. The company hasn’t disclosed the terms of its mSoft purchase, but people familiar with the transaction tell me they bought the company for under $10 million.

Roback and Goldberg founded Launch Media in 1994, and sold it to Yahoo (YHOO) in 2001; the two stayed on to run Yahoo Music until 2007. Earlier this year, Goldberg invested in and took over SurveyMonkey, an online survey coordinator.

Goldberg is one of many former digital music executives I’ve talked to who thinks the music business is fundamentally broken, so at first blush it’s a tiny bit surprising to see him back in it again.

But he and Roback are essentially investing in an entirely different industry–it’s a business-to-business market that really hasn’t been affected much by the digital revolution. If you want to use a song in your TV show, you can’t steal it via BitTorrent or stream it for free on Spotify.

Nor has the digital revolution affected the industry’s infrastructure, which remains pretty ancient. Music supervisors for TV shows and movies still end up resorting to faxes and phone calls to track down tunes they’d like to use.

So there are some obvious opportunities for someone who can amass scale and decrease friction here. It may not be as sexy as providing consumers with all the free music they want, but it may end up being more profitable.

Old Michael Jackson Story: Traffic Snarls the Web. New Michael Jackson Story: Look at Our Traffic!

Peter Kafka — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:30:59 +0000

Remember all those stories about Web sites buckling under the weight of all that Michael Jackson traffic? Here’s the flip side, now being promoted by those same Web sites: Look at all of our Michael Jackson traffic!

I’ve seen stories touting big traffic spikes at Time Warner’s (TWX) TMZ, which broke the story; Wikipedia, which apparently was flooded with Wikipedians squabbling over the details of Jackson’s demise; and Gawker, which lives for this sort of thing. At some point, the man-bites-dog story will be a site that doesn’t report a huge spike in Jackson traffic.

In any case, here’s the latest one I’ve seen: Yahoo (YHOO) boasting that Jackson’s demise has been its good fortune. Here are the data, per Yahoo PR:

Yahoo! News:
· Yahoo! News set a record in unique visitors with 16.4 million UV’s in a day. Our previous record was on election day when we had 15.1 million visitors.
· Yahoo! News had 4 million visitors come to the site between 3-4 pm, setting an hourly record.
· Yahoo! News recorded 175 million page views yesterday, our 4th highest day after the Inauguration and Hurricane Ike.

Front Page:
· On our front page, the story “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital” was the highest clicking story in our history. It generated a whopping 800,000 clicks within 10 minutes and news of his death saw 560,000 clicks in 10 minutes. Also, the news area on our front page experienced five times the amount of traffic it normally receives.

Yahoo! Music
· Yahoo! Music’s blog post on Michael Jackson has generated 21K comments in under a day.

UPDATE: Here’s some boasting from CBS’s (CBS) Web group. Happy to keep adding to this if anyone else wants to do a little chest-beating.

· Since the news broke, Last.fm saw a huge surge in users streaming music tracks by Jackson. On average, users were streaming 43,000 Jackson tracks per hour. The Michael Jackson artist page has received heavy traffic with more than 30 page impressions per second as fans log on to pay their respects to the pop icon. The traffic for the artist page continues to increase, and the site continues to see more than 45 times the normal traffic.

· TheInsider.com reported record traffic for June 25, with an increase that was close to double compared to the previous week. Prior to yesterday, the record for high traffic was held on May 5 when the site shared revealing photos of former Miss California Carrie Prejean.

· Within 12 hours of the announcement, CBS.com saw 100% aggregate growth over the same day last year as fans turn to CBS.com for breaking news about the tragedy, as well as to link to CBSNews.com and THE EARLY SHOW for their streaming coverage.

· CBSNews.com traffic tripled during the hour in which Jackson’s death was officially announced (3 p.m. PACIFIC/6 p.m. EASTERN) on June 25 as people turned to the site to learn more about the circumstances involving his death.

And yes, this is the third Michael Jackson post I’ve written today. Which gives me an opportunity to embed a third Michael Jackson video. This one is the intro to the “Jackson 5ive” animated series from the 1970s, procured by our eagle-eyed Beth Callaghan. Enjoy.

[Image credit: Library of Congress]

Yahoo Opens Up

John Paczkowski — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:20:02 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Yahoo Opens Its Open Strategy With Mail, Toolbar, My Yahoo and Media

John Paczkowski — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 20:19:46 +0000

After a week of bleeding purple, a heavily bandaged Yahoo has regrouped to roll out its vaunted Open Strategy. At an event in San Francisco today, the company introduced “socialized” upgrades to Yahoo Mail, Toolbar, My Yahoo, Yahoo TV and Yahoo Music. Each service now features social enhancements that essentially transform the experience of using it into one more akin to social networking. Yahoo Mail, for example, now manages your in-box according to your social connections. It’s also been tricked out with a new social photo browser from Xoopit and a feature that allows you to easily turn a message into a WordPress blog post.

“By tying together our audience and context, we can have even more relevant experiences,” said Tapan Bhat, senior vice president of Front Doors and Network Services at Yahoo (YHOO). “All our properties are going to be socialized…and fundamentally, it is going to change how information is consumed.”

The now-socialized Yahoo Mail is to go live today at 1 p.m. PST. My Yahoo, the Yahoo Toolbar, Yahoo TV and Yahoo Music go live later this week.