Digital Media Mixtape

I’m Cathy Halgas Nevins, and this is my blog where I post on the business of digital media, digital music, and occasionally whatever music I’m listening to at the moment. I’m currently consulting for digital companies focused on music/social TV/social media/mobile and working towards a master’s degree in strategic communications at Columbia. My background includes corporate communications for eMusic, Bluefly, Myplay (the 1st cloud music company) and in my previous life, publicity for artists like Ben Folds Five, Tracy Bonham and Letters To Cleo.

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Zeppelin! This will rock your world today!

[slaughterhouse90210]

“The trick of enjoying New York is not to be so busy grinding your way to the center of the earth that you fail to notice the sparkle of the place, a scale and a kind of wonder that puts all human endeavors in their proper place.”

— David Carr, The Night of the Gun

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...We all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end any time soon.

David Carr

[thisweekinmusictech]

I travel internationally a handful of times a year, and each trip usually has a few “the world is flat” moments. I talked baseball with a cab driver in Japan! I flew to Africa and wound up in a hipster motorcycle shop/coffee bar just like the one three blocks from my house! I watched a movie,...

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Apploud Is Like An Instagram For Live Music Where Musicians Get Paid

appLOUD is a new startup with a clever new app. Think of it as an instagram video feed of live music only, no food shots, baby shots, or selfies, and which creates a micro-crowdfunding platform aimed at the mobile generation.

Content is uploaded by fans who witness great live music and they can tag the twitter handles of the artists featured. Within 10 seconds a fan can help the artist make money by sharing their videos. Once the twitter handles are tagged, the app automatically adds links to [so users can] tip the artist (or their favourite charity), buy tickets to their next show, or buy their music.

Sound promising... would love to see this succeed!

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Digital Media Mixtape turned 3 today!  Guess I better get back to it... !

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Digital Music News: The is a breakdown of the different types of music listeners according to Ovum Research.

...most consumers don’t care if Spotify has tens millions of songs, according to the latest research.  And they aren’t fanatics trying to discover new music or research obscure bands.  Instead, the real money may be in “lean-back listening,” a less interested group that research groups Mahindra Comviva and Ovum Research say is sorely underserved and oftentimes ignored.  ”The problem for the music industry is to ensure its services and features appeal to the lean-back listener, an easy-to-eat rather than all-you-can-eat approach.  Lean-backs are looking for help to discover their musical taste, and are big listeners of hit radio stations, looking to have digital music recommended, curated, themed and packaged for them.”

“Lean-backs do not want to work to set up their basic music session but do want compelling and easy to access choices.”

Essentially what I've been saying in my earlier posts.  Not only do these listeners need to be marketed to, they need a simpler experience.  Story goes on to note that it's why "Pandora has been crushing the competition" and Beats Music is looking good.  And why terrestrial radio was a champion for so long.

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Why Android Users Download Less Music

Today's NYT looks at the decline in digital download sales and observes:

Some experts also point to the rise of Android devices as a possible factor in the drop in downloads. While phones using Google’s operating system now represent a majority of sales, Google’s Play store remains eclipsed by iTunes, by far the dominant music retailer.

Some research also suggests that Android users may spend less money on music than Apple customers. The NPD Group, a market research firm, reported this year that 54 percent of iPhone users — whose operating system is iOS — said in a survey that they were likely to buy music, compared with 30 percent for Android customers.

This points to the fact that, as I've discussed in earlier posts, Apple actively markets its platforms as ways to consume music, while Android does not. Maybe if there were actual marketing for the Google Play store,  we'd be seeing more music downloads from Android devices.

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Some in the media business call this cord cutting. But three decades ago, we had a different name for this in the industry. We called it competition.

-- Epix CEO Mark Greenburg at the Next TV Summit in San Francisco on OTT viewing, as quoted in Paid Content.  Greenburg also notes that a lot of young people can't afford at $100 cable bill, Netflix may not be so successful if cable providers had delivered better on TV authentication, and smaller, curated cable bundles could be on the horizon, especially since the average viewer only watches about 14 channels.  Smart guy.

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So great: Marketing: Artists vs. Scientists - which one are you? I'm an artist with a splash of science...

[sharedolives]

Remembering the night NYC went dark: 10 years later. #blackout

[digitalmediamixtape]

We know that you are fighting over lucre, not our inalienable rights as cable consumers. Pretending that you are fighting on our behalf rather than in the interests of your shareholders and executives is infantilizing and unbecoming. CBS is coming off another record year, Time Warner Cable’s stock is storming along, and the fight over retransmission fees is about how the pie is sliced, nothing more.

NYT's David Carr, as always, telling it like it is - Self-Serving War of Words by 2 Giants in Television

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Another cool music video I found on Vimeo, this one for Daft Punk's "Give Life Back to Music."  Not the official video for the song, but a  great idea for it!

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It was inevitable - Introducing the Social TV Ecosystem Chart 2.0 - Courtesy of Ad Age and Trendrr: "Structurally a little different from previous 1.x charts, in that we cut back and consolidated the number of "slices" of the pie to simplify things a bit. And, once again, we've added a bunch of companies while removing others. Some of the adjustments were for happy reasons (for instance, Bluefin Labs is gone because it got purchased by and absorbed into Twitter in February in a deal said to be in the $100 million range). Others, less happy (Umami, maker of a social-TV iPad app, "concluded its beta trial period" in the spring, and last we heard, had put its intellectual property up for sale).

As always, this chart isn't the last word on the rapidly morphing social-TV sector, so we'll keep updating it. Stay tuned..."

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Weird but cool video for new Pixies song, "BagBoy," (on Vimeo)

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If you go public now as an ad tech company, the statement is you’ve tried to sell the company unsuccessfully once, twice or three times... It’s a last-ditch effort. The only time an IPO is a first resort is when you’re too big to be acquired.”

-- Waller Capital's Sundeep Chanana, in "The Ad Tech Shakeout is Coming" on Digiday

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Content marketing can be as simple as building a blog or publishing a white paper, or as complex as building out a user-generated digital contest supported by social media and branded journalism. Content marketing is a lot more than native advertising. Like content marketing, native ads are meant to be digestible forms of branded content, intent on creating a seamless, non-disruptive consumption experience for users. The main difference between the two is that good content marketing fuels native advertising, not the other way around.

A helpful definition on content marketing from "What is Native Advertising?" on the excellent NewsCred blog, The Bureau.