Last.fm Will Be a Charts Site
There was an announcement today from Last.fm that read:
CBS-owned (NYSE: CBS) social music discovery and radio service Last.fm announced on Tuesday that it is discontinuing the on-demand song streaming service on its website, which had been available for the past two years in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, and will no longer host music videos.
What, Last.fm didn’t like paying tons of cash to have people play music for free? That’s amazing! Of course they cancelled this. They were offering free services which grew traffic but not monetizing those users at all. Not surprisingly someone asked why their offered the freebies. The release continued to read:
The company also said a number of new digital music services will now support “scrobbling” of tracks to users’ Last.fm charts. They include Spotify, The Hype Machine, MOG, We7 and Vevo.
This is the only reason i know of that people use Last.fm. People want to know what their most popular track is and it’s interesting to see what are the most played tracks. Where does this lead? It leads to last.fm being the Neilsons or Comscore or Billboard of the future. This site will tell us what’s popular and by who. In my mind, this is the future they have. I wonder if CBS is regretting paying $280 million in cash for them.
Into the Fire: Startup Life
There is an ancient Chinese story of an old master potter who attempted to develop a new glaze for his porcelain vases. It became the central focus of his life. Everyday he tended the flames of his kilns to a white heat, controlling the temperature to an exact degree. Every day he experimented with the chemistry of the glazes he applied, but still he could not achieve the beauty he desired and imagined was possible in a glaze. Finally, having tried everything he decided his meaningful life was over and walked into the molten heat of the fully fired kiln. When his assistants opened up the kiln and took out the vases, they found the glaze on the vases the most exquisite they had ever encountered. The master himself had disappeared into his creations.
Working within a company so long, it’s easy to see how your blood and bone can become part of the product and ultimately make something truly unique. Giving a company your all, walking into the fire is both painful and pretty romantic. The poet, David Whyte talks about this proverb, saying:
Work is the very fire where we are baked to perfection, and like the master of the fire itself, we add the essential ingredient and fulfillment when we walk into the flames ourselves and fuel the transformation of ordinary, everyday forms into the exquisite and the rare.
It’s an interesting analogy because in you can see that the potter, in disappearing into the kiln, he created something he loved and something truly special, but he also dies. In doing his work he ceases to be a person that the rest of the world can interact with and relate to.
Such is the life of working on a startup
(thanks to Jerry Colonna for writing about this first)
Revisiting We Are The World
When listening again to the classic We Are The World, i couldn’t help but think what a great song it is. It was written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and became the fastest selling American pop song single ever.
We Are The World (download here)
Some notes on the song:
- Michael Jackson pretty much wrote the entire song himself. Sure, Lionel was there but it’s mostly MJ’s work.
- All the musician came from the American Music Awards. All came in limousines except Bruce Springsteen who drove a pickup truck and parked it outside and paid for meter parking
- There was a big sign listed above the studio with the words, “Leave your ego at the door.”
- Prince bailed at the last minute because the organizer called him a creep (guess he didn’t see the sign)
ANyway, a good song to go back to and check out
Advice from creator/writer of Dilbert
The following advice below the image is from Scott Adams, the creator and writer of the comic strip Dilbert. I was talking with my sister about careers the other day and this sprung to mind. It’s not a specific roadmap but something to keep in mind as you accrue experience.
Scott says….
If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:
- Become the best at one specific thing.
- Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.
The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.
The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.
…Get a degree in business on top of your engineering degree, law degree, medical degree, science degree, or whatever. Suddenly you’re in charge, or maybe you’re starting your own company using your combined knowledge.
Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix…
It sounds like generic advice, but you’d be hard pressed to find any successful person who didn’t have about three skills in the top 25%.
The Wire in Schools
There’s a good article in Slate about how the TV show The Wire is becoming a common item for professors to assign to college students. Some schools have a whole course dedicated to it. As many of you know, i’m a huge fan of the show and can understand why profs would use it.
One of the professors teaching a course on the show is the sociologist William Julius Wilson—his class, at Harvard, will be offered this fall. He says,
Although The Wire is fiction, not a documentary, its depiction of [the] systemic urban inequality that constrains the lives of the urban poor is more poignant and compelling [than] that of any published study, including my own
That’s how badass the show is. Anyone who hasn’t checked it out, should get into it.
Waking Sleeping Beauty
I saw the movie Waking Sleeping Beauty a few weeks ago which takes a look at Disney’s Animation Studio from the years 1984, when it hit it’s lowest point after releasing The Black Cauldron (which got out-grossed by The Care Bears), to 1994 when it released it 4th straight mega blockbuster, The Lion King.
In 1984 Disney’s animation studio was filled with old-timers and young eager newcomers such as Brad Bird, Jon Lasseter, and Tim Burton. The old timers lacked the passion and the youngsters lacked the experience. For years they were at an impasse and it resulted in really lame, tired movies. Disney recognized this and hired Michael Eisner, Frank Wells and Jefferey Katzenberg. The new brass didn’t immediately recognize the importance of animation, nor really understand it. They did know that change was needed and went about the standard “weed, feed and seed” strategy that I’ve seen in my startup experience. This is a technique of getting rid of the old/bad talent (weed), bringing in new hires (seed) and empowering those who have great ideas (feed). It almost always works.
What makes the film interesting is that even though this is a documentary, the footage is all in the time period. There are no talking heads in 2009 telling us how it is. It’s only interviews from the 80’s with all its hair, sytles and the culture.
The animation workers had to endure quite a bit from 1980 to 1988 when they produced their first hit in decades, The Little Mermaid. Bringing in outside song writers for Mermaid proved to be a stroke of genius. From that film they gained confidence and experience and then scored another massive hit with Aladin. After Aladin, they immediately started working on Beauty and The Beast this time with some swagger. When Beauty premiered at the NY Film Festival in draft form, it received a standing ovation and went on to be one of the rare animated films to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. After Beauty and The Beast, egos were looming large. Eisner was jealous of Katzenberg for promoting himself as the head of the Animation studio and the animators all were getting agents, high salaries, and big heads. Despite that, you could tell that they knew they had something special and they were able to rally together once more to score another major hit with Lion King – which shattered all major box office records at the time. After the release of the Lion King, Frank Wells died, Katzenberg quit, and the animators fell under their own egotistical weight.
I saw the film with the director/producer who worked at Disney during this entire period. In his Q&A afterwards commented that everyone knew they were doing something special, but in the end you can’t keep a winning team together for too long – talented people just become too expensive. In any industry or endeavor, you can’t keep a winning team together forever. Think of the Red Sox, Shaq & Kobe, Microsoft, etc.
This is a fun film to watch. It captures an amazing run of films we all know and love, and the turmoil, passion and business antics that went into making Disney a phenomenon.
Classic Noir is Back. The Ghost Writer is Great
I just saw the film The Ghost Writer and is was awesome. Really great. I felt the way i feel when i’m watching an old Hitchcock movie for the first time. That feeling when watching a movie that everyone tells you have to see becuase it’s so good and then you finally get around to watching it. You know it’s good from the beginning and as the film continues it gets better and better and you can just feel the goodness of the movie as you watch it. That happened here.
The movie was writen by Robert Harris who is a former BBC TV reporter and political columnist. He actively supported Tony Blair until the Iraq War, which Harris felt was a mistake. When Blair resigned in ’07, Harris quit his job to write the novel The Ghost. So, the similarities between Blair and Adam Lang, Cherie Blair and Ruth Lang, Hatherton and Halliburton, etc. are definitely intentional.
I also love it because it’s a classic film noir. The rarely make films this way anymore because people want action instead of suspense, love instead of skepticism, optimism instead of curruption and happy endings instead of killing the good guy. Well, I like warm fuzzies and Jennifer Aniston as much as the next guy, but what a i LOVE is a good old kick-ass Noir. Let me explain:
- The whole movie is dark and rainy. I was freezing in the theater and i couldn’t tell if i was actually cold or if it was just the film’s atmosphere. That atmosphere — a rain-swept Martha’s Vineyard in winter — has an ominous, gray chill, and the main interior looks just as cold. Interesting note: the movie was filmed in Germany and all the views of the ocean were done with green screen. Classic noir.
- Corruption rules. No matter how hard the Ghost tries to find out the truth and do the right thing, he’s in over his head – just like his predecesor was and it’s likely to get him killed. Everyone is cheating on everyone else either sexually or professionally. Who can you trust? If you’re familiar with Polanski’s other classic, Chinatown, you’ll know that the answer is nobody. Classic noir.
- Mysteries and Clues. There are dead bodies and they point to clues which point back to the dead body which point to something. What? We don’t know. The story is great and you can actually try to figure it out, which is amazingly novel these days. In the latest Sherlock Holmes, did you ever for a minute follow the mystery that was trying to be solved? I didn’t. That’s why that movie sucks and this movie is awesome.
- Women are deadly and the last ones standing. There’s a reason the phrase “femme fatale” was given to the noir genre. Oops, did that give anything away? Sorry about that.
- Everyone dies. Well not everyone, but this film has no problem killing people you like. And it doesn’t kill them in a cheesy way like a gun shootout but in an old school way – with one giant event. Classic noir.
Polanski did an amazing job. There is obviously a big parallel between Polaski and the character Lang as both are exiles sought by a court. Apparently the Swiss arrested him while they were filming this and he finished the film while in prison. I haven’t seen the documentary about him that came out last year but i do know that he’s got a way of making really good movies.
The Deck: A Fascinating Ad Platform
There’s an intersting advertising network that i learned about at SXSW this week called The Deck. They do one thing differently and it substantially impacts everything else: they get rid of the CPM. Selling ads by the 1000 holdover from the days of print media and TV where companies wanted to align ads to circulation and ratings. Deck does things differenly.
If you look at the three constituents of ad sales: publishers (the web site), readers, and the advertisers. The CPM is beneficial only to the advertiser. With CPM, publishers optimize their site for page views. This results in chopping stories into 3 pages, making photo galleries, lack of ajax, or other gimicks that result in more page views at the expense of user enjoyment. Typically when sites begin to focus on monetizing, they get worse for the reader, not better.
The Deck is an ad network. They represent both publishers (Twitteriffic, Daring Fireball, etc.) and advertisers (Rackspace, Gowalla, KickApps, etc.). They subjectively vet both of them. The also have the following rules:
- They will only represent websites of a certain type. In this case it’s sites focused on design or technology
- They will only place ads of products they like or endorse
- They then will place only one ad per page of one size and of one format. They charge the advertiser a monthly rate and sign yearly contracts wht the publishers.
- Their ads have up to 80 characters and one image
Does it work? Definitely. They are way oversubscribed for both advertisers and publishers. Even though advertisers get less impressions, they are more effective. Thus, 7 out of 10 advertisers return month after month. Publishers have more attractive, less cluttered sites and no longer have to worry about chasing pages. Sure they want an audience and the bigger the better but whether it’s 3 page views per user or 10, it doesn’t matter
The author of Daring Fireball has a story of when he was using Google Ads instead of Deck. For a while his most successful, in revenue terms, article was one where he compared a certain design to a man’s toupee. What he found was all the Google Ads next to his article had to do with men’s hairpieces. He also found that men’s hairpiece keywords are very highly priced and he earned 7x the amount of money on that page than other pages. This was troubling for him because he then started thinking about what words are valuable to Google when writing articles rather than what he readers want. His revenue (and interests) were properly aligned with advertisers nor readers.
Deck is an interesting example of someone innovating around ad networks. I find it fascinating as i really don’t like the CPM either. But, does it scale to other, non design/technology sectors? Maybe. I think it requires the readers to be intelligent and (somewhat)affluent. So i could see Travel or Cars having a similar ad network. But it gets harder after that.
Handsome Man Club
Traditional Late Night TV has become a joke to me lately. Even though i love Conan, he wasn’t that funny at the new slot. . Leno just doesn’t do it for me either. That said, this clip is fantastic. More of this and i might be adjusting the ol’ Tivo.
I’m now seeing that this has over 1.5 million views so maybe i’m late to the party. Oh well, still worth a post: