Sales of recorded music in the United States are nowabout 30% lower than when Shawn Fanning introduced Napster in 1999. Sales in the physical form (e.g. CDs) are down by nearly half. There is little doubt that the Internet has been a “game changer” for the record label business.In this audio program we explore a couple of ways that the Internet can add revenues. One is already generating more money for the industry and promoting new artists. The second appears to be an idea whose time has come.The first example is Internet radio whose potential was amplified recently by the 3G-iPhone and Apple’s iPhone Apps Store. Our first interview is with Tim Westergren who is the founder of Pandora (Internet Radio). Tim reports that iPhone downloads of Pandora software have nearly doubled the number of new subscribers daily.
Moreover, Pandora enables listeners to buy tracks with the “push of a button” and Tim notes that they are one of the top affiliates for download stores like iTunes and Amazon. Pandora engaged a 3rd party research firm to investigate the buying habits of its listeners and discovered that 40% are buying more music than before joining the service and only 1% are buying less. Finally, unlike the broadcast radio stations, Internet radio pays mandatory royalties to the record labels.
Confessedly, Pandora also announced that the royalties that it pays the record labels are too high. About $17 million of the company’s total annual revenues of $25 million are used to pay such royalties. However, the impact of the iPhone apps store is changing the whole conversation about Internet radio. There are two ways to solve the problem.
First, the labels can agree to accept lower royalty rates. Second, Pandora can seek incremental revenues by utilizing more advertising. My guess is that the likely solution will involve a combination of the two.
The second new way to get paid for music stems from our interview with Chris Wallace of The Super Group. His company is a website design and construction firm that specializes in providing interactive tools designed to engage website visitors. I contacted Chris because I read an article in The Wall Street Journal about his management policies.
He permits employees to work of projects of their own during “downtime”. Although The Super Group retains the rights to the work product, employees appreciate the opportunity to pursue their passions on company time. When they work on personal projects, Chris feels they tend to be extraordinarily productive.
For example, in a recent contract with The Weather Channel, Chris’ company created an interactive animation tool that website visitors can personalize and send to friends and family. The background audio was music composed by one of The Super Group employees during his office “downtime”. Thus, wherever the animation gets sent on the Net, so also does the music.
Chris and I explore ideas for creating interactive animations that might apply to musicians and an associated advertising sponsor. For example, an Indiana Jones animated game might contain background music of John Williams, thereby generating revenues for both the Indiana Jones trademark as well as John Williams’ music. Coke or Pepsi might, hypothetically, sponsor the game much like Dr. Pepper seeks identity with Jones by placing images on individual bottles.
While needing to do some fancy text parsing in AS3, I stumbled on this class written by Ryan Matsikas. It extends the text functionality with several handy utilities. For example, you can easily check for the count of occurances in a string by calling something like:StringUtils.countOf(stringYoureSearching, “string youre searching for”); It will return a number. Real real real real handy!
A Tornado in Your Room, a Tour on Your Laptop
Want to take a live tour of The Weather Channel, the 24-hour cable network that just got a $3.5 billion buyout offer from NBC Universal and two equity firms? Well, you can’t.
It’s not because the channel’s current owners, Landmark Communications, are inhospitable. In fact, they’ve conducted very popular live tours of the outlet’s Atlanta broadcast studios for years.
While testing the beta of our ringtone creation software for a yet-to-be-released project, I believe we’ve created the worst ringtone of all time. Thank goodness Elliott captured this monumental occasion on his iSight for your enjoyment.
When I think of the term Open Source, I, like a lot of people I imagine, think of web based software. But the concept of Open Source (which in short means that anyone is free to use or redistribute something, and the code or instructions used to create it), can be applied to not only software but just about anything as well. The folks at the Blender Foundation, have released their second Open Source Movie, called Big Buck Bunny. Not only is the software which they used to make the movie free and open source, so are the assets used in the movie. Anyone can download the 3D models of the characters, backgrounds etc, to learn from, build on, or use in their own projects.The film itself differs signifigantly from the previous one, Elephant’s Dream, which was definitely targeted towards an adult audience and had a dark steam-punk kind of theme. Big Buck Bunny, as the title might imply, is about a large rabbit who lives in the forest and avenges the death of a butterfly… a little more kid friendly. The animation is fantastic as is the overall production, and proof that open source software and projects can work well.
The Weather Channel has finally launched their HD Studios, and The SuperGroup is proud to announce that we developed the online virtual tour of this impressive facility. Check it out… there are some pretty cool 3D Flash tricks in there.
Agency’s Interactive Work for The Weather Channel Recognized
Atlanta, GA (5/30/08) - The SuperGroup, a trendsetting web-communications agency, has won an impressive FOUR Communicator Awards, a highly-respected international honor in creative communications excellence. Over 9,000 entries were received from companies and agencies of all sizes, making the Communicator Awards one of the largest programs of its kind.
The SuperGroup won for its Snowjoke (www.snowjoke.com) campaign, an interactive, fun, and high-energy experience designed to promote The Weather Channel’s television programming and its vast ski resort info found on www.weather.com. Snowjoke won top honors in the following interactive categories:
Best Website - Television
Best Online Advertising & Marketing - Viral Marketing
Best Online Video - Viral
Best Branded Content - Viral
“We wanted to design a fun, educational viral campaign with a winter theme that encouraged people to interact and better familiarize themselves with all that The Weather Channel has to offer,” explained Chris Wallace, one of The SuperGroup’s founders. “Within one month of launching Snowjoke, we had 40,000 unique views. People enjoyed creating their own online character, and visitors to Snowjoke saw that The Weather Channel was much more than a destination to review a ten-day extended forecast. Viewers were introduced to the network’s programming as well as its skiing and snowboarding information. Our client like our work as did the judges of the Communicator Awards. We’re humbled by our peers awarding The SuperGroup four separate honors for one single campaign. That shows the depth, functionality and innovation of Snowjoke.”
For the winning campaign, The SuperGroup invited people to custom create a skiing or snowboarding character and then build an online video at Snowjoke.com, which they could share with others, insert on a blog or put up on a social networking page. Photos were inserted to show a likeness of a person, and there were a slew of accessories to add to the character such as clothing, music, and skiing equipment.
The campaign was launched in December, 2007, and on top of the 40,000 unique views within the first month, 70,000 initial videos were also created. To date, over 130,000 visitors have stopped by this viral destination. The popular buzz for Snowjoke was the result of an electronic viral marketing effort.
About The SuperGroup (www.thesupergroup.com) - The SuperGroup is a web-branding experience in adventure and exploration. Founded in 2002, TSG has quickly become a recognized leader in the creative industry, and one of Atlanta’s hottest design firms. An interdisciplinary creative agency specializing in interactive new media development, graphic design, and creative consulting, the agency’s work has been seen by tens of millions of people. Clients include The Weather Channel, AOL / Time Warner, Amp Energy Drink, Krystal Hamburgers, and Johnson & Johnson.
About the Communicator Awards www.communicator-awards.com - For fourteen years, the Communicator Awards has honored the best creative work in the communications fields. The Awards are overseen and sanctioned by the International Academy of the Visual Arts, an invitation-only body consisting of top-tier professionals from acclaimed media, communications, advertising, creative and marketing firms.
As Apple made the announcement of the iPhone SDK, I’ve been following closely what the folks over at the Surfin Safari blog have been up to. Apple and Mozilla alike have been making great strides in pushing web standards forward in the past few years, but Apple especially, with the open source Webkit project (better known to most people as the Safari browser), have been pushing ahead by proposing new properties to the W3C for the developing CSS3 spec. Among the new proposed properties include really fun things such as drop shadows, gradients, rounded corners for borders, and even better, animation properties. What this means for developers and designers alike is that web designs can be created with a little more CSS but a lot less unnecessary XHTML, and even fewer images. The result being a better structured web that’s both more accessible to users and search engines alike, as well as faster page loads, and less of a reliance on plugins.
The SuperGroup is a creative agency located in Atlanta, GA. We focus mostly on web design, interactive innovation, and how to use those tools to effectively market brands. The internet is constantly evolving, and part of what makes us the best is keeping up with what's out there. This is the place were we share what we think is cool, and our own contributions to the industry.
Sales of recorded music in the United States are nowabout 30% lower than when Shawn Fanning introduced Napster in 1999. Sales in the physical form (e.g. CDs) are down by nearly half. There is little doubt that the Internet has been a “game changer” for the record label business.In this audio program we explore a couple of ways that the Internet can add revenues. One is already generating more money for the industry and promoting new artists. The second appears to be an idea whose time has come.The first example is Internet radio whose potential was amplified recently by the 3G-iPhone and Apple’s iPhone Apps Store. Our first interview is with Tim Westergren who is the founder of Pandora (Internet Radio). Tim reports that iPhone downloads of Pandora software have nearly doubled the number of new subscribers daily.
When I think of the term Open Source, I, like a lot of people I imagine, think of web based software. But the concept of Open Source (which in short means that anyone is free to use or redistribute something, and the code or instructions used to create it), can be applied to not only software but just about anything as well. The folks at the 