Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog

This is the season where many bloggers are providing their predictions for the year ahead. I tend to opt out of these because a year is both too long and too short to foresee many types of change, which are like rainstorms or earthquakes: you know one's coming, but you don't know quite when or where until the early warning signs appear. I'm more of a Long Bets man, so today I'm going to revisit something I've touched on occasionally in the past, most recently nearly two years ago: the falling price of MP3 players and the possible implications for listening/buying experiences.

Continue reading "The Age of the Free MP3 Player" »

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Continue reading "Audio Branding: ‘Tis the Season" »

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by: Ilya Vedrashko

"ComScore released a study of online sales of "In Rainbows," a new record album from the band Radiohead. During the first 29 days of October, 1.2 million people worldwide visited the "In Rainbows" site, with a significant percentage of visitors ultimately downloading the album. The study showed that 38 percent of global downloaders of the album willingly paid to do so, with the remaining 62 percent choosing to pay nothing."

Continue reading " Study: Radiohead Promotes Music with Free Music" »

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by: Karl Long

So in the first week Radiohead’s album, In Rainbows, which they allowed customer to set their own prices 1 sells 1.2 million downloads and gets an average of $8 each. Next time I’ll just ask them to up the bitrate a little bit.

Continue reading "Radiohead update, set your own price experiment sells 1.2 Million albums at $8 each " »

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by: David Jennings

My book is out in the UK. If you buy it from Amazon.co.uk, you'll make me happy. If you can add to the reviews for the book, you'll make me even happier.

Continue reading "Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll is published" »

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by: John Caddell

No, she wasn't caught partying with Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan. She wasn't arrested or sent to rehab.

As described in a front-page article in today's Wall Street Journal (link - $$), musician Marie Digby made simple videos of herself singing cover songs, posted them on YouTube, got millions of views, and parlayed that into gigs on the Carson Daly show, local LA radio, and general buzz as a true YouTube discovery.

Continue reading "What's Wrong with what Mary Digby did" »

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by: Dick Stroud

This Reuter’s article is an interesting reflection on the 50-plus and their tech literacy.

Continue reading "The Techy 50-plus" »

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by: C. Sven Johnson

Having already done the virtual reality and Industrial Design round-ups, I’m finishing off with this collection of links which - in some way or another - have something to do with cross-reality ideas/concepts and rapid manufacturing. Well, at least they come kinda close (in my mind).

Continue reading "Transreality/Rapid Manufacturing Round" »

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by: Roger Dooley

Many forms of marketing incorporate music - often, this is to create a mood or evoke memories of a particular time period. New research shows that changes in the music are what really gets the attention of the listener’s brain:

Continue reading "Music Changes Grab Attention" »

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by: C. Sven Johnson

While reading something yesterday concerning marketing in virtual worlds I resisted the urge to comment. Last night and again early this morning, I further resisted the temptation to post something here regarding what I’d read. And I’m now resisting the urge to slip something in. I won’t.

Continue reading "Personal Entry: Pre-Alpha" »

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by: C. Sven Johnson

Joel Greenberg has a blog entry (Link) worth reading regarding Suzanne Vega’s upcoming concert inside Second Life. Some of what he’s getting at has come up here before (reLink). And of course scarcity is something I’m often thinking about, given my particular interests.

Continue reading "The Niche of Mass" »

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by: David Jennings

The contention between subscription and à-la-carte models for online music has been running for at least five years, and I suspect it has at least another five years left to run. Rhapsody was the first to start offering a subscription service, where you pay a monthly fee in return for access to (but not permanent ownership of) a vast catalogue of music, in 02001. iTunes has remained firmly in the à-la-carte camp, selling music track-by-track for a unit price. Steve Jobs has maintained that consumers don't want to 'rent' music, and so far the market has backed him up. Then there are hybrid models such as eMusic, which offers a fixed number of permanent downloads for a regular monthly fee.

Continue reading "Revisiting Subscription versus A-La-Carte models" »

Posted by Futurelab at 7:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)  • Email this article to a friend

by: David Jennings

The flipside of sites run by fans is of course sites run by artists, and yesterday the New York Times ran a feature — Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog (hmmm, not a bad title; I wonder if I could adapt it…) — about what it refers to as 'B-list' artists and how they communicate with fans online. 

Continue reading "Rise of the artist site" »

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by: David Jennings

Andy Aldridge, who created one of my favourite fan sites, and whom I interviewed for the book (notes to appear here when I get round to it), is asking whether such sites are on the way out.

Continue reading "Fan sites RIP?" »

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by: David Jennings

There's an interesting article in Sunday's New York Times about how we arrive at collective judgements of cultural products.

Continue reading "Cumulative advantage versus the wisdom of crowds" »

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By: Stefan Kolle

We reported earlier on the Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG the band Nine Inch Nails (NIN) is using to promote it's latest album. For a full overview of all the (brilliantly conceived) activities that have taken place, a Wiki has been set up. I suggest to take a look.

Continue reading "Silly retreating battles - how the music industry once again misses the point" »

Posted by Stefan Kolle at 2:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)  • Email this article to a friend

by: Alain Thys

Exactly a year ago this blog went "live" and we just wanted to thank everyone who's been part of making it something much more successful than we ever thought it would be.  Today, we've got about 25,000 regular readers, over 1,400 posts, and more importantly, our base of daily feedburner subscribers keeps growing by the week (currently at 2,500).

Continue reading "Happy Birthday Futurelab Blog" »

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by: Lynette Webb

I’ve got iPods on the brain today. Here’s another quote from the same article (and book).

“The iPod is only the most recent, and most compelling, advance in a movement of portable cocooning that's been underway for decades. In 1974, sociologist Raymond Williams used the term "mobile privatization" to describe the phenomenon of people forming technological bubbles around themselves. Click image to enlarge.

Continue reading "ipod is most recent advance in portable cocooning" »

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by: Lynette Webb

And one final quote from the same article that I couldn’t resist. I was reminded of this last weekend when listening to Jonathan Ross on radio 2… he was talking about how nowadays he seldom listens to the end of any song, he’s always fast-forwarding to the next. I’m the same and I guess it’s fairly common. The only bad thing is that iTunes hasn’t quite caught up with that behaviour yet.

Click image to enlarge.

Continue reading "ipod scroll has made us a skipforward generation" »

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by: Lynette Webb

No need to say much about this. It’s a bit tongue in cheek, but I’ve had this quote sitting round for a while and today I stumbled across the perfect image for it. It’s a reminder of just how fast things like the iPod have spread.

Click image to enlarge.

Continue reading "no-one would have believed ipod more popular than beer" »

Posted by Futurelab at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)  • Email this article to a friend

by: David Jennings

David Hepworth (director of Word magazine) asks "why should anyone care about the chart?" The reason I give in the book is that the chart helps us know what other people like.

Continue reading "Why we need, but cannot trust, charts" »

Posted by Futurelab at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)  • Email this article to a friend

By: Ilya Vedrashko

"The Bone Fone put a unique spin on personal stereos--with its wrap-around design unique speaker placement, the vibrations "resonate through your bones--all the way to the sensitive bones of your inner ear" giving the listener breathtaking sound.
-- Pocket Calculator Show

Continue reading "Flashback: Bone Fone" »

Posted by Futurelab at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)  • Email this article to a friend

by: Dominic Basulto

Over on the On Disruption blog, software executive and guitar enthusiast Zack Urlocker has posted a great case study of disruptive change within the billion-dollar professional guitar industry.

Continue reading "Disruptive innovation within the rock 'n roll guitar industry" »

Posted by Futurelab at 3:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)  • Email this article to a friend

by: Alain Thys

As I compiled the most read posts on this blog, I couldn't shake the feeling that "there was a lot of great stuff missing". That's why I decided to do the "old media" thing and make a selfish editorial selection of what I thought were the twenty strongest thoughts expressed on this blog since its inception (one per contributor). 

Continue reading "The 21 Strongest Thoughts for 2006" »

Posted by Futurelab at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)  • Email this article to a friend

by: Alain Thys

It's the season to make lists and hitparades, so to end the year we'll do our bit as well.  According to Google Analytics, here's a list of the ten most read articles since the launch of this blog on March 5th, 2006.  It's an interesting mix, which for me, is also a testimony to the way the Long Tail seems to be working.

Continue reading "The Ten Most Read Futurelab Articles in 2006" »

Posted by Futurelab at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)  • Email this article to a friend

by: David Jennings

Jason Herskowitz has started a wiki site so we can all collate examples of different kinds of new-generation music sites.

Continue reading "Music 2.0 Directory" »

Posted by Futurelab at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)  • Email this article to a friend

by: David Jennings

The current issue of Word has a good sceptical article by Peter Robinson on the promotion of new music through the Net in general and MySpace in particular.

Continue reading "Debunking the MySpace 'Revolution' and its Effect on the Charts" »

Posted by Futurelab at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)  • Email this article to a friend

by: David Jennings

There's an interesting article on jazz blogs in yesterday's New York Times (registration may be required shortly), which touches on several themes that I cover in the book:

Continue reading "Jazz Blogs Curate a 'Lost' Period" »

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by: David Jennings

There's an interesting set of issues raised by sites like Best MySpace Band, which add second-generation features to discovery sites like MySpace, Last.fm and so on.

Continue reading "Second Generation Discovery Sites" »

Posted by Futurelab at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)  • Email this article to a friend

by: Alain Thys

We've been a bit quiet over the past few days because of a busy week at the Marketing 3 conference in the Netherlands, yet to make up, we wanted to bring you a few early Christmas presents in the form of key videos from the conference.

Continue reading "Must Watch video: Shopping 2016" »

Posted by Futurelab at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)  • Email this article to a friend

 By: Alain Thys

I promise this is the last time I post about our Knight Rider, yet as the project Hoff Alert had now managed to land this most unlikely of musical heroes on the number 3 spot in the UK, I just had to find out who was behind it.  Was it really a bunch of fans who got together ?  Or was it an innovative ploy by a record company executive looking for a fast buck ?

Continue reading "People Power Lands Hoff on #3" »

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by: David Jennings

Soundflavor is the latest playlist sharing service to move beyond just their sharing community (see my review) to offer a software download that plugs into iTunes to recommend playlists. The download is called Soundflavor DJ™, and you can download it here.

Continue reading "Soundflavor Moves Into Music Recommendation Client Software" »

Posted by Futurelab at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)  • Email this article to a friend

Last August

Continue reading "Hoff Alert: Consumers Play the Hitparade" »

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by: John Caddell

This month's Harvard Business Review discusses a study by three Columbia academics on the effect of social influence on selecting music ("Marketing in an Unpredictable World" - $$).

Continue reading "Trying to Market Music? Don't Try to Predict Hits" »

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by: David Jennings

The Digital Music Survey by Entertainment Media Research (and, apparently, Olswang) covers many interesting areas, from MP3 players to DRM to illegal downloading. There's a 106-page PDF with a rich set of figures available for free download from Entertainment Media Research's site. I'm going to focus here on a couple of the findings concerning discovery and sharing of music.

Continue reading "UK Survey of Digital Music and Discovery" »

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Continue reading "Crowdsourcing and financing music: Sellaband" »

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by: Stefan Kolle

Another innovative use of technology - the branded Skypecast.

Simply put, a Skypecast allows a host to broadcast audiocontent to 100 users at a time. It reminds me of the analyst call Wall Street companies hold regularly. For instance Gizmodo has used it for interviews with tech execs.

Now there has been a surprising new application of the technology.

Continue reading "It's a small step for mankind, a big step for Rock and Roll....and beer" »

Posted by Stefan Kolle at 4:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)  • Email this article to a friend

By: Alain Thys

Some time ago I posted about Gnarls Barkley conquering the world from a MySpace page.  These days David Hasselhoff is having a go at it ... or better, his fans.  On www.gethasselhofftonumber1.com they are trying to convince enough people to purchase a Hoff single on iTunes to bring our Knight Rider to the Top of the UK hitparade.  I'm curious to see where it goes.  Meanwhile, make sure to check out this video by "The Hoff".

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