The resilience of the Japanese population after the devastating earthquake and tsunami back in May is amazing. The photo collection from the Sacramento Bee via The Big Picture is jaw dropping. Click on the photos below to got to the full article.
If there were any doubts about the power of social media to turn an industry upside down, look at the recording industry. The story of the band Cults at the Austin City Limits Festival is included below.
ACL is a powerful venue. Has been for years. I remember watching ACL on PBS back in the 70s and 80s, even today when I can catch it, and seeing great bands, singers and songwriters. Some were famous, some not so much. But a great venue nonetheless.
Cults is a great indie group.They have a loyal following. But over half a million views? Comparable to the mega group Coldplay? That's social media power.
The recording industry has nothing to do with it. It's all the fans. The fans have the power now in all music genres.
Except for maybe Top 40 radio which still seems to think that they are the buzz makers - they are heavily influenced by the recording industry - thus the demise of Top 40 radio.
Good on ya Cults! Good on ya ACL! Good on ya fans!
Keep it up!
Something phenomenal happened during our Austin City Limits Festival live webcast this past weekend. A band blew up right before our eyes DURING the Festival weekend. It happened online. And it further proved that in 2011 Festival webcasts are making a difference for artists.
Full disclosure: I produce the live webcasts and the video at the ACL Festival (and Lollapalooza and Coachella).
Here’s what happened.
In addition to the live webcast of 50 bands, we were asked by YouTube if we could clear at least 4 artist-approved songs for the online Archives by the end of Friday night. If so, they would promote these videos on the YT Home Page on Saturday, and drive traffic to the ACLFestival page. We scrambled and got approved titles from Coldplay, Foster the People, Brandi Carlile, and Smith Westerns. And an emerging band called Cults, who played first-up on Friday at 11:45am, in front of a few hundred on a small stage, just about the lowest slot at the Fest.
The YT Home Page promo went up mid-Saturday. By midnight on Saturday 160,000 people has streamed the VOD of Cults buzzed-about song ‘Go Outside.’ At that point Coldplay’s new single Paradise was at 150,000 streams. Foster’s hit also had big numbers. By Sunday the Cults number was 320,000; Coldplay tracking right with them. As of Tuesday evening when I’m writing this, uber-stars Coldplay are at 502,817 streams, and Cults are right there at 502,416. Five Hundred Thousand Streams in 4 days!!! It’s not a dancing cat or a cute baby. It’s a song. I knew Cults had a buzz, but WOW.
All these videos and dozens more below:
I just like this story. Young band, barely out of the basement, gets blog love, still getting their shit together, hasn’t toured much, record just out. Then HUGE CRAZY numbers of fans find them this week online, and see that they are cool. And this costs the band nothing. The label didn’t do it. The festival promoters (C3 Presents) made this happen (and YouTube, more on them later). Everyone on the band’s team gets jazzed. They sell-out more shows. Get to make more records. Rock ‘n Roll lives to fight another day.
And it’s surely not our video genius that’s making this happen. Frankly, our video for Cults is not so damn good. It was Noon (!), first band of the first day, our smallest stage, director hasn’t settled in, doesn’t even know his cameramen’s names yet. It’s 101 degrees in Texas, band is barely awake, crowd is just arriving. We only had 3 cameras working there, so I’m just thrilled we even caught it properly. It’s all live/live, no edits, no remix. But a hit’s a hit!
Cults are far from the only ones to benefit from Fest webcasts. At Coachella the indie-band Freelance Whales told me they vaulted into the top Twitter Trends during their webcast performance. Foster the People at Lolla got crazy numbers for their perf video of Pumped Up Kicks. Coldplay has blogged repeatedly about their Festival webcasts, and the traffic has followed. My Morning Jacket’s's online fans came back to the band with tons of love for their Lolla and ACL shows. Just a few examples, but literally every band connects.
So what changed in 2011? It’s on YouTube, that’s what. You need a great Festival, committed promoters, and a sponsor who wants to be part of it all. But YouTube brings it to the people globally, and then let’s them know it’s there. At Coachella, we cleared Arcade at 5pm on showday, and Kanye at 8pm on showday, and YouTube still got the word out. They sit in our trucks all weekend, and tweak the user experience non-stop. And get this, they care about the music. I’m telling you, they are passionate.
So good for Cults AND Coldplay. And good for another band next time.
According to several leaked parts and info coming from Apple's Eastern supply chain, the company is not refreshing the iPod Touch much on Oct. 4, if at all. Apart from perhaps an uprated A5 CPU, grabbed from the updated iPhone, and apart from a lick of white paint, the flagship of the iPod lineup is not even being redesigned. It's a minimal-effort update, because Apple's attention is better spent elsewhere right now. In fact, it's time for the entire iPod line to go, while it can leave on a high note, being regarded as one of the most transformational consumer devices ever made.
Apple sells four varieties of iPod today: The diminutive, screenless Shuffle for $49, the Nano for about $149, the touch from $229, and the Classic from $249. And Apple should kill 'em all. Here's why.
The Classic dinosaur still sports Apple's trademarked "clickwheel," and it hasn't changed much in engineering or UI design for years; it's only added storage space as the tech behind hard disks improves (now coming with a 160 GB hard drive, but at the cost of a quarter of the price of an entire MacBook Air or half an iPad). We predicted its death a while back, but Apple kept it on sale--presumably appealing to a niche hardcore music fan who prefers to take their entire music collection (40,000 songs) or 200 hours of video on the road with them. But Apple's moving away from magnetic drive storage altogether, and killing the Classic would be an easy decision for them, even if it's true the costs of making the thing must've been shaved down to razor thinness over its years of optimized production. We're guessing Apple will drop the hammer on the Classic next month.
The Shuffle packs just 2 GB of flash RAM. It's small, quirky, cheap, and appeals to the entry level (and perhaps youth) markets. Apple introduced it to energize the iPod line and sell to a more mass audience, and when it arrived in January 2005 it was the first iPod to use flash memory. It competes in a very crowded space with branded and rebranded products from a huge number of peers, and for its price it's possible to get a comparable MP3 player that has a screen--albeit without the Apple cachet. Apple likely doesn't make huge profits on the device, although its manufacturing costs and BOM must be pretty small--it's instead relying on profit by mass sales. Apple could easily exit this market and aim for yet more profitable segments.
The Nano has been through several innovations, and with its tiny touchscreen and iOS look-alike interface, it completely shook up the mid-price MP3 market when it arrived in 2010. We've seen that Apple has experimented with augmenting the Nano's capabilities--incuding with a camera, which may arrive in its 2011 refresh, but we'll talk more about the Nano later, as this could be the one iPod Apple shouldn't kill.
The Touch is the big Apple surprise--it's sales have been stellar since it launched, possibly because it offered the hugely desirable app experience offered by the iPhone at a lower price (and sacrificing phone and roaming 3G Net capabiltiies). According to some analysis, it's responsible for one third of sales of iOS devices to date (60 million sales, roughly, to mid-2011), matching the flagships iPad and iPhone. Apple's gently upgraded its capabilities and design as the years have passed, adding new features but always being careful to keep them lagging the iPhone so no cannibalization happens--apart from storage, which the touch beats the iPhone for.
But Apple should kill the Touch after this latest minimal refresh, mainly because it's likely releasing the iPhone 4S--the cheaper iPhone "lite"--to appeal to a more entry-level smartphone market, including those in developing nations, as well as the enormous global pre-pay scene. This phone is expected to beat the iPod Touch, if only because it sports a 3G connection and probably a better camera system. It'll likely be comparably cheap, and in an era when everything is getting connected to the Net, and more emphasis is moving toward streaming content (as in Apple's iCloud) it's an example of how Apple will take its iPod line into the future ... as iPhones. Maybe users will exercise the option to turn off the phone functionality and go for a data-only price plan, just as iPad 3G owners do now. It's the natural successor to the iPod touch, especially next year when the iPhone 6 arrives, and the tech world will likely be flush with iPad-like tablets of all sizes.
Then there's this graph, which tells you almost everything you need to know about iPod sales:
In the last quarter of 2010, the iPod was responsible for just over 8% of Apple's total revenues, and then in the second quarter of 2011 Apple sold just 9 million iPods of all types compared to 18.7 million iPhones and 4.7 million iPads. This represented a 17% decline on the previous year's figures. By this time next year, and probably after an accelerated drop in sales as the world gets more used to iPads and cheaper iPhones (let's guess a 20% year-on-year decline which'll see just 7 million iPods sold in the second quarter of 2012), Apple's time and effort is just not going to be worth injecting into the iPod product line. That development cash (admittedly something Apple's not short of) and staff could be redeployed to make Apple more innovative elsewhere.
Of course, we're not suggesting Apple should merely throw away 6-8% of its quarterly revenues. It should transform its iPod into something new. Here's what Apple could make: It could learn its lessons from the iPhone and iPad and apply them to the Nano, refreshing it dramatically by injecting a small but powerful ARM chip and low-power Bluetooth 4 tech, along with the smallest VGA webcam unit Apple can find. This would turn it, as we've suggested, into a second-screen iPhone companion (and, yes, discrete MP3 player) that could access a whole new lucrative app marketplace. Think: specialized apps for sports fans, check-ins, wireless payment tech, and so on. It would innovate into a whole new market, pulling off a trademark Apple maneuver.
The iPod changed the consumer electronics world, and arguably the entire music industry, but its time is done.
This umbrella by 25togo from Taiwan has a goggle-shaped window for seeing (or spying, as is suggested), no doubt helpful when you want to keep dry yet not crash into other pedestrians. Topped off with a periscope-shaped cap, it’s cute enough to get some smiles and funny enough to be admired (no scoffing allowed). Two umbrellas for
general info:
dimensions: L 85 cm W 14 cm (approximate)
weight: 360g each umbrella
package includes: two umbrellas (bright yellow & gray), protective bag, introduction card
We're going to be seeing a lot of the retrospectives over the next few days, but this one from The Atlantic magazine is very compelling and moving. Warning - some images are disturbing, but are an integral part of the full story.
We've had some terrible flooding in Maryland today. I've included a gallery of photos below from the area in Parkton where Little Falls passes underneath York Road. Most of the photos were taken from the parking lot of Elizabeth Jacobs Salon.
