www.dpingram.com

Joost is now on Intel Macs, says the Joost blog here.

OK, this stuff is getting CRAZY now. If you’ve read The Long Tail you’ll know of the theory that markets are changing because production, promotion, and distribution are getting easier and cheaper, driven largely by new technology which is upending old markets.

I read today that MySpace is selling artists music direct from their website using their Music Store / Snocap initiative. Thats not all that surprising. What took me by surprise a little was to hear that its not just the small unheard of artists that are selling in this way…

MySpace says…

This month’s featured Snocap Featured Download: Snoop Dogg Distribution. Download exclusive tracks featuring Snoop Dogg and JT the Bigga Figga. Fresh tracks from these hip hop icons coming weekly!

Jeez, Snoop Dogg!!! So think about this… this will really throw the music industry into turmoil over the next few years. Previously you needed expensive studios, equipement, promotion, and distribution channels to get music from your head to the customer (and to get paid in return). All those people in the supply chain took their little slice which meant that price had to support them all. BUT, now, you get Snoop and some of his homies (I beleive that is the correct nomenclature ) jammin is his HOME STUDIO and just releasing this stuff week by week without any of the middlemen.

OK, so Snoop can do this and still sell because we all know him and that heavyweight old production engine has already made him famous, BUT, with new promotional channels emerging on the web every day its entirely possible for anyone to do this, and because the costs in the supply chain are lower they actually dont need to charge so much for each sale to make the same kind of money…

Anyway I digress, the real point I wanted to make is this… we used to get a new album every 6 months after LOTS of production and other work going on it took that long (and cost that much). But, now these guys can churn out this stuff like there’s no tomorrow, and if they price it lower we’ll lap it all up. Its great.

More music, lower cost, more variety. Millions of niche markets, each indivisual ‘product’ selling fewer (or maybe even more), for less, but in aggregate MORE total sales and MORE money being spent/earnt.

Anyway, its no longer just niche bands, the big boys are there too.

Ok, so I’ve been trying to ignore this story for the last week, but its still getting circulated and so I feel compelled to comment.

Pete Cashmore at Mashable says it best and I quote…

“The end result is that another politician with no real insight into social networking is once again fear-mongering in an effort to win public support. We pity the librarians and schools who would have to enforce these bills if they ever get passed - it seems like an impossible challenge. If they want to win votes, maybe Senators would be wiser to embrace social networks as a communication tool, ala Barack Obama, rather than attempting to ban them.”

Its ridiculous, Senator Matt Murphy (Illinois) might as well try and ban pubs or restaurants, or just tell us to not speak. Social networking is not some evil nemesis, but the natural evolution of social interaction - we just do it with our computers now as well as chatting to people in real life. You cant stop it Murphy.

Here’s a similar story I remember from my childhood : King Canute on the Seashore

Om Malik writes on NewTeeVee about the most popular online video companies. Here is a short except…

According to Compete data for the month of December 2006, YouTube2 has 41.1 percent market share, followed by MySpace3. Google4 clocks in at #3 with 10.2 percent of the market share, followed by AOL and Yahoo. Add Google and YouTube together, and they are half of the online video market. Okay, so $1.6 billion to become the 500-pound gorilla is not such a bad strategy, especially if they can figure out a way to make money from the traffic, and keep the likes of Viacom happy5.

Rest of the list, like Break6 and Metacafe7, has tiny shares. One notable site missing from the list: Revver8.

Jeff Jarvis sums up the top few here… (again I quote)

* YouTube: 41.1 percent market share, 86.8 million sessions, 29.7 million unique visitors
* MySpace: 19.3 percent share, 40.9 million sessions, 17.6 million visitors
* Google: 10.2 percent share, 21.6 million sessions, 12.1 million visitors

The whole Om Malik piece is here
Jeff Jarvis comments are here

Boy, I am sooo slooow these days. Of course I’d heard about Steve Job’s open letter discussing the abolition of DRM, but I only just got round to reading it myself.

For me, this is perhaps the most important section - doing away with DRM actually makes good sense. They’ve been selling DRM free music for ever, and today over 90% of it is still DRM free.

and I quote from Jobs…

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

The original piece is in full here

Why do commercial content owners keep pulling their stuff off YouTube. Its SUCH a great promotional tool for them. Lets face it, the video quality is crap, so its no real substitute for the real professional content - its like a low quality teaser. Jeez, before YouTube these big media companies would have killed to get the sort of viral pre-promotion that YouTube gives them. Now they have it they dont want it - or is it just that THEY dont own YouTube, it belongs to someone else - yep, mabe thats it.

With all the news and hype around Joost I thought I’d add some balance by mentioning Veoh.

Veoh, like Joost is a peer-to-peer video network that allows content owners to create channels for distributing full-screen, high quality video.

While Joost has been in closed beta Veoh has been out there for a while:

MySpace is to offer free video filtering for content owners who want to block users from uploading their copyrighted videos. The technology in use is Audible Magic.

Techcrunch has more details here

Jeremiah Owyang has blogged an entire list of whitelabel social networking tools. His post is here, and it includes the following, but its clear (as he admits) that there are MANY MANY others:
BlogTronix
Sharepoint
Five Across
Community Server
PeopleAggregator
Social Platform
SiteLife from Pluck
Affinity Circles
Kick Apps
Web Crossing
Crowd Factory
CollectiveX
ElggSpaces
Me.com
Onesite
PHPfox
Select Minds
Small World Labs
Social Network Server
Sparta Social Networks
Phpizabi
Leverage Software

link here

On IMified’s blog… Note they saw a significant uptake with just one ‘informal’ post. I say ‘informal’ because all social media posts are relatively informal, but it just shows you the potential power of just one post…

Here is what they write on their blog following the post to TechCrunch…

IMified’s Viral Growth
February 10th, 2007
I should probably have my nose in some code right now fixing bugs and building new services, but I’d like take a minute to reflect and share on our experience launching IMified. In just 5 days we’ve gone from 2 users to many thousands and have been getting some really positive feedback. Our users have used IMified to perform over 25,000 tasks at the time of this writing! What really amazes us is this all happened by submitting one post to the Techcrunch company review forum. That’s it, just one post. The buzz that followed was a direct result of this post as we didn’t even try pitching our service to anyone else. The idea was to get some users in who enjoyed reviewing new services and get some feedback before doing any viral marketing. Lucky for us, that plan backfired and the news spread. We’re really proud of the fact that we’ve had zero server down time and just some minor network interuptions on AIM and MSN. AOL and Microsoft even contacted us to say Kudos! How cool?

The post to TechCrunch was made on February 4th, this entry was written in IMified’s blog on Feb 10th. 6 days later.

The whole post is here
ImIfied’s website is here