Nitmesh

Competing with Free - Content Predictions for Music Industry

What if all online music was given away for free? John Battelle's on his Searchblog writes this fictional post predicting EMI giving away all music in the autumn. It makes sense. Wall Street Journal, New York Times and CBS are going to or are already giving away embed codes for all their video content so we all can host (with ads) on our own sites. We hyperlink content already to associate with it on our blogs and websites, why not give away music and film too, give away all content? It only takes one person to find the content for free and pass it on to cause the domino effect, to all of the online world. More people see it, read it, listen to it which drives the indirect effect, causing more offline sales through word of mouth, through the offline crowd. Onliners are the Influencers. Soon we're all be equal.

All it would take is for old film and music industry to embrace idea and to thrash out some effective revenue models. If you give away movies, games and music online why not run pre-roll ads, contextual advertising, or much more effective, subtle multi-client product placement when it comes to professional video/TV or film content. We already all engage for hours with Facebook which we get for free, why not everything else?  Online = Free? Offline=Expensive?

I'll finish with this damning post from theregister.co.uk where CD sales are falling 40% in some markets and record companies are desperately trying to claw back revenues through live, merchandise and brand advertising.

John Kennedy, chairman of the IPFPI, a UK music association says it all. 'The old model is not working' but although we are loading our iPods up with our past, we're not buying new music, we'll too busy playing online games, having virtual sex on second life, writing blogs and commenting on what we care about, watching short video and listening to podcasts...I could go on...

Photosynthing

The great TED is hosting this webvideo to blow us all away. The ideas are limitless for this especially with social networking and photo hosting sites like flickr.

New Sony Blu-ray Disc Commercial - Lasers

Here is a piece of our latest work. It's the latest Sony commercial directed by Brett Foraker at RSA Films.
Here's the full length version hosted at the Museum of Low Res website. Here's the embedded code version.

The advert was filmed on location in Hungary within a working industrial chimney, with all shots taken in the absence of any form of natural light.  A bank of lasers capture the action of gladiators battling futuristic robo-cops and suped-up motor cars being dropped from a sheer height (hence the industrial chimney!) 

Revealing Second Graph & Future of Advertising

Businessweek shows clearly who is generating content on the net. Same as my previous post of last week. It's the youth. It's split up between Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives. It's 12 to 26 year olds doing all the creating, blogging, photographing, commenting, filming and making music. So will all the old passive models like, newspapers, magazines, TV and radio suffer and shrink from all this flood of consumer/user generated content? No one is going to have the time to passively read, watch and listen to the past models if their on blogs, podcasts. video-sharing sites and social networks. Are they? Another nail in the coffin of the era of mass-media. It will still exist, just a thinner slice of the marketing pie in this competitively fragmented new world.

Norwegian Viral

A piece of short viral content advertising an engineering degree.

Appealing to niche audience of young engineering students.