The Problem With Concert Tickets

We all want to have a fair chance at a good seat when tickets go on sale for a concert, but increasingly that's becoming a pipe dream as scalpers and third party brokers swoop in to buy them all up. These are then sold back to the public at an enormous increase in price. Add that markup to the service charges, premiums, parking, and general high ticket costs, and you have the situation today where ticket prices are so high that people can only afford to attend a show a few times a year.

There are ways around this, like electronic ticketing on your phone, or tickets that you print yourself at home, but believe it or not, there are actually laws against that in some states like New York. How a law like this benefits the public I don't know, but it sure does benefit the ticket brokers.

Green Day thought they found a way around this for a concert at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn in April. They came up with the idea that fans could only pick up tickets on the day of the show at "Will Call" at the venue. That way, brokers and scalpers wouldn't have a chance to get their hands on them, and everyone would pay a fair price, especially for the premium tickets on the floor.

It turns out that fan protests caused them to relent and revert back to selling the old fashioned way, making the brokers happy and the fans a bit poorer.

Why did they protest? Many fans felt that by only having the chance to pick up a ticket by showing an ID right before the concert, their rights were violated. The Fan Freedom Project insists that when a ticket is purchased, it's then the property of the fan, who then has the right to sell it, trade it, give it away, or use it as he so pleases. Other fans were upset that they would have no recourse than to eat the money if they couldn't attend. Of course, the brokers thought that the band was skirting the electronic ticket law, and were prepared to bring a lawsuit.

It seems that something that should be so easy, like purchase tickets to a concert, will remain in the dark ages at least for the near future.

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Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media. The best of over 800 posts.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Record Twitter Video With Vine

What could be better than a short 140 character message? How about a real short video? Twitter recently launched their answer to video, called Vine, and it lets users share video clips of up to 6 seconds on social networks like Twitter, Facebook and the Vine platform itself.

While 6 seconds doesn't seem like much, professional broadcasters will tell you that it can be a lifetime, especially where every half-second increments count. That's why Vine may be the next big social thing, since it's easy to both create and consume, and just like Twitter, is perfect for our short attention span world.

Want a quick look at some vines? You can start off by going to Vinepeek, an unmoderated real-time stream of Vines from all over the world, but if you want to get started posting vines yourself,  go to the App Store (it's an iOS app) and download the Vine app.

When you first open it, you will be asked to log in either with your Twitter account or email address, then you'll be asked if you want to receive push notifications and to let Vine access your location info.

After you've signed in, you'll be taken to a landing page where you'll be served up an editor's choice of Vine feeds until you start following the people that you choose.

To create a Vine, press the camera icon on the top right of the home page, which will take you to a new page that features a camera view, a status bar and and X to exit. To record, hold your finger on the screen, where you'll see the green status bar indicate how much you've recorded. Remove your finger and Vine will stop recording. You don't have to record all 6 seconds at once. You can record for a few seconds, stop, set up for a new shot, then record again for sort of a stop-motion movie.

After you've finished recording you can preview what you've shot and choose to keep or delete it. Then you're able to share it on Vine, Twitter or Facebook. Remember that if you choose to share on Twitter or Facebook, you also have to share it on Vine as well. If you don't choose to share it, you can save it anyway as a "camera roll," otherwise, all Vines are public. You can also choose to add a caption.

6 seconds can be a lot longer than you think, but it's still short enough that people are much more likely to watch a Vine than a regular movie. Now go get Vining!

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Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

The New Piracy Threat From A Trade Policy

Antigua: Imagine servers on the beach

Just about the time you thought that the issue of piracy was at least somewhat behind us comes a new threat, thanks to some US foreign policy. It seems that the government of the small Caribbean island of Antigua is angry at the US government for applying trade sanctions in order to prevent it from being used as a base for Internet gambling. This has been exacerbated by the fact that the World Trade Organization has actually ruled in favor for Antigua's right to host the gambling sites, which the US has chosen to ignore.

In an act of revenge, Antigua is now set to host servers that will allow users to download copyrighted music, movies, books and software, in order to make up for some of the lost revenue from gambling. The problem for Antiqua is that any revenue stream from illegal downloads will probably be pennies on the dollar as compared to what they received from gambling, so you can look at the move as using copyright protection (or lack thereof) as a way of trying to force the hand of the US.

You might think that since it's known where the servers are, that it would be easy to block them, but that's apparently not the case. By the use of a virtual private network (or VPN), the traffic to the illegal content is routed through another country or countries, making it extremely difficult to trace.

This might all be a moot point when it comes to music anyway, as the world is quickly moving to streaming audio as the favored way of consuming music. Even without Apple's participation (which may come soon anyway), the masses are quickly learning that it's a lot better to rent than own.

In the meantime, it will be interesting to watch the fight ahead between David (Antigua) and Goliath (the US Government).

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Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Google+ Is Now #2

It was only a matter of time, but Google+ is now the second most used social network world-wide, according to a study of network activity in December by Trendstream. While Facebook had 693 active users, Google+ followed with 343 million. YouTube was third with 280 million.

But YouTube is owned by Google, right? You can make a case that we could combine the numbers for Google+ and YouTube, but that would still give you only 623 million, a good 70 million short of Facebook. That said, don't forget that there's been a huge swing to online work tools like Google Docs, which might make up the difference.

The problem with the Google numbers is that although everything is listed as active usage, in many cases people are interacting with Google and being listed as active without even knowing it. When you're interacting with a YouTube video, you're being listed as part of the social network, for instance. Is watching a video an active or passive pursuit? It depends upon how you look at it, or measure it.

Then again, it's difficult to be sure what constitutes an active user on Facebook or any other network either. If you have Facebook on an open tab of your browser all day, does that constitute as active? That's why we shouldn't get all that wrapped up in the number details of any study, but instead just look at the overall trend. That means that Facebook is still king of the hill, but Google+ now can easily claim #2.

You can find some great additional info in an article at Forbes.

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Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media. The best of over 800 posts.

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Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

2012 By The Numbers Part 2

On Friday we looked at Part 1 of the 2012 Web Numbers, today we'll look at Part 2, which encompasses the numbers for social media, search, mobile, video and images. As with Part 1, the numbers are just staggering.

Social media

• 85,962 – Number of monthly posts by Facebook Pages in Brazil, making it the most active country on Facebook.
• 1 billion – Number of monthly active users on Facebook, passed in October.
• 47% – Percentage of Facebook users that are female.
• 40.5 years – Average age of a Facebook user.
• 2.7 billion – Number of likes on Facebook every day.
• 24.3% – Share of the top 10,000 websites that have Facebook integration.
• 200 million – Monthly active users on Twitter, passed in December.
• 819,000+ – Number of retweets of Barack Obama’s tweet “Four more years”, the most retweets ever.
• 327,452 – Number of tweets per minute when Barack Obama was re-elected, the most ever.
• 729,571 – Number of messages per minute when the Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo saw 2012 finish and 2013 start.
• 9.66 million – Number of tweets during the opening ceremony of the London 2012 olympics.
• 175 million – Average number of tweets sent every day throughout 2012.
• 37.3 years – Average age of a Twitter user.
• 307 – Number of tweets by the average Twitter user.
• 51 – Average number of followers per Twitter user.
• 163 billion – the number of tweets since Twitter started, passed in July.
• 123 – Number of heads of state that have a Twitter account.
• 187 million – Number of members on LinkedIn (September).
• 44.2 years – Average age of a Linkedin user.
• 135 million – Number of monthly active users on Google+.
• 5 billion – How many times per day the +1 button on Google+ is used.
• 20.8% – Usage share of HootSuite as a social media management tool among the world’s top 100 brands.

Search

• 1.2 trillion – Number of searches on Google  in 2012.
• 67% – Google’s market-leading share of the U.S. search market (December).
• 1 – The top trending question of the year on Ask.com: “Will Rob and Kristen get back together?”

Mobile

• 1.1 billion – Number of global smartphone subscribers.
• 6.7 billion – Number of mobile subscriptions.
• 5 billion – Number of mobile phone users.
• 5.3 billion – Number of mobile handsets.
• 1.3 billion – Number of smartphones in use worldwide by end of 2012.
• 465 million – Number of Android smartphones sold in 2012, a 66% market share.
• 31% – Percentage of the U.S. Internet population that used a tablet or e-reader.
• 13% – Mobile share of global Internet traffic.
• 5 billion – Number of mobile broadband subscriptions.
• 1.3 exabytes – Estimated global mobile data traffic per month in 2012.
• 59% – Share of global mobile data traffic that was video.
• 500 megabytes – Amount of monthly data traffic consumed by the average smartphone.
• 504 kbps – The average mobile network connection speed globally (all handsets).
• 1,820 kbps – The average mobile network connection speed globally (smartphones).

Video

• 14 million – Number of Vimeo users.
• 200 petabytes – Amount of video played on Vimeo during 2012.
• 150,648,303 – Number of unique visitors for video to Google Sites, the number one video property (September).
• 1 billion – PSY’s Gangnam Style video became the first online video to reach 1 billion views (currently just over 1.1 billion) and it achieved it in just 5 months.
• 2.7 billion – Number of views of videos uploaded to YouTube tagged Obama or Romney during the 2012 U.S. election cycle
• 2.5 million – Number of hours of news-related video that was uploaded to YouTube.
• 8 million – The number of concurrent viewers of the lifestream of Felix Baumgartner’s jump from the edge of space, the most ever on YouTube.
• 4 billion – Number of hours of video we watched on YouTube per month.
• 60 million – Number of global viewers monthly on Ustream.
• 16.8 million – Number of total viewers in a 24 hour period for a video on Ustream, the most ever.
• 181.7 million – Number of total unique viewers of online video in the U.S. during December.

Images

• 7 petabytes – How much photo content Facebook added every month.
• 300 million – Number of new photos added every day to Facebook.
• 5 billion – The total number of photos uploaded to Instagram since its start, reached in September 2012.
• 58 – Number of photos uploaded every second to Instagram.
• 1 – Apple iPhone 4S was the most popular camera on Flickr.

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The 2012 Web By Numbers

Here are some amazing numbers regarding the world's Internet use in 2012 courtesy of Pingdom. These numbers will make your head spin if you're not careful, but they just go to show how much being online is part of everyone's lives all over the world.

Internet users

• 2.4 billion – Number of Internet users worldwide.
• 1.1 billion – Number of Internet users in Asia.
• 519 million – Number of Internet users in Europe.
• 274 million – Number of Internet users in North America.
• 255 million – Number of Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 167 million – Number of Internet users in Africa.
• 90 million – Number of Internet users in the Middle East.
• 24.3 million – Number of Internet users in Oceania / Australia.
• 565 million – Number of Internet users in China, more than any other country in the world.
• 42.1% – Internet penetration in China.

 Web pages, websites, and web hosting

• 634 million – Number of websites (December).
• 51 million – Number of websites added during the year.
• 43% – Share of the top 1 million websites that are hosted in the U.S.
• 48% – Share of the the top 100 blogs that run WordPress.
• 75% – Share of the top 10,000 websites that are served by open source software.
• 87.8 million – Number of Tumblr blogs.
• 17.8 billion – Number of page views for Tumblr.
• 59.4 million – Number of WordPress sites around the world.
• 3.5 billion – Number of webpages run by WordPress viewed each month.
• 37 billion –  Number of pageviews for Reddit.com in 2012.
• 35% – The average web page became this much larger during 2012.
• 4% – The average web page became this much slower to load during 2012.
• 191 million – Number of visitors to Google Sites, the number 1 web property in the U.S. in November.

Domain names

• 246 million – Number of domain name registrations across all top-level domains.
• 104.9 million – Number of country code top-level domain name registrations.
• 329 – Number of top level domains.
• 100 million – Number of .com domain names at the end of 2012.
• 14.1 million – Number of .net domain names at the end of 2012.
• 9.7 million – Number of .org domain names at the end of 2012.
• 6.7 million – Number of .info domain names at the end of 2012.
• 2.2 million – Number of .biz domain names at the end of 2012.
• 32.44% – Market share for GoDaddy.com, the biggest domain name registrar in the world.
• $2.45 million – The price for Investing.com, the most expensive domain name sold in 2012.

Email

• 2.2 billion – Number of email users worldwide.
• 144 billion – Total email traffic per day worldwide.
• 61% – Share of emails that were considered non-essential.
• 4.3 billion – Number of email clients worldwide in 2012.
• 35.6% – Usage share of the most popular email client, which was Mail for iOS.
• 425 million – Number of active Gmail users globally, making it the leading email provider worldwide.
• 68.8% – Percentage of all email traffic that was spam.
• 50.76% – Percentage of all spam that was about pharmaceuticals, the top category of all spam.
• 0.22% – Share of worldwide emails that comprised some form of phishing attack.

There's even more information where that came from. Stay tuned for Part 2 coming up.

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Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Music Pirates Buy More Songs

The music industry has been blaming piracy on decreasing sales forever, but it just might be that they were more off-base than anyone thought. A new study from Columbia University called Copy Culture In The US And Germany has determined that frequent users of P2P "piracy" networks in the US actually legitimately buy 30 percent more music than their non-stealing counterparts.

Of course this hasn't been the first study that points this out, but each one is immediately shot down by the RIAA as flawed. The problem is that we all know somebody that's such a music freak that they have to either have the latest release or something that no one else is hip to yet, even if that means they have to download it illegally. Of course, kids with no money tend to steal music, but they wouldn't have bought it in the first place anyway.

Some other points from the study include:

• Nearly half the population in the US and Germany (46% US; 45% DE) has copied, shared, or “downloaded for free” music, movies, and TV shows. 

• Much of this activity is casual and small scale. In both countries only 14% of adults have acquired most or all of a digital music or video collection this way. Only 2%–3% got most or all of a large collection this way (>1000 songs or >100 movies / TV shows).

• Copy culture tracks strongly with youth. Among adults under 30 in both countries, around 70% copy, share, or download media for free (70% US; 71% DE). In the US 27% in this age group acquired most or all of their digital music/video collections this way, and 10% acquired most or all of a large collection this way. In Germany the corresponding numbers are 33% and 7%.

• In both countries offline “private copying”—copying for personal use or sharing with family and friends—is comparable in scale to online file sharing. In the US, private copying and online file sharing contribute roughly equal shares to the average digital music collection: 22%–23% among those under 30. In Germany, online file sharing contributes more to average collection size (34%, versus 18% for private copying among those under 30) but less when controlling for collection size (17% for downloading; 25% for private copying). Put differently, most Germans copy more than they download.

• Copying and online file sharing are mostly complementary to legal acquisition, not strong substitutes for it. There is no significant difference in buying habits between those who copy or file share and those who do not. 

• P2P file sharers, in particular, are heavy legal media consumers. They buy as many legal DVDs, CDs, and subscription media services as their non-file-sharing, Internet-using counterparts.  In the US, they buy roughly 30% more  digital music. They also display marginally higher willingness to pay.

• In Germany much of this copying is legal under the “private copy” provisions of copyright law, which carve out a space for noncommercial personal uses, including passing copies to family and friends. This exemption does not extend to downloading or to copies made from “evidently unlawful public sources.”

• In the US little to none of this private copying is presumed legal, and much of it is now subject—in law if rarely in practice—to high criminal penalties.

Here's one last piece from the study that may be the most important; pirating and copying is declining as streaming music use climbs. Why steal it when it's always at your fingertips?

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Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media. The best of over 800 posts.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Making Money From YouTube

Believe it or not, there is some real money being made from YouTube views, although it may not be coming from where you think.

A s a general rule of thumb, record labels make around 40% of any ad revenue generated from a song, and this can increaseby another 20%  if it can prove ownership of the video (the "official" version). This amounts to around $5,000 per million views. Now how much of that is getting passed on to the artist is another story, but some labels actually split it 50/50 while others are........not so generous.

But there's a way for a songwriter/artist to cash in without worrying about the label getting in the middle. If a person covers your song in a video or uses it as the underscore for a video, that still requires a publishing sync license. The artist can claim the ad revenue from any video that uses their song. Doing that isn't always that easy, though, as you either have to search manually for the cover or use a company like INGrooves, which uses audio fingerprinting to crawl YouTube to find those than are using your material.

That's where everything changes though. Where once a time an artist would send a take-down notice, now they just ask for any ad revenue generated. If the person who posted the video doesn't want to take the video down, he'll leave the ads in (or put them in if they weren't there before). Of course, many record labels continue to issue take-downs, still not hip to the new revenue stream that could be.

Oh, and if you happen to right a song about a car crash, an insurance company that uses your video may generate 5 to 7 times more than the norm, so keep branding in mind (someone else's, that is) when you're writing those songs. It can mean a chunk of change in your pocket.

You can read more about INGrooves and YouTube monetization on this in a great article in the Guardian.

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Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media. The best of over 800 posts.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

So Much For Europe's Record Stores

Maybe this is just Europe catching up to the US, or maybe it's the beginning of the final gasp of the last era of music business, but all over the continent the last of the record store chains are closing.

The famous HMV retail chain in England recently went into bankruptcy, with the fate of all of its 200 stores now in doubt. Workers there recently went on strike demanding unpaid wages from the chain.

In France, the same happened at the 26 Virgin Megastores, and the FNAC chain in Italy was recently sold to private equity investors who are expected to shut stores and cut jobs.

To say the least, things do not look good on the CD/DVD retail front.

Soon the store closings become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as people who genuinely want to buy a CD can't because there's not a retail store open near them. This is certainly the case in the US, where their are major cities without a single CD retail outlet.

That being said, CDs are still a big business, as people do buy them online and at concerts and gigs. In fact, there were 326 million CDs sold in 2011 (it's too early for the 2012 tallies yet) that we know of. I say that because a lot of CDs are sold privately at gigs or online that Soundscan never sees, so aren't included in the totals.

Still, you can see the writing on the wall. Anyone who has experienced the convenience of digital music just doesn't want to go back. And with hi-res digital music coming more and more available, the increase in quality will leave CD lovers in the dust.

Of course the business model of selling CDs is the thing that record labels, artists and publishers alike grieve over, but let's face it, that ship has already sailed.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media. The best of over 800 posts.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

A Look At The New Mega File Sharing Site

It's interesting that every time the world of piracy seems to calm down a bit, in a flash something new surges it ahead. Thus is the case with the new file sharing site called Mega created by Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom.

Megaupload was one of the top file hosting sites in the world but was shut down by the US Department of Justice in January of 2012 for copyright infringement. At that point, Dotcom promised he was working on something new that would be a foolproof way around any of the legalities that typical file sharing sites face. Now that Mega has launched, we'll soon see about the claim.

It's already been alleged that Mega is the most private, invincible file sharing service ever created, and here's why. Everything you upload is encrypted locally. When you generate a download link, it contains the decryption code that you need to unravel the file. Mega can't be prosecuted for anything illegally posted because they don't have the decryption key and therefore can't look at the contents of the file. Only you have that. Plus, when you agree to the terms and conditions for using the service, you agree to absolve Mega from anything that you might do that could violate a law somewhere.

This is the difference between Mega and other cloud services, or even Facebook for that matter. They all have access to your data and can readily see what it is. Since it's encrypted on Mega, the only person that can view it is the user and whomever he gives the decryption key to.

Here's what it means to any creator of copy-written material. Kim Dotcom is going to make a lot of money from advertising on his site, and you'll see none of it while your material is being illegally distributed the world over. And it looks like there's nothing you can do about it.

Once again, if you're a musician, just go with it and don't give it a second thought. Remember, your music is your marketing. If you're just starting out, feel privileged that someone thinks so highly of your music that they'd want to steal it and share it with their friends. It's okay if the word about you is getting out. If you're an established artist, you know that you make most of your income from touring, merch and licensing anyway. View it as publicity.

Either way, it looks like Kim Dotcom has outsmarted everyone this time. Plus, the service seems like a real bargain. The basic user gets 50Gb for free to start, and up to 4Tb for only $39.99 a month. Demand has been so high that the site is currently offline as it works to overcome the overload.

You can read more about it on Gizmodo.

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Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media

I've been posting on this blog since November of 2009, which amounts to almost 900 posts. If you've ever tried to do a search here, you know that the Blogger platform isn't the most friendly for finding archive material. That's why after continued requests, I've gone back and collected the best posts and categorized them into an eBook called The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media: Tips and Tricks For Using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+.

This first volume primarily looks at social media concepts for musicians, and examines the various tips and tricks for using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+ as a promotional tool.

Among the concepts covered in the book are:

• the principles of fan communication
• tips for growing your online audience
• the best way to measure your social media exposure
• the best days and time of day to tweet or post on Facebook
• the secret to increasing your Twitter audience
• YouTube tips and tricks from the pros
• the features of Google+ especially for artists

The book also includes a chapter of useful links, an extensive social media glossary, and tips for using social media for promotion. Best of all, it's only $2.99! and available now from Amazon, and Barnes & Nobel, and soon from the iBook store.

This is Volume 1 of the From The Music 3.0 Blog series, with Volume 2 covering music and merchandise sales and touring coming in a month or so.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did putting it together.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Taking Advantage Of YouTube's Redesign

I don't know if you noticed, but YouTube quietly redesigned its site over the last few months. What you now see is a streamlined version that's a lot less cluttered so that it fits better with mobile browsing. YouTube is trying to make the site stickier, so the emphasis is now more on channels rather than individual viewing, although that's not something that's particularly overt. And of course, the more social they can make it, the better, since that adds to the stickiness as well.

As with other social sites, a redesign frequently means that you must do some updating in order to take full advantage of the new features, and this case is no exception. Here are some things that you an do:

1. Select an avatar. The channel avatar is your main marketing image and appears everywhere across your channel, so choose it wisely.

2. Choose your channel details. Both the name of your channel and the description also appear in a number of places, so it's important that you take care in how they're created. For instance, in some cases only 45 characters of your description appear next to your avatar, so make sure that you can get your message across with those limitations.

3. Choose your video metadata. This includes being sure that you have a keyword in your video's title (preferably the first word), and you have both an informative description (don't skimp on the copy here) and the appropriate links included.

People forget how important SEO is for their videos, but the fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google is a good enough reason to pay extra attention to the details.

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