Look out for the alligators

I was just catching up with the good people at weheartmusic.com, where I came across a song called “We are Dungeons, You’re Dragons” by The Alligators (posted by Emelia). (You can, and should, give it a listen on their MySpace page.)

I’d never heard of them before, and from the looks of their MySpace page, they seem to be reformed, but relatively new, anyway.

The music is just this side of raw and really brings me back to listening to my friends playing in bands in various basements around town where I grew up. They are not polished, but they definitely have the hooks. I’ve really enjoyed the four songs I’ve been able to check out.

Thought you may enjoy them, too, as you hopefully enjoy your weekend.

the spirit of the game

Seth Godin recently posted an observation regarding those who get ahead by gaming the system vs. those who work the system to get ahead. The post is called “Spirit of the Game,” and it’s called that because Ultimate Frisbee has a tenet by the same name.

I think the point of his post, that there is a difference between beating the system and working the system is generally sound. I would quibble, instead with the analogy.

As a 20 year veteran of Ultimate Frisbee, I’ve always found that the “spirit of the game” claim is nothing more than marketing that serves more to make ultimate players feel their game is superior to other sports.

Nearly all sports, except ultimate, have referees. However, ultimate hints at superiority over other sports because they’re all level-headed and fair enough to call their own rules transgressions. The only problem is that though the sport may claim those things, it is still played by human beings… the same humans who compete in other sports – and in business.

My experience has been that show me a competitive ultimate game, and I’ll show you a call made by a player that leads to a game-stopping, ill-will driving (and possibly entire-team-involving) delay. Whereas other sports would have an impartial referee call infractions so the game can stop, reset and move on, even the highest levels of ultimate can devolve to a pick-up game level argument that interrupts the game.

Systems evolve due largely to human behavior. Ultimate Frisbee, instead, adheres to the belief that they can use an outdated system that has long since been discredited by those who game the system.

Seth’s analogy also falls apart because many players learn the rules simply so they can use them against the other team. Take this example:

I played in a tournament in which one of our players caught the frisbee in the endzone for a point. There was no disagreement that she was in. However, our player didn’t know she was in, so she threw it to another of our players who was “more” in. That player let the disc hit the ground because he knew the point had already scored.

The opposing team called us out on a little known rule that said if the player doesn’t know their in, then the point doesn’t count. This was 11 years ago, so I’m not sure if that rule still exists.

So, which is a greater display of “spirit” – to learn the most obscure rules and use them against a competitor or to allow a point that was scored legitimately and without incident to count?

There’s a fine line between gaming the system and working the system, and NewTunes hopes only to play within the system. There are a lot music discovery websites out there – Pandora, Musicovery, to name a few. We’re not afraid of them, nor are we trying to beat them.

Music discovery is a big space, and we’re pretty sure there’s room for all of us – and then some. There are enough musicians and enough fans that I think we can all enjoy success in this industry.

Roll your own

There’s been a decent amount of alternative or indie pop posted here in the past few weeks, but we haven’t really indulged our DJ side too much here. However, this past week, I came across Tripswitch and fell in love with it.

Tripswitch is Nick Brennan, a musician from the UK who’s been playing various instruments since the age of 5. Later in his musician career, he moved toward spinning and now incorporates his guitar and piano abilities into his trance sound. The sound is like trance Thievery Corporation or King Kooba.

Tripswitch has only released one full-length album called Circuit Breaker. Brennan released some harder hitting music under another name, Codemonkey, and is working on another full-length album as Tripswitch.

There are a few videos for Tripswitch out there – most notably for “Roll Your Own.” Interesting that the video seems to use graphics straight from the iTunes player, which while it seems obvious, I can’t say I’ve ever seen it before.

This is “Roll Your Own” from Tripswitch…

one click purchasing vs. a shopping cart

As mentioned in an earlier post, Developer Joe and I are in New York today meeting with a few of our site development partners.

We’re spending the majority of the day sorting out the site architecture so we can go back and finish building out the site, as a user will see it.

During the course of the meeting (which is still going on as I write this), a question came up that I had not really thought much about – do most music buyers on iTunes use “buy now” purchasing or do they put music in a shopping cart to be purchased later? [Interestingly, three of the four of us in the discussion use "buy now," and none of us could immediately find the shopping cart option.]

Obviously, Apple has this data, and obviously, we don’t.

But this is an important piece of data as we discuss our approach to purchasing music on NewTunes.

If you visited our site prior to the change to this blog, then you probably remember that our MusicStreaker contest would play a song, and then you would try and build a “streak” based on you providing a correct (based on pre-established meta data or previous popular opinion) answer to a question regarding the song’s metadata – i.e., genre, tempo, etc.

One capability we are building in is that you can tag any song that you liked, as it played during the contest. This way, you can go back and look at songs you tagged and decide if you want to purchase some or all.

So, the question came up, “should the user have only that shot at purchasing, or should the songs automatically go to a shopping cart that you could visit any time?”

Both, is probably the obvious answer. But here are some of the arguments…

For having only one chance to purchase:

• The songs you selected were tagged in the context of that contest session. Once you are out of the contest, you won’t remember or have any context to the songs in your cart.
• Music fans will err on the side of buying that .99 song.
• A user is more likely to make that purchase if it’s the only chance they would have to do so.

For all songs going to a shopping cart:

• Users can revisit tagged songs at their leisure.
• A user can leave the site and do more research on a new band or song and decide to purchase after that.
• Users will have more opportunities to buy, which makes them more likely to purchase than the pressure to purchase immediately.

When all was said and done, the question boiled down to “do frequent music buyers use a shopping cart or instant purchase?” Again, the answer is probably both, but which do you think is more common for a frequent music buyer?

Please tell us what you think in the “comments” area.

Hey buddy… wanna buy some barbed wire?

We’re back from New York. While we were there, we stayed in New Jersey (Princeton, specifically) and took the train in.

What struck me while we were in the train on the way to New York was that North Jersey must use more barbed wire than our country used in all prior wars combined. Every building and every fence has barbed wire on it.

Big Barbed Wire clearly has its hooks into the local politicians of Newark. My question is, where would you even look to purchase barbed wire. Having never been in the market, I’m not even sure who manufactures barbed wire. A quick look online had me seeing nothing but Chinese companies.

Given the sheer amount of barbed wire in the Newark area, and the fact that China seems to be producing it all, I now understand why they are a significant financial competitor with the United States.

We must stop exporting our barbed wire production jobs!

myspace… the industry standard?

Maintaining an earth-shatteringly successful blog like this one is far more work than first imagined.

Updating and including links, communicating with other bloggers and people who email me with questions takes up far more time than I would have thought. It seems that one could easily justify established companies hiring a person to do simply this.

In fact, in one of my agency interviews (we’re looking for a marketing agency right now), they started talking to me about how they could write my blog in my style and “voice.” I said, “what are you talking about?” She explained that many companies want them to take over or write blogs for them. I guess the thought had never crossed my mind – and it won’t.

One of the maintenance tasks I was just working on was linking up to some of my favorite band websites. I hadn’t visited some of them in awhile, so it was good to check in on some of them.

But when I was doing Google searches, I was amazed at how many bands have their own site, but it’s outdated, or it just directs you right to their myspace page.

Now, I knew that many musicians were using myspace, and that they had kind of “won the war” against Facebook and others when it came to band pages. But does it make sense for a band to make their myspace page their mainpage – especially when they have their own website?

As I was undertaking this exercise, I was finding more examples of confusion between the two. For example, if you go to John Wesley Harding’s website, it seems complete enough. But then you see it hadn’t really been updated recently. Then go to his MySpace page, and it was updated today.

So, is it the expectation of music marketing today that I, the fan, will go to the MySpace page or to the main website? Is it better for a band to have their own website or be on MySpace?

I’d rather see them on their own website, in an environment that is a blank canvas. I’d like to see what the band does with their website. Take the Au Revoir Simone site. It is very elegant and flows quite nicely. And, they don’t have their own MySpace page.

My guess is that bands feel they HAVE to be at MySpace because everyone else is there. But MySpace doesn’t really have a mechanism to discover the other bands there, and the way the web moves, I’m not sure moving within MySpace is any more efficient than moving to an outside site.

To the fan, I think having multiple sites, or anchoring your core site on MySpace, is confusing and limiting. But I suspect there are some marketing people involved here who are advising them otherwise.

The unattainable is unknown

One of the first and most versatile websites I can remember is Zombocom.

If memory serves, you can do just about anything – no, anything! – at Zombocom. The unattainable is unknown at Zombocom.

Goat Radio

NewTunes is located in Fitchburg, WI. No insult intended to Fitchburgians, but let’s face it, Fitchburg is just another name for Madison. It’s essentially a suburb of Madison, although I’ve noticed if a cop from one of the two is following you toward the other, they’ll veer off at what I’m guessing is the official city line.

Anyway, many in Madison love to compare us to Austin, TX. Probably has more to do with our size and the dominant, in-town university. But, having been to both, I think the comparison should stop there (okay, it’s really not even close).

First of all, Austin has burritos the way god intended. But also, they have a world renowned music scene. Madison’s just isn’t there, yet.

Not so say that there aren’t a few gems in this city. One such gem is Goat Radio (not to be confused with Goat Radio). They’re a five piece band with members from both Madison and Milwaukee. Pretty much a self-labeled, “Midwestern Southern Rock” sound, Goat Radio’s strength comes in their strong, but user-friendly, song writing. If you have any fondness for country-infused alt-rock, you’ll probably enjoy their music.

I have not had a chance to see them live, yet, but they do have several songs on their MySpace page and are releasing a full-length album later this year.

There’s not much quality video of them available, but this one seems to give a good indication of what their live sound is about. Check them out if you get the chance.

404 not found

Programmer Joe and I were recently at our server farm in Chicago checking out our rack (not as sexy as it sounds).

While Joey and the Geeks (written with affection, of course) were doing whatever it is they do with the servers, I was noticing the surroundings. Very Matrix-like in it’s stark whiteness with black racks of servers. Our location is rack 406 – two down from 404.

This got me thinking… if buildings don’t have a 13th floor because of bad luck, shouldn’t server farms not have a rack 404?

A lyric on whom you can depend.

I was about to post regarding the story from Hypebot regarding Telling on Trixie’s “A Band With a Plan” initiative, when I got distracted.

I went to their site to check out some of their songs, and I started with the song “Halfway Back to Sane.”

I’m not usually a lyrics guy (I enjoy vocals as more of another instrument), but the song starts out with “You called for a friend, on whom you can depend.” Not sure why I found that so jarring, but it immediately got me wondering if that is the most used lyric in music.

I went to Google and searched for “‘friend on whom you can depend’ lyrics” and stopped counting after 12 different songs – on the first search page – came up. I think this ruined the song for me. Then further listening to the song went on to ruin it for me again.

Way too much like the Gin Blossoms for my tastes (by the way, my Gin Blossoms imitation is not only great, in and of itself, but it perfectly illustrates why they are just no good – maybe we’ll make some video).

Well, at least it was a grammatically correct usage, so points for that.

As an aside, Prince was also consistent with “…on whom ‘U’ can depend…”