February 19, 2008 – 9:29 am
I was recently advised that hoteliers treat New York City much like a separate country within the United States. NYC has its own gravity and way of working. As major (and minor) hotel companies strive to find a little bit of differentiation within an increasingly monolithic industry, the New York Times profiles an architect who [...]
December 20, 2007 – 8:04 pm
I met David Byrne twice. Once when the Talking Heads played the Boomer Theater in Norman, Oklahoma on tour for their second album. We sat up in the old projection room aka green room sipping Heineken’s with the rest of the band. And once a few years later in the Stop Making Sense days when [...]
November 29, 2007 – 3:36 pm
The predictions for what will be hot next are a staple at this time of year. This is true for consumer items and for business trends. I liked this list of marketing ideas for 2008.
Few marketing programs completely fulfill one’s hopes. In the new year, marketers should avoid over-hyped opportunities to focus on measuring success [...]
November 21, 2007 – 10:24 am
Kids these days. Who can predict what the latest fashion will be or the hit ringtone?
The king of Spain’s recent undiplomatic outburst at the Venezuelan president has become a ringtone hit across Spain. An estimated 500,000 people have downloaded the insult featuring the words “Why don’t you shut up?”, generating a reported 1.5m euros ($2m).
Read [...]
November 19, 2007 – 9:15 am
An undercurrent to the whole music industry crash and burn has been this implied, and sometimes quite overt, notion that the kids today “just don’t value music” and this somehow is the reason why usage of peer-to-peer networks has increased. It seems that the less and less music is valued, the more and more music [...]
November 16, 2007 – 10:42 am
Some new elephants are emerging from the music business model jungle. Concert promoter Live Nation, fresh off a Madonna acquisition (see earlier blog), has added more merchandising to its growing empire.
Concert giant Live Nation has now acquired merchandising group Signatures Network for $79 million, according to deal points disclosed Thursday. Signatures, a specialist in [...]
November 6, 2007 – 2:21 pm
Slowly, ever so glacially slow, the traditional media outlets and big advertisting agencies are beginning to understand the predicament they find themselves. This Ad Age article exposes some behaviors of media consumers and advises how to fit into those consumers’ landscape.
It’s Not the Media That Matter, but the Modes
Tune In: Understand the Mind-Sets That Drive [...]
October 11, 2007 – 8:44 am
Back in the day, recording artists made the bulk of their revenues from merchandising. Herbie Herbert, Journey’s burley manager, was the first person I was aware of who exploited this fact to great benefit. I was told that Journey made more money from merchandising sales and touring receipts than from their platinum albums.
I got a [...]
October 11, 2007 – 8:08 am
When you want to go out in style.
See all the products here
August 23, 2007 – 3:03 pm
Steve Martin said, “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” In today’s world of fluid context shifts and modal ambiguities, it hardly seems like an absurd or derisive comment anymore (maybe more like a rhetorical hypothesis to be tested).
Case in point is this brilliant experiment that illustrates a certain kind of lateral thinking that [...]