Waist Deep in the Media Swamp

We're headed for big trouble...

As I passed a Chevron station in San Francisco that was being remodeled today, I spotted this sign for $100 a gallon gas.

William Morris Endeavor’s Global head Graham Taylor gave the keynote at the LA Film Festival today. He may have given the one of the more insightful and inspirational overviews of the situation all content creators and artists are facing today with all the old models of distribution crumbling while the media revolution is continuing.

I like to give similar advice, but never as succinctly as he has.

He concludes with:

What’s not boring is making shit happen. We are the inmates taking over the asylum. We Build, Enable and Activate content, financing and distribution. We are in a revolution and now is our time. We finally have a bigger seat at the table.

Read the complete and enjoyable transcript here.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m advising a startup called RipplFX that adapts all kinds of books into iPad and iPhone apps.

We recently released a great parody called ‘Monster for President,’ from author Hal Pollock. It takes aim at the political process and elections with the headline “Politicians May Behave Like Monsters, But What If They Were Monsters?” It is very humorous and has beautiful illustrations by Anthony Parisi, which we animated in comic book layout form.

I also liked the fact we used a real movie trailer VO artist, Andrew Dawson, in the video promo.

It is an interesting marketing challenge as it is a definite PG13 rating since it has some mild sexual innuendo. However, it’s presented like a kid’s book – and that’s part of the satire.

We’ll see how it goes as we attempt to get traction over the next few months.

You can purchase the app here.

[a slightly shorter version of this article originally appeared in Write On! Online]

Pitch Video for Mary Kerr’s IndieGoGo Project “Swinging in the Shadows”

Many writers, filmmakers and other creatives are considering using crowdfunding sites to help raise funds for their projects. These sites allow you to pitch your projects to the public so that funds can be collectively raised. You can create your pitch from a mix video, images, and text. Like PBS or NPR fund drives, potential patrons are offered cumulative ‘rewards’ or ‘perks’ at levels determined by the amount they contribute.

The main crowdfunding sites are IndieGoGo and Kickstarter. IndieGoGo was founded in 2008, Kickstarter in 2009. Both have raised millions of dollars for thousands of projects. Recently, Kickstarter had some headline grabbing projects, such as an iPod Nano watch that raised nearly $1 million (when their goal was to raise $15,000).

That is the exception rather than the rule. Many projects attempt to raise less than $3,000. Regardless of the goal, most fail to reach it.

I was asked by producer/director Mary Kerr to help her set up a crowdfunding campaign to raise finishing money for a two-part documentary she’d been shooting on and off over the last 15 years about the untold story of the California Beat Era. She has self-funded the project until now and the docs are now complete and edited. She needs to raise $8,500 to add audio sweetening, pay her editor, create a boxed set of DVDs with bonus materials, etc.

The biggest difference between the two is that in order to receive contributions at the end of the campaign, you have to make or surpass your goal on Kickstarter (all or nothing), where IndieGoGo dispenses whatever funds have been pledged, whether or not the goal is reached (any money raised is yours). Kickstarter takes a 5% fee; IndieGoGo takes 4% if the goal is reached and 9% if it is not.

In addition, Kickstarter requires contributors to use Amazon Payments (limiting contributors to having a US bank account or a US address); IndieGoGo accepts direct credit card or PayPal.

Check both sites FAQs for more details.

Ultimately, we went with IndieGoGo as Mary wanted to be able to receive whatever funds are contributed.

The process for both is the same:

1. Decide how much money to raise and set the goal.
2. Determine how long it may take you to reach the goal (up to 120 days)
3. Post a project and create a pitch
4. Offer gifts and perks to donors based on how much they contribute
5. Share your pitch with others

In the pitch video, description text and the perk levels, being clear and clever is a big plus. For example, here are clever, successful Kickstarter campaigns for a book on design and another by a musician.

Perhaps the most important part of a campaign is what you do after you launch – marketing and sharing the pitch to others. Both of the examples had a built in fan base to start and that helped.

As I post this we only have a weeks to go. Feel free to contribute to the project or encourage others to do so.

Kevin Smith - writer, director, internet entrepreneur

The Holy Grail for anyone involved in media has been how to monetize internet entertainment. Independent filmmaker, writer-director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma, and many others) has created his own model for a successful entrepreneurial internet show business enterprise that works for his audience. He has become the ringmaster in a multi-ringed comedy circus that is starting to make real money.

Silent Bob (his movie character) is silent no longer. Starting with a single, free podcast, 3 years ago, he now has a network of over nearly a dozen weekly podcasts, has his own theater to record them live with paying customers, tours the country doing live shows, and that’s just the beginning…

The TV talk show format is moribund, to say the least. Though Conan’s reincarnation on cable is interesting, it is still following the same, boring-ass format everyone else uses that was originally set in the 1960′s. Guests are booked to plug their latest movie/TV show/book/whatever. There are no conversations, hosts read pre-screened questions from cue cards. The few who attempt conversations (like Charlie Rose) tend to be extra-dull or so full of themselves you can’t stomach it for long. It’s not entertaining.

Talk radio, with a few NPR-like exceptions, is no better. If it’s not screaming ideologues from all sides of the political spectrum, it’s infomercials. Maybe a few sports talk hosts attempt actual conversations.

Then came podcasting on Apple iTunes. Free, original, niche, DIY programming.

Regardless of the fact that all Apple cares about is selling you the devices to play podcasts, the tools to create them, and owns the major distribution channel for them, an immense amount of creativity was unleashed – most of it bad, but that was not the point. For virtually no cost, anyone could now create anything they want and have it distributed around the world.

You Tube is similar. But despite all of Google’s as well as many other third party aggregator’s efforts, there still is no easy way to curate and organize the content there. Apple TV, Google TV and others still have not gotten it right. It will happen someday, but has not yet.

Enter Kevin Smith.

I’ve had a lot of respect for Kevin Smith for many years. He has always taken his own path – regardless of the critics (and the box office). And he is funny. Since early 2007, he and his partner/producer Scott Mosier created their own podcast, called SModcast. What began as essentially weekly hour-long two guys sitting around shooting-the-shit, profanity-laced, sometimes gross, humorous conversations where no topic is off-limits, has just had its 150^th episode – quite a feat for any show. I started listening about the time they released their third or fourth show.

At the time, Smith had also gotten a reputation for his no-holds-barred, funny, live Q & A sessions at ComicCon and a few other places. A few months after he began SModcast and while I was a VP at Final Draft, we hired him to be our keynote speaker at our Screenwriter’s Showcase. As I was escorting him from the Green Room, I mentioned that I had listened to all the shows and that they were great. He seemed a bit surprised and said, “You’ve listened to them all? ” (As a keynote he killed, BTW)

Since then Smith has slowly expanded this single podcast into a media mini-empire:

• A network of at least 10 regular, free, mostly weekly, different SModcasts, with various characters & associates from Smith’s life (my favorite is Hollywood Babble-On – HBO with Ralph Garman of KROQ/Kevin & Bean Show)
• Live SModcasts and Q & A’s across the country – including Carnegie Hall (Smith travels by bus like a rock band since his Too Fat To Fly Incident on Southwest Airlines)
• Leasing the SModcastle Theater in West Hollywood last summer – where the podcasts are recorded in front of live, admission paying audiences
• In the past month, Hollywood Babble-On & Jay and Silent Bob Get Old have moved to the Jon Lovitz Comedy Club at Universal CityWalk – bigger venue, higher admission cost

The amazing thing is Smith participates in many of the podcasts every week – even while shooting a movie this fall (Red State will premier at Sundance in January). Of course, there is a podcast for the movie, too.

This week four of the shows made the iTunes Best 2010 Podcasts in the Audio category (out of the top 25) – Hollywood Babble-On, Jay and Silent Bob Get Old, Tell ‘Em Steve-Dave, and Highlands: A Peephole History.

Very impressive. And he is making money, too.

Some facts from an interview he recently did for Fast Company:

• SModcastle shows… 50 seats at 10 or 25 bucks a head depending on the show, one or two performances a night, four nights a week, in a place that rents for $4,000 a month
• SModcast gets $2,000 for an advertising spot, with two spots for Adult Toys running in a typical hour
• He performs weddings (SMarriages) at SModcastle for $5,000 each
• There’s plenty of merchandise for sale (of course)

With all this talking, Smith has honed his skills as a talk-show host. Early this month, he recorded an almost 3 hour SModcast with science fiction/fantasy writer Neil Gaiman and Neil’s wife, self-described art chick & member of Dresden Dolls, Amanda Palmer. It was called Starfucking with Kevin Smith.

This is a good example of what 21^st Century entertainment can be – especially for talk shows. It is intimate & engaging; targets a niche audience; contains intelligent, witty, adult conversation; and offers interesting music and entertaining readings.

Brilliant. Not your father’s Tonight Show. Definitely not for everyone. But perfect for Kevin Smith. And his audience.

That audience is huge. He has over 1.7 million followers on Twitter (that’s as many people that watch the new Conan most nights). He tweets humorously, obsessively, and interactively. He is a very creative and clever writer and he plays this 140 note instrument very well.

He is a true internet media mogul.

What’s next? Slowly, more multimedia elements – jingles, audio and video clips, etc. – are being incorporated into the shows (even though you can’t see the clips on a podcast). Perhaps someday they will begin video podcasting. Now that will be interesting…

Smith seems to be having a ball running the whole deal. He loves talking & entertaining people. He can geek out when he wants to. He is making a living creating an entertainment product that a lot of people enjoy. He is doing it his way and making money. That’s what every internet entrepreneur strives to do.

Update – Monday Jan 24, 2011

It was no surprise to hear Smith’s announcement after the Red State premier at Sundance last night that he was going to self-distribute the movie under the Smodcast Pictures banner. Many people immediately jumped on him calling ‘bullshit’ while others applauded.

I think that is a logical progression that evolved naturally given what he has accomplished in the last few years.

As he says, Indie 2.0 (as he terms it) is going back to the past business model when movies went from town-to-town as part of a larger road show. He will have value-adds at every performance (Q & A’s, other Smodcast celebs, artifacts from movies) and – no surprise – ticket prices will be considerably higher.  His fans will consider it a great bonus and he will probably succeed.

Anybody can make a movie… What we aim to prove is that anybody can release a movie now as well.

Anybody with almost 2 million Twitter followers should be able to do so. He’s worked hard to develop his audience and now he will reap the rewards. His is a ringmaster of his own circus.

It will also be interesting to see how he reacts when it is pirated.

Over the last few months, I have been blogging about my adventure in getting my buddy & independent musician Jimmy Z on iTunes Ping.

I was asked to condense all my tribulations into one long article that is now posted on Michael Brandvold’s great Music Marketing site, here.

BTW – Michael’s site has lots of great resources & suggestions for independent musicians.

The business and tech blog, Silicon Alley Insider, has sited Ping as being the sixth biggest tech flop of the year and site it for utterly failing to gain traction.

As my previous posts have indicated, post-launch communications to independent musicians was mishandled, the integration with Twitter is lame, no one can really use it other than to promote music sales as is is not truly social and open, etc.

It isn’t like Apple to continue to support lame initiatives and products, so my hope is still that they might get it all together. But the clock is ticking. Loudly. I still hold out some hope they will pull it together on 2011.

Update December 13, 2010 – I was  asked to condense all my tribulations with Apple and Ping into one long article that is now posted on Michael Brandvold’s great Music Marketing site, here.

Read Write Web analyzed recent Twitter data regarding the new Ping integration.

In brief, so far there is low volume and no retweets. Here is their graph of English language results, yellow being the 1.41% Ping retweets:

They compare that to a 6% retweet rate for the Instagram photo-sharing program over the same period.

Though not discussed in the report, maybe its because when you click the link in Twitter it takes you to iTunes. What if you don’t have iTunes installed? And most people do not. Fail.

Read the complete post here.

Update December 13, 2010 – I was  asked to condense all my tribulations with Apple and Ping into one long article that is now posted on Michael Brandvold’s great Music Marketing site, here.

Today, Twitter and Apple announced that iTunes Ping can now be integrated in Twitter.

I’m not convinced it will help independent musicians, but it will surely generate more revenue for Apple.

It will be interesting to see how deeply this is adopted. We’ll be watching this closely over the next few months.

Update December 13, 2010 – I was  asked to condense all my tribulations with Apple and Ping into one long article that is now posted on Michael Brandvold’s great Music Marketing site, here.

I attended the 1st Anniversary of the SF AppShow last night, hosted by my friend, Gina Smith.

Eleven apps were demo’d, and some great food and a cake from Eco Chef and App creator Bryan Au was served.

One outstanding app that was previewed was from Free2Work.org, in association with anti-slavery group, Not For Sale Campaign. They help keep consumers informed by reporting on corporate hiring practices, especially in their supply chains.

The app will allow consumers to scan bar codes on products and learn the conditions under which the products were made.

A more detailed report can be found here.

[Gina and I also reminisced about our mutual friend Gina Rubattino and hope she is OK, wherever she is]

I’ve been a fan of director Alex Cox since seeing his Repo Man and Sid & Nancy in the ’80′s.

On Monday, he came to San Rafael to screen the updated version of his 1987 campy-cult western Straight To Hell Returns at the Christopher B. Smith Film Center.

It is definitely a movie you either love or hate – there is no middle ground. For me, the absolutely absurdity of it makes it worthwhile. Watching Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello, Courtney Love, Dennis Hopper, and the other misfit outlaws on their rampage of killing, looting, and ultra-violence was much sillier this time around.

One thing that stood out to me was the almost complete lack of profanity – so tame compared to what it would be if it was shot today.

This newly restored version has a few added scenes and excellent special effects shots done by Collateral Image.

The question and answer session with Alex was led by the San Rafael’s Film Center’s programmer Richard Peterson. Tod Davies, Alex’s wife, also sat in and commented. Along with some great anecdotes, topics ranged from the long history of the much-used movie’s set, his other movies, George Lucas, Roman Polanski, Sam Pekinpah, Luis Buñel, Charles Bronson, punk rock as a marketing scheme as well as a revolution, surrealism, Christian iconography in movies and art, reality versus dreams in movies, and much more.

Sorry – the sound was recorded a bit low, so you’ll probably have to adjust your volume. Feel free to download.

Alex Cox- Straight To Hell Returns – Question & Answer

Alex Cox’s website

AquaNotes in my shower

While taking a shower or a bath, we all have many thoughts, epiphanies, insights and Eureka moments.

Whether it’s encouraged by the relaxing effects of heat, the background white noise, the solitude, a combination of those factors or other reasons does not matter so much to me as the fact that it happens on a regular basis. The problem is keeping those ideas fresh afterward and being able to take them to the next step.

Now that I’ve discovered AquaNotes, there is no need to rush out of the shower to write an idea down. Their tagline says it all – No more great ideas down the drain.

The waterproof paper and pencil work great. It’s easy to jot down all your (hopefully) brilliant thoughts easily.

Moments after I read about AquaNotes in Shawn Blanc’s blog in July, I ordered my first pad. I’m now on my second as they are not refillable (when I ordered again, I bought their 5-pack).

Though I can’t say my ideas have gotten any better, at least they no longer disappear into the steam.

[this is a continuation of a previous post and other previous posts about my saga with iTunes Ping]

Apple has responded to more of my questions about how our iTunes Ping profile for independent musician Jimmy Z can be best utilized.

I asked, “How can an artist have their page customized (like Jack Johnson’s)?” The reply:

The profiles with different backgrounds are transferred automatically from artists pages in the iTunes store that have artwork and backgrounds applied. This application of art/background is based on decisions by our editorial team and usually occur around a new release.

My followup  – “How can we apply/request to have art added to the Artist Page, etc?” They replied:

You will need to work with your label rep to see whether this is something to consider for the next release.

This was the same gray area we found ourselves in when I initially attempted to get Jimmy Z a profile, so I wrote “We have no label rep. We have digital distribution via CD Baby.”

The person that replied is in the Independent Artist & Label Relations department:

You should route your request for an artist page through CD Baby & they can discuss with their rep here. I can tell you in advance that Artist Pages take a lot of work from our Designers & UI Engineers, so we’re only able to do a very limited number of them.  They are usually reserved for the most popular artists, who have an extensive sales history (Jack Johnson, Kanye West, U2, etc. being examples of the kind of artists).  We’d love to do more, but we just don’t have the resources to do those types of pages for every artist.

So the answer is essentially – you don’t have a chance to get use of our resources unless you make lots of sales.

I replied back that “In my opinion, if Ping if to every really take off (and help) indies, you need to be able to let them do the things you now do for major artists – customizing, event listing, etc. Otherwise, you may be never be more than a “nice’ feature of iTunes – but not very social. It appears that Ping today is simply a vehicle for helping boost sales in iTunes – which is fine – but helping indies sell their products there would also considerably help Apple’s bottom line too.”

There will be more to this story, I’m sure… so stay tuned.

Update December 13, 2010 – I was  asked to condense all my tribulations with Apple and Ping into one long article that is now posted on Michael Brandvold’s great Music Marketing site, here.

Much better than speech-to-text or YouTube auto-captions, SpeakerText converts videos into searchable and clickable transcripts so that can be be used for SEO, social, etc. They do it with a combination of AI & human beings. Brilliant.

Here’s an interview with their CEO and co-founder Matt Mireles on Beet.TV (funny, that they don’t have the SpeakerText transcript…):

SpeakerText video demo:

[this is a follow-up to a previous post]

It is clear now that iTunes Ping could care less about supporting independent musicians with anything but iTunes sales of their products. Their reply to me about having a gig listed with tickets available At the Door is disheartening, but not surprising:

Thanks for sending. We’re collecting information about the shows that aren’t currently included in iTunes so we can better understand which ticketing companies we should pursue adding. We will only list shows that include online ticket sales. At this point we are only able to support shows ticketed by Ticketmaster.com, LiveNation.com and TicketWeb.com.

This adds fuel to my presumption that Apple is taking a cut of any ticket sales listed on Ping.

Since the beginning of the year, Jimmy Z and the ZTribe performed at over 50 shows, only one of which had tickets sold online.

Getting new fans to shows is one of the most important methods to promote independent music – not networking sales through iTunes.

Regardless, we will continue to post many items, including information about forthcoming shows on Ping, as we need to take advantage of every avenue for marketing we can.

In my mind, Ping is far less useful than MySpace is  – even in the abysmal condition it is today. At least they let you list all events easily so that fans can view them.

Until Ping integrates with Facebook & Twitter, there is not much that is social about it. It’s just another way to add to Apple’s bottom line.

Update December 13, 2010 – I was  asked to condense all my tribulations with Apple and Ping into one long article that is now posted on Michael Brandvold’s great Music Marketing site, here.