Sell Like a Human: How to Make Money Online Without Acting Like a Tool

Posted on 12. Jul, 2010 by refe.

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Last week, Hypebot asked me to contribute a brief post for their ‘Social Media Day’ feature. You can find it here. The exercise got me thinking, and I’ve decided to expand on the topic a bit here on Creative Deconstruction.
If I were to create a poll to find out the average internet user’s feelings toward [...]

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Ignore the Real World: Blogging the Start Up Experience

Posted on 21. Jun, 2010 by refe.

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“That would never work in the real world.” You hear it all the time when you tell people about a fresh idea.
This real world sounds like an awfully depressing place to live. It’s a place where new ideas, unfamiliar approaches, and foreign concepts always lose. The only things that win are what people already know [...]

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How to Create a Release Strategy for the New Music Marketplace

Posted on 25. Jun, 2009 by refe.

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If you are an independent artist or record label I want to challenge you to try something different. The normal course of business for most artists is to spend months or years writing and recording an entire album’s worth of material. Once it’s finished, you hype it as best you can for a few more [...]

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Last.fm Founders Hand Over Keys To CBS

Posted on 10. Jun, 2009 by refe.

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The founders of music streaming service Last.fm announced this morning that they will be leaving the company they helped create. “This is the latest stage in a long journey for us founders, which began in a living room in East London in 2002, and took us to the headquarters of one of the biggest media [...]

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Cable on its way to Becoming Obsolete

Posted on 02. Apr, 2009 by refe.

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The cable industry’s annual trade convention is going on this week, and the big topic of discussion this year is the Internet. According to yesterday’s article in the Chicago Tribune, Cable has watched the Music and Newspaper industries struggle to adapt to the digital world, and there has been a lot of talk about how [...]

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The Darknet and the Web Apocalypse

Posted on 01. Apr, 2009 by refe.

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The Chicago Tribune ran an article a couple of days ago by music critic Greg Kot. In it Kot talks about the way that the ‘Darknet’ – closed networks where users engage in illegal file sharing – may cause the government to impose tyrannical restrictions on the Internet in order to protect copyrighted materials.
Kot paraphrases [...]

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Is the Album Dead?

Posted on 01. Apr, 2009 by refe.

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I have often heard people say that the Album has become an unintended casualty of the post-iTunes era. I have tended to agree. It used to be a sign of greatness when a band was able to craft a cohesive album that was more than a simple collection of songs. Now, listeners pick and choose [...]

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7 Things Record Labels Can Do to Stay in Business (a little longer)

Posted on 30. Mar, 2009 by refe.

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1. Diversify your product offerings -The value of recorded music now rests largely in its effectiveness in promoting a complete experience. What people want today is to experience their favorite artists’ music in a much fuller way than was previously available. To capitalize on this, find a way to package and monetize different elements of [...]

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Why You Should Run Your Band Like a Business

Posted on 27. Mar, 2009 by refe.

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I talked previously about the way that declining record sales have hurt the major record labels, and how this presents an incredible opportunity for artists to strike out on their own. It’s a shame that it has taken the deconstruction of an entire industry to make this possible, but I suppose if it didn’t I’d be [...]