Record companies their artists are seeing benefits of using their music in television commercials.
“A major marketing move for bands has been getting on a commercial,” Chris Milk, a TV commercial and music video director, said this week at the advertising industry’s annual get-together in the south of France.
“In the past, a song on a commercial made you a sell-out, but now because the cool indie rock bands are doing it, it’s opened it up for everyone,” Milk said.
[snip] Important turning points for
music in ads were Nike’s use of the Beatles’ “Revolution” in 1987 and Microsoft’s Windows 95 launch to the tune of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.”
Any guesses about who might have asked AP to take this photo down? The link points to a Google archive.
Hat tip: NRO
Singapore will air Asia’s first phone drama series, a move that foreshadows greater US use of new-generation cell phones.
Across the world, broadcast and cable networks have jumped on to the 3G bandwagon, rushing to churn out content for mobile phones and collaborating with telecom operators to provide entertainment clips that can be aired over the wireless network.
Fox Entertainment Group Inc. in May 2005 launched several series of “mobisodes” — television programs whittled down to one-minute episodes and designed specifically for the mobile medium.
In 2001, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo Inc. was the first operator in the world to launch its 3G service. But the service was not as successful as was expected because of poor geographical coverage, sluggish feeds and pricey handsets.
However, with faster wireless broadband connections telecom operators believe video-streaming could be a “killer application” for 3G, with the potential to pull in billions of dollars in revenue.
The VHS cassette is about to disappear from the nation’s largest retailer.
Howard Dean says he won’t comment on stories that are reported on Fox News:
“My view is that Fox News is a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party and I don’t comment on Fox News.”
This is the identical approach used by Clinton and Kerry who painted Matt Drudge as a right-wing propagandist to duck answering questions about stories carried or linked to from the Drudge Report.
Richard Durbin blames ‘right wing’ for making too much of Howard Dean’s daily insanities:
The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate yesterday blamed “the right wing” and elements of the press “in service to it” for repeating Howard Dean’s remarks about Republicans and inflating them out of proportion.
“I think we all understand what’s happening with you all,” said Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin, in remarks echoing Hillary Rodham Clinton’s blaming a “vast right-wing conspiracy” for her husband’s legal-ethical woes.
“The right wing has got the agenda moving. Fox [News Channel] and everybody’s got the agenda. It’s all about Howard Dean. You’ve bought into it,” Mr. Durbin said.
Hat tip: NRO.
iTunes is showing its strength against free (illegal) P2P music sites.
“One of the music industry’s questions has been, when will paid download stores compete head-to-head with free P2P download services,” said Russ Crupnick, president of the NPD Group’s music and films division.
“That question has now been answered. iTunes is more popular than nearly any P2P service, and two other paid digital music
offerings have also gained a level of critical mass. These digital download stores appear to have created a compelling and economically viable alternative to illegal file sharing.”
In 1974 Edward Jay Epstein foreshadowed today’s criticism of Woodwood and Bernstein’s investigative work as being relatively weak in light of being handed all the information by the FBI leaker.
From 1974:
A sustaining myth of journalism holds that every great government scandal is revealed through the work of enterprising reporters who by one means or another pierce the official veil of secrecy. The role that government institutions themselves play in exposing official misconduct and corruption therefore tends to be seriously neglected, if not wholly ignored, in the press. This view of journalistic revelation is propagated by the press even in cases where journalists have had palpably little to do with the discovery of corruption.
And note this overlooked insight:
But who was “Deep Throat” and what was his motivation for disclosing information to Woodward and Bernstein? The prosecutors at the Department of Justice now believe that the mysterious source was probably Mark W. Felt, Jr., who was then a deputy associate director of the FBI, because one statement the reporters attribute to “Deep Throat” could only have been made by Felt. (I personally suspect that in the best traditions of the New Journalism, “Deep Throat” is a composite character.) Whether or not the prosecutors are correct, it is clear that the arduous and time-consuming investigation by Woodward and Bernstein of Segretti was heavily based on FBI “302” reports, which must ultimately have been made available by someone in the FBI.
The LA Times offers an analysis of Limbaugh’s entry into podcasting last Friday.
The influx of popular broadcasters could help push mainstream audiences to adopt the new medium, which emerged about a year ago as a hybrid of blogs and radio broadcasting. Podcasting’s steady rise also reflects how computers, digital video recorders and other digital technologies give individuals more control over media and entertainment, said analyst Phil Leigh of Inside Digital Media. “Is the Internet a better way of delivering media than live broadcasts, scheduled broadcasts? And the answer is probably yes,” Leigh said. “What TiVo is conditioning people to think is, I want my media when I want it…. Ultimately, media is going to be consumed on demand.”
Howard Kurtz of WaPo looks at some of the damage that Deep Throat has done to journalism.
The revelation also serves as a reminder that sources may have complicated motives for whispering to the press. Felt may have worried about the FBI’s integrity but he also may have been resentful, as the bureau’s No. 2 official, at being passed over for the top job, and according to Woodward he came to detest the Nixon White House. Inside sources rarely have clean hands.Three decades later, the use and abuse of unnamed sources is rampant, especially in Washington, and the media all too often protect those with partisan agendas. It’s a long road from Felt telling Woodward to “follow the money” to a Bush adviser telling the New York Times that John Kerry “looks French.” But such potshots have become routine in daily reporting.
Newsweek is asking its readers to answer an online poll that asks “Do you think the federal government should lift restrictions on stem-cell research?” As Michelle Malkin points out, the question seriously misses the point.
The absence of a governmental subsidy is not the same thing as a governmental restriction. If that were true, then I could claim that michellemalkin.com is restricted by the government, since it is not federally subsidized. Newsweek’s survey would have been accurate if it had said, “”Do you think the federal government should lift restrictions on federally subsidized stem-cell research?”
Captain’s Quarters reproduces part of last night’s interview between Larry King and Dan Rather, in which Rather still defends the truth of the Bush memo story.
KING: Are you saying the story might be correct?
RATHER: Well, I’m saying a prudent person might take that view.
Mark Cuban plans to shake up the movie distribution industry by breaking the movie, then DVD, then TV traditional release schedule. Movie theatres are not pleased.
2929 Entertainment, the company the Dallas Mavericks owner founded with partner Todd Wagner, is determined to collapse the traditional distribution windows by simultaneously releasing films across theatrical, home video and cable. But even though the experiment has barely begun, it already is running into steely opposition from theater owners across the country.
PoliPundit references some interesteing statistics from a USA Today story on opinions in and of the MSM.
In the referenced survey – which included 1,500 non-media folks and 673 journalists – 38% of the public described themselves as conservative, whereas only 24% described themselves as liberal.
[snip]
On the flip side, however, 31% of the media portion of the survey described themselves as liberal, whereas only 9% said they were conservative.
Bloggers uncover a little bit of hypocrisy at the Columbia Journalism Review.
Imagine this scenario: A supposedly unbiased publication is being run by someone with a clear political bias, and that person is not listed on the publication’s masthead. It’s just the type of story that media watchdog Columbia Journalism Review would love to uncover.Only in this case CJR is the perpetrator.This blog has learned that Victor Navasky, publisher, editorial director and apparently co-owner of iconic left wing journal The Nation, is running CJR; however he is not on the masthead.
Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit predicts in the Wall St Journal that amateur correspondents are ready to take on professional journalists.
When you take content from correspondents around the world, organize it in an easy to navigate form, and deliver the eyeballs that it attracts to advertisers, you’ve created something that looks rather a lot like . . . a newspaper. But it’s a very different kind of newspaper, one that takes advantage of the big-media capabilities that, thanks to technological progress, are now in the hands of individuals worldwide. Will traditional newspapers be able to keep up?
Even if they don’t, they’ll benefit. Because with mainstream media losing credibility through scandals like Easongate, Rathergate, and Newsweek’s latest, free-press protections are likely to come under fire. The best defense will be a public that sees free speech as something it participates in, not just a protection for big corporate entities. What some are calling “we-dia” may wind up saving the media.