DISQUS

A VC: Ian Roger's Aspen Music Talk

  • marcel weiss · 1 year ago
    Great post as always. Only one thing we should discuss in my eyes:

    You say: "I talked about how my friend Steve Greenberg was trying to break a band called The Jonas Brothers using embedded videos on MySpace. That tricked worked out pretty well and the Jonas Brothers are now a huge act for Disney."

    To generalize that: this way represents getting big on the internet so you can make a jump into the places of the web (with bigger audience and scarcity and so on). the thing though is that in say 20+ years for all or most of the kinds of media that exist there won't be many places off the web to go to. the web will the the beginning and the end for the must mediastuff. So this strategy (as in get big on the web than make your money on tv or radio or whatever) won't exist anmore more or less. or am I wrong?

    (Dunno if that makes sense. It's late in the evening here and I'm not a native English speaker)
  • marcel weiss · 1 year ago
    (argh. I meant "places off the web")
  • fredwilson · 1 year ago
    I think the web will evolve so that getting big on the web will be all that
    you need to do to make money

    fred
  • SilviaPfeiffer · 1 year ago
    The idea of having a native video tag (and audio tag) similar to the existing image tag for HTML is one that the W3C is currently developing for HTML5 (see http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-wo...).

    You might want to check out the demos at http://metavid.ucsc.edu/blog/2007/12/18/short-m... and http://blog.gingertech.net/?p=52 to get a feeling for what could be possible if we had a new set of Web video standards.

    At Annodex http://www.annodex.net/ the technology that enables those screencasts is being developed, all in a truly open technology fashion, such that they can really become the foundation of the future video web. It is based on the open Theora http://www.theora.org/faq/ video codec technology, which is also under discussion for adoption for HTML5.

    Thought this could be of interest to you.
  • leigh · 1 year ago
    "But would you rather be Elf Yourself or Addicting Games? You choose"

    If I were an agency given the job to create a xmas promo to drive awareness that would be unpaid media (aka 'viral') that wouldn't have to be supported passed the holidays then I would prefer to be Elf Yourself.

    :)
  • Lucas Gonze · 1 year ago
    Fred, I think you'll dig the player. If you want more precise control over the player than with the default view, check out: http://yahoomediaplayer.wikia.com/wiki/How_To_Link

    This is very much a first release and there are still bugs big enough to matter. For example the play state sometimes gets out of sync and you end up with two songs going at once.

    Also, we're eating too much screen real estate in the default layout. In the next rev we'll have the same footprint as PlayTagger.

    BTW, I am both the product lead for this player (I report to Ian) and Sylvia's peer at Xiph. The business and standards issues are aligned.
  • tokintrader · 1 year ago
    fred, how would you apply your abundance/scarcity thinking to:

    a service offering proprietary time sensitive information that could be reverse engineered - data that would be gamed when scaled? Example - Cake or Covestor or Vestopia - if these web models scale with their 'open view', an advantaged fund will wait for an opportunity to take out the leaders portfolio stops, along with all the followers.

    how do these models hope to get big and make money?
  • Mark Evans · 1 year ago
    There's been some terrific writing recently - Seth Godin's 14 Rules and a story in The Economist. Music executives would be wise to make these must-reads.
  • paul pangaro · 1 year ago
    perhaps scarcity is always involved: the abundant resource [here: computation + connectivity] is required to 'leverage' the scarce resource [usually: expertise, creativity, novelty]. this is a somewhat cliched economic principle, but makes sense here, i think
  • beach · 1 year ago
    Ian is awesome. I've said this internally at Yahoo, but I'll say it here, Ian is key to Yahoo's future.

    I'm using the yahoo player on my tumblog and on my mp3 blog:
    http://beach.tumblr.com
    http://www.swedelife.com

    I agree with lucas about the size of the player, but since my sites don't flex 100% it works well for me.