Have you discovered one of your favourite music artists by chance on a social networking site? How do you feel about friend requests from bands you’ve never heard of? Can you recall a really outstanding marketing approach from a music artist on a social networking site? Lots of questions and one survey which is trying to find out the answer:  Fansights 2.0

Fansights 2.0 – The Survey

To introduce myself: My name is Kathrin and like Sinéad I am a master student at IADT and right now running a survey as part of my master thesis. My survey Fansights 2.0 is about music marketing on social networking sites (e.g. MySpace, Bebo, Facebook) and the perception of these marketing techniques among music fans. I am still looking for music fans and music promoters who would be willing to take part in my survey. If you could take a few minutes to fill out the survey or pass it on to interested friends I would really appreciate it. You can also drop me a message under www.myspace.com/fansights and you will receive a copy of the results once they are published.

Thanks a mill to Sinéad for posting this and to everybody interested in my research project!

This is rather interesting, especially considering that just recently Universal Music, Sony-BMG and Warner Music signed a deal with Myspace to create “Myspace Music” where fans can listen to free streaming music (of their choice, of course), whilst being bombarded with advertisements. All this, in an attempt to retrieve revenue lost, from… illegal mp3 file sharing.

I found these forums searching for information on the upcoming Breeders album, Mountain Battles, set for release on the 7th of April, only to find a leaked copy fully available to download.

The question is – was the temptation to download it too much? Or did I simply click the “report abuse” button and quickly move on.

What do you think?

Rumour has it that in the late 90′s Sony were in the process of developing a hard drive based MP3 player, but pressure from Sony Records (members of the RIAA, and were obviously anti-MP3) meant the project was shut down. Then Apple came along in 2001, launching the iPod, thus reaping the oh-so-many benefits. 

Clearly the music industry bosses are just bitter.

They can’t keep up with the market and they certainly can’t control illegal downloading. There is no technical solution to filtering and banning peer-to-peer file transfers and Eircom can’t and won’t do it. There’s no point in trying to control the digital music black market, it will always exist and always HAS existed. What the music industry needs to start doing is offering consumers better value for money and incentives to start buying CDs again.

I mean, for god’s sake, they’ve had the last 10 years to think about it.

Over the last few years I’ve seen some fairly awful attempts to engage the consumer for example: full albums available on 64mb SD or MiniSD cards, access to secret sections of an artist’s website only if you purchase the CD, “bonus” DVDs that are really just teasers/trailers, etc.

I honestly don’t understand why I can’t just walk into HMV and connect my MP3 player via USB and pay to instantly download a full album that comes with a nice little book full of lyrics and artwork. I like lyrics and artwork. Yet, so many bands neglect to include lyrics in the album sleeves. So, why would I bother buying the CD if it doesn’t offer me anything extra, except for being another plastic dust collector on my shelf?

Loving reading 100′s of old Sinfest webcomics – adorable, American-manga that deals with religion and other dirty (contemporary) stuff. Look out for my favourite characters Pooch and Percival and this strip made me LOL (no really! it’s not a Loi). Hating how addictive it is.

Loving learning new things from the WikiHow, for instance I learned a valuable lesson – don’t put your headphones together, as this pushes the internal magnets together, overflowing the power and making them useless. Cool. Hating today’s spotlight article – How to Use a Bidet. Gross.

Loving Songza.com – it’s a music search engine. Type in ANY artist and/or song and it’ll give you a list of streaming tunes to play. Hating that you can’t download the tracks, but it does allow you to setup a playlist and also links to the music video and legal methods in which to download the them.

There are some minor drawbacks, however. This IS of course the case with most technology these days (what, you expect it to work out of the box?!) Despite what the sales people drone, even an iPod won’t play your DVDs for you straight out of the box. A number of minor tweaks are required.

Guide to the Creative Zen

The first step with the Zen is to update the firmware for the device. Firmware is a computer program, it’s similar to an operating system (like Windows) and it can be updated in order to have new features added (just like Windows). You can find and download this on the Creative website, or directly from here (links to the European site). All you have to do is make sure your Zen is connected via USB before opening the downloaded file.

The second step is to download and install the newest version of Zen Media Explorer (this is a very handy utility for transferring files to the player), also on the Creative website, or here. Once this is done, your player and transferring files will run smoothly. If you don’t follow these two steps be prepared for the occasional need to reset the player and you might also encounter a few issues with transferring large numbers of files.

So, now you’ve got music… but what about a few videos? Personally, I don’t even bother ripping DVDs, I get all my video goodies online, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t still have to convert them. Unfortunately, Zen Media Player doesn’t convert videos very well (just trust me on that one). Thankfully there are many free converters out there. I currently use iRiverter, which you can download here. This will convert videos you’ve downloaded from the Internet, like movie trailers etc., but it will also convert DVDs to play on your Zen.

The reason I’ve chosen to recommend this software is because it is the fastest I’ve tried, but in order to get iRiverter working for you (as the name suggests, it’s not exactly designed with the Zen in mind), you’ll need to download this file (links to anythingbutipod.com, registration is required). The folder where you have installed iRiverter has a subfolder called “profiles”, unzip the file and save it in this subfolder. When you’re using iRiverter make sure that you change the device that you want to convert the DVD for to “iAudio” and then “D2″, the reason we do this is because the settings for the iAudio D2 player are the same as the Creative Zen.

Ripping DVDs is can seem like a daunting task, but all it requires is some patience and you’ll eventually get the hang of it. Depending on the length of your DVD, it can take quite some time to convert and this all depends on how much computer memory you have for the task. If you find it’s taking a long time, don’t sit and wait for it to finish, go be productive elsewhere for 30 minutes. Although, converting video files you already have on your computer takes very little time in comparison.