Merge Records is a little-known indie label based in North Carolina. And yet their acts consistently churn out great records. Three of my favorite acts, Camera Obscura, M. Ward and Arcade Fire, are on Merge (at least for their US distribution). I hear the new Spoon album is supposed to be a good one but am reserving judgment as I’ve only heard it once. Regardless, like Matador Records or 4AD, I’ll pretty much give any Merge album a shot because I trust their musical tastes.
The Rugby World Cup
England played (and lost to) South Africa on Saturday night in the final of the Rugby World Cup. Like the Fifa World Cup, this is played every 4 years and it’s a big deal in most countries. The US was in the tournament and almost pulled off an upset, even though it gets scant coverage in the US. But in the UK, it was a national obsession as the whole country cheered on the ‘rugby boys’ to glory.
My friend Cameron was kind enough to invite me to watch it with a bunch of his mates…I was the lone American amongst a bunch of Kiwis, Canucks, Aussies and, yes, even Brits, which made me feel special. I got a crash course on the rules of the game and a primer on strategy. It was great to watch in such an atmosphere but I must say that I’m not completely sold: All of the points in the game were scored on penalties, which I had a hard time identifying, and most of the game’s strategy involved kicking the ball out of bounds…what kind of a game is that??!! I was told to expect a defensive, strategic game that’s all about field position so at least expectations were set. Apparently the All Blacks and the Aussies play a much less defensive style that can make it a beautiful game…I think I’ll stick to football/soccer as the ‘beautiful game’ and try to acquire the taste of rugby.
Feature Request For Travel Sites: Enable Award Travel Searches
I’m finally getting around to figuring out my travel plans for Thanksgiving. What I’d like to do is to first see if I can use frequent flyer points to book my travel before having to resort to buying a ticket. But it’s a huge pain to go to the various airline sites, log in and then search for award travel. It’d be great if a site like Kayak or Expedia had my info and could search for award travel in addition to regular travel. It could then present me with my options based on what is available, how many points are required, etc.
Ray of Light: The Live Nation / Madonna Deal
It was officially announced earlier this week that
Madonna was leaving Warner Music
Group in favor of Live Nation in a long-rumored landmark deal said to
be worth $120 M. Madonna gets a huge chunk of change and equity
in Live Nation’s in exchange for their participation in a number of
revenue streams including recorded music, merchandise, ticket sales and
the Madonna brand. Many analysts think Live Nation overpaid for
the deal. They are probably right when it comes to monetizing
Madonna herself. But Live Nation must view this in a much larger
context in hoping that having Madonna as the charter artist in their
"Artist Nation" program will give them credibility to sign up other
artists, both established and up-and-comers, which will be more
profitable. Fox used this strategy in 1994 when they won the
rights to broadcast the NFL.
They were an upstart network but
this put them on the map and let them win affiliate stations
to increase their reach. Viewed through this lens, the premium
Live Nation is paying is basically coming out of their A&R budget
as they compete with the labels, who are themselves trying to horizontally integrate by doing
360-degree deals.
So the battle has been joined. I would also expect a major talent
agency to try to elbow in on this turf: after all, isn’t that what Live
Nation is essentially doing? This is good news for artists as
there emerge more vehicles for them to make a living, whether via the
traditional labels or upstarts like Live Nation or even going direct
like Radiohead (though I would submit that they’re the exception that
proves the rule).
Recent Travels
Just got back from an extended amount of traveling, mostly for work but was also able to squeeze in some personal time. Some of the highlights included:
- Dinner at La Colombe d’Or. This is a world-famous restaurant and hotel (and on the Conde Nast Traveller Gold List) in St. Paul de Vence, a quaint medieval town in the hills above Nice. I stayed near there, in Vence, while attending the Mipcom conference. The restaurant itself serves traditional French cuisine – I had the sole Dijonnaise with escargots to start. The highlight for me was the souffle for desert – it looked huge but was light as a feather and not too sweet. But the real attraction of the place is the farmhouse-like setting
with option to dine outside during the day and, most notably, their original art collection. Apparently lots of starving artists traded painting for food and the place had an original Picasso, a Calder mobile and lots of other great art hanging on the walls. A very memorable experience. - Registering for the IRIS Biometric system in the UK. Usually landing in Heathrow in the morning means an hour wait in the immigration queue since so many other flights have also just landed. This morning the process took all of 30 seconds.
- Doing the 2-hour 4:30 pm Baron Baptiste yoga class in their Cambridge Studio. It went in exhausted and came out energized. I fear that I won’t find a place like Baron Baptiste in London. What I like about it is their Vinyasa/flow style combined with the hot, but not too hot, room. This makes it a good physical workout and I like sweating out the toxins in my body. My routine involved drinking coconut water afterwards to replenish the electrolytes. Again, I hope I can find it here in London.
- Hanging out with my friends Brad, his Yorkie Napoloen, and Lilian.
- Visiting my alma mater and seeing lots of old squash buddies as we celebrated 110 years of Princeton Squash. It was a brilliant fall day and walking the campus brought back fond memories. It’s always interesting to see the new buildings coming up, which reminds you that the institution is far from a static place. As these changes get made, there are lots of repercussions to the fabric of campus life.
WPP’s Stream ’07 UnConference
I was fortunate to be able to attend Stream ’07, an event put on by WPP last week billed as an ‘unconference’, open source style, with no formal agenda, no hierarchy and people from different walks. I’d say it was a resounding success. I liked the diversity of the people there: young professionals just out of college to media veterans, entrepreneurs to big company types, and representing a number of verticals and professions such as VC, digital music, video, games, advertising, CPG, etc. I even met a real life conductor. Of course the setting (the Club Med outside of Athens, in Marathon), didn’t hurt either!
I liked that it wasn’t dominated by web ‘celebrities’, and everyone seemed to feel comfortable participating and adding to the dialogue. The sessions varied in quality but my hands-down favorite was the one led by Ital, the Israeli conductor. He used clips of famous conducturs to illustrate management styles in a highly interactive workshop. Ricardo Muti’s authoritarian style was panned while the passion and free-spirit of Kleiber was the crowd favorite (mine was Leonard Berstein’s). I wonder what the results would have been with, say, a military audience.
Thanks to the WPP team for putting on such a great event.
Facebook’s Music Platform
A number of outfits wrote about the rumor of a music platform that Facebook is developing with respect to profile pages, streaming widgets, etc. Yes, it does make a lot more sense than any sort of music store — selling recorded music is just a bad business to be in these days. Valleywag thinks it’s bad news for iLike. But iLike will be fine. Yes, they’ll need to adapt. But their mission is all around optimizing social music, whereas it will be hard for Facebook to have a laser focus on the problem. Also, the Partovi brothers [disclosure: Ali is a friend of mine], are world-class entrepreneurs who know a thing or two about being nimble and dealing with competition from incumbent platforms. In fact, as paidcontent writes, iLike’s widgets will be among the ones going on the pages. FWIW, I think Bebo also has a good platform for musicians as does Virb, although both are somewhat more closed than MySpace. I look forward to the offering from Facebook.
Radio Getting Into Online Classifieds
I’m catching up on my reading and came across this article in Mediapost about radio getting into the online classifieds game. Stations have been doing this in varying degrees for some time. It makes a lot of sense, especially for smaller-market stations that don’t have as much competition by the likes of Craigslist and of course the newspaper sites.