[Manic Monday] What The Resurrection Of RBT And Arrival Of iTunes Store Indonesia Mean For You

December 5th, 2012 was a good day if you worked in the recording music industry in Indonesia – well, at least, considering the doom and gloom that hung over the industry players recently. After over a year since the so-called Black October happened, Indosat, XL Axiata and 12 of Indonesia’s largest music labels, launched a major initiative to support ringback tone sales. The program integrates the promotion of ringback tones of both telcos, formerly using separate dial-in numbers, to a single code applicable to both telcos, and also combines the promotion efforts – and marketing money – done by both telcos. The telcos are now investing heavily again in promoting ringback tones to their customers.

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[Manic Monday] Books Might Disappear, But The Words In It Won’t

When was the last time you read a book? How many times have you read a book for the past month, say compared to, the amount of articles you read on the internet, or from social media feeds? I probably read only one book a month, and usually science fiction. Everything else is gobbled up in small bites through articles on the Internet here and there. I don’t think I have enough bandwidth in my head to keep up reading more books, either by quantity or quality or genre. I still buy books and try to collect books by my favorite authors, but even my reading habit has started to move over to Kobo.

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[Manic Monday] Should Digital Distribution Channels Invest In Producing Content?

These might be interesting times for content creators the world over, as it is increasingly becoming cheaper to produce and distribute content – music, movies, games, literature – and there are also a multitude of ways to enjoy such creations, where one creation can lead to another (for instance, a book inspires a movie, a movie inspires a game, and so on), not to mention the ways it can all interact and integrate. Yet times are not as rosy for content producers, especially in the ‘traditional’ sense. Continue reading [Manic Monday] Should Digital Distribution Channels Invest In Producing Content?

[Manic Monday] Your Fans Are Your Monetization Strategy [Part 2]

I’m revisiting this article simply because it just touched the surface on how fans of any type of creative content, which could be movies, music, games, software and so on. The decentralized nature of the internet has helped make a lot of things simpler – production, aggregation, distribution, payment – and many internet-based services can help you with these needs cheaply or even for free. The trick is, since every creative content is unique and probably has a similarly unique fan base or consumer segment, you need to come up with the business strategy behind it yourself.

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[Manic Monday] Looking At E-Commerce From A Digital Entertainment Perspective

During the past two years, various e-commerce sites have set up shop in Indonesia, some being multinational companies setting up a branch here, some being joint ventures, and some local players as well. The objective is pretty clear – to enable sales of anything imaginable via the internet, to reach a larger amount of customers while increasing the level of convenience for them as they do not have to take the effort of going to a store. Although Indonesia may not yet reach the level of e-commerce like in some other countries, where they even sell fresh produce of the internet, it is pretty clear that these e-commerce sites are here to stay.

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[Manic Monday] Your Fans Are Your Monetization Strategy

I come from a corporate background, but somehow I really hate the word ‘monetization’. The word is somehow soulless in its way that categorizes everything into things that can make money for you, and things that cannot. As if, the merit of a certain idea, creation, program, strategy, or product, solely depends on how it can make money for you. And the people who are the object of monetization – the consumers – are somehow treated just as a factor, that they would mindlessly spend money for no reason. But of course, this is all in my head. The ‘monetization’ term is not a greedy capitalist term, but it’s a business term that we should get used to.

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[Manic Monday] Perception Of Value For Digital Music

We live in times when actual value and perceived value are rarely the same thing. Even that piece of paper you use as money, has more relation to perceived value as to actual value, as the number written on the money is almost definitely more than the actual value of the paper it was made with. Money is represented by specially-printed pieces of paper as a form of guarantee from the government, that it represents the number printed on it; harking back from old times (as recently as the 20th century) where every piece of money was guaranteed its value in gold, kept safe in government safes.

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[Manic Monday] Why The Universal Music Purchase Of EMI May Turn Out To Be A Good Thing

The music industry was abuzz late last week regarding the approval from the European Commission and the US’s Federal Trade Commssion, regarding the planned purchase of EMI’s recording arm by the already-dominant Universal Music Group International. Many groups, including indie bands and indie labels, have stated opposition to the deal from the start, saying that Universal will have too much power in the market, and of course articles here and there have claimed that this is the day that the music died.

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[Manic Monday] Rethinking The Movies, With A Digital Twist

The movie and cinema have been around for at least 100 years already, and by principle it remains largely unchanged. A camera records sequential images upon a medium, which is then duplicated, and spread to locations with projectors and screens. The sequence of images is projected onto a screen. The technology has definitely progressed light years from those old hand-operated cameras. The medium is in a major shift from celluloid to digital and the ‘locations’ are now highly-specialized buildings, with comfortable seating, optimized screens, and powerful cinema projectors. But the essence remains the same.

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