[Manic Monday] Empowering Music With Data

Several years ago, when I was still in University, I owned a USB thumb drive. It was still relatively new then and not many people owned one, to the point that I had to carry around the installer CD everywhere. That thumb drive was capable of storing a whopping 64 MB, much larger than the box of floppy disks that I carried everywhere, and was most certainly less prone to fungi. Today, a thumb drive with such capacity is probably not for sale anymore; even 1GB drives are usually given away as bonuses.

Continue reading [Manic Monday] Empowering Music With Data

[Manic Monday] Music, Entrepreneurship And Technology Gathering

Last Saturday, April 20th, 2013, a few friends and I had the chance to create a small gathering to discuss about music, entrepreneurship and technology. This gathering started off from people who had joined a group with the same name on Google+, moderated by Robin Malau and Widi Asmoro. Looking at how active the discussions were in the group, and the variety of topics covered in a group what was literally weeks old, I offered to create the first gathering for this group at the offices of Think Web, which is also where Wooz.in is headquartered. Thanks to Ramya Prajna for providing the space and the audiovisual equipment.

Continue reading [Manic Monday] Music, Entrepreneurship And Technology Gathering

[Manic Monday] Revisiting Royalties

One of the main pillars of industries based in intellectual property are royalties. In this definition, royalties is the amount of revenue shared and received by an owner of an intellectual property or work, from usage of said work by other parties; it often refers to musical works and compositions. The royalties paid can be 0% to 100%, depending on the agreement between the work owner and the party who wants to exploit it. Bottom line, every work that is used, whether it is duplicated, broadcast or used in sync with other products (in what is called synchronisation rights, usually for ads, movie soundtracks, and so on), the work owner will receive a portion of income as agreed.

Continue reading [Manic Monday] Revisiting Royalties

[Manic Monday] The “New” Music Industry Needs You!

Last week I had the chance to participate in the Lean Startup Machine workshop in Singapore, with fellow contributor Dondi Hananto, who has written about his experiences in the workshop. In summary, the workshop was a valuable experience, which I would recommend to anyone who wants to build their own startup, wants to study a “quick” way of customer development, or wants to get a different perspective on how to build businesses. Of course, the LSM approach is only one of many ways in building a business. But I hope, for those of you who want to get into the startup scene, that you will think of how to build a business, and not just a program or application.

Continue reading [Manic Monday] The “New” Music Industry Needs You!

[Manic Monday] Searching For A New Frame Of Mind For Entertainment Industries

Previously, the entertainment industry was a process that tended to be straight and vertical. Like now, anyone can create something, but usually the entertainment work that would be allocated the most investment (which usually meant the largest promotion and distribution) is the one, as determined by the stakeholders of the entertainment industry, that could be digested by a large amount of people, and gave return on investment – or even profit. The principle of scale of economies apply: invest in something with a fixed/static value, which could then be duplicated for multiplied profits. Of course, this vertical relies on complete control on all the aspects of the industry – from creation, production, promotion, marketing, distribution, and even the retail price.

Continue reading [Manic Monday] Searching For A New Frame Of Mind For Entertainment Industries

[Manic Monday] Remember the “Old” Content Industry?

One of the tragic things of our increasingly digital lives is that, whatever appears to us on a ‘screen’ (whether it be a TV screen, computer screen or mobile phone screen’, is just there, in seconds, and can practically be pulled up on demand. Either its on the Internet, or it isn’t. There’s hardly a transitional state for anything on the internet – even services that are in beta are well, right there already, and you probably won’t notice its building progress unless you look closely. Mimicking its basic building blocks of bytes, the conditions of ‘0’ and ‘1’ apply. It’s either on, or off. And in many cases, it’s either good, or bad. ‘Liked’, or not liked.

Continue reading [Manic Monday] Remember the “Old” Content Industry?

[Manic Monday] Does the Music Industry Really Need to be Healed?

Looking from one aspect, it really does seem like music is in such a mess. It is difficult to find CD or cassette stores because many have shut down. Ringback tones, once the cash cow of the music industry, has almost no more users. Online stores that sell digital music files (like MP3s) have run for several years but the market shows slowing signs of interest; it is said that music sales through iTunes Indonesia, although growing exponentially, still shows small impact on revenue. Meanwhile, the same songs can be obtained from various websites, free, without any payment to the owners of the sound recordings.

Continue reading [Manic Monday] Does the Music Industry Really Need to be Healed?

[Manic Monday] Making Money From YouTube

Many stories have circulated the Internet on how this person or that person has made money by simply putting up a video on YouTube, getting many views, and in turn receiving a good amount of money from advertising placements. The most recent example of this would be PSY raking in about $8 million of ad revenue from YouTube, for pretending to ride a horse to an infectious rhythm. But let’s face it, we’re not all destined to be a Korean pop star, but it doesn’t mean we can’t pave the way to make a bit of our own cash through YouTube.

Continue reading [Manic Monday] Making Money From YouTube

[Manic Monday] Using NFC To Distribute Your Music – And More

Near-field communication, otherwise known as NFC, is still somewhat of a mystery to most. It’s often touted as the ‘killer’ new feature of some app or phone, as it is gradually being integrated with some high-end phones (and even some mid-range phones), although most of the world still has no real use for it. The most notable use of NFC is of course mobile payment systems like Google Wallet, Isis and some Visa or Mastercard-driven programs in Europe, Singapore and Korea.

Continue reading [Manic Monday] Using NFC To Distribute Your Music – And More

[Manic Monday] Using Customer Relationship Management To Engage Your Fans – And Customers

Customer Relationship Management, usually known as CRM, is something that has actually been around for a while and is becoming increasingly scrutinised by companies planning to expand their consumer-facing business to the next level. It takes the concept of customer service, where usually a customer interacts on a one-to-one basis with an officer of a company tasked with, well, taking care of the customer, employs the scalability of digital technology and deploys it on a larger scale.

Continue reading [Manic Monday] Using Customer Relationship Management To Engage Your Fans – And Customers