[Music Monday] So You’ve Got A Band. Now What? Make A Website?

Despite all the doom and gloom you might hear in the music industry lately about how it’s more difficult to sell albums, it’s actually a great time to be a band or musician. Whatever the type of your music, you could probably record most or all of your music on your computer, with adequate quality also. And if you don’t have your own computer, most small-to-medium sized music studios already use a computer to do most of the heavy work, and cost less to rent.

From the software point of view, there are many software suites you can use to record, mix, and make a CD master, even free ones, and the Internet offers various paid and free audio libraries to enhance the recording, whether it be a sound effect or a drum loop. Just make sure you can use it for your own music (just make sure it’s totally free or ask permission from the owner). You can even write and share the musical notation of your songs online.

Then what are you going to do once you’re happy with the recording result, and have finalized writing all the lyrics? Then it’s time for the world to hear it. These days, you don’t really need to wait for enough songs to be finished to create an album ready to share (or sell), because if you’ve recorded the music digitally, then it’s only one upload away to be up there on the Internet.

Continue reading [Music Monday] So You’ve Got A Band. Now What? Make A Website?

[Dailyssimo] Does A Blog Need SEO?

These last few days, I was involved in a discussion in a Facebook group that I found quite interesting and quite eye-opening about the point of view of digital strategists in this country.

One of the topics discussed was the application of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on a blog and this elementary topic spurred reactions that I can consider representative of most people’s perspective.

Do you think a blog needs SEO? The easy, fast and without further thinking answer is: Yes! But does a blog really need SEO?

The essence of a search engine is collecting and collating (indexing) the popular, and much sought after words on the list. The more popular a word, the more likely it will be on the top of the list. So if the word we’re looking for is the full name of a blog complete with the link then what we need to be on the top list of the search result is indeed, popularity.

Continue reading [Dailyssimo] Does A Blog Need SEO?

[Music Monday] Why Music Download Stores Won’t Work In Indonesia

The more I think of it, the more I think that many music services – at least in Indonesia – are going about it the wrong way. Since 2008, Indonesia has had a number of online music download stores. Various business models were tried – an ISP tried ISP billing, telcos tried charging via SMS, and some others even had a choice of payment systems; either through SMS or electronic voucher.

Investments in (quite expensive) hosting and delivery systems were made, in an attempt to replicate what seemed to work overseas – the music download. Essentially, users will pay for a song that they want, and only the song that they want, and download it to their choice device. Most services were required to implement digital rights management (DRM) as a way to circumvent unauthorized copying, and the files themselves were usually confined to the device that downloaded the file.

Needless to say, it didn’t work. It has never delivered the results that the music industry wants, that’s for sure.

Continue reading [Music Monday] Why Music Download Stores Won’t Work In Indonesia

[Simply Business] Pass the Gold, Shovel Your Way To Riches

The first millionaire in California became one during the legendary 1850 Gold Rush, his name was Sam Brannan. Despite the gold rush, he did not become rich by discovering and selling gold, he was actually selling shovels. The second person that got rich in the same gold rush is a Jewish guy. He experimented with a material called denim and made comfortable but strong and durable pants to wear when digging for gold. His name was Levi Strauss, the inventor of Jeans.

Gold rush is always happening, even right now in our own digital era. Ten years ago everybody was rushing to have a website and now everybody was rushing to make mobile apps. Many people are finding opportunities in making mobile apps, but how many people actually make money from mobile apps?

Continue reading [Simply Business] Pass the Gold, Shovel Your Way To Riches

[Music Monday] Wait, You Can Make Money For Music From The Internet?

The [recorded] music industry has been in very dark days lately, especially in Indonesia – I’ve frequently written about the current situation so I won’t revisit it. But the breakdown is this: there is currently no real way the [recorded] music industry can make money from their work. CD sales are diminishing, music through mobile is going through a crisis, and there’s not really an online music store worth mentioning for the local market. But this does not mean that the Internet cannot make money for you, the musician or music label.

I’ll admittedly be broad about this – I won’t say there are a million ways to make money for music directly from the Internet, but there are definitely a lot of ways to make sure the Internet works for you and gets you that much-needed money. Music may be virtually free for most music listeners, but it doesn’t mean making the music you want does not cost money. Even downloading Audacity or Gamelan will take some money off your Internet bill.

Trying to pitch to a music magazine to cover your band may not cost money but bringing along coffee for the journalists goes a long way. And so on. Even if you’re a self-proclaimed indie artist that does not want to spend money, eventually you’d need money for food, right?

Continue reading [Music Monday] Wait, You Can Make Money For Music From The Internet?

[Simply Business] Working Too Hard Is Bad For You

I have been seeing a disturbing trend in the startup world. A behavior that plagues the corporate world and also the main reason why I left the corporate world is also infecting our beautiful little universe. That trend is: Working too hard.

Yes, I’ve seen it happen. People working late are viewed as heroes and working on weekends is already considered a norm. Not doing so would make you the mockery of your society. It doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t matter how many hours you spent working, it’s the results that matter.

Need an example? Check out the way Ryan Carson runs his business, by working only 4 days a week yet still makes a profitable ($3 million per year revenue) business.

Continue reading [Simply Business] Working Too Hard Is Bad For You

[Music Monday] Taking OpenEMI’s Torch And Taking It Further

On April 22-24, 2012, a conference aptly named Rethink Music was organized by the Berklee College of Music in Boston. They basically brought together professionals from all over the music industry – from media, from the music labels, from artist management, and even from technology companies like Youtube, Rhapsody and Echo Nest (you can look at the whole speaker roster here). But one of the most interesting things announced and discussed at Rethink Music, in my opinion, is OpenEMI.

The basic concept of OpenEMI is to provide access to startups who want to create music applications and services based on EMI’s music library – and if the app is interesting enough, EMI may partner with the startup to develop it further. You can either request for a access to a wide range of songs, or request deeper access to single artists with more audio, video and other content. This developer-friendly system is supported by Echo Nest, the company that also has a wider-range API for music applications that power services like Spotify’s Radio feature.

Continue reading [Music Monday] Taking OpenEMI’s Torch And Taking It Further

[Dailyssimo] Stand Out, Folks…!

The word lay-off or termination will probably always be the scourge of the professional workers who depend their lives on a company. Perhaps we still remember a short while ago when Yahoo! laid off 2000 employees worldwide, and Sony followed – but has nothing to do with what happened at Yahoo! – by laying off 10.000 of its own employees.

We can imagine how the employees affected by the layoffs suddenly have no income and at a crisis in their lives, especially those who have families. Yes, it’s terrible if all of the sudden, we are in that position without having any lifeboat.

Many tend to believe that layoffs occur due to reasons caused by the employees themselves but this is clearly not true because there are plenty of reasons for layoffs to occur. Don’t be surprised when you see a top employee getting laid off seemingly without any clear reason.

When the financial crisis hit the United States a few years ago, we saw how the wave of layoffs happened, with a rapid domino effect and within a few weeks, reached my workplace at that time (at Yahoo! Southeast Asia) and for the first time in my life, I saw how a company lays off employees in the interest of the company itself on a large scale.

Continue reading [Dailyssimo] Stand Out, Folks…!

[Simply Business] Go Local, Screw Global

Going global! That’s pretty much the dream of any startup founders when planning on their startups. The dream that has been achieved by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and everyone else in Silicon Valley. It’s a common thing to think globally, but don’t forget that to go global, you need to plant your roots locally first.

I’m pretty sure we all watched “The Social Network” so we all know that Facebook started in a dorm room targeting Harvard students. It grew to target more universities and then only after that, it went public and achieved nationwide recognition. The process it takes when going global is by doing it one step at a time. Facebook did not start as a global company, it started as an exclusive Harvard-only social network and it grew one step at a time.

Let’s look at another site: Groupon. Groupon started by Andrew Mason in November 2008. The first city that got stormed by Groupon was Chicago. They hit jackpot in that city and then expanded to Boston, New York and Toronto. They grew enormously in 2 years with 35 million users in North and South America, Europe, and Asia by buying local Groupon-like startups across the globe. Yes, they became a massive force globally, but they started all that in one city: Chicago.

Continue reading [Simply Business] Go Local, Screw Global