[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[Manic Monday] My Wishlist: Digital Entertainment in Indonesia, 2013

This is my first post in 2013 – so I thought it would be fitting to jot down a few things that I hope will happen in 2013 in the digital entertainment scene here. 2012 has certainly been an interesting year – International music services like iTunes and Deezer finally arrived, the much-adored (by industry players, at least) RBT is somewhat ‘resurrected‘, and of course, perhaps many other things that has not shown their importance yet. Naturally, this list is very subjective.
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[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] 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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