As indie music artists from all over the globe converge in Austin for this year’s South by Southwest fest, much of the best music can be found online for free download. Indie artists don’t have ad budgets and distribution contracts with big box retailers. Making their music available free is simply the best way to connect with new fans who can’t make it to Austin to see them perform.

Want to sample the gigabytes of free music for yourself? Visit the SXSW music page for MP3’s or the unofficial torrent site for a complete compilation.

The days of insane salaries and the self serving illusion of objective reporting have ended, at least at ABC.  News as a time slotted sound byte presentation that has become increasingly biased simply can’t compete with the always on, many viewpoint web. ABC  is the first to implode, but it won’t be the last. Even the 24 hour cable networks face extinction as cable continues to lose ground to on demand and largely free TVoIP.

ABC News President David Westin confirmed in an interview Friday that the network’s ranks of bureau correspondents, which currently number several dozen, would be cut in half and be replaced with “digital” journalists who would be expected to shoot and edit their own stories.

“We will have as many total journalists as we do now,” he said.

Although the network will keep a minimal staff presence in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami and Boston, it will shut down its bricks-and-mortar bureaus there and ask its remaining employees to work from the local affiliates. The Washington bureau will remain open, but its size will be substantially reduced.  (LA TImes)

Is it over for network news? Probably not. I can see a future for it as pure entertainment. The 5 o’clock reports are already near the bottom of the slippery slope into tabloid journalism.  The shift this represents is profound. Control of information concentrated too much power in the hands of the few. The ability of the mainstream media to form the public agenda and opinion was incredibly powerful. Two recent examples are the perpetuation of the global warming myth and swinging a presidential election. It’s pretty certain that so few people will not have so much power over the rest of America in the years ahead. Look for increased efforts on the part of the old media elite to control the net. Unfortunately for them, it’s too late. People prefer to make up their own minds instead of being told what to think.

I’m not much of a gamer but , as a male I would not have anticipated this even if I were. My last exposure to social gaming was when coworkers had me sworn to secrecy about a unauthorized gaming server they had  co-loed in the company’s computer room. Only one of the group was a woman, and she was not the most avid of the clandestine gamers. Fast forward 10 years to social networks and gaming with your friends in the cloud:

A growing category of what are called “social games,” however, appeals to a much different demographic, according to a recent study. The study — sponsored by PopCap, creator of popular social games such as Bejeweled and Insaniquarium — looked at game players in both the United States and the United Kingdom, and found that the average player of these online social games is a 43-year-old woman. More than 24 percent of those who responded to the survey (full results in PDF form here) said they regularly play social games, a category that includes Facebook games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars and Happy Aquarium. According to survey company Info Solutions Group, that level of response suggests a total social gaming population of approximately 100 million. Social gamers were defined as those who said they play games on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace at least once a week. (Gigaom)

With the sales of console games going  sideways, one has to wonder how Microsoft, Nintendo and  and Sony will will respond to this trend - if they do at all. If a growing group of female 40 somethings are gaming in their free time, this could mean big trouble for television -specifically soap operas and Oprah.

In the earlier century as newspaper business become big business, it’s robber baron owners successfully had hemp outlawed to create a market for tree pulp newsprint. They profited handsomely. The current generation of suits at the New York Times are acting as if they’ve been smoking the hemp. Not only are they still in denial about the current realities of the news business, they also seem to be determined to prop up the dead tree edition at any cost.

Rumors are flying that there’s a battle within the NY Times on how to price their app for the iPad. Those on the newspaper side of the house apparently believe that it should be priced at $20 to $30/month to avoid cannibalizing the print product. By the way, if you want a simple tip for how to fail at business, it’s to make a decision to avoid cannibalizing your own business. When you do, you’ve just made it clear that a competitor is going to cannibalize your business for you. The folks on the interactive side of the house think that $10/month makes a lot more sense and believe that pricing it at the $20 to $30 range is suicidal. Of course, if you thought that the management at the NYT’s was really crafty, you might believe that this whole story was floated to reset the anchor price, though I have trouble believing that’s true. (Techdirt)

I’ll grant that if any paper has a chance of finding a paid online subscriber base, the New York Times is easily the most likely. I’ll also grant that the typical Apple customer is accustomed to paying exorbitant prices. My take: If the Times can do something truly remarkable for the iPad, enough of the fanboys are likely to take at $10 / month to make it worth while. Expecting $30 per subscriber is either the work of a clueless crew of elites who think everyone is as well paid as they are are or a crew of regular guys who have had way too much of the hemp.  My vote goes to clueless.

What is old news? It’s history. With more than a century of audio visual news in the library, why not make yesterdays available to educators? You might even make a little money in the venture. That’s exactly the concept for NBC Learn. While I question the journalistic integrity of NBC’s news division and the strong possibly of its bias being applied editing archives, the concept itself is brilliant.

NBC Learn is the education arm of NBC News. We are making the global resources of NBC News and the historic film and video archive available to teachers, students, schools and universities.

• NBC News Archives on Demand (K-12 and Higher Ed) unleashes the power of the NBC News archives and makes thousands of video clips available to teachers, students, schools, colleges and universities.
• What’s Your iCue? is the video trivia challenge that blends learning and gaming.
• Original video content from NBC Learn is engaging, innovative, and makes learning fun! (NBC Learn)

It had to happen sooner or later. The UK based hypermart giant that is something of an analog to Walmart is beginning full length feature production.  I it is natural extension of the private label business to the extreme.  With Hollywood squeezing margins to less than a buck on $15 movies this comes as no surprise. There’s also the possibility that Tesco isn’t satisfied with Hollywood’s product mix.

UK retail giant Tesco is getting into the business of producing movies itself based on the books of some very famous authors. The movies will be direct-to-DVD and direct-to-the-internet, but the idea is for Tesco to use these movies to generate more traffic to their stores (both online and off). In fact, if you look at the retail business, music and movies have long been used as a loss leader of sorts, to drive traffic to get them to buy other, much higher margin, goods. This is really an extension of that, but all the way to the point of helping to fund the production of the movie itself. Also, while it will have a window of exclusivity at the beginning, it sounds like Tesco is quite open to other stores selling the movie as well. (Techdirt)

This could be great news for independent producers. The cost of making a full length HD feature is racing to Zero outside of salaries. Take way the incredible prices  that a list actors and directors are demanding and you have a business that has impressive profit potential selling cheap and in volume.  The time could be coming when indy producers will more easily find funding and distribution in Bentonville instead of Hollywood.

As Apple prepares to enter the already crowded ebook business, competitive pressures are driving prices up - at least for Macmillan’s catalog. It’s no secret that publishers want more for electronic copies, and it appears that Apple plans to appease them. It also appears that Amazon isn’t giving in to that idea without a fight.

As of last night, Amazon stopped listing all books from Macmillan Publishers, referring searches to other sellers instead. According to the New York Times, this is because Macmillan is one of the companies that now has an agreement to sell ebooks through Apple’s new iBooks store, and asked Amazon to raise the price of their ebooks from $9.99 to $15. An industry source told the Times that the de-listing is Amazon’s way of “expressing its strong disagreement” with the idea of a price hike. Gizmodo suggests this is the first volley in an Apple-Amazon ebook war. Quoting: “It feels like a repeat of the same s*** Universal Music, and later, NBC Universal pulled with iTunes, trying to counter the leverage Apple had because of iTunes’ insane marketshare. Same situation here, really: Content provider wants more money/control over their content, fights with the overwhelmingly dominant, embedded service that’s selling the content. (Slashdot)

In a truly competitive world, more sellers should drive prices down. With the average author’s royalties amounting to  a tiny fraction of retail, one would expect electronic copies that have a distribution cost near zero would be $3 to $5 rather than $10. Not good enough! The big publishers want $15. It appears that Apple is leveraging a higher price to attract publishers and the publishers will use this as leverage to force price increases from other sellers.  In the end this will harm both authors and consumers. It also illustrates how current copyright laws only benefit the distributors of content who had little or nothing to do with creating it.

With cable and satellite subs flat and the telcos struggling to grow a pay TV business, online video is thriving - even the pay subscription kind. The cable guys and telcos can blame the recession, but there’s still business to be had if you give people what they want: a movie anywhere there is an internet connection for $9 a month. The combination of online viewing with a DVD in the mail, Netflix managed to grow its customer base by more than 1 million in the last quarter. If the movie studios would allow, the DVD could be done away with all together.

The results reflect the growing popularity of Netflix plans that bundle DVD rentals with unlimited video streaming over the Internet for as little as $9 per month. Netflix’s success contrasts sharply with more traditional home video options such as Blockbuster Inc. and Movie Gallery, which are closing hundreds of their stores and struggling to attract traffic to the locations still open.

Netflix added more than 1.1 million customers during the quarter — the most in any three-month period in its history. It took Netflix four years to attract its first 1 million subscribers after launching its rental service in 1999. (Yahoo)

We here at ThirdPipe have long held the conviction that paywalls for content on small value product really are wrong unless you are providing the service as part of a larger offering. A good example would be the Apple Store iTunes as a conjunction with the Nano MP3 player. Or the paywall is a convenience factor to an already high value information source. Say Dunn and Bradstreet where all you have to do is register if you already subscribe to the service.

But to view a paywall as a new income stream? Bonkers man. Ain’t gonna fly. NYT found that out two years ago. Now NewsDay has found out the same thing –

So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?

The answer: 35 people. As in fewer than three dozen. As in a decent-sized elementary-school class.

That astoundingly low figure was revealed in a newsroom-wide meeting last week by publisher Terry Jimenez when a reporter asked how many people had signed up for the site. Mr. Jimenez didn’t know the number off the top of his head, so he asked a deputy sitting near him. He replied 35.

Now to be fair one has to consider the context of that number. NewsDay also owns the local cable franchise as well. Plus anybody who subscribes for the pulp get the online subscription free as well. So a large swath of the potentials already have access for free. But what it does show is that a paywall is a barrier unless one is linking it to something larger. There is too much free content out there to justify paying for it. Fact one concept that none of the papers yet fathomed is that they are third person before the reader gets to it. Customers are cutting out the middleman and reading the press releases directly now, removing the filter and hence the need for the paper itself!

We have said this before. If a paper wants to make a go of digital news content they need to follow an old Telco prescription. Offer the handset for ‘free’ and pay for it and your talk time as a bundle. In the papers case, you offer the Kindle II for free bundled with a 2 year subscription to the paper at $9.95 a month. Then you make sure the digital daily is on the machine everyday. Don’t require the reader to futz with a download, it has to be a push.

Its a multimillion dollar idea offered free.

Linky.

A while back, Long Island, NY paper Newsday put up a pay wall and asked $5 a month to access its online site. After three months, it had attracted 35 subscribers. Will Americans pay for online news? Well at least in this  affluent part of New York state, the answer is no.

So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?

The answer: 35 people. As in fewer than three dozen. As in a decent-sized elementary-school class.

That astoundingly low figure was revealed in a newsroom-wide meeting last week by publisher Terry Jimenez when a reporter asked how many people had signed up for the site. Mr. Jimenez didn’t know the number off the top of his head, so he asked a deputy sitting near him. He replied 35. (observer.com)