BasBasBas.com

Drew this model up for my thesis, to basically summarize the way the new music business works for most labels. Does this look right to you? Am I forgetting anything?

Click picture to enlarge. Click here for Suzanne Lainson’s post, mentioned at the bottom of the model behind the asterisk.

I plan to draw up a bunch of other seperate models to incorporate theories such as the long tail and 1,000 true fans. Things will also become much clearer once a diffusion of innovations model is worked in there, like I did with my paper titled Best practices of the online promotion of new musical content.

Any pointers would be great. My thesis is due very soon!

Recently I released a paper titled the best practices of the online promotion of new musical content. I pushed it through some networks and sent it to contacts I’ve made while studying the music business and the results have been phenomenal. Giving away something good for free really does work! Some highlights.

I submitted it to Techdirt, probably my favourite technology blog, where Mike Masnick blogged about it. This blog post was then mentioned in the daily newsletter of the ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.

It was also posted to the great Make It In Music blog, as a guestpost. Students of the music business course at the NYU were given this paper to read. Someone is even making a Spanish version of it to increase the reach of the paper, especially in Latin America. Thanks Pp! I’ve also been spreading it around LinkedIn with some pretty good results.

Wow!

To be honest, part of the strategy of my thesis was to build some momentum, release it, make it go viral and brand myself as an expert on this topic, but even this paper is making some ripples.

The ironic thing is that in the paper I say that giving away something of value for free can be a great promotional tool… especially if what you’re giving away is easily reproduced and easy to share. The reception of the paper proves exactly that.

Extremely motivated to get that thesis done asap and start utilizing the momentum I’ve built! More soon!

P.S. If you’d like to read the paper, click here for the PDF.

As the regular readers of my blog probably know, I’m writing my graduation thesis about the future of music distribution. Due to some setbacks and unforseen circumstances, this thesis has suffered some delays. However, using the knowledge and insight I gained in the past month, while studying my thesis’ topic, I have compiled a paper called the Best Practices of the Online Promotion of New Musical Content.

It looks at artists like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, Mos Def, and Groove Armada, and analyzes what they’ve been doing right and wrong and why they’ve been doing it in the first place.

So while you wait for the thesis and the launch of FutureOfMusicDistribution.com, how about going through this 20 page paper?

To download and read the whole paper, just use this link:

http://www.basbasbas.com/online_promotion_of_new_musical_content-Bas_Grasmayer.pdf

And feel free to redistribute it, it’s licensed under a Creative Commons license!

Love,
Bas

Yesterday I had an interview with Gerd Leonhard, a media futurist, and probably the foremost thinker on the topic of my thesis; The Future of Music Distribution.

He had some interesting things to say, like his principle of Music Like Water, which states that in the next few years, users will be paying a tax in some way to collectively license musical content. I had a talk with him for about 25 minutes which I posted on my thesis blog.

If you want to have a listen to it also, you can download it as an MP3 or use the stream below.

In case you’re wondering why it’s been so quiet on this blog lately… There are a few reasons.

• I’m working on my graduation thesis about the Future of Music Distribution which is quite hard work;
• I’m working for a record label here in Bulgaria, working on the internet side of things, mainly promotion;
• I’m doing an assignment for a political party here and helping them out with their internet campaign, since the parliamentary elections are coming up;
• I’m making videos for SpinEARTH.tv – although haven’t finished any recently… Actually, I attended a show and accidentally deleted the video I made there. F!!K!
• I’m going to be speaking on a conference about self-development and social psychology in Prague next month and brainstorming about what I want to say. I want it to be groundbreaking and paradigm shattering!

On top of all that, one of my best mates visited me for 7 days last week annnnddddd we saw the sun come up quite a few times.

Will resume a more regular blogging schedule soon though.

BasBasBas.com is about my life abroad. I regularly write about my adventures in Istanbul, Bulgaria and travels in the region, but like to ponder about the future also. If you’d like to stay up to date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox. You can also follow me on Twitter.

As if the amount of blogs and micro-blogs I have right now are not enough… I set up yet another blog. For my final thesis I’m studying the Future of Music Distribution. While I was studying I realized that instead of saving my notes in a document on my computer, it would be easier to post them to a place where I can access them from every computer. Then I thought “why not make them public?” So that’s what I did. I present to  you my new blog, The Future of Music Distribution.

Don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging here, but instead of posting 5 updates per day regarding this topic on this blog, I’ve chosen to keep it separate. My ‘life’, travels, pictures and views go on here and all stuff related to my final thesis go on there. Visit The Future of Music Distribution now!

BasBasBas.com is about my life abroad. I regularly write about my adventures in Istanbul, Bulgaria and travels in the region, but like to ponder about the future also. If you’d like to stay up to date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox. You can also follow me on Twitter.

This Tuesday I’m giving a presentation for my course in Public Opinion accompanying my essay on Bulgaria’s public opinion of Turkey. It’s already finished, so I figured I’d put it online. I’m moving from Istanbul to Sofia next week, so it’s double-appropriate

I stripped it from some of the images, because SlideShare was not displaying them properly (eg. overlapping the text etc.)

Slide 10 should say: “Turkish people abuse their position as an ethnic minority to get rights even normal Bulgarians don’t have”.

Hope you enjoy. More updates soon. Heading into a very busy week.

Merhaba! Benim adım Bas. Nasılsınız?

After just two days in Istanbul, I realized why so few Turkish people speak English. If it’s anywhere near as hard for them to learn English, as it is for me to learn Turkish, I can imagine most don’t even want to bother with it if they don’t need it.

When I came here and didn’t speak one word of Turkish 3 days ago, I longed for Bulgaria where I actually am able to make myself understandable, but told myself to stop being a p***y and stop whining. After all, I didn’t speak any Bulgarian when I arrived there either.

I arrived at my language course 2.5 days late but I figured I could catch up because I’m a fast learner and I as willing to do the work. When I opened my books at home that day, I was looking at a 100% Turkish book. Not only were the exercises in Turkish, so was the explanation. Looked like catching up will be a bit harder to do, so yesterday when they announced a test for today I decided to aim for something I hardly ever aim for. The middle. Not the top 5%, but just be somewhere in the middle. After all, I had missed 3 days, so I had an excuse for myself.

The Turkish language is very tough for a Western European. We start sentences with the subject and then the verb, but the Turkish do it differently. The verb has to wait until the end of the sentence, which is very unnatural for us. Imagine going to a bar and ordering a drink. “I want a coke.” In Turkish the structure would be more like “I coke want”, but this of course is still a very simple sentence. It gets incredibly complex, the verbs get many suffixes, quite a few grammar rules are unlike anything I’ve had to deal with, even in Bulgarian.

However, I really can’t stand being perceived as a tourist (I’d rather be seen as a foreigner who’s living here) and if you speak English and no Turkish at all, you will get ripped off. Constantly. My frustration with this, my impatience, and high demand of myself to understand the language cause me to pick up the language faster than I anticipated and I even don’t mind doing some studying,

I’m sure within one month my Turkish will be quite okay and I won’t have to fall back on my English, or, since many people don’t understand English, gestures and body language.

Gülü gülü!

It’s my last weekend in Holland. This Monday I’m flying to Sofia, Bulgaria, from where I’ll take a bus to go to Istanbul where I will be studying for half a year. Moved out of my apartment last weekend, staying at my parents now, getting ready to stay in a hostel for a while, so I’m officially homeless again. Woohoo! Freedom!

Figured I’d deliver an update on some things.

My visa
After posting the concerns I had about my visa, I decided to email a friend of mine, Ivaylo, who has a lot of experience with travelling and living abroad. His take on it was that once I get my residence permit, I’ll be a temporary citizen of Turkey, which will thus grant me entry into Turkey. So even though I have a single entry visa, once I get my residence permit I should be set.

I’ve tried calling the Turkish consulate over the last 2 days to get a confirmation about this, but haven’t been able to get through yet. Once I’m finished with my studies I’m seriously going to consider helping out ministries of foreign affairs around the world to shape up the external communication side of their consulates and embassies, since I have very few very good experiences with consulates or embassies. The only embassies that I dealt with and I’m impressed with is the English embassy in The Netherlands and the Dutch embassy in Bulgaria, though I guess the latter doesn’t have very much to do (just joking of course).

Monday morning I’ll get up early to call the consulate, just in case I do need to go to Rotterdam to change my visa, which I don’t expect. If I don’t get through, I could of course take care of it when I’m in Turkey.

Language course
I decided that I actually should take part in the language course I blogged about. After posting it here and going through the comments, I figured “why not?” So let’s just do it and see what happens. I emailed them again to double-check if they had seen the email in which I said I would not be attending and to ask whether I could still be part of the course.

And I can. Cool.

A place to live
We set up a group on Facebook which has a big number of the Erasmus students who are going to be doing one or two semesters for an exchange this year. Some of them are already finding apartments and looking for people to come and live there.

I decided to add everyone to my friends with a small note about the exchange in Istanbul and then get messaging to see if I meet like-minded people to live with, or people who are already looking for an apartment. While doing this, a Turkish girl who studied at the university I’ll be attending (Yeditepe), sent me a link to a consulting company that helps with temporary housing in Turkey. BY Consulting Company‘s site looks promising, but they don’t have anything near my university currently. Maybe if I contact them once I’m in Istanbul I can find out more.

Turkish hospitality
Every Turkish person I know or have spoken to through Facebook has been incredibly friendly and from a Dutch perspective are going out of their way to help me out. Offering to hook me up with people in Istanbul who can introduce me to the city, helping me out with ideas for housing, regularly checking on me; I’ve never met a more hospitable people than the Turkish and I haven’t even set foot on Turkish soil yet.

All worries are gone. Everything will be perfectly okay and will run smoothly. The only thing I worry about now is getting my stuff washed and packing my bag with as much stuff as the airline allows (which is just 20 kilograms). Just 3 more nights in Holland!

I’ve been officially accepted to Yeditepe! Time to sit back and relax, right? Not.

Last week: 2 final exams. This week: 1 final exam, 1 deadline for a website, some work assignments. So at this point I was already busy. Anyway, I decided to figure out how I would get my ERASMUS grant. I went to the international office and they informed me I should have my forms in before the 15th of July (I would be in Bulgaria/Macedonia from the 25th of June to the 17th of July), including a certificate of enrollment for the NEXT study year. I handed my enrollment in last Friday and was going on holiday this Saturday, so that got me quite stressed.

“No worries, mate” I told myself. I figured I’d just take care of something that I could take care of immediately. I googled a bit to find out more about the Turkish embassy in Holland and visa. The embassy site was nearly completely in Turkish, but I found a number and called them. After passing through 2 rude receptionists and being connected to a person, I was informed that I should not call her but someone asked and she asked me why I called her. I blamed television and she gave me the number of the Turkish consulate. I called the consulate, had to go through the same annoying type of receptionists and finally got someone who knew anything about what I was asking. Turns out the studentvisum for Turkey is… 446 euros! Awesome. Perfectly reasonable to ask from a student, right?

More stress.

Then I did something I should do more often before asking stuff to people who don’t really know the answer either. I used my eyes and applied them to some text. I did some reading. I saw I could get an advance on the Erasmus grant, which meant I could probably use that money to pay for the visum. Also, I got in contact with the central international office of my degree factory (commercial university) and found out my enrollment for this year would be enough.

Last time I had stress relief like this I decided it would be best not to blog about it. So I won’t.

Nervewrecking stuff if you’re going on a holiday for a month in just a few days. Anyway, it all seems to be okay now. Still nervous about the visum, since I’d rather not borrow money for it, but we’ll see. Let’s hope the woman was confused and told me the normal or work visum instead of a studentvisum. Not counting on it though. The very worst is that I will have to go visit the consulate which is built in Holland’s pit of doom, Rotterdam. Lord, help me

Oh! So I’m going on a holiday this Wednesday. Expect to see many stories and pictures!