BasBasBas.com

Category: life

  • My midem 2012 participation & my move to Moscow

    Hi!

    Long time no speak. This is the first post in a long time and might be the last post in a while too. I’ll keep writing articles for other sites from time to time, so if you wanna find out about them, check out the ways to connect at the bottom of this post.

    So one thing I’ve been busy with was preparing for midem and the three events I participated in, a speech on Visionary Monday, a Meet the Speakers mentoring session, and a panel about music business trends.

    For the thesis I’m talking about in the speech, go here: basbasbas.com/thesis

    Then I was in a panel with Eliot Van Buskirk, editor of Evolver.fm; James Martin, midem’s community manager & session moderator; Will Sansom, writer and consultant for Contagious.

    The panel, whose aim was to resume the industry’s key trends as seen at midem, featured a sense of optimism towards the future of music and technology, with this year’s conference trends focusing towards data and experimentation as the age of access begins to enter the music industry marketplace.

    http://blog.midem.com/2012/01/liveblog-bloggers-wrap-data-streaming-hackers-are-shows-top-trends/

    Needless to say, I had a great time at midem – also being able to finally meet so many of the people I’ve been connecting with through Twitter & blogs over the last few years.

    But now, let’s talk about Moscow!

    I’ve been hired as Head of Information Strategy at Moscow-based Dream Industries, who run 3 disruptive content-focused platforms, named Zvooq, Theory & Practice and Bookmate. Zvooq being the leading legal music streaming service in Russia & CIS (Financial Times article), Theory & Practice being a knowledge and education-sharing platform and community, and Bookmate being the leading platform for publishers in Russia and CIS countries, providing access to the social reading of the vast library of books on leading mobile platforms.

    I’m really excited to be joining them and will be moving to Moscow.

    So… if you want to stay up to date, you can follow me here:

    All are quite different channels, so choose whichever is/are most convenient for you.
    At some point I hope to remix this blog & turn it into a feed of posts from those accounts, as well as guest contributions to blogs & publications around the web.
    But until then… see you around the internet! 🙂
    Bas

  • Catching Up: Ecosystem Music Marketing, Internet Filters, The Clouds and DIY Tips

    Just like a few weeks ago, it’s time to bring you up to date with what I’ve been doing. Showcasing some articles I wrote for Official.fm, Techdirt and Hypebot.

    I did some more writing, but these are the most relevant. Enjoy!

    Keep up with me on Twitter or Tumblr (or Facebook if we have ever physically met).

  • Recent articles + news about my thesis!

    Hi everyone!

    I recently started blogging for Techdirt, so keep an eye on that blog or my profile to see more articles by me. Of course, I’ll throw out updates like this one every once in a while, so you don’t have to follow me in 3 different places.

    Two articles I recently did for Techdirt:

    There will also be an expansion of The Ugly Dance case-study soon, so keep your ears and eyes open (I suggest by following me on Twitter).

    The main reason many of the readers of this blog found me, is my thesis on digital communication strategy for the new music business. I am almost ready to publish it and send it out, so if you’re not on my distribution list already, put yourself on there. I promise not to spam you too much. 😉

    Also, I’m moving to Sofia, Bulgaria next week and I would love to find a job that let’s me apply my knowledge and expertise in digital communication strategy and leveraging the power of the ecosystem. If you can help me out or know anyone that can, please get in touch.

    Twitter: @Spartz
    My LinkedIn profile
    Email:

  • Data-analysis heroes… ATTENTION PLEASE! 😉

    Solved. Thanks.

    I’m trying to figure out how to get data from a particular database and so far it’s #fail. Hopefully someone here can be of help.

    1) I asked people where they bought music online. Only the people that buy music online, filled this one in (so some people skipped the question). Multiple answers possible.
    2) I asked everyone what kind of music they’re into. Multiple answers possible.

    My theory is, that people of one particular type of music (electronic mainly (like house, drum ‘n bass, etc.)), buy music at different places than people that mainly listen to other styles. I know if I take an average of the whole group, I should have a good number to test it against. It probably wouldn’t really matter if I include the electronic music listeners or not.

    Anyway, I’ve been messing around with SPSS for half an hour now and cannot figure out how to pull the data out. I know exactly what the table I want should look like… but I have no idea how to construct it.

    Any tips? Don’t mind if it’s via Access/Calc queries. Just want to get the info out.

    The hypothesis is valuable for my thesis, but not vital… so if it’s really complicated, don’t worry. I’ll graduate with or without the hypothesis 😉

  • FEEDBACK WANTED: Business Model of New Music Biz

    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?

    Music business modelClick 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! 🙂

  • To fail or not to fail… Piratenpartij 2.0

    I’m writing this post in English for two reasons. The first is that I find it easier to express myself in English, having lived abroad a lot over the last years. The second is that the eyes of pirates worldwide are upon us!

    For the last few months I’ve been the campaign manager for the Dutch Pirate Party. Even though last night’s results are disappointing in one way, we’ve accomplished something to be proud of. From being a very small group of people, we’ve formalised a political organisation, jumping all the bureaucratic hurdles along the way. We made it. With hardly no grassroots activity (except for in Brabant) and almost no funds, we’ve managed to convince thousands of voters (exact number unsure at this moment) and to reach millions of people. As a communication specialist I have to say that’s a spectacular result, even though it didn’t get us a seat in parliament.

    If you look at the below map, you can see there are pirates almost everywhere in The Netherlands!

    Via twlevo.

    Now we face a choice. To fail or not to fail. So we didn’t get seats in parliament, which isn’t easy to accept, seeing the fact that some of us sacrificed their lives for this, over the last months. What we do have is national awareness and support! We cannot let our ideas, our principles, our vision go to waste.

    What we need to do is ORGANISE. In my eyes, the most fundamental challenge in our campaign was having to cope with almost zero grassroots activism. That’s why I believe the main focus of the Pirate Party in the next months, should be on setting up local chapters that are self-organised modules in a lean mean Pirate machine. The idea of local groups is to give our formal organisation a more informal character and base. This informal character will attract a lot more people that can support the organisation in a lot of ways. These local groups will have FUN first and they’ll combine it with activism. That’s the opposite from what a lot of us have been doing in the last months: work hard first and hopefully have fun along the way.

    We cannot let our new government ignore the fact that copyrights and the patent system are up for reform. We cannot let them take away more privacy without being challenged. We need to get the local organisations growing, so that we can group together whenever it is most needed.

    We’ve worked hard. We can be proud of ourselves.
    We said we wanted to remix politics; now we’ll have to!

    For a free information society.

    Yaaarrs truly,
    Bas

    P.S. Let’s support the people of Piracy Festival (June 19, Utrecht). They still need some volunteers. See you there!

    (this post is a crosspost from the Pirate Party blog)

  • Yaarrr

    You might have noticed it’s gone a bit quiet here. That’s because I’m busy as communication manager for the Dutch Pirate Party which is aiming to get multiple seats in parliament with the June 9 election. More or less every moment of my day is spent doing things for the Pirate Party.

    Most of the regular readers know me as someone who’s quite involved in the music industry; these readers probably also know that the Pirate Party aims to drastically reform copyright (and other intellectual property laws). I believe the Pirate Party serves the needs of music creators and fans/consumers better than the current industry lobbies and with reforming laws, it will do a much better job facilitating ‘music 2.0’ and the recording industry has (see: Spotify, imeem, Pandora, Last.fm or all those other struggling music 2.0 initiatives).

    More important than that, is civil liberties. We live in an age of digitalisation; an age that has made copyrights impossible to maintain without seriously infringing on the rights of civilians and destroying the openness of the internet. We have a choice. Either we jump into the digital revolution and safeguard our liberties, or we let the big corporations convince the government to ‘industrialize’ the digital. The industrial revolution is over, it’s time for a new reality.

    To further understand why I’m involved in this worlwide movie, check out the video below and the website of the Dutch Pirate Party (in Dutch).

    Uppsala Declaration
    http://int.piratenpartei.de/Uppsala_Declaration
    Important instruction for all pirates
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUe-Ebe8dWU
    Pirate Manifesto parties at a glance
    http://int.piratenpartei.de/Pirate_Manifesto_parties_at_a_glance

    Edit – Oh yeah, and I’m also a Pirate Party candidate for parliament 😉
    http://twitter.com/Spartz

  • Happy New Year! Now, about these resolutions…

    Happy new year to everyone! Today while reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying I ran into a good poem to remind you how to deal with new year’s resolutions and figured it would make a great post to start the year off with.

    Autobiography in Five Chapters

    1) I walk down the street.
    There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
    I fall in.
    I am lost… I am hopeless.
    It isn’t my fault.
    It takes forever to find a way out.

    2) I walk down the same street.
    There is a deep hole in the sidealk.
    I pretend I don’t see it.
    I fall in again.
    I can’t believe I’m in the same place.
    But it isn’t my fault.
    It still takes a long time to get out.

    3) I walk down the same street.
    There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
    I see it is there.
    I still fall in… it’s a habit
    My eyes are open
    I know where I am
    It is     my fault
    I get out immediately.

    4) I walk down the same street.
    There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
    I walk around it.

    5) I walk down another street.

    One of my own resolutions is to blow more life into this blog, since it has been gathering digital dust for quite a while due to personal circumstances. No more though, just subscribe to the feed (I recommend using Feedly) and stay in touch!

    Happy 2010!

  • Follow Friday: blogs that keep me up to date on the new music industry

    I’m borrowing one of my favourite Twitter memes called Follow Friday, though I hardly ever participate. On Fridays, many Twitter users recommend their followers to follow interesting people that they themselves are following. It’s kind of like networking. Actually, it’s more than just ‘kind of’ like networking!

    I always find it really tough who to recommend, but I love the principle. That’s why I have decided to recommend some of the blogs I subscribe to so I stay in the know about developments in the (new) music business. Maybe you can recommend some to me too?


    Billboard.biz
    A rather traditional source of information – not too forward thinking, but has some interesting case studies every now and then.

    Digipendent
    Looks at trends in music & the digital world.

    Digital Audio Insider
    Describes itself as a blog about the economics of digital music and I think that’s quite an accurate description.

    Digital Music News
    Definitely one of the best blogs out there on this topic! So I gave it some sweet italic loving!

    Digital Noise
    A CNET blog about music and technology. Hightlights lots of interesting innovative initiatives in the digital music business.

    FileShareFreak
    A blog about filesharing, piracy, torrent sites, lawsuits and other fun stuff.

    Future of Music Coalition
    A non-profit organisation looking at the future of the music business and how artists can cope with the rapid changes.

    Hypebot
    A blog about the new music business. Hardly misses a thing. Very impressive!

    Make It In Music
    Artists have to take more and more control of the tasks record labels previously used to take care of. This blog educates them on how to do that. Also interesting for people who are simply interested in the music business, but not as an artist.

    me*dia*or
    Kind of a monitor of the music business blogs. Everything in one place here, but I prefer visiting the individual blogs / reading their RSS feeds.

    Media Futurist – Gerd Leonhard
    The blog of Gerd Leonhard, who’s a media futurist. He appears to be touring constantly, speaking at conferences about technologies and how our society could adopt them. He shares many of his presentations, slideshows and ideas on his blog. Great material! Also check out the interview I had with him about the future of music distribution.

    MIDEM(Net) Blog
    MIDEM is one of the world’s biggest music business conferences. MidemNet is its simultaneous digital music business conference. The blog is filled with interesting analyses by industry experts.

    Music Ally
    The corporate blog of this digital music business information and strategy company.

    Music Business and Trend Mongering
    A blog about the great ideas and trends in the new music business.

    Music Think Tank
    Awesome blog about what works and doesn’t work (and why!) in the music industry. Highly recommended.

    MusicBizGuy Speaks
    A music business veteran’s view on the new music business. Very impressive track record and highly insightful articles.

    Net, Blogs and Rock’n’Roll
    A blog about the digital discovery of music and entertainment.

    New Music Strategies
    The name more or less speaks for itself. Sporadic posts, but high quality guaranteed.

    P2P Blog
    Lots of news about innovation in peer to peer technology.

    p2pnet
    About filesharing, peer-to-peer technology, RIAA madness, and innovation in the sharing of digital information.

    Remix Theory
    A blog about remix culture.

    Rocketsurgeon’s Music 2.0 Directory
    A listing of all the tools and services participating in the ‘new media revolution’. Very cool.

    RouteNote’s Blog
    RouteNote’s a company specializing in the distribution of artists’ music to (digital) music stores. Their blog offers a great look into the world of digital music distribution.

    Techdirt
    About innovations in technology and how this affects government policy and the economy around us. Probably my favourite blog of this whole list.

    The Daily Swarm
    A bit like me*dia*or, in the sense that it aggregates content from other places and links back to the full articles. Sometimes they catch something I had missed, so I try to keep up with them as much as I can.

    The Forrester Blog for Consumer Strategy Professionals
    Not necessarily about the music business, but definitely gives great insight into marketplaces that are changing because of technology. These guys are really on top of the trends and give valuable insights into them.

    TorrentFreak
    Another favourite blog. They ask some very tough questions to the music business about how they deal with filesharing. Also has a lot of news about torrent trackers, politics, what’s hot in the filesharing networks, and much much more.

    TuneCorner
    TuneCore also specializes in distributing signed artists’ music to digital music stores. On their blog, great tips about music and technology, insights into the new music business, and how to use the web to your advantage.

    Wired | Music
    Wired is a technology news website and has a music section too. Great read! They have a very talented staff.

    ZeroPaid
    Another (good) blog about filesharing.

    Whenever I spot a great article worth reading in one of these (and other) sources, I share them via Google Reader, so have a look at my shared items and subscribe to them!

    What are blogs you would recommend? Did I miss any good ones?

  • Reception of my paper about online promotion of new music

    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.

    From the ASCAP newsletter

    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.

Related Posts Widget for Blogs by LinkWithin