- Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo and then backed out (with an unclear future strategy about this).
- NIN and about 50 top artists decided to follow Radiohead’s initiative by giving away music over the web
- Pirate Bay got sued about a gazillion times
- Twitter went to the roof and most of the people I know are starting to use it (or at least talk about it)
- GTAIV sold 6 million copies in it’s first week
- The new album for Réplica is FINALLY on iTunes

…and a lot of great stuff I would have loved to share. Unfortunately I didn’t, so instead of complaining or apologizing, I will talk about what’s ahead.

We are working hard on a new web design for Dixo. No rush about it, since I’m taking all the time possible to do some necessary research, so expect big changes and great improves. This takes pretty much all my time during work days.

Also, my friend Oscar Yasser and I decided to make a podcast together. Some of you have asked about this, so we are expecting to release the first one a week from today. It’s going to be called “Nerdcore”, so I guess you can do the math about it, but expect great surprises too.

For those who don’t know Oscar, he is the one of the guys to thank for the healthy video game industry we live in Mexico today. More @ his website.

So, pointing the obvious it’s time to take care of this blog and work harder. Since I needed some inspiration for this, I decided to give the blog a new look. Don’t forget to check it out! if you are subscribed. See you soon.

Well, it’s true that I haven’t been able to post for a while. To be truthful, I’ve been busy with video games, downloading, traveling a bit and very important stuff like that.

It’s funny how my mind works sometimes, but I have this draft saved since november in which I tried to explain our (Replica’s) experience with IODA, but this was meant to come out as soon as the new record hit the stores, but unfortunately this hasn’t happened yet, but still, I was waiting for it to happen until I posted anything else. Because you know… it was like the big event.

IODA is a very interesting concept we’ve been working with. I call it the “modern music distributor”. They call themselves “the industry-leading digital distribution company for the global independent music community“.

Since october we contacted Humberto Carmona (awesome dude), and he liked very much our material, so we gave a list of online stores we wanted to be in, which included iTunes, Amazon, Beatport and Bleep, among others. I consider myself a BIG fan of Bleep, and when Humberto told us that Bleep actually selects the material they sell I thought it was going to be a long shot, but they actually approved it and it was supposed to come out around december, but we were warned about usual delay issues so I decided today to break the silence a bit about it and to tell ya’ll the great experience we had with IODA.

So far our fist ep is already on sale on Amazon, iTunes and others (as I pointed earlier) and we couldn’t be happier.

Not because of a possible revenue share, but for the exposure. And I’m very confident that when we hit Bleep it would definitely mean a lot. It’s the right music at the right place. A place where Djs research for music do that they can play it on clubs or radio stations. And this goes as well for Beatport. So, pointing the obvious, we’re very happy with IODA, hopefully we’ll be able to work some more with them. If you have a band you should try it, I totally recommend it.

Finally, I know how stupid is to make New Years resolutions. I do believe that every single day is a great moment to change your life, but a New Year has a taste of conquer, and I always want to conquer the next year, so it’s a great excuse to put down some rules around and I’ll do my best to post as often as possible.

Pointing the obvious… happy new year.

This of course is something we wanted just to “be there” and to experience the store as a band. I’m still going to give the new album for free as soon as it is ready (we decided to make some last minute changes).

Pointing the obvious I’m not encouraging to buy this album, I just wanted to share the moment

Are they missing something or what!?

I really don’t understand why they’ve decided to take this actions on October 2007. It would have made perfect sense to me a few years ago, but not now, not after everything that we’ve learned, not after artists finally deciding to quit on contracts. And this just keeps getting better and better, now the IFPI is giving this ridiculous and stupid excuses, and they’re actually behaving worse than those they’re trying to reprehend.

Don’t get me wrong for the title of this post, I don’t think that OiNK’s administrator is a pirate, but I definitely believe that the IFPI is worse than those bastards that charge for the distribution of copyrighted material. They’ve managed to hijack OiNK’s website, to put on their propaganda, and all of this without ANY real legal base. Is this an ethic behavior? Also, they are lying without any hesitation about the activities that went inside this private tracker saying that users were charged in order to get their memberships, and of course this is absolutely untrue, I was a member for over a year, and I was NEVER asked for 1 penny. And why not lie some more? They’re also saying that users were encouraged to upload pre-releases, also NOT true, and this is actually they’re strongest argument against the tracker, since OiNK was the primary source of leaks for unreleased albums, but there has been, for a long time, discussion over this because it is very likely that this leaks came from insiders from the record industries themselves.

Pointing the obvious, this is clearly a ‘last-breath’ type of action. Since P2P networks showed up I’ve been questioning myself about the future of record companies (generally speaking), and I’ve always came to the conclusion that they were not meant to disappear, but they’re actually digging dipper into they’re graves by the minute.

There are tons of examples of artists that have managed to use P2P as a beneficial method of distribution along with their record sales. There’s another ton of stories where record industries use P2P networks as ginny pigs for their releases [1]. Why would they take actions such like these?

Deeply, from the heart of a young (and confused) man: Please stop wasting your time and start delivering some new business models for the music biz, stop messing around. We are not afraid of your “scary messages”. Please IFPI, quit the crap!

Now, OiNK’s administrator has been released from custody after a very obvious attempt to scare P2P users, and attracting media’s attention. Here’s a video from BBC covering the arrest:

To put the cherry on the top, Jeremy Banks from the IFPI itself declared that “This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure”. Jeremy… TFSU!!!

Links: TorrentFreak [2] [3]

The excuse?

“OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of pre-release music online. This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure. This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not own the rights to and posted it online”

Which of course it’s not under discussion that this guys have it all wrong, but somehow it seems that they’re gonna make everything they can to give this case a hard time. I believe that OiNK’s administrator can protect himself from much of the accusations because of the nature of this technology as we all know, but somehow, authorities are accusing that this website was “encouraging people to upload copyrighted material”, which of course is stupid, but hey… They’re doing it.

A part of me has died today, I hope that OiNK survives this along with The PirateBay, Demonoid and Suprnova, all of them trackers that were brought up to the authorities in the last year or two.

More news and details found here. Via GigWise. Image: TorrentFreak

Update: Official press release (Damn you!)

Update 2: OiNK’s home page displays this advice: “A criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site’s users”

What really interests me is that years ago the only way to tell if an artist was popular was record sales, but today there are lots of people that use P2P networks as an “on-demand radio station” which, pointing the obvious, can be tracked and measured rather than the traditional radio, in which you don’t really know if someone who has the device on is really listening or cooking breakfast for the kids.

As Eduardo puts it, having an intensive research on music trends can be quite expensive, but watching the activity on P2P networks suddenly seems like a friendly idea, even though P2P is still “the enemy”. Perhaps, if record labels are so into these networks, we are close to finding a way to keep it free to users and make these companies earn some money from their contents, because its pretty darn obvious that the labels can be benefited from this new way of consuming:

In a business, this type of market foresight can be invaluable. Nearly always leading to more profits, customers feel happier and more satisfied with the products they are offered, leading to greater loyalty longer-term.

Link. Via ALT1040

Digg was actually brought to a mayor question, but a very basic one. In terms of being the creators of a new project with no previous reference of which “rules” to follow but the ones from traditional media (limited to ethics and terms of the use of content) this new “media” was to build their own. The thing with new rules is that they’re not always accepted by everyone.

A new story was published on Digg. One that became very popular quickly because it had the key-code for the HD-DVD encryption. So technically speaking, this represented no violations for Digg’s terms of use, though, they received a cease and desist letter to remove that content so they started to remove the posts. Soon enough, people started posting different news with the same code over and over till Digg’s homepage had the code all over it.

So putting it into Kevin Rose’s own words:

We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code. But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

This means that they actually complied to their users by keeping the content instead of removing it. So basically they’ve decided that complying to their new rules was more important that complying to old ones so to speak.

If something actually happens to Digg for not complying to the cease and desist letter it would only mean that maybe its not time for making new rules. Or maybe it is. Probably it will all be settled by some kind of agreement but it’s definitely not gonna be the last headache for Digg’s founders.

This is a crystal clear example of the problems that new projects encounter as to creating their new pads and rules.
I get a lot of this with Dixo, a project of mine (which I’ll be referring to continuously) that everyday encounters new problems with old media procedures. A few of them because it was built by people who have been working on radio and TV, but mostly because of the difficulty that represents to explain new media to a country that has such a massive influence from old media.

In Mexico, more than 70% of the total budget destined for marketing and publicity is strictly for radio and television. Then there’s a few percentage destined to prints (ads and magazines), and a very very small one for the internet. Most of this due to ignorance of the media agencies. Fortunately I’ve ran into some brands that are actually interested in new media and it’s reach. (I’ll be referring to them later too).

So… Sticking to our rules is really the right thing to do? Maybe it is yet to see but as Kevin puts it, “if we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying”

Everybody is doing it so:
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