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Re: Afternoon Napster



> > Get rid of the current record companies and a new structure will form up 
>to provide the same services.
>
>I have been thinking about that.  The Who, of course, aren't stupid but 
>they're not Business School grads either.  If you were going to set up to 
>sell your own material online, you're going to need to form an apparatus 
>that works like a mini record company to do it, find out how to most 
>effectively spend your publicity money, etc.  And where do you find these 
>people?  Heaven knows there's probably a ton of people, including many, 
>many crooked ones, itching to volunteer for that job.

Looks like they're fairly agile at it so far, without any visible crashes.  
There was the little brush with Pixelon, and there's been some discussion of 
Roger's positive statements about the company, which may have been part of 
the deal or maybe a paid endorsement.  Just that brief statement didn't do 
anything to hurt their reputation, but it might serve as a warning to 
investigate any companies before making major committments.

What looks good about what TED have done so far is that they've apparently 
used their existing management structure to handle things, rather than 
hiring some superduper newfangled internet marketing company to do it for 
them.  They seem to be trying things out on a small scale first and then 
going with companies that have something of a track record.

It looks like Pete handled the production and marketing of Avatar and 
Lifehouse himself through Eelpie.  Worked great as a trial project.  He 
already has the know-how and the connections to do that, but maybe it turned 
out to be too much work for the staff, so they went with Musicmaker.com for 
BTTB, a project where maybe they expected to have a larger response.  Roger 
already had experience with Musicmaker.com, as they've had his Celebration 
cd tracks up for sale for a couple or three years.

Looks like a lot of the publicity has gone through the usual channels like 
radio stations and VH1 and Rolling Stone and the tour through SFX's 
publicity machine.  I don't know if it's Trinifold or TED that are watching 
for the opportunities, but I've been fairly impressed with how fast they 
respond to things.  It may be TED, especially Pete, who seems to surf a lot 
and leave little tracks behind him.  Roger may complain about the internet, 
but he's obviously fine with using it as a marketing tool--I think we've 
seen more Roger interviews on line than Pete interviews so far.  Folks say 
John has been online longer than the others, but for some reason we don't 
see much of him.  Too quiet, I guess.  ;)


keets
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