Gadget Show Live 2012 – TLAudio Mi-Tube
Tube amplifier with a bluetooth connection for mobile music hookup.
Pensado’s Place : #48 – Bret “Epic” Mazur
On the 48th episode of Pensado’s Place. Dave and Herb are joined by Musician, Producer, and Songwriter, Bret Mazur.
Ableton Live Tutorial – Re-Sampling to Create Unique Glitch FX
Watch as Jonny Miller (Sonarpilot Audio) demonstrates how to create your own unique glitch FX with re-sampling using Ableton Live’s Vinyl Distortion device.
Learn Keyboards & Music Creation Lesson
In this first lesson he covers a small essential part of music theory so people can carry it onto the keyboard. It’s just about some chords. The C chord, F chord and G chord. Then moves over to the keyboard and teach aspects of these chords and how they are made, how they can be clarified and applied to the electronic functions of the keyboard. (He is use a Clavinova CVP303 digital piano and a Yamaha PSR 202 and a Casio keylighting keyboard)
Here’s Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years
We think of Google and Facebook as Web gorillas. They’ll be around forever. Yet, with the rate that the tech world is moving these days, there are good reasons to think both might be gone completely in 5 – 8 years. Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone. And there’s some academic theory to back up that view, along with casual observations from recent history.
When I was a PhD student 15 years ago, I studied with Don Hambrick who is a scholar known for a career showing the effects of management teams and directors (for good and for ill) on their organizations’ strategies and performance. One of the central tenets of this school of thought on organizations is that senior teams and directors have an outsized influence on organizational outcomes. What’s more, their backgrounds (including education and career paths) have a big effect on how they see the world, various competitive situations and the choices they make.
There’s another school of thought which takes the opposite view called population ecology or organizational ecology which put forward that managers don’t really matter all that much. This view grew out of sociologists who’d taken to study organizations in the 1970s. They assert that organizational outcomes have much more to do with industry effects than who the CEO is and the choices he or she makes. They study birth and death rates of populations of organizations, as well as the effects of age, competition and resources in the surrounding environment on an organization’s birth and death rate. Most of these organizational ecology scholars come out of the University of California at Berkeley.
Read the rest after the jump! -forbes.com
As a graduate student, I didn’t have much time for this ecology line of thinking. I believed in the power of the individual executive to overcome all challenges in the external environment. We can always point to dynamic CEOs as case studies, even though the sociologists would say those are the equivalent of celebrating the smarts of lottery winners.
As I age and watch what’s happening in the world of technology and mobile, I can’t stop thinking of these ecologists though.
More and more in tech, it seems that your long-term viability as a company is dependent on when you were born.
Think of the differences between generations and when we talk about how the Baby Boomers behave differently from Gen X’ers and additional differences with the Millennials. Each generation is perceived to see the world in a very unique way that translates into their buying decisions and countless other habits.
In the tech world, we’ve really had 3 generations:
- Web 1.0 (companies founded from 1994 – 2001, including Netscape, Yahoo! (YHOO), AOL (AOL), Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY)),
- Web 2.0 or Social (companies founded from 2002 – 2009, including Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD), and Groupon(GRPN)),
- and now Mobile (from 2010 – present, including Instagram).
With each succeeding generation in tech, it seems the prior generation can’t quite wrap its head around the subtle changes that the next generation brings. Web 1.0 companies did a great job of aggregating data and presenting it in an easy to digest portal fashion. Google did a good job organizing the chaos of the Web better than AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and all the other search engines that preceded it. Amazon did a great job of centralizing the chaos of e-commerce shopping and putting all you needed in one place.
When Web 2.0 companies began to emerge, they seemed to gravitate to the importance of social connections. MySpace built a network of people with a passion for music initially. Facebook got college students. LinkedIn got the white collar professionals. Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon showed how users could generate content themselves and make the overall community more valuable.
Yet, Web 1.0 companies never really seemed to be able to grasp the importance of building a social community and tapping into the backgrounds of those users. Even when it seems painfully obvious to everyone, there just doesn’t seem to be the capacity of these older companies to shift to a new paradigm. Why has Amazon done so little in social? And Google? Even as they pour billions at the problem, their primary business model which made them successful in the first place seems to override their expansion into some new way of thinking.
Social companies born since 2010 have a very different view of the world. These companies – and Instagram is the most topical example at the moment – view the mobile smartphone as the primary (and oftentimes exclusive) platform for their application. They don’t even think of launching via a web site. They assume, over time, people will use their mobile applications almost entirely instead of websites.
We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.
Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies still seem unsure how to adapt to this new paradigm. Facebook is the triumphant winner of social companies. It will go public in a few weeks and probably hit $140 billion in market capitalization. Yet, it loses money in mobile and has rather simple iPhone and iPad versions of its desktop experience. It is just trying to figure out how to make money on the web – as it only had $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011 and its revenues actually decelerated in Q1 of this year relative to Q4 of last year. It has no idea how it will make money in mobile.
The failed history of Web 1.0 companies adapting to the world of social suggests that Facebook will be as woeful at adapting to social as Google has been with its “ghost town” Google+ initiative last year.
The organizational ecologists talked about the “liability of obsolescence” which is a growing mismatch between an organization’s inherent product strategy and its operating environment over time. This probably is a good explanation for what we’re seeing in the tech world today.
Are companies like Google, Amazon, and Yahoo! obsolete? They’re still growing. They still have enormous audiences. They also have very talented managers.
But with each new paradigm shift (first to social, now to mobile, and next to whatever else), the older generations get increasingly out of touch and likely closer to their significant decline. What’s more, the tech world in which we live in seems to be speeding up. Tim Cook had an interesting line about the velocity of change in his earnings call last week:
through the last quarter, I should say, which is just 2 years after we shipped the initial iPad, we’ve sold 67 million. And to put that in some context, it took us 24 years to sell that many Macs and 5 years for that many iPods and over 3 years for that many iPhones. And we were extremely happy with the trajectory on all of those products. And so I think iPad, it’s a profound product.
Yahoo is already a shell of its 2000 self. There is increasing chatter (including from me) about how Google’s facing a painful multiple contraction, once its desktop search business (still accounting for the vast majority of its revenues and profits) starts to fall off a cliff as users dramatically drop traditional search for new ways of getting information they want in a mobile world. Is Amazon destined to decline? There seem to be no signs of it today and people will still need to buy stuff in a mobile world, but the new mobile platform will certainly open the possibilities for new entrants that Amazon can’t even imagine today.
Facebook is also probably facing a tough road ahead as this shift to mobile happens. As Hamish McKenzie said last week, “I suspect that Facebook will try to address that issue [of the shift to mobile] by breaking up its various features into separate apps or HTML5 sites: one for messaging, one for the news feed, one for photos, and, perhaps, one for an address book. But that fragments the core product, probably to its detriment.”
Considering how long Facebook dragged its feet to get into mobile in the first place, the data suggests they will be exactly as slow to change as Google was to social. Does the Instagram acquisition change that? Not really, in my view. It shows they’re really fearful of being displaced by a mobile upstart. However, why would bolting on a mobile app to a Web 2.0 platform (and a very good one at that) change any of the underlying dynamics we’re discussing here? I doubt it.
What about Apple? Where does it fit in to this classification scheme?
Apple is really a hardware company, so it’s difficult to put it into a bucket related to web apps. It certainly seemed very Web 1.0 with its Ping social application. Yet it’s succeeded in mobile from making the best hardware and software ecosystem for apps to proliferate on. In some ways, as long as it has a successful iOS platform, it doesn’t care which Web 1.0, 2.0 and mobile companies fail or succeed on top of it. Maybe that’s why so many non-mobile companies seem to want to emulate Apple. Google bought Motorola Mobility (MMI) to get into the hardware business. Facebook and Baidu (BIDU) are rumored to be launching their own mobile OS.
The bottom line is that the next 5 – 8 years could be incredibly dynamic. It’s possible that both Google and Facebook could be shells of their current selves – or gone entirely.
They will have all the money in the world to try and adapt to the shift to mobile but history suggests they won’t be able to successfully do it. I often hear Google bulls point to the market share of Android or Eric Schmidt’s hypothesis that Google could one day charge all Android subscribers $10 a month for value-added services as proof of future profits. Yet, where are all the great social success stories by Web 1.0 companies? I imagine we’ll see as many great examples of social companies jumping horses mid-race to become great mobile companies.
It’s a lot easier to start asking Siri for information instead of typing search terms into a box compared to thousands of enterprises ceasing to upgrade to the next version of Windows. Google’s 76% market share. Facebook’s 900 million monthly users. They just aren’t as sticky as they seem.
And does anyone think the pace of change is going to increase in the next 5 years versus the last? That we’re going to see fewer innovations, fewer start-ups trying more stuff on cheaper and more powerful processing power? In all likelihood, we could have an entirely new way of gathering information and interacting with ads in a new mobile world than what we’re currently used to today.
The Googles and Facebooks of tomorrow might not even exist today. And several Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies might be completely wiped off the map by then.
Fortunes will be made by those who adapt to and invest in this complete greenfield.
Those who own the future are going to be the ones who create it. It’s all up for grabs. Web monopolies are not as sticky as the monopolies of old.
Bill Miller On Marketing with Respect for the Artist
Bill Miller, a Native American singer and songwriter, gives his thoughts on marketing an artist. Miller explains the issues he has with the marketing process, such as individuals in the industry who don’t have a heart for the musician or attempt to change the artist to fit into a mold. Miller has worked with artists like Tori Amos and Pearl Jam in the past and he has strong beliefs about compassion in working relationships.
The Cola Wars: How Pepsi and Coke Are Battling In the Music Space
Check out an excerpt of the article below. Read the entire thing here.
The dueling global campaigns are just the latest chapter in Coke and Pepsi’s decades-old rivalry, which has included numerous failed flavors (New Coke and Crystal Clear Pepsi, anyone?), loyalty programs (the now-defunct Pepsi Stuff and still-active My Coke Rewards), singing-competition series (“American Idol” for Coke, “The X Factor” for Pepsi) and, most recently in the States, action sports (Coke’s Mountain Dew challenger, Vault, was discontinued in 2011). Coke’s use of music as a branding tool goes back to 1899, and though Pepsi’s music strategy didn’t kick in until the 1950s, by the ’60s more than 150 original Coke jingles performed by the likes of the Who, the Supremes and Aretha Franklin wrestled for airtime with Pepsi songs from the Four Tops, Martha & the Vandellas and Jackie DeShannon (see story, page 23). The two companies have battled for supremacy in the pop music space just as they’ve battled on supermarket shelves, spending big as they do so. PepsiCo and Coca-Cola are the most powerful presences in U.S. sponsorships, spending $330 million and $240 million, respectively, on entertainment and sports programs across all its brands, according to research firm IEG.
-allindstrom.com
Analogue Workshop 1 Distortion and Feedback review
http://soundsandgear.com checking out a new library from Timespace and Ian Boddy from the Analogue Workshop series. This one is focused on Distortion and Feedback. It’s a custom Kontakt interface ready to play and tweak all sorts of sounds and noises created from analog modular synthesizers using distortion and feedback routing.
How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes
Apple, the world’s most profitable technology company, doesn’t design iPhones here. It doesn’t run AppleCare customer service from this city. And it doesn’t manufacture MacBooks or iPads anywhere nearby.
Yet, with a handful of employees in a small office here in Reno, Apple has done something central to its corporate strategy: it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in California and 20 other states.
Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains.
California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero.
Setting up an office in Reno is just one of many legal methods Apple uses to reduce its worldwide tax bill by billions of dollars each year. As it has in Nevada, Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands — some little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office — that help cut the taxes it pays around the world.
Almost every major corporation tries to minimize its taxes, of course. For Apple, the savings are especially alluring because the company’s profits are so high. Wall Street analysts predict Apple could earn up to $45.6 billion in its current fiscal year — which would be a record for any American business.
Apple serves as a window on how technology giants have taken advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill suited to today’s digital economy. Some profits at companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft derive not from physical goods but from royalties on intellectual property, like the patents on software that makes devices work. Other times, the products themselves are digital, like downloaded songs. It is much easier for businesses with royalties and digital products to move profits to low-tax countries than it is, say, for grocery stores or automakers. A downloaded application, unlike a car, can be sold from anywhere.
The growing digital economy presents a conundrum for lawmakers overseeing corporate taxation: although technology is now one of the nation’s largest and most valued industries, many tech companies are among the least taxed, according to government and corporate data. Over the last two years, the 71 technology companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index — including Apple, Google, Yahoo and Dell — reported paying worldwide cash taxes at a rate that, on average, was a third less than other S.& P. companies’. (Cash taxes may include payments for multiple years.)
Even among tech companies, Apple’s rates are low. And while the company has remade industries, ignited economic growth and delighted customers, it has also devised corporate strategies that take advantage of gaps in the tax code, according to former executives who helped create those strategies.
Apple, for instance, was among the first tech companies to designate overseas salespeople in high-tax countries in a manner that allowed them to sell on behalf of low-tax subsidiaries on other continents, sidestepping income taxes, according to former executives. Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” which reduces taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands and then to the Caribbean. Today, that tactic is used by hundreds of other corporations — some of which directly imitated Apple’s methods, say accountants at those companies.
Without such tactics, Apple’s federal tax bill in the United States most likely would have been $2.4 billion higher last year, according to a recent study by a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan. As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent. (Apple does not disclose what portion of those payments was in the United States, or what portion is assigned to previous or future years.)
By comparison, Wal-Mart last year paid worldwide cash taxes of $5.9 billion on its booked profits of $24.4 billion, a tax rate of 24 percent, which is about average for non-tech companies. For the rest of the article go here.
David Banner Speaks at Harvard University About State of Rap Music
David Banner gave a riveting speech at Harvard University during an event that acknowledged the 20th anniversary of the L.A. riots. Held at the Barker Center, Banner was the keynote speaker and panelist at “The L.A. Riots: Twenty Years Later Conference.”
Arturia MiniBrute Analog Synthesizer Keyboard Introduction
Arturia MiniBrute analog synthesizer delivers a revolutionary new 25-note keyboard that features a true analogue signal path. Arturia MiniBrute offers a host of unique features, including USB/MIDI in/out, CV control and LFO’s that sync to its Arpeggiator. MiniBrute sets a new standard in both sound and design for what users can now expect from a hardware synthesizer.
DJ Khaled’s Tour Bus Goes Up In Flames
Miami rapper/producer/personality DJ Khaled was forced to cancel a concert scheduled for April 27th in Orlando, Florida, after his tour bus blew up.
Khaled tweeted photos of his tour bus, which caught fire and exploded on the side of the highway.
“I’m sry I couldn’t make it 2 grad bash it was out my control my tour bus caught on fire & blew up!” DJ Khaled tweeted. “The gd thing me & my team is ok!”
DJ Khaled actually owned the vehicle in question, having purchased it in late 2010, after paying too much to rent buses for his tours.
“I was sick of renting tour buses, because that s**t is expensive,” DJ Khaled said in an interview in late 2010. “What I did was bought me a new tour bus. We going to be on the road a lot, we going to be in them clubs a lot and we going to be in them stadiums a lot. We’re going to be everywhere. This is the way we got to travel, so I wanted to do it right.”
Luckily all occupants escaped the fire unharmed. Check out more pics after the jump!
Teairra Mari & Rico Love – Behind The Scenes of the making of “U Did Dat”
Go inside the studio with hit-producer Rico Love as he helps Teairra Mari with her song “U Did Dat”. Enjoy!
Studio Rehearsals – No More Trouble – Bob Marley
Probably the longest Bob Marley video footage you gonna see and… this is his last filmed rehersal session.
Lil Wayne Settles $20 Mil ‘Lollipop’ Lawsuit
Lil Wayne has finally struck a truce with a bitter ex-producer over the Grammy Award-winning “Lollipop” and other songs — settling the producer’s $20 million lawsuit out of court.
TMZ broke the story … producer Darius Harrison — aka Deezle — sued Weezy over the album “Tha Carter III,” claiming he produced several songs on the record, including “Lollipop,” but was never paid for his work.
According to Darius, the album grossed over $70 million — and he wanted $20 million to call it even.
Wayne initially shot him down — claiming Darius had no grounds to sue — but the two parties recently reached a confidential agreement, finally settling the case.
The case has since been dismissed. -tmz.com
Rodney Jerkins on Showbiz Tonight
Rodney Jerkins special edition episode on Showbiz Tonight explaining the lifestyle of the super producer.
Big Fish Audio – AcousticSamples Wurlie review
Sounds and Gear checking out a new EP library from Acousticsamples called Wurlie, based on a 206A student model Wurlitzer EP. Runs in UVI workstation, Mach Five 3, and Motu BPM.
Logic Tutorial – Creating a track using scripts in Native Instruments
As featured in the Point Blank Sound Design Course Danny J Lewis (Enzyme Black, Defected) shows you how to make use of the featues in Kontakt to take your compositions to the next level.
Messe12 Studio Logic Sledge Polysynth
Powered by Waldorf Synth engine – a DSP polysynth.
Brad O’Donnell What an A & R Representative Does
Brad O’Donnell, Vice President of A&R for EMI CMG Label Group, talks about what his job as an A&R rep encompasses.
Steinberg Cubase 6.5 Recording Software New Synths
Steinberg Cubase 6.5 replaces the hugely successful Cubase 6 and delivers the latest version of Steinberg’s flagship DAW platform. Steinberg Cubase 6.5 pushes the boundaries of what is possible with computer based recording software.
ASAP Rocky Gives Up And Comers Advice
Via HHDX:
In a recent interview with DJ Skee, A$AP Rocky discussed a slew of subjects, including the A$AP Mob’s upcoming project.
When asked whether his solo album would still be dropping in July, Rocky replied, “Yes, definitely. But we tryin’ to drop the [A$AP] Mob tape [in May].”
The emcee was asked what the A$AP Mob tape would sound like. “You know, like, the beginning of the Coachella performance?” asked the New York native. “That was like a quick preview of what is about to happen. I’m tellin’ you – we got ammunition. It’s not even a joke.”
A$AP Rocky also provided some advice to artists trying to get into the game.
“I just feel like…believe in what you do,” explained Rocky. “You really got to. Because if you fakin’ it, it’s gonna show eventually, and that’s the worst thing you want. That’s when people get shelved and flop, and all that other stuff.”
A$AP Rocky was also asked to list who he thought were the best current emcees. “Kendrick and Schoolboy [Q],” replied Rocky, quickly.
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