MaxxoMedia Digital Media and Entertainment Trends

Authored by Guy Kawasaki This piece was originally published on Guy’s blog How to Change the World Guy’s bio can be viewed here.

Avenue A Razorfish released the 2008 Digital Outlook Report yesterday. The purpose of the report is to help Avenue A’s clients understand consumer behavior in the digital space. In the report experts cover topics such as media spending, mobile web usage, social influence marketing, the state of search, and behavior targeting. Here are some tidbits from the report:

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

Reselling tickets, once viewed as illegal and a rip-off of consumers, is now being legitimized. Over the past few months there have been a number of large acquisitions of “ticket resellers” made by leading e-commerce companies in an effort to take advantage of this lucrative secondary ticket market. eBay purchased Stubhub for $365 million; last month Ticketmaster purchased TicketsNow for $265 million. Many of the tickets that are re-sold on these secondary marketplaces are initially purchased from the Ticketmasters of the world.

The new combined business model aims to cut in the venue owners and promoters. Ticketmaster President and Chief Executive Sean Moriarty said, “Clients who five years ago were not willing to allow a ticket to be resold now want a piece of it.”

The size of the secondary ticket market is hard to judge, but estimates range from $2.5 billion to $5 billion a year in the U.S. So it’s no surprise that new companies are popping up looking to enhance the experience and take a slice of the pie.

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

Not long ago, people had few choices for finding new music. These included listening to the radio, hanging out in their friend’s bedroom listening to their collection, or subscribing to a music magazine. All three were really limiting.

Radio limited the music they played to the hits; you were limited by the number of your friends’ record collections, which were limited by their budget … and the same with magazine subscriptions.

Will.i.am interviewed by Tamara Coniff from Billboard Magazine at the 3GSM Conference in Barcelona Spain.

The mobile industry, not the record business, will create the next wave of music superstars, according to Black Eyed Peas founder Will.i.am.

Speaking at Mobile Backstage, a GSMA/Nielsen production for the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, powered by Billboard and the Hollywood Reporter, the artist said the record industry was now “like a grandmother — and the artists of tomorrow need to do deals with her granddaughters. It’s the mobile industry that will produce the Michael Jacksons and Madonnas of tomorrow.”

From Springwise

Customised content has long been held up as the Holy Grail of digital publishing, and idiomag is making that promise a reality with a personalised, daily digital magazine about music that is based entirely on members’ individual interests.

Launched just over a year ago, UK-based idiomag uses a system of weighted tagging to customise both content and advertising to readers’ personal musical tastes. Readers initially name their favourite music topics and weight the relative importance of each of them in the content they will view. idiomag then uses that information to serve articles, tracks, videos and other multimedia content in a high-quality, audio-visual virtual magazine format that readers can enjoy in page-by-page fashion. idiomag has content partnerships with publications including Billboard, 365mag and Hip Hop Nation as well as popular blogs such as Aurgasm and BlogCritics. It has also built up a large team of its own journalists across the UK. As readers rate the appeal of the content they view, idiomag intelligently adapts subsequent issues to reflect those changing preferences.

Not insignificantly, advertisers benefit from idiomag’s personalisation system as well, with the ability to serve nonintrusive, full-screen and rich-media advertisements that closely match readers’ interests. A newly incorporated social element, meanwhile, uses Facebook integration to let readers get their idiomag within the social networking site, view their friends’ magazines and capture articles they like, submit articles, and view trends and favourites among the other idiomag readers on the site. idiomag also offers widgets to incorporate the magazine on other social networks, blogs or home pages. Subscriptions to idiomag are free for readers; advertisers are charged on a CPM basis, and revenue is shared with content providers based on their content’s popularity.

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

18 months ago two friends had a conversation about how technology has been changing the landscape of the music business.They agreed that companies like Pandora, Amazon and iTunes were changing how people experienced artist recordings. But, they were concerned that a very important part of the music business was not being addressed – the live performance. They talked about how no one was really focusing on this aspect of the business. So it was decided they would.

What makes this conversation interesting is that it took place between Danny Socolof, a 25 year veteran of the music industry and Jeff Henshaw, a founding member of Microsoft’s XBOX team.

Socolof is a pioneer in pairing brands and music with The Who, Led Zeppelin and well known brands like Pepsi and Apple’s iTunes. He has been responsible for some of the most memorable live performances in the past quarter century including Woodstock ’98. Henshaw was with Microsoft for 18 years and last lead efforts to bring new entertainment experiences to the XBOX.

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

To TXT or not to TXT We all know cell phone text messaging is a great way to quickly connect with someone. Everywhere we look people are hunched over their phones, tapping on the keys feverishly. But what about texting while driving?

I know you would never do it .. .but even though the overwhelming majority of adults think that driving while texting is dangerous, two in three adults (66%) who drive a car and have used text messaging say they read text messages or e-mails while driving — and 57% of them even admitted to sending text messages or e-mails from behind the wheel. On January 1st, the State of Washington was the first state in the nation to enact a new law that prohibits text messaging while driving and more states are not far behind.

So what is the technologically well-connected person to do? How can you communicate safely on the go? Enter instant voice-messaging for your mobile phone from San Francisco based Pinger. The service helps you keep your eyes on the road and minimize distractions while you drive. Combined with a hands-free headset, Pinger’s instant voice messaging service is a safer way for drivers to stay in touch from the road.