- A Chain Store Outsmarting Wal-Mart
- NXNE:Â Just Call It the Festival That Could
- Harper Flashes Cash at Gay Pride Festival
- Twitter Bends to Tehran’s Tweets
- Sex & Drugs & Cirque du Soleil
- Beeb Licence Fees Could Bolster Private Market
- Glaswegians Bubble over Boyle Stage Performance
- Digital Delivery Undermines Entertainment Business
- Crusin’ with 30,000 Radio Stations at your Finger Tips
- The Trouble with YouTube Is It’s Only Getting Worse
- ASCAP Wins Royalty Battle Against YouTube
- Hipgnosis: The Company that Revolutionized Album Artwork
- Crunching the Online Numbers
- NARM Award Recipients
WAL-MART’S WILY COMPETITOR: KKR had the luck to acquire Dollar General just as thriftiness was returning to the culture. It brought in a new CEO, Rick Dreiling, who had previously run the Duane Reade drugstore chain. Along with several new executives and KKR’s in-house retailing experts, Dreiling focused on the basics of retailing. Rather than simply pile up cheap bottles of detergents and ultracheap clothes—truth be told, only about 30% of the items it stocks retail for less than a buck—Dollar General began to think about how the firm could be more relevant to its customers. For example, even though most of Dollar General’s stores are in the South, which is hard-core Coca-Cola country, the stores had carried only Pepsi. Dreiling stocked Coke and upgraded the quality of private-label products. The new team systematically examined the items offered—about 7,500 per store—and eliminated less profitable ones. Essentially, the team tried to remodel the bargain basement into a condensed version of Wal-Mart—tightly run, more convenient, less overwhelming.
It’s working. More customers are coming to Dollar General, and they’re visiting more frequently and spending more money. After rising 9% in fiscal 2008, same-store sales grew by 13.3 percent in the first quarter, better than smaller rivals or Wal-Mart. Most significantly, profits aren’t being driven by heavy discounts. In the most recent quarter, gross profits were 30.8% of sales, compared with 25.8% in fiscal 2006. And the chain is expanding rapidly. This year, it plans to open 450 new stores, creating 4,000 jobs. Slate
NXNE: Just call it the little festival that could. That’s how Andy McLean, co-founder and managing director of Toronto’s North by Northeast Music & Film Festival and Conference (NXNE), likens this annual indie event now considered one of the best in the world. Five hundred bands from North America and Europe, 30 films, 50 venues in Toronto’s club district…NXNE’s vibrant, all-music strategy pulled in an estimated 70,000 fans, artists, industry pro and volunteers in 2008. The projections for 2009′s festival (June 17-21) rival that figure.
“Ever since we launched NXNE in 1994 we’ve had one mission: Give Canada’s independent musicians a platform. That’s our passion — for me, our performers and our 450-plus volunteers,” says McLean.
Patterned on the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, NXNE was “the right idea and the right time for Toronto,” says McLean. “Fifteen years ago there was nothing here to address the needs of the burgeoning independent music sector,” McLean told CTV.ca.
TORY PRIDE: The federal government is giving $400k to Pride Toronto organizers to make the massive festival more accessible to people with disabilities and those accessing information on the Internet. The money comes from the government’s new Marquis Tourism Events Program and will be spent on improved infrastructure and services to help make the ten-day festival more accessible. Cash will also be spent on marketing, programming and improving the event’s website.
Small Business Minister Diane Ablonczy made the announcement from the city’s Gladstone Hotel on Monday. She says increased accessibility will help draw even more people to the event, which is already the city’s second-largest summer festival next to Caribana. Pride kicks off this Friday and will span ten days and over twenty downtown blocks. It wraps up on Sunday, June 28 with a parade down Yonge Street.
TEHRAN TWEETS: A critical network upgrade BY Twitter was pushed back in order for Iranian dissidents to tweet the West, according to a message posted on the social network’s blog. “Our partners are taking a huge risk not just for Twitter but also the other services they support worldwide—we commend them for being flexible in what is essentially an inflexible situation. We chose NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services early last year specifically because of their impeccable history of reliability and global perspective. Today’s decision and actions continue to prove why NTT America is such a powerful partner for Twitter.” Twitter blog
SEX & DRUGS & CIRQUE: Guy Laliberté, the billionaire impresario whose Cirque du Soleil troupe will today celebrate its 25th birthday, has announced plans to sue the publishers of an unauthorised biography which depicts him as a bed-hopping scoundrel with an inexhaustible appetite for sex, drugs, and a rock and roll lifestyle. The threat, which sparked a circus of the media variety in Mr Laliberté’s native Canada, comes after the influential Montreal news magazine Macleans published a revelatory extract from the muck-raking new book, entitled The Fabulous Story of the Creator of the Cirque du Soleil.
It details some of the famously decadent parties that Mr Laliberté financed with the proceeds of his business empire, which currently controls 18 shows in dozens of countries, and supports almost 4,000 employees, including hundreds of the world’s most talented dancers and acrobats.
The book claims that Laliberté’s assistants invited busloads of prostitutes from his native Montreal to the parties, which were attended by the likes of Robert DeNiro and Sir Paul McCartney. Mere B-list guests were required to sign a confidentiality agreement before attending. Independent online
THE BEEB: The BBC could be made to share part of the television licence fee with commercial rivals under government plans to be announced later. The Digital Britain report will suggest ways to help companies like Channel 4 cope with the impact of the internet. It is also expected to include plans to tackle illegal file-sharing and to bring broadband to the whole country. Gordon Brown said fast internet was now “an essential service, as indispensable as electricity, gas and water”. BBC News
SUSAN SOARS: Susan Boyle received a standing ovation when she sang at the Britain’s Got Talent tour in Glasgow, a day after cancelling two concerts. Publicist Nicola Phillips said the crowd in Glasgow broke into applause halfway through her performance of Memory, from the musical Cats. She also sang I Dreamed a Dream from Les Miserables, the song that propelled her to international fame. BBC News
DIGITAL DOOM: Three pillars of the entertainment industry-music, movies and video games-are facing economic challenges due to the disruptive influences of digital distribution.
“The music industry was knocked off balance by the emergence of the MP3 in the late 1990s and has not recovered, and Hollywood’s two core businesses, box-office receipts and DVD sales/rentals, have stopped growing,” says Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Digital Entertainment Meets Social Media. “And while the sales of video game consoles and software titles remain relatively strong, the industry’s future is shifting to digital distribution and ad-supported models.”
To take music as an example, spending on CDs and other physical sound carriers dwindled to $5.8 billion in 2008, down 60% from a peak of $14.6 billion in 1999.
“In 2009, the US recording industry will mark 10 consecutive years of declining CD sales,” says Mr. Verna. eMarketer
IN-DASH INTERNET RADIO: Australian technology is powering the world’s first internet car radio, which will soon provide drivers worldwide with access to 30,000 stations including online broadcasts and AM and FM stations from around the globe. The technology was developed by Melbourne-based online radio aggregator miRoamer, which has inked a deal with one of the largest producers of car radios in the world, German-based Blaupunkt.
The technology, unveiled in prototype form at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, poses a significant threat to traditional terrestrial broadcasters such as Austereo because it opens them up to competition from tens of thousands more radio stations from around the world. Blaupunkt will produce the radios, which should soon be integrated into the latest models by car manufacturers such as Ford, Holden, Mercedes, BMW and Audi. The product will also be sold separately for those who want to install it in their cars. WA Today
YOUTUBE BLUES: I think that the real problem is that YouTube is taking all the stuff that’s good that they can monetize, and they’ve already monetized that stuff. If you look at the way in which content is growing on YouTube, the user-generated novelty content and the copyright-infringement stuff is growing much faster than the content they can monetize. So whereas, with most businesses you’d say, well, over time it gets better, I think YouTube has a business where over time it continues to get worse, because the proportion of content you can’t monetize continues to outstrip the portion of content that you can.” Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne in Advertising Age
MORE YOUTUBE BLUES: You may remember last year around this time, a district court set a totally arbitrary royalty fee that AOL, Yahoo and RealNetworks had to pay ASCAP for music streamed over their services. Reading through the details of the decision was immensely troubling, because it seemed to calculate the amounts on a somewhat meaningless formula based on taking a percentage of revenue from the companies that had absolutely nothing to do with music itself. Basically, it looked at almost any revenue that somehow sorta kinda touched on music (including search) and included that as part of the calculation process. Recently, ASCAP and Google went through a similar case in front of the same district court to determine just how much Google has to pay ASCAP for all the music streamed on YouTube. To be honest, I’m still not sure why it makes sense that Google has to pay anything for this, but that’s one of the oddities of modern copyright law.
While the decision hasn’t received much press attention, last week, the court ordered Google to pay $1.6 million to ASCAP (thanks to Eric Goldman for sending me the decision). The court seemed to take a “split the difference” approach, as ASCAP had asked for $12 million for all music streamed between 2005 and the end of 2008 (and another $7 million for 2009). YouTube, in response, had suggested $79,500 for 2005 through the end of 2008 and then $20,000 per quarter ongoing. The court rejected both proposals, and dinged both companies for weakly supporting their positions, or being somewhat misleading in their assertions. Techdirt
A HISTORY OF HIPGNOSIS: Let’s explore a particularly innovative British art design company that specialized in creating instantly recognizable album covers- Hipgnosis. This creative group has made album covers for some of rock’s dignitaries, including Pink Floyd, Genesis, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Yes and the Scorpions, just to name a few.
Hipgnosis primarily consisted of artists Storm Thorgerson, Aubrey Powell and later on, Peter Christopherson. In 1968, Thorgerson and Powell were asked to design an album cover for Pink Floyd’s second album called A Saucerful Of Secrets. They completed that project and soon commissioned additional work from EMI, which included photos and album covers for Free, Toe Fat and the Gods.
Being art and film students, the pair was able to utilize the darkroom at the Royal College of Art, but after they graduated, they had to set up their own facilities and in early 1970 they rented a space and built their famous studio.
Their unique company name came from graffiti found on the door to their apartment. They liked the word because it sounded like hypnosis and they combined two somewhat contradictory terms, “hip” for new and cool and “gnosis,” which related to ancient learning.
Hipgnosis got their real big break in 1973 when they were hired to do the cover for another Pink Floyd album, Dark Side Of The Moon, which is one of the most recognized album covers in the world. After the success with the Floyd cover, they were in high demand and soon took on jobs for Led Zeppelin, Genesis, UFO, Black Sabbath, Peter Gabriel and The Alan Parsons Project, to name a few. JustPressPlay
CRUNCHING NUMBERS ONLINE: Facebook surpassed News Corp.’s MySpace in U.S. Web traffic for the first time ever in the month of May, TechCrunch reported, citing data from Internet audience measurement firm comScore. Facebook counted 70.278 million unique visitors last month, compared to MySpace’s 70.255 million.
NARM AWARD RECIPIENTS: The National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) announced the recipients of its industry awards at the Awards Dinner Finale of its 2009 Convention at the San Diego Marriott on June 10.
The awards included the newly implemented NARM Outstanding Achievement Awards, as well as the inaugural NARM Independent Spirit Award and the Outstanding Achievement Award Celebrating a Lifetime of Musical Collaboration. These are in addition to the NARMÂ Chairman’s Award for Sustained Creative Achievement, which is given to a musical act; the NARM Presidential Award for Sustained Executive Achievement, which is given to an industry leader; and the Harry Chapin Memorial Humanitarian Award, given to an artist or industry member for charitable and philanthropic endeavors.
NARM Chairman’s Award for Sustained Creative Achievement
-Daryl Hall & John Oates
NARM President’s Award for Sustained Executive Achievement
-Robert “Bob” Higgins, Chairman & CEO of Trans World Entertainment
Harry Chapin Memorial Humanitarian Award
-Norman Lear, television producer, writer and philanthropist, and co-founder and owner of Concord Music Group
NARM Independent Spirit Award
-Don VanCleave, Founder and former President of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores
NARM Outstanding Achievement Award Celebrating a Lifetime of Musical Collaboration
-Nick Ashford & Valerie Simpson
NARM Outstanding Achievement Community Award
-Hopeless Records
-Rhino Entertainment
NARM Outstanding Achievement “Green” Award
-WEA Corp.
NARM Outstanding Achievement Packaging Award
-Fueled By Ramen for Panic at the Disco’s “Pretty.Odd.” vinyl/CD/DVD deluxe set
-Universal Music Enterprises for its “Motown: The Complete #1′s” box set
NARM Outstanding Achievement Collaboration Award
-EMI Music Marketing & Best Buy, for its Coldplay marketing initiatives
-Universal Music Group Distribution & Cricket Communications, for its mobile music
initiatives
NARM Outstanding Achievement Marketing Award
-Big Machine, for its campaign supporting the release of the Taylor Swift “Fearless”
album
-Earshot, for its Heavy Metal marketing campaign
-J&R Music World, for its New York-citywide ad campaign
-Universal Music Enterprises, for its Motown 50th Anniversary campaign
NARM Outstanding Achievement Business Innovation Award
-Atlantic Records, for its Fanbase online music site
-iTunes, for its iTunes Pass initiative for Depeche Mode
-Sony Music Entertainment, for its iPhone artist applications
-Topspin Media, for its direct-to-fan marketing, management and distribution platform.
