In the last 24hrs, I’ve read a lot of analysis across the spectrum and heard the thoughts of friends in various segments of the music industry. Here are some of the big issues that are front of my mind.

Whither the MP3 of streaming music?

Most of the people I respect in online music have been opining for on-demand streaming music for years. So, their first reaction has echoed that of my friend Lucas: music in the cloud will now be a reality. But *how* it will become a reality matters too, and I think that’s been lost a bit in the discussion so far.

In the download world, an open format (MP3) pre-dated Apple’s entry. So, they had no choice but to support it in order to make their software and devices backwards compatible. In fact, it’s easy to forget today that the market for iTunes and the iPod was largely built around satisfying the needs of consumers of illegally acquired music (the iTunes Music Store was actually launched over 2 years after iTunes debuted). If not for that pre-existing market condition, I don’t think it’s hard to believe the iPod would only play AAC music files (Apple’s proprietary format). Remember that no one could compete with the iTunes Music Store as a legitimate storefront for online music until less than two years ago, when the labels agreed to let Amazon and others sell in MP3 format so that customers could play the songs sold by retailers other than Apple on iPods. (This in itself was an interesting saga with Jobs publicly justifying why Apple would never support someone else’s proprietary format on their software/devices and why they would never license Apple’s DRM to others. In the end, the labels’ fear of Apple’s growing control of the online music value chain was greater than their fear of piracy and they called Jobs’s bluff by actually licensing MP3 sales.)

The relevance here is that there is no MP3 equivalent for streaming music — no pre-existing open standard that consumers will require Apple to support before they buy a wifi-enabled iPod (aka iPod Touch). Just like there is no (legitimate) way to play films or tv shows not downloaded from the iTunes Store on your Apple TV, there will be no way to consume on-demand streaming music from other sources in the native player on your iPod. You will of course continue to be able to install separate third-party applications, like Pandora or Spotify, to manage and play streaming music you acquire through those services. But, that silo will continue to be incompatible with iTunes and the rest of your music library while the native player will offer you an integrated consumption experience across downloaded and streaming music. Maybe this will still be good enough for the small number of power-users who care enough to want an alternative to the Apple offering (like those of us today who install the eMusic or Amazon download manager to have a somewhat equivalent purchase alternative to the iTunes Music Store).

However the segment for whom I think the lack of an open streaming music standard is potentially most harmful is the actual artists and the growing industry of direct-to-fan enablers, including my good friends at Topspin. Direct-to-fan sales are better for the artist because they get to own the customer relationship with the people who are *their* fans to begin with (see my boy Ian explaining to Wired how important this is) and they can have more control of the offering and better margins by cutting out middle-men like Apple. Today, I can buy an album directly from Topspin artists like Get Busy Committee or Fitz & The Tantrums (two of my current faves) in MP3 format and play it in iTunes and on my iPod. How exactly are they going to sell me streaming music outside of iTunes (or a 3rd-party service)? There are products like MobileRoadie, which artists can use to create their own branded iPhone/iPod app. But, I don’t foresee consumers being willing to switch apps every time they want to hear a new artist (and forget about a streaming playlist with multiple artists).

Licenses, schmicenses!

Several commentators on the Lala deal have noted that their licenses with the labels expire in the case of an acquisition. And I hear from insiders that Apple has already had requests for streaming licenses denied by at least some labels. Here’s why neither of those things matter.

Apple is going to build a kick-ass streaming experience natively integrated into their service/software/device stack of the iTunes Music Store, iTunes, and the iPod. They are going to get the thousands of independent labels, aggregators like TuneCore who represent individual artists, and at least one or two major labels (my bet is EMI will be first) to give them streaming licenses on a critical mass of music. Then, they are going to use the iTunes Music Store to promote the shit out of both downloads and streaming (most likely bundled) from the artists for whom they have streaming licenses while at the same time freezing out promotions for any hold-outs.

This is a non-issue IMHO and every song you can buy as a download from the iTunes Music Store today will be available for streaming within a year of launch (just ask NBC how well playing chicken with Apple works).

Sustaining innovation doesn’t work.

This post is already way longer than I intended, so I’ll leave this point as more of a footnote. On-demand streaming music is the future. Everyone I respect believes it, Apple believes it, it is the logical conclusion of the path the music consumer experience has been on since Napster. And yet it is a business widely viewed as “toxic” by investors, several of whom in recent months have demonstrated they think so little of its future potential that they are willing to take steep losses on their investments to get out. What gives?

Not only were these businesses endorsed by the major labels, both iMeem and Lala actually had labels as investors (as does Spotify). The reason that on-demand streaming music is a great product but shitty business is because the license fees demanded by the labels make it impossible to make money with any kind of offering that consumers will think is reasonable. It’s somewhat counter-intuitive that a vendor who is an investor wouldn’t be willing to adjust their pricing in order to preserve the value of their investment. But Warner Records, in particular, made it clear that are happy to spend tens of millions of dollars co-opting companies they see as potential threats and running them out of business in order to prevent hundreds of millions of dollars in (perceived) cannibalization.

This is Clayton Christensen 101:

By only pursuing ‘sustaining innovations’ that perpetuate what has historically helped them succeed, companies unwittingly open the door to ‘disruptive innovations’.

In other words, by trying to take an innovation and use it only to perpetuate and/or protect legacy business models, incumbents give new entrants the opportunity to do things the way the market actually wants them to be done regardless of how they have been done in the past. By trying to force LaLa from being a potentially disruptive innovation into a sustaining innovation, Warner Music and the other major labels unintentionally drove them into the arms of Apple, still the biggest threat to the legacy model the labels are trying to preserve. (Studios and networks trying to “de-fang” Hulu, take note.)

“Beaver Fever” and “Keepin’ Your Head Up” at The Viper Room on October 16, 2009 (Joe takes my camera on stage about 2min in):

“Scene You See” at The Viper Room on October 16, 2009:

“Scene You See” at Little Radio Summercamp on August 30, 2009:

• Seth’s Blog: Don’t Shave That Yak! – A thing that I do, which I shouldn't.
• SnapABug visual customer support – Another live support feature for your website, but this one includes screen capture to help troubleshooting.
• 13 Useful JavaScript Solutions for Charts and Graphs | Resources –
• Buzzzy – A Search Engine for Buzz. – Google Buzz search with an API.
• New Facebook Statistics Show Big Increase in Content Sharing, Local Business Pages – Facebook historical statistics as of February 2010 based on previous updates to their public statistics page.
• Lost Moon Radio: Live Band Karaoke With The Moon Units – Live band karaoke in LA. Available for parties and private events. Very fun!
• Fixed to Flexible – The Ebook – A free 37 page eBook on high-level microeconomic business theory with solid practical examples. The primary focus is on margin, specifically the pricing and cost strategies that go into that equation. It's a very quick read, concisely and clearly written with very illustrative (if somewhat over-simplified) examples.

  For me, the most interesting ideas were on 'constructing value' for a previously unknown product. First, you need to have a compelling free offering so there is minimal risk to customers trying your new product. Secondly, you should take the lead in setting the perceived value of your new product by using an 'anchor' of premium pricing even if you end up selling at a discount to it.

• The Twitter Engineering Blog: Introducing the Open Source Twitter Text libraries – Twitter releases libraries for parsing tweets.
• Great Lake, a Chicago Pizza Shop, Enjoys Being Small – Question – NYTimes.com – A very interesting story about a small artisan pizza shop in Chicago that was reviewed in GQ as one of the best pizza shops in America and how they are (or rather aren't) dealing with their newfound success.

  "We really enjoy the work that we’re doing and we don’t want to cheapen it. Consciously or unconsciously — probably both — we’re trying to create a manageable way to earn a living and still maintain our sanity. We value time as much, if not more so, than money."

• Give-A-Fuck-O-Meter – Saving this to send to people in the future when they tell me something I could care less about.
• The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage – Conservative attorney Ted Olson, a member of the legal team challenging the federal constitutionality of California's Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage, explains his rationale for participating in the case as a conservative American who wishes to preserve and forward the fundamental principles on which this country was founded:
  "Conservatives and liberals alike need to come together on principles that surely unite us. Certainly, we can agree on the value of strong families, lasting domestic relationships, and communities populated by persons with recognized and sanctioned bonds to one another. Confining some of our neighbors and friends who share these same values to an outlaw or second-class status undermines their sense of belonging and weakens their ties with the rest of us and what should be our common aspirations."
• YouTube – Sugar: The Bitter Truth – A very interesting, if long and sometimes quite technical (it is a med school lecture) explanation of the scientific, socio-economic, and political reasons our food is making us less healthy as a nation (and ultimately a planet) in the last 30 years. It centers around increasing our refined sugar intake, in particular fructose, which has the same long-term chronic health effects as alcohol.
• The Third & The Seventh on Vimeo – One of the most amazingly photo-real works of CG animation I've ever seen.
• Facebook Developers | Extending Facebook Share – Mention of awe.sm in the official Facebook blog post announcing their new sharecount button and data APIs.
• How Best Buy plans to beat Wal-Mart – Dec. 1, 2009 – A strategy to make Clayton Christensen proud. Best Buy is betting that the consumer electronics and computer markets have not yet reached a good enough point where cost is the only factor. By providing an integrated buying/service solution with their in-house Geek Squad division, Best Buy hopes to differentiate from retailers like Wal-Mart who are commoditizing the purchase experience. In this case Best Buy is playing the Apple Computer role to Wal-Mart's WinTel approach.
• What’s strategic for Google? – An interesting and concise analysis of Google's various product/business initiatives using a simple but intuitive strategic framework.
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• Entrepreneuring…Side Effects | Howard Lindzon – A humorous (but all too true) list of the potential side-effects of starting your own business.
• Paul Buchheit: Open as in water, the fluid necessary for life – A very interesting rationale for the potential common good of social media behavior that is increasingly referred to as "over-sharing". The more we share about what we think and do, the more information will be available to help improve ours and others' future decisions.

  "The basic pattern of openness is that better access to information and better systems lead to better decisions and better living. This general principal is broadly accepted, but we're just now discovering that it also applies to the minutiae of our lives."

• The New Music Business Model: Imogen Heap « Deep Dive Marketing – A very thorough account of the many ways Imogen Heap is using different social media services (i.e. Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, uStream) as a cohesive whole to build deeper relationships with her most engaged fans.
• Ping – How Sharing Links Has Become Big Business – NYTimes.com – NY Times article on the democratization of influence on the web and the roll of individuals and their social networks as traffic drivers.
• 20×200 : Print Information : think-make-think (second edition) – If I were ever to hang an inspirational print on my wall, this would be it.
• Communilytics: Applied Community Analytics: Web 2.0 Expo New York 2009 – Co-produced by TechWeb & O’Reilly Conferences, November 16 – 19, 2009, New York, NY – Web 2.0 Expo panel on which I will be speaking on 11/16/2009
• Op-Ed Contributor – Wall Street Smarts – NYTimes.com – A deceptively simple (yet likely true) explanation of the underlying cause of the financial meltdown: the level of Wall Street’s intelligence finally caught up with that of its greed.
• Twitter to Facebook: 5 Ways to Post to Both – Mashable mention of TweetPo.st.
• Letters of Note: Okay, you lazy bitch – A great letter from Hunter S. Thompson to a production executive on film adaptation of his book “The Rum Diary.” If you know anything about the film business, you know that sometimes cursing and threats of bodily harm are more than appropriate, they’re necessary
• No. 1 With Bullets? USB Uzi Is Latest Killer Album Format | Underwire | Wired.com – Wired blog coverage of the upcoming release from Get Busy Committee, which will be available on Uzi-shaped USB drives.
• 100 years of Big Content fearing technology—in its own words – Ars Technica – A well-compiled overview of the arguments used by content industries to stifle various production and distribution innovations from the gramophone to the DVR. The overriding theme being that incumbent content producers are more inclined to seek government intervention (usually through sensationalist fear-mongering tactics) to protect old models in the face of new technologies rather than to figure out ways to improve their businesses to take full advantage of the benefits these technologies afford.
• Olark – sell better using live chat – Live chat tool to interact with customers on your website in real-time.
• 30 Under 30 2009 – Hype Machine Profile – Very nice write-up of my friend Anthony Volodkin, founder of the Hype Machine, named #27 in Inc. Magazine’s 30 Under 30 for 2009. He definitely should have been higher
• The power of no reward | Derek Sivers – An interesting article on the difference between ‘Social Mindset’ and ‘Market Mindset’. Actions driven out of personal volition are more authentic and the motivation is more powerful though more difficult to activate. Whereas actions driven out of financial calculation are by definition more mercenary — easier to activate, but of less value and harder to maintain. If you can appeal to someone’s ‘Social Mindset’, you cheapen your offer by invoking their ‘Market Mindset’.
• The Power Of Passed Links – A framework for thinking about the relative value of inbound traffic from different sources based on conversions (however one defines them) and growth. The hypothesis is that links passed from friend to friend via channels like Facebook and Twitter will have significantly higher conversions.
• Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes: Get Wasted With The Day, In Robes recorded Aug 31, 2009 – Live session with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, including downloadable tracks.
• Official Google Blog: Leave the math to us: Advertisers increase their profits using Conversion Optimizer – “Each and every time someone types in a search query, AdWords runs a new keyword auction. Advertisers who are still bidding on a cost-per-click basis will be using the same bid in many different auctions, so sometimes their bid may be too high or too low. However, for advertisers using Conversion Optimizer, we’ll automatically adjust the bid for each of these auctions so that it can hit the sweet spot more often, helping the advertiser to make more money.”
• Seed is the new Series A for VCs | VentureBeat – A good overview on the move by later stage investors into earlier “seed” rounds along with advice for entrepreneurs on raising a pre-Series A round.
• Know all those Retweet Buttons across the web? Well now Facebook has one. – The first write-up on fbShare.me, from The Next Web.
• Awe.sm Lets You Track Articles Shared Into Facebook – Write-up of the latest Snowball Factory product, the fbShare.me sharecount button for Facebook.

• Connect/Automating Tests – Facebook Developer Wiki – Automated unit testing for Facebook Connect applications.

• Taking the Initiative: Carl Pope’s Blog – Sierra Club – This is as depressing as it is sickening. We progressive Americans who were finally so galvanized by our reaction to 8 years of Bush/Cheney coupled with the bright promise of the change Obama could bring have reverted back not just to complacency, but worse to underestimation. Just because *we* are immune to the politics of fear, does not mean they have lost their power — no matter how absurd the claims in question (whether it be death panels, Obama's racism, or Van Jones's "extremist views and coarse rhetoric"). Remember how much we underestimated George W. Bush in the 2000 election? We have to stop assuming people fact check outrageous claims and recognize that inflammatory propaganda must be stopped in it's tracks and those who perpetuate it must have their credibility undermined so they can't continue to spew it. Say something enough times (especially on tv) and too many people will start to think it's true.
• Facebook Connect Plugin Directory – Facebook Developer Wiki – List of Facebook Connect publishing platform plugins by 3rd party developers.
• 16 Best Facebook Connect Plugins for Your Blog, Forum, Wiki, or CMS – List of Facebook Connect plugins to add community functionality to your publishing platform.
• Kareem Mayan’s Weblog – How I Discovered My Life’s Purpose – I've never really thought about coming up with a mission statement for my life, but that's what my friend Kareem has spent the last 18 months doing. I'm very excited that he feels he has come up with a verbal distillation of his life's purpose (even if I personally find the actual language to be a bit vague). I look forward to seeing the ways he comes up with to pursue this purpose.

  I agree with a lot of Kareem's thinking on these matters (which is probably why we're friends ) and greatly admire (and somewhat envy) his courage to so aggressively pursue these questions. So, it's great to be able to ride along on his journey even from afar. My favorite line from this post is: "The opposite of quiet desperation, I reasoned, is magnificent fulfillment."

The right-wing extremists we united to vanquish only 10 months ago haven’t disappeared; they just went underground long enough for us to lose focus and for them to prepare their insurgency. This political battle is Afghanistan, not Iraq (or more accurately, what Iraq was supposed to be) — it’s not quick or sexy and the minute we let up, the enemy will take advantage with sneak attacks.

With enough stability regained that the everyone no longer feels we’re in crisis mode and Obama in office long enough for people to realize he’s not some kind of miracle worker and that the solutions to the problems we face are going to take meaningful time and effort, the right-wing has turned up the intensity of their guerilla war by reengaging in the politics of fear. Healthcare is obviously the most conspicuous theater (‘death panels’, really?!), but Glenn Beck’s unabashed claims that Obama is a racist, the “outrage” over Obama’s back-to-school speech, and now the forced resignation of Van Jones are all part of a pattern we cannot afford to ignore.

This post was prompted by one from Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, on the Van Jones debacle entitled “We All Blew It“. I couldn’t agree more, and it made me realize this is a problem that is only going to escalate if we don’t do something to stop it. We progressive Americans, who were only finally galvanized by our reaction to 8 years of Bush/Cheney coupled with the bright promise of the change Obama could bring, have reverted back not just to complacency, but worse to underestimation.

Just because *we* are immune to the politics of fear, does not mean they have lost their power — no matter how absurd the claims in question (whether it be ‘death panels’, Obama’s racism, or Van Jones’s “extremist views and coarse rhetoric”). Remember how much we underestimated George W. Bush in the 2000 election (regardless of whether he legitimately won, none of us thought it would ever even be close)? We have to stop assuming people fact check outrageous claims and recognize that inflammatory propaganda must be stopped in it’s tracks and those who perpetuate it must have their credibility undermined so they can’t continue to do so much damage. Say something enough times (especially on tv) and too many people will start to think it’s true. The more unsubstantiated and/or downright false claims we allow the Glenn Becks of the world to shout from the rooftops, the further they will push the boundaries. We cannot afford to let these extremists define the terms of engagement — if you have to answer questions on ‘death panels’, you’ve already lost.

The politics of hope are a challenge of patience and understanding, while politics of fear pander to our desire for quick fixes and to blame others. Getting people to think beyond sound-bites and seek substance is no easy task, but we have proven it can be done. Let’s not let all that hard work be squandered by neglecting to follow through.

I won’t lie, I’ve found the continued emails from the White House and Equality California (the No on Prop 8 folks) annoying. But I realize now that’s because they remind me I can and *should* be doing more. I’m going to start by phone banking for Equality California this week, because if I don’t participate then I don’t have a right to complain.

What are you going to do?

• A Band That Knows Where the Money Comes From – Gadgetwise Blog – NYTimes.com – Chester French are one of the savviest artists about using social media (and more conventional CRM tools like email and Salesforce) to build and cultivate their fan-base.

• Thingfo powers Biggest Gleek social media game for Fox hit “GLEE” – finding, channeling and rewarding the top evangelists at Thingfo blog – Announcement of the new social media game for the Fox TV show Glee, built by Thingfo and powered by awe.sm.
• Facebook | Publishing to Twitter from Facebook Pages – Facebook has released a feature that enables Fan Page owners to syndicate their updates to Twitter automatically.
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• Peer-to-peer ‘(un)classes’ match interest with passion – Springwise – Another nice write-up of (un)classes.
• Unclasses.org Launches | Culture San Francisco – DailyCandy – A nice (if oblique) write-up in Daily Candy SF on my side-project (un)classes.
• Raphaël—JavaScript Library – Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library. Used by Thingfo.com.
• Hitwise Intelligence – Robin Goad – UK – An interesting post about Twitter traffic growth in the UK. But, the most interesting part is the chart showing sources of traffic for various vertical categories of websites. Notably that over 40% of traffic to sites in the 'Entertainment' category is coming from either Twitter or Facebook. This reinforces my hypothesis that social media is a particularly powerful marketing channel for content.
• The Smart Growth Manifesto – Umair Haque – HarvardBusiness.org – 20th century economies are limited to unsustainable, unfair, brittle, dumb growth. Smart growth is more sustainable, equitable, and resilient based on 4 pillars:
  1) Outcomes, not incomes
  2) Connections, not transactions
  3) People, not product
  4) Creativity, not productivity
  The inefficient legacy technologies for measuring growth forced us to reduce our understanding of it to purely quantitative terms that don't accurately represent the whole point of progress: to advance humankind. People do not measure happiness and satisfaction in purely quantitative terms, yet those have become our de facto measures of success. Now that we have the capabilities to measure the effects of qualitative goods, we should abandon our legacy tactics that reduce progress to mere numbers.
• Confessions of an Executive Producer: earn it – "The irony is consumers have never been easier to find but never harder to reach. As I see it brand/consumer relationship is analogous to that of a married man to his mistress. For years the affair was a simple proposition. He wined and dined her. Bought her jewelery. Paid her rent. In return he got laid and left guilt free at the end of the evening. After years of this pattern, the mistress begins to feel used and unsatisfied. She desires more than material goods. She wants conversation. She wants to be listened to. She wants to be in a relationship. Much to the displeasure of the adulterer, sex can no longer be bought. It has to be earned. I believe the same thing is happening today with the brand/consumer relationship. Brands must earn consumers time not simply purchase it. The problem is they don't know how and don't seem eager to learn."
• Tweetpo.st – Update Facebook & Twitter At The Same Time | Visit tweetpo.st – Write-up of TweetPo.st on the Killer Startups blog.
• TweetPo.st – the smart way to update Facebook from Twitter « EverythingTwitter – Write-up of TweetPo.st on the Everything Twitter blog.
• TweetPo.st, aggiorna facilmente Facebook da Twitter – Geekissimo – A write-up of TweetPo.st on an Italian technology blog.
• TweetPo.st – a smarter way to update FaceBook from twitter – A write-up of TweetPo.st on twi5, a Twitter tools site.
• Master of 500 Hats: How to Pitch a VC (aka Startup Viagra: How to Give a VC a Hard-On) – Dave McClure's excellent presentation on how to structure a startup investor pitch (oh, and it's funny too).
• the blip.tv blog : blip.tv: the next generation – "Over the course of the last century the television networks (and their younger cable siblings) have evolved into nearly perfect businesses. Unfortunately, however, they have optimized for a historical condition: an oligarchical economy of scarcity. The networks are perfect for an era of expensive production, limited distribution and ubiquitous attention.

  2009 is not 1949. Modern consumer electronics and the Internet have ushered in a new economy of plenty. Production costs have decreased at an astounding rate. Distribution has become ubiquitous. It is no longer necessary, for all but the most ambitious projects, to seek out a studio to bankroll your pilot and a network executive to green light you for a time slot. Your talent and work ethic are now greater predictors of your success than who you know."

• How to Pitch to a VC or Angel – ReadWriteStart – A collection of high-level tips for startup investor pitches, including Guy Kawasaki's 10 slides / in 20 minutes / with 30pt font rule.
• Maturation of the Twitter Ecosystem – A very cool presentation about how the ecosystem of Twitter applications has evolved over time (featuring a shout-out to TweetPo.st on slide 31).
• TweetPo.st a smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter – Another nice write-up of TweetPo.st, a Snowball Factory product
• LocalBunny Gives Businesses Custom Twitter Bots, But It Longs For Old @Replies System – LocalBunny is a new paid service targeted at small businesses that will auto-respond to keyword mentions on Twitter with @replies based on user-defined rules. The kinds of use-cases mentioned as examples are interesting and the app sounds good on paper. But, I'm not sure I'm fully convinced that auto-responses will be successful in a medium like Twitter with such a high value placed on authenticity.
• BackType — Blog Archive » Tweetcount Widget & Plugin – Announcement of the new awe.sm-powered Tweetcount widget from BackType. It shows the number of times the current page has been tweeted using the BackTweets API and uses awe.sm to create new tweets.
• Brand Mentions Preferred over Ads – eMarketer – Study showing that earned media (i.e. consumer/press brand mentions) and permission marketing (i.e. *solicited* emails) are more effective than paid media in general and interruption marketing (i.e. banner ads and pop-ups) specifically.
• Digg the Blog » Blog Archive » DiggBar and Digg Short URLs – Digg reverses course on their URL shortener and states that they have no intention of marketing it as a conventional URL shortener. It is solely a way to share Digg pages.
• 10 Impressive New Implementations of Facebook Connect – TweetPo.st (né TweetFace), an application built by our company to connect Twitter and Facebook, was included as #7 on Mashable's list of "10 Impressive New Implementations of Facebook Connect".
• TweetMeme Blog » Retweets Are Go – Announcement from TweetMeme that their popular Retweet button now supports awe.sm.
• Sharing on Facebook Now More Popular than Sharing by Email – Data from the AddToAny showing that Facebook is now the most popular sharing channel for their share widgets. This data claims Facebook has 24.0% of shares while email has only 11.1% of shares. However, this is inconsistent with ShareThis data from less than a year ago that still had email near 50% of all shares.

• Ed Ulbrich shows how Benjamin Button got his face | Video on TED.com – A look at Digital Domain's process for creating the fully CG performance of Benjamin Button's head for the first hour of the film. Using high-resolution 3D scanning and the F.A.C.S. methodology they developed a template for creating a digital library of facial components that could then be animated using the actor's actual facial expressions.

• Universal/TuneCore deal opens major doors for indie artists – Ars Technica – By offering their marketing services to independent musicians on a fee basis with no transfer of rights required, Universal Music Group is basically turning into a music marketing agency. The decline of physical distribution (for which labels were gate-keepers) and the ascendency of relatively open digital channels coupled with the elimination of barriers to entry in production costs means that mainstream marketing is really the only differentiated competency the labels have left. Universal's recognition of that and this play to those strengths is a smart move. It will be interesting to see if other labels (and ultimately studios, who are subject to the same technological market shifts) will follow suit.