On a mild Monday afternoon in mid-January, Ester Dean, a songwriter and vocalist, arrived at Roc the Mic Studios, on West Twenty-seventh Street in Manhattan, for the first of five days of songwriting sessions. Her engineer, Aubry Delaine, whom she calls Big Juice, accompanied her. Dean picked up an iced coffee at a Starbucks on Seventh Avenue, took the elevator up to Roc the Mic, and passed through a lounge that had a pool table covered in taupe-colored felt. Two sets of soundproofed doors led to the control room, a windowless cockpit that might have been the flight deck of a spaceship.
Tor Hermansen and Mikkel Eriksen, the team of Norwegian writer-producers professionally known as Stargate, were waiting there for Dean. Both are tall and skinny ectomorphs with pale shaved heads who would not look out of place in a “Matrix” movie. Dean, who is black, is neither skinny nor tall; she reached up to give them big hugs, which is how she greets almost everyone. They chatted for a while. Dean has a comical, Betty Boop-ish speaking voice, which will be featured in the upcoming animated film “Ice Age: Continental Drift.” (Sid, the giant ground sloth voiced by John Leguizamo, is finally getting a girlfriend, Dean’s Sloth Siren.) After ten minutes or so, she pronounced herself “ready to work.”
Most of the songs played on Top Forty radio are collaborations between producers like Stargate and “top line” writers like Ester Dean. The producers compose the chord progressions, program the beats, and arrange the “synths,” or computer-made instrumental sounds; the top-liners come up with primary melodies, lyrics, and the all-important hooks, the ear-friendly musical phrases that lock you into the song. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, the president of Roc Nation, and Dean’s manager, told me recently. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre-chorus, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge.” The reason, he explained, is that “people on average give a song seven seconds on the radio before they change the channel, and you got to hook them.”
The top-liner is usually a singer, too, and often provides the vocal for the demo, a working draft of the song. If the song is for a particular artist, the top-liner may sing the demo in that artist’s style. Sometimes producers send out tracks to more than one top-line writer, which can cause problems. In 2009, both Beyoncé and Kelly Clarkson had hits (Beyoncé’s “Halo,” which charted in April, and Clarkson’s “Already Gone,” which charted in August) that were created from the same track, by Ryan Tedder. Clarkson wrote her own top line, while Beyoncé shared a credit with Evan Bogart. Tedder had neglected to tell the artists that he was double-dipping, and when Clarkson heard “Halo” and realized what had happened she tried to stop “Already Gone” from being released as a single, because she feared the public would think she had copied Beyoncé’s hit. But nobody cared, or perhaps even noticed; “Already Gone” became just as big a hit.
A relatively small number of producers and top-liners create a disproportionately large share of contemporary hits, which may explain why so many of them sound similar. The producers are almost always male: Max Martin, Dr. Luke, David Guetta, Tricky Stewart, the Matrix, Timbaland, the Neptunes, Stargate. The top-liners are often, although not always, women: Makeba Riddick, Bonnie McKee, and Skylar Grey are among Dean’s peers. The producer runs the session and serves as creative director of the song, but the top-liner supplies the crucial spark that will determine whether the song is a smash. (When I asked Tricky Stewart to define “smash,” he said, “A hit is just a hit; a smash is a life changer.”) As Eric Beall, an A. & R. executive with Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., a music publisher, puts it, “The top-line writer is the one who has to face a blank page.” Stargate works with about twenty top-liners a year, and creates some eighty demos. These are sent out to A. & R. departments at record labels, to artists’ managers, and, finally, to the artists, for approval. Around twenty-five of Stargate’s songs end up on records each year.
Dean has a genius for infectious hooks. Somehow she is able to absorb the beat and the sound of a track, and to come out with its melodic essence. The words are more like vocalized beats than like lyrics, and they don’t communicate meaning so much as feeling and attitude—they nudge you closer to the ecstasy promised by the beat and the “rise,” or the “lift,” when the track builds to a climax. Among Dean’s best hooks are her three Rihanna smashes—“Rude Boy” (“Come on, rude boy, boy, can you get it up / Come on, rude boy, boy, is you big enough?”), “S&M” (“Na-na-na-na COME ON”), and “What’s My Name” (“Oh, na-na, what’s my name?”), all with backing tracks by Stargate—and her work on two Nicki Minaj smashes, “Super Bass” (“Boom, badoom, boom / boom, badoom, boom / bass / yeah, that’s that super bass”) and David Guetta’s “Turn Me On” (“Make me come alive, come on and turn me on”).
“Talk That Talk,” a Dean-Stargate song that’s the title track of Rihanna’s most recent album, is built around one chord progression—F-sharp minor, E minor, B minor, D. The music combines genres that, twenty years ago, were distinct: the hard beats of hip-hop and the big melody “money notes” sung by nineties stars such as Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and Celine Dion. The first hook comes right away, in an abbreviated chorus that precedes a Jay-Z rap. Then comes the main hook: “One and two and three and four / come and let me know if you want some more,” a salacious-sounding bit of rhythm singing, backed by dirty-sounding synths, which opens the chorus. Then there’s a verse, which delivers the third hook: “Say what you want, say what you like / Say what you want me to do and I got you.” The chorus rolls around again, this time with the lift, followed by the bridge, which delivers yet another hook: “What you say now, give it to me baby / I want it all night, give it to me baby,” sung over a nasty-sounding snare drum (which, like all the instrumental sounds, is machine-made). The bridge also conveys the “breakdown,” when the song’s momentum pauses momentarily. Then comes the chorus for a final time. The song is neither clever nor subtle—we are a long way from Cole Porter here—but it is deeply seductive all the same.
Dean’s preferred method of working is to delay listening to a producer’s track until she is in the studio, in front of the mike. “I go into the booth and I scream and I sing and I yell, and sometimes it’s words but most time it’s not,” she told me. “And I just see when I get this little chill, here”—she touched her upper arm, just below the shoulder—“and then I’m, like, ‘Yeah, that’s the hook.’ ” If she doesn’t feel that chill after five minutes, she moves on to the next track, and tries again.
In advance of Dean’s arrival at Roc the Mic, Stargate had prepared several dozen tracks. They created most of them by jamming together on keyboards until they came up with an “idea”—generally, a central chord progression or a riff—around which they quickly built up a track, using the vast array of preprogrammed sounds and beats at their disposal. Hermansen likens their tracks to new flavors awaiting the right soft-drink or potato-chip maker to come along and incorporate them into a product.
Their plan with Dean was to finish one or two songs at each session. Given their record of success, they dared hope that one of these would be a smash. The others would be relegated to the “good but not good enough” file. Around Roc the Mic, writing songs for any reason other than making hits is a waste of time.
Top Forty radio was invented by Todd Storz and Bill Stewart, the operator and program director, respectively, of KOWH, an AM station in Omaha, Nebraska, in the early fifties. Like most music programmers of the day, Storz and Stewart provided a little something for everyone. As Marc Fisher writes in his book “Something in the Air” (2007), “The gospel in radio in those days was that no tune ought to be repeated within twenty-four hours of its broadcast—surely listeners would resent having to hear the same song twice in one day.” The eureka moment, as Ben Fong-Torres describes it in “The Hits Just Keep on Coming” (1998), occurred in a restaurant across from the station, where Storz and Stewart would often wait for Storz’s girlfriend, a waitress, to get off work. They noticed that even though the waitresses listened to the same handful of songs on the jukebox all day long, played by different customers, when the place finally cleared out and the staff had the jukebox to themselves they played the very same songs. The men asked the waitresses to identify the most popular tunes on the jukebox, and they went back to the station and started playing them, in heavy rotation. Ratings soared.
By the end of the decade, Top Forty was the most popular format in the nation. It thrived in the sixties, but began to struggle with the popularity of FM radio, and the rise of album-oriented rock, in the seventies. Rock music, with its artistic aspirations, didn’t fit the nakedly commercial format as well as the bubblegum pop of the pre-rock era had. Also, mainstream pop began to splinter into “adult contemporary,” “easy listening,” and “urban,” among other formats. Rock, meanwhile, gave birth to “classic,” “modern,” and, in the nineties, “alternative” formats. Top Forty never went away—Casey Kasem’s syndicated radio show, “American Top Forty,” kept the format going into the twenty-first century—but by the eighties it could no longer claim to be America’s soundtrack.
In the past decade, however, Top Forty has come back stronger than ever. You hear it in shops, in restaurants, and at sporting events; it’s the music my thirteen-year-old son and his friends listen to on their iPods and dance to at parties. Paradoxically, in an age when an unprecedented range of musical genres is easily available via the Internet, the public’s appetite for hits has never been greater. (The best-selling-singles chart on iTunes, which is calculated from digital sales, and YouTube’s most popular songs, based on online views, match up closely with Billboard ’s Hot 100, which is mainly derived from radio play and sales.) In New York City, contemporary hit radio now dominates FM stations, a remarkable turn of events for anyone old enough to remember when FM radio was the antithesis of Top Forty.
How did this happen? How did mainstream rock, once the source of the catchiest hooks in popular music, become robotic, unimaginative, and predictable, while pop, always the soul of artifice, came to seem creative, experimental, and alive? (Billboard ’s list of the top ten songwriters of the past decade includes only one rock writer, Rob Thomas, who ranks fifth, between Alicia Keys and Max Martin; Stargate comes in ninth.) Whereas rock is about the sound of a band playing together (even when its members aren’t actually together) and features virtuoso solos played on real instruments, today’s Top Forty is almost always machine-made: lush sonic landscapes of beats, loops, and synths in which all the sounds have square edges and shiny surfaces, the voices are Auto-Tuned for pitch, and there are no mistakes. The music sounds sort of like this: thump thooka whompa whomp pish pish pish thumpaty wompah pah pah pah. The people who create the songs are often in different places. The artists, who spend much of the year touring, don’t have time to come into the studio; they generally record new material in between shows, in mobile recording studios and hotel rooms, working with demos that producers and top-line writers make for them to use as a kind of vocal stencil pattern. (The production notes for Rihanna’s single “Talk That Talk” say that her vocal was recorded on “the Bus” in Birmingham, Alabama, in Room 538 of the Sofitel Paris Le Faubourg, and in Room 526 of the Savoy, in London. When I remarked on this peripatetic recording method to Hermansen, he replied, “It’s music as aspirational travel.”)
As was the case in the pre-rock era, when Phil Spector-produced girl groups led the hit parade, many of the leading artists of the post-rock era are women. Rarely a month goes by without a new song from Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Kelly Clarkson, Kesha, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, or Pink near the top of the charts. But the artist who best embodies the music and the style of the new Top Forty is Rihanna, the Barbados-born pop singer. At twenty-four, she is the queen of urban pop, and the consummate artist of the digital age, in which quantity is more important than quality and personality trumps song craft. She releases an album a year, often recording a new one while she is on an eighty-city world tour promoting the last one. To keep her supplied with material, her label, Def Jam, and her manager, Jay Brown, periodically convene “writer camps”—weeklong conclaves, generally held in Los Angeles, where dozens of top producers and writers from around the world are brought in to brainstorm on songs. After an album comes out, she may release remixes, like her recent ill-advised collaborations with Chris Brown, to give singles a boost. She has sold more digital singles than any other artist—a hundred and twenty million.
Rihanna is often described as a “manufactured” pop star, because she doesn’t write her songs, but neither did Sinatra or Elvis. She embodies a song in the way an actor inhabits a role—and no one expects the actor to write the script. In the rock era, when the album was the standard unit of recorded music, listeners had ten or eleven songs to get to know the artist, but in the singles-oriented business of today the artist has only three or four minutes to put her personality across. The song must drip with attitude and swagger, or “swag,” and nobody delivers that better than Rihanna, even if a good deal of the swag originates with Ester Dean.
Several of the tracks that Stargate had prepared for Dean were “cray-zee,” one of two catchall superlatives used around the studio; “dope” is the other. But since they had five days of sessions ahead, and Dean often required time to get into her zone, there was no point in squandering the best tracks right away. So they warmed up with a throwaway number, which all parties knew immediately was not “the one.”
Their second attempt was more promising. Dean carried her iced coffee into the recording booth, which adjoined the control room. She was dimly visible through the soundproofed glass window, bathed in greenish light. She took out her BlackBerry, and as the track began to play she surfed through lists of phrases she had copied from magazines and television programs. She showed me a few: “life in the fast lane,” “crying shame,” “high and mighty,” “mirrors don’t lie,” “don’t let them see you cry.” Some phrases were categorized under headings like “Sex and the City,” “Interjections,” and “British Slang.”
The first sounds Dean uttered were subverbal—na-na-na and ba-ba-ba—and recalled her hooks for Rihanna. Then came disjointed words, culled from her phone—“taking control . . . never die tonight . . . I can’t live a lie”—in her low-down, growly singing voice, so different from her coquettish speaking voice. Had she been “writing” in a conventional sense—trying to come up with clever, meaningful lyrics—the words wouldn’t have fit the beat as snugly. Grabbing random words out of her BlackBerry also seemed to set Dean’s melodic gift free; a well-turned phrase would have restrained it. There was no verse or chorus in the singing, just different melodic and rhythmic parts. Her voice as we heard it in the control room had been Auto-Tuned, so that Dean could focus on making her vocal as expressive as possible and not worry about hitting all the notes.
After several minutes of nonsense singing, the song began to coalesce. Almost imperceptibly, the right words rooted themselves in the rhythm while melodies and harmonies emerged in Dean’s voice. Her voice isn’t hip-hop or rock or country or gospel or soul, exactly, but it could be any one of those. “I’ll come alive tonight,” she sang. Dancing now, Dean raised one arm in the air. After a few more minutes, the producers told her she could come back into the control room.
“See, I just go in there and scream and they fix it,” she said, emerging from the booth, looking elated, almost glowing.
Stargate went to work putting Dean’s wailings into traditional song structure. As is usually the case, Eriksen worked “the box”—the computer—using Avid’s Pro Tools editing program, while Hermansen critiqued the playbacks. Small colored rectangles, representing bits of Dean’s vocal, glowed on the computer screen, and Eriksen chopped and rearranged them, his fingers flying over the keys, frequently punching the space bar to listen to a playback, then rearranging some more. The studio’s sixty-four-channel professional mixing board, with its vast array of knobs and lights, which was installed when Roc the Mic Studios was constructed, only five years ago, sat idle, a relic of another age.
Within twenty minutes, Dean’s rhythmic utterances had been organized into an intro, a verse, a pre-chorus (or “pre”), a chorus, and an “outro”; all that was missing was a bridge. (Friday, the final day of the sessions, was reserved for making bridges.) Delaine, the engineer, who hadn’t said a word thus far, sat down at the computer and began tweaking the pitch of Dean’s vocal. Dean went back into the booth and added more words: “Give me life . . . touch me and I’ll come alive . . . I’ll come alive tonight . . .”
Hermansen listened, his bald head bobbing to the beat. “You don’t want ‘I’ll come alive at night,’ ” he said, over the booth’s intercom. “That’s too zombie.”
“I’ll come a-LI-I-IVE,” Dean tried, drawling out the syllables.
Once the hook was finished, Dean wrote a couple of verses on her MacBook Air. In a little less than two hours, they had a finished demo.
Was this the one? Hermansen wasn’t sure; they would listen to it again tomorrow. Big Juice seemed to like it, though. After hearing the final playback, he spoke for the first time.
“That’s dope,” he said.
Dean was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Her great-grandmother on her mother’s side was a full-blooded Cherokee. She has a country twang in her voice, and uses it on her demos to amplify her swag. Her father drank, and after her parents split up she moved with her mother and five siblings (Ester is the youngest), first to Tulsa, then to Omaha. Dean left school after tenth grade and, after drifting around, wound up in Atlanta, working as a nurse’s aide in various hospitals. One of her sisters and a nephew lived with her in her one-bedroom government-subsidized apartment. Later, her mother moved in, too. Dean wanted to be a singer. She had been writing songs since third grade, and she sang beautifully in school as a child—everyone told her so—but she didn’t know how to break into the music business.
Early in 2005, Dean was at an outdoor concert given by the Gap Band, a funk ensemble made up of the three Wilson brothers, who, like Dean, are from Oklahoma. Dean, in the crowd, was singing along with Charlie Wilson, the lead singer. The producer Tricky Stewart happened to be nearby. “I heard this singing coming from somewhere around me,” he told me, “and I’m trying to listen to Charlie Wilson, but my producer’s ear is hearing this other voice, and I’m thinking, Wow, that is not natural. Charlie Wilson is a damn good singer, but this other voice is keeping right up, executing all the tricky little runs perfectly. Finally, I just had to find who that was.” He followed the sound of the voice to Dean, and introduced himself. “I said, ‘Do you have any musical training?’ ” he recalled. “She said she didn’t. I said, ‘Well, a person who can sing like you has a gift.’ ”
Stewart invited Dean to his studio, RedZone Entertainment, in Atlanta. “I just wanted to put her in a room with some other talented musicians to see what she could do,” he told me. In addition to singing, they worked on writing, because, he added, “I truly believe if you can sing you can write songs.” Dean sang some of her songs for Stewart, and he offered her a contract with his publishing company. She made some extra money by singing on demos, but she was still broke, living with her family in her cramped apartment and working at the hospital.
On Super Bowl weekend, 2008, Dean saw a movie called “The Secret.” It purports to demonstrate “the law of attraction,” an ancient principle, long suppressed by nefarious powers, that states that if you want something badly enough, and if you “manifest” your dreams clearly in your mind and remove any doubts you harbor about attaining them, they will come true. As an aid to this kind of thinking, the film (and the subsequent best-selling book, by Rhonda Byrne) advocates making a “vision board”: a poster with taped-up pictures of people, achievements, and things you admire, aspire to, or covet. After watching the film, Dean took the plastic cover off a storage container in her apartment and taped to it a picture of Ciara, a pop singer and songwriter who happened to be from Atlanta. She cut out pictures of a house, a car, and an American Express card, and taped those up, too.
In the fall of 2008, another producer, Polow da Don, brought Dean to Los Angeles, and she met Jimmy Iovine, the head of Interscope Records. She soon began writing for Ciara, and then for Christina Aguilera and Mary J. Blige. Dean describes herself as a “prude,” and she neither smokes nor drinks, nor does she frequent clubs or parties, but when she gets on the mike she becomes a person who does all those things, and more. (She told me that her raunchiest lyric, for Rihanna’s “S&M”—“I may be bad but I’m perfectly good at it / Sex in the air, I don’t care, I love the smell of it”—came to her on a Sunday, adding, “Father forgive me.”) It is when writing for Rihanna that her inner bad girl gets freest rein; she becomes the woman she imagines Rihanna might be, which Rihanna herself, tall and slim and sexy, would never aspire to with such urgency. If you listen to Dean’s demos for her Rihanna hits on YouTube (which someone uploaded without her permission), it’s hard to tell whether Dean is channelling Rihanna or Rihanna is copying Dean. “People put comments on my YouTube demos saying stuff like ‘This cover sucks,’ ” she told me indignantly. “I ain’t never covered a song in my life!”
Dean’s hits have made her a lot of money, both from record sales and from performance income, which writers earn when songs are played on the radio. (A No. 1 single can earn the writer a million dollars or more, and Dean has cowritten five.) She has a nice home in the Brentwood section of L.A., and another house nearby, which she uses as a recording studio. She generally prefers to have producers e-mail her tracks; she writes the top line and records her vocal in her own studio with the help of Delaine, who is her full-time engineer. “When I’m working alone, I have no feedback, just the occasional nod or ‘I like it’ from Aubry,” she said. “Stargate is the only producer where I go to their place, ’cause everyone else is so hit-minded. They’re always looking at you, going, ‘Didja get it? Didja get it? Is that the hit?’ And I don’t know what I’m going to give them. I never try to tap and find out what it is; I just do what I do.”
In only a few years, Dean has achieved all the goals she taped up on her vision board. But she has one more goal (and another vision board for that): to be a recording artist herself. She had a modest hit with her recording of her 2009 song “Drop It Low,” featuring Chris Brown, but an EP or an album did not follow. In fact, Dean’s becoming an artist is the very last thing many people in the music industry want, because, as Dean put it to me, “to them, I’m a check. So their attitude is ‘Why you want to take away my check?’ ”
Nevertheless, Dean has declared—and Jay Brown, who became her manager last December, has agreed—that 2012 will be the year of Ester Dean. She sees herself as the second coming of Missy Elliott, in accordance with her somewhat mystical belief in artistic reincarnation: Beyoncé is Diana Ross, Lady Gaga is Madonna, Usher is R. Kelly, and Ester is Missy. She added, “I’m lucky I got people who truly believe in me, like Jay.” “Ester has an idea of what she wants to do,” Brown said. “And there’s a long precedent for it, from recent writers who became artists, like Ne-Yo and John Legend, and going back to people like Carole King and Smokey Robinson.” Shortly before Christmas, Polow da Don helped broker a deal with Jimmy Iovine, at Interscope Records, who signed Dean and plans to bring out an album of hers later this year. “Jay be, like, ‘I know what to do with you,’ ” Dean told me, “and I’m, like, ‘Yes! Finally somebody who sees me as more than a check!’ ” There is talk of calling the album “UnderESTAmated.”
In Dean’s mind, that was what these sessions with Stargate were for: to create songs for her own album. (A first single, “Gimme Money,” showed up online in February, though it hasn’t been officially released.) Stargate was paying for the sessions, so they were under no obligation to give any of the songs to a particular artist or label. They only had to work it out among the three of them.
Growing up in Trondheim, a small seaside city in Norway, Mikkel Eriksen was nuts for American R. & B. and hip-hop, but there was no Norwegian urban-music scene. He made hip-hop drum loops on his Commodore 64 computer, and he kept all his electronic gear under the bed—keyboard, tape machine, reverb, sequencer. “That was my whole life,” he told me, “buying gear, and playing in cover bands to make money to buy more gear.” One day in 1998, a friend said to him, “You should meet this guy Tor Hermansen—you are the only two guys who listen to urban music in Norway.”
Hermansen’s parents divorced when he was five, and he lived with his father, who drove a backhoe for work. He wasn’t around when Tor came home from school, so Tor listened to lots of music, to pass the time. “I got hooked on American culture from movies—Steven Spielberg, ‘Grease,’ and ‘Beat Street,’ ” he said. “I was obsessed with the South Bronx, from songs like ‘The Message,’ without even knowing where it was.” He started writing stories and taking pictures for local newspapers when he was thirteen. He wrote frequently about music, and eventually got a job at Warner Bros. in Oslo, where he worked his way up to head of A. & R.
Eriksen made an appointment with Hermansen and took along a demo of an artist he was working with. Hermansen didn’t like the artist, but he liked the backing track. “He said, ‘Did you make this music? It’s good,’ ” Eriksen recalled. Before long, Hermansen had quit his job and joined forces with the other half of Norway’s urban-music fan base.
Their big break came when they met Tim Blacksmith and Danny D., a British management duo, who brought them to London to remix American urban hits for the European market and to produce U.K. acts. Their job was to add Euro-pop sweetness to the city grit. “The idea at the time was that urban music needed to have more sparkly, brighter choruses, and more of a lift, to work in Europe,” Eriksen said. He added, “Our experience with remixing really has helped us in the way we work today, because we know that if we have a good vocal we can strip out the music and replace it with other music.” Their dream was to be on the radio in the United States. “We had tried a few times with labels in the U.S., without success,” Eriksen said, but “it wasn’t our time.” From around 2000 to 2003, hip-hop was dominated by big beats, created by producers like Timbaland and the Neptunes. “We loved it, but couldn’t make that kind of music,” Eriksen said. Hermansen added, “As much as we wanted to do the typical stripped-down hip-hop record, we were better at the melodic stuff.”
In 2004, things suddenly slowed down for Stargate in the U.K. “People got fed up with Stargate’s sound—things change fast in the music business—and there was no work,” Eriksen told me. “We were sitting back in Norway wondering, What do we do now? Should we shut it down? Our manager, Tim, said, ‘Let’s just go to New York, book a studio, and give it a shot there.’ We didn’t have much money left, but we paid for the trip. No one here knew who we were. We had a few sessions with writers, but nothing substantial. Our goal was to sell one song, and we did, we sold one, so we came back for one more week of sessions, and then we were going to call it quits.”
They reserved a room in the old Sony Music Studios, on Tenth Avenue. One day, they met the vocalist and songwriter Ne-Yo wandering the halls, and invited him into the studio. Hermansen says, “He heard our track and couldn’t believe two white guys had made this kind of music. So we set up a session, and ‘So Sick’ came out of that—Ne-Yo wrote it in twenty minutes. Afterward, we were just jumping up and down, buzzing.” “So Sick” went to No. 1 in 2006. “Irreplaceable,” written by Stargate and Ne-Yo and recorded by Beyoncé, spent ten weeks at the top of the U.S. singles chart in 2007, making it a bona-fide smash. Eriksen said, “We thought we’d have to adapt to the beat-driven music here, but it turned out that it was our more choral, melodic music that people gravitated toward.” Hermansen told me, “When we first got here, American pop music was linear and minimalistic, with few chord changes, and no big lift in the chorus. If you listen to radio today, there are big breakdowns, buildups, instrumental parts, and more tempo.” That is due in no small part to Stargate: by bringing a European remixer’s sensibility to the crunchy beats of hip-hop, they created a new kind of urban pop.
At Roc the Mic, Stargate carries on a glorious and disappearing New York tradition that stretches back to the Brill Building days of the late fifties and early sixties, when songwriting teams such as Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry cranked out hits for the top pop acts of the day; and further back still, to the nineteen-tens and twenties, when the Broadway-to-Sixth Avenue reach of West Twenty-eighth Street, known as Tin Pan Alley, for the sound of pianos coming from the upper floors, was the center of the music-publishing industry. With their managers, Blacksmith and Danny D., orchestrating demand, Stargate has become one of the very few writer-producers whom labels approach when they absolutely must have a hit single, or a “bullet,” as Hermansen calls it, to market an album with. Often, panicked label execs approach them in the final weeks, or even days, before an album is mastered, because Stargate has a reputation for speed. “You can have two or three hot singles on an album, or no singles,” Hermansen explained, “and that’s the difference between selling five million copies worldwide and launching an eighty-date sold-out world tour, and selling two hundred thousand copies and having no tour. That’s like a twenty-million-dollar difference.”
“I’ll Come Alive,” the best song from Monday’s session, wasn’t sounding as dope on the following day. Before Dean arrived, Hermansen listened to a playback and delivered his verdict: “That’s not the one.” He added that Ester, in creating top lines for songs she wanted to record herself, seemed to be suppressing the overtly sexual lyrics that emerged when she was writing for other singers, and which were, for better or worse, her trademark.
Dean arrived, dressed in a floppy knit hat, leather jacket, jeans, and boots—her usual “casual but fly” style. Stargate began the session by playing one of their craziest tracks. It started with a snare drum layered with handclaps, with an evil-sounding, distorted guitarlike synth moving in and out of the foreground. Dean listened to the track for about twenty seconds, until she began humming a melody softly. “O.K., got it,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
She went into the booth, got out her phone, and as the music started she began vocalizing: “How do I get it . . . walkin’ in the cold to get it . . . you gotta, I’m-a wanna.” She had the core of the melody, but it needed words. About a minute in, she hit on the main hook, “How you love it,” in which the words played syncopated rhythm with the beat. It was classic Dean, freestyle and suggestive-sounding. This was followed by a secondary hook: “Do you do it like this, do you do it like that, if you do it like this can I do it right back.”
In the control room, the Stargate guys sensed something special was happening, and they worked quickly to capture it in song structure.
“Let’s loop the first half.”
“Do the synth chords and then use the arpeggiator to set the rise.”
“I love the straightness of the beginning. Put a couple more notes in the pre.”
In the booth, Dean, feeling the chill, put her hands in the air and did a snaky dance, testing the effect of the hooks on her hips.
Back in the control room, Dean wrote a verse, which Eriksen looped. He copied parts of the vocal and stacked two or three copies on top of one another to create a choral effect, a technique known as double-tracking. Now they had half of a great song, but it “runs out of ammo in the middle,” as Hermansen put it. Then Eriksen remembered a rap that Nicki Minaj had written for another Dean-Stargate song that hadn’t made it onto Minaj’s début album. He stripped out Minaj’s vocal and added it to their new track. “Let’s see if it fits,” he said, and it did. Another playback, and it sounded sensational.
“It’s a smash!” Hermansen declared.
Everyone was giddy, like children on Christmas morning. Blacksmith and Danny D. came into the control room and listened to the playback, whooping raucously at the choruses, perhaps the very first of countless revellers who would bounce to the song. Dean danced. Delaine bobbed his head and smiled. When it was over, everyone cheered.
Then Danny D. said, “Let me just interject one word. You know who’s looking? Pink.”
“I’m keeping that one for myself,” Ester said, firmly.
“I know. I’m just saying. Pink’s looking for an urban song with a contemporary beat.”
“No!”
“Kelly Clarkson’s supposedly looking. And Christina!”
Friday, the final day of sessions, was quiet. Dean came in, later than usual, to add bridges and some extra verses to the songs they had worked on. While waiting for her, Hermansen reviewed their output for the week. Besides “How You Love It,” there was a fiery up-tempo number called “Edge.” (Dean had also claimed this one for herself, on Wednesday, when they wrote it, but by Friday the song was being referred to as “the Katy Perry song.”) There was also a promising R. & B. song they had composed on Thursday, although the hook wasn’t strong enough yet.
I asked Hermansen what would happen if a well-known artist wanted to record “How You Love It.” “If it’s a super-smash, and a Beyoncé or a Rihanna wants to do it, we’re going to want to do it with them,” he replied. “Because artists like that don’t come along every day. So Ester is going to have to make a decision.” He paused. “But Ester is smart.”
But what about her own album?
Eriksen said, “A lot of writers want to be artists. Most of them can sing, and a lot of them can sing really well. But, to be an artist, that’s another story. To be able to perform, to be the person everyone looks at when you walk into the room, with all the publicity and touring, and then to be able to get that sound on the record—that’s not easy. You can be a great singer, but when you hear the record it’s missing something.”
What is that? I asked.
Eriksen thought for a while. “It’s a fat sound,” he said, “and there’s a sparkle around the edges of the words.”
Dean arrived, with her iced coffee, but she couldn’t seem to get down to work. She chatted with her friend Traci Hale, whom she had brought along to help her write; she danced around the control room to playbacks; she played a game called Fruit Ninja on her iPad; she checked the iTunes ranking of her latest smash, David Guetta and Nicki Minaj’s “Turn Me On” (it had reached No. 1). Tim Blacksmith came in and tried to goose her along. Big Juice maintained his Buddha-like cone of silence.
The Stargate guys hung around for as long as they could, but they wanted to get home to their wives and young children. They were heading to Los Angeles the following week, for ten days of sessions at Westlake Recording Studios; the Grammys were coming up, and a lot of writers and artists would be in town. Stargate was nominated for record of the year (Katy Perry’s “Firework”) and rap song of the year (Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow”).
Dean had never been to the Grammys, although she has received multiple songwriter nominations and has been invited each time she’s been nominated. This year, she was nominated for her contributions to Rihanna’s “Loud,” which was up for album of the year, but she still wasn’t planning to go. “I don’t have anything to wear,” she said. “Anyway, Adele’s going to win everything.”
“You never know!” Blacksmith declared, trying to be positive. But with the mention of Adele the air pressure in the control room seemed to change. Stargate knew well from their experience in London how quickly fads come and go in the pop business; a massive smash such as Adele’s “Someone Like You,” with its heartfelt lyrics, accompanied by simple piano arpeggios—no arpeggiator required—could be the beginning of the end of urban pop.
Finally, the Norwegians left, saying they hoped they’d see Dean in Los Angeles. Dean decided she’d go get something to eat, and then she’d come back to Roc the Mic and “knock the bottom out of these songs.” ♦
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Sad, but true - pop music often is manufactured. From NewYorker.com | Stargate and Ester Dean, Making Music Hits
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Universal McCann's Wave 6 now released.
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Wave 6
Proprietary Studies
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Starting in 2006, Wave is the world’s largest and longest-running study of the impact of social media on today’s global marketplace – making UM the most authoritative agency voice in the social media space.
Covering 62 countries and 43% of the worldwide internet population, Wave 6 – ‘The Business of Social’ – is the most ambitious and sophisticated instalment to date. It offers invaluable, and actionable insights as to how advertisers can bring commercial value to their business through social media strategies, at a time when the value of social media has never been more important to brands.
View Wave 6 here, download the soft-copy using the link above, or click here for the official press release.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
From Rappler.com. The Internet: PH speeds and speed bumps
GETTING BETTER. Speed on the Internet is getting slowly but surely better.
MANILA, Philippines - Speed kills. This is true on the road as well as online.
In the case of the Philippines, it is the lack of speed online that keeps the country hungry enough to be a part of online space. Speed and the availability (and affordability) of broadband connections continue to plague a country that desires connectivity with friends, relatives and the world in general.
Thomas L. Friedman, a highly regarded columnist for the New York Times calls our world today a “hyperconnected world,” a world that exceeds any previous notion of being a part of each other. Is the Philippines ready for this new world?
Hampered by a topographically challenging landscape of 7,100 islands, a controversial National Broadband Network project, a lack of competition in the industry, and various equally pressing issues that beg for resources from limited budgets, the Philippines has its work cut out for it.
Enter Akamai
Akamai is a leading global service provider for accelerating content and business processes online. It also publishes a well-regarded quarterly, “State of the Internet” report. In the latest report it published for the 3rd quarter of 2011, we get a glimpse of how the Philippines fares compared to other countries as far as broadband speed is concerned.
Based on 1 trillion content requests worldwide as well as 25,000 unique IP addresses from July to September 2011, the report reveals a number of data points for various countries and regions.
Global Average Connection speeds have continued to rise. The 2011 report indicates a 2.7Mbps average, which was a 4.5% increase from the previous quarter and a 39% increase year on year. South Korea continues to lead the world with a 16.7 Mbps average followed by Hong Kong (10.5Mbps) and Japan (8.9Mbps). The balance of the Top 10 countries in the world for average measured connection speeds is from Europe. The US ranks No. 13.
For peak speeds, South Korea leads the world followed by Japan. The city of Taejon has a mouth-watering 58.8 peak speed followed by another South Korean city (Taegu) with 57.2Mbps. Japan’s Shimotsuma recorded a 55.4Mbps peak speed followed by Kanagawa with 54.5 Mbps.
How the Philippines fares
The Philippines ranks 101st among all countries surveyed for average connection speed. For the 3rd quarter report, the Philippines recorded a 1.1Mbps average connection speed and is ranked 12th among 13 countries classified under the Asia Pacific table.
Note that a 1.1Mbps speed is below the 2Mbps “broadband” threshold. It was ahead only of India which reported a 0.9 Mbps. The Philippines was also only one of 4 countries in the region that recorded a quarter to quarter drop in connections speeds – 4.7% down from the 2nd quarter of 2011. (see Table 1)
SLOW. The Philippines ranks among the lowest in terms of connection speeds.
No Philippine city made it to the list of "Top Asia Pacific Cities by Speed."
In the table for Average Peek Connection Speeds, the Philippines ranked better both globally and within the Asia Pacific region but it was also the only country that registered a decline in peak speeds in the region. The Philippines ranked 87th in the world for peak speeds with 8.3Mbps, which was a 12% increase year on year; but the country was down 0.2% versus the previous quarter. It also jumped to the 11th spot among the Asia Pacific countries. (Table 2).
PEAK SPEED. The Philippines ranks better only than India and China.
Unfortunately, the Philippines was also only one of three countries (together with India and China), that recorded average peak speeds below 10Mbps.
Given the aggressive rollout of the various providers of broadband in the country, it comes as no surprise that there was a significant increase in broadband adoption for the Philippines. The country however (while included in this metric) did not register the required 25,000 unique IP addresses for the report.
For High Broadband Connectivity, more Filipinos are now enjoying speeds above 5Mbps. The country registered a 79% increase year on year with a 15% increase from the 2nd quarter. Unfortunately, this comes from a very low base of people that enjoyed the high speeds to begin with, as evidenced by the fact that the country did not register 25,000 unique IP addresses. As such, it remains unranked globally and regionally. (Table 3)
UNRANKED. The Philippines remains unranked even regionally.
For connections above 2Mbps, only 9.3% of connections were classified as above 2Mbps which was 0.8% down from the previous quarter. This was, however a 32% increase from the same quarter in 2010. (Table 4)
WISHFUL. Less than 10% of the country have a connection speed of over 2 Mbps.
The gap between countries is significant. And while Malaysia, China and India are in the bottom half of the table, you will see that the year-on-year growth is way above that of the Philippines which could mean that the Philippines will be left behind in take up over the next two reports.
Finally, we look at narrowband connections – homes and connections below 256kbps. As countries roll out broadband, it is but natural that narrowband connections decline. While that is true for most, countries that have low broadband take up with populations only now becoming online savvy are resorting low speeds to get started.
This may also be a consequence of the price of connectivity driven by local competition or regulatory pricing schemes. Filipinos with less than 256kbps speeds increased by 7.8% from the previous quarter but overall, less Filipinos had these low speeds. The explanation could be that while more homes have migrated to higher speeds, there are also newcomers that have opted for these low speed entry packages. (Table 5)
LOWER EXPECTATIONS. Many in the country are opting for lower connectivity rates.
Over the next few weeks, Rappler will take a look at the state of the Internet for the Philippines bringing together various reports that help us understand this new, hyperconnected world.
Are we ready? How do we rank? And why does this matter to our future? – Rappler.com
From The NYT: Younger Shoppers Using Technology, Not Salespeople
“In all honesty, because I shop so much, I feel sometimes I know the brands better than some of the associates,” said Ms. Karim, 26, an analyst at Intel in Phoenix.
For a generation of shoppers raised on Google and e-commerce, the answer to “Can I help you?” is increasingly a firm “no,” even at retailers like Nordstrom that have built their reputations around customer service.
But instead of getting defensive, some stores and brands are embracing the change by creating new personal touches that feature gadgets rather than a doting sales staff. Bobbi Brown has touch-screen televisions to demonstrate the perfect smoky eye, something that was once the exclusive domain of makeup artists. The basketball star LeBron James’s shoe store in Miami has 50 iPads to describe its merchandise. Macy’s is testing cosmetics stations where tablets offer reviews and tips. And at C. Wonder, shoppers use a touchpad to personalize the lighting and music in dressing rooms (there is also a button in case, olden-days style, they need to call for help).
The self-service theme, which started years ago with checkout at groceries, has progressed to the point where shoppers can navigate entire stores without once having to say, “Just looking, thanks.”
Companies are adding the technology now because it has gotten cheap enough to make it feasible and because Apple and other tablet and touch-screen makers are increasing their sales efforts. Stores also don’t want to risk losing those customers who are not content shopping from home but nonetheless prefer Pinterest recommendations, Zappos reviews and Fashism feedback to interacting with someone behind the counter.
“There’s a tendency to believe that if you talk to somebody, they’re going to waste your time or sell you something you don’t need,” said Ricardo Quintero, global general manager of market development for Clinique, which uses touch screens at its counters. “It’s taking the pressure off.”
In Nordstrom’s case, customers have surprised the retailer. Nordstrom introduced an app in the fall that executives expected people would use remotely to order items while they were watching TV or waiting for a train. In addition to that, though, customers used the app while shopping at Nordstrom rather than approach the sales staff.
“How the customer is defining service and wants service to be delivered is changing pretty rapidly, and a lot of that is driven by technology,” said Erik Nordstrom, president of stores for Nordstrom. “A lot of customers like to touch and feel and try on the merchandise, but they also want that information that they get online.”
Nordstrom has added Wi-Fi to almost all its stores, in part so its app will work fast, and is testing charging stations and clusters of iPads and computers. It does not limit what people can do on the in-store devices, Mr. Nordstrom said. “It’s to have our stores be relevant, be a helpful place for people to be whether they’re shopping from us or stopping to check their e-mail,” he said.
The plain truth, some retail analysts say, is that businesses of all sorts have no choice but to accommodate consumers who are trained to do research on their own — and prefer doing so. Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland now gives suite visitors an iPad so they can order food and drinks directly from it, while Aloft Hotels, a Starwood division, has installed tablets instead of concierge stations.
At Land Rover, the addition of online tools for research has cut down sharply on dealer visits. In 2000, people, on average, made 7.5 visits to a dealer before placing an order. In 2010, that figure was 1.3 visits, with shoppers conducting 80 percent of their research on their own, said Andy Goss, president of Jaguar Land Rover North America.
The new technology is also being adapted by manufacturers who have been dependent on employees at big-box stores to sell their products but now see the opportunity for a direct line to the customer.
Scott Paul, chief executive of iPad Enclosures, which installs technology for retailers, said Samsung and other manufacturers were considering adding iPads that offered live video chat with a Samsung salesperson at stores like Best Buy. “You can use the kiosk to do better, in a lot of cases, than a 17- or 18-year-old sales rep,” Mr. Paul said.
The replacement of salespeople with screens is not without its detractors. Some people worry about jobs, though stores say that for now they are not getting rid of employees to accommodate their digital counterparts. And Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that shoppers lost something intrinsic to the human experience when they avoided salespeople.
“The point is not to be nostalgic for the good old days, but to ask ourselves, what kind of society do we want?” said Professor Turkle, the author of “Alone Together,” a book on people’s relationships with technology. With technology replacing human interaction, she said, “you’ve taken out a lot of the richness, the messiness and the demandingness of actually having to deal with people.”
Ms. Karim, the Phoenix shopper, says that she does not avoid all salespeople, but that technology has given her the freedom to be choosy. She still enjoys chatting with makeup-counter salespeople, for example, and getting suggestions from personal shoppers.
“It’s fun to see things in person, and touch the fabrics, and try on shoes,” she said. “It’s a social experience.”
Friday, March 09, 2012
Hmmm... Looks like there is something to look forward to: 7-Eleven TV Network's Early Advertising Success
Highlights:
- 7-Eleven TV significantly lifts sales of advertised brands.
- Nielsen study reports clear consumer recall from targeted advertising campaigns.
- Digital out-of-home model has a powerful influence on in-store sales.
MELBOURNE, FL/DENVER, March 8, 2012 — Harris Corporation announced that 7-Eleven TV significantly increased sales and revenue for advertisers across 4,344 stores in its first year of operation — validating the influence that digital out-of-home media has on consumers. The company reported that:
- Well-known national carbonated beverage brand sales were 17-to-35 percent higher in stores using digital advertising versus non-digital tactics.
- Targeted Hispanic language advertising resulted in a 21-percent sales increase for a leading national soft drink advertiser.
Meanwhile, the new Nielsen Fourth Screen Report confirms 7-Eleven TV advertisers are reaching targeted demographics and attracting viewers, with approximately 93,500,000 monthly ad exposures. The report arms media buyers with valuable audience metrics on one of the nation's largest digital out-of-home networks, with targeted impressions rivaling the top four broadcast TV networks.
Key Nielsen study figures include:
- Large audience shares in key advertising demographics including ages 18-49 (80 percent) and 18-34 (43 percent);
- Strong advertising recollection, with 68 percent remembering at least one ad; and
- Strong screen recognition, with 72 percent stopping to view screens — translating to increased customer dwell times in stores.
"The Nielsen Fourth Screen Report data clearly legitimizes the digital out-of-home model as a powerful advertising medium," said John Watkins, president of ABC National Television Sales.
Darren Mann and David Veckerelli, co-CEO's of DDN, provide additional perspective on the results: Mann said, "The report proves to both endemic and non-endemic advertisers that we are attracting viewers and reaching a highly sought after demographic." Veckerelli added, "As a result, the stores are reporting increased consumer dwell times and higher sales. All of this is attributable to the power and impact of in-store digital signage."
7-Eleven TV broadcasts programming that features entertainment content including Jimmy Kimmel Live, Access Hollywood and G4's Attack of the Show, and custom, targeted advertising sold through ABC Regional Sports and Entertainment Sales. Harris provides extensive network management capabilities across all store locations. 7-Eleven TV network advertisers include major brands such as Pepsi, Frito Lay, Hershey, ESPN and the California Lottery.
"Digital media is reaching consumers today in more ways than ever, and 7-Eleven TV proves the bottom-line impact for advertisers within the digital out-of-home model," said Harris Morris, president, Harris Broadcast Communications. "The Nielsen Fourth Screen Report metrics prove that strong video content and targeted advertising have a powerful influence on in-store sales."
About Digital Display Networks, Inc.
Digital Display Networks (DDN), www.ddninc.tv, is a digital network provider that creates and installs digital networks, produces and manages all content and administers advertising sales to provide a singular digital signage solution at point of purchase. DDN's 7-Eleven TV currently airs in over 4,300 7-Eleven convenience stores located in the top DMA's in the United States, reaching over 93 Million customers each month. DDN was formed by the principals of Explorer TV (www.explorer-tv.com), the nation's largest in-hotel digital visitor information TV network servicing over 150,000 hotel rooms in major cities in the U.S. and Europe, as well as cruise ships, visitor information centers and airports.About Harris Corporation
Harris is an international communications and information technology company serving government and commercial markets in more than 150 countries. Headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, the company has approximately $6 billion of annual revenue and about 17,000 employees — including nearly 7,000 engineers and scientists. Harris is dedicated to developing best-in-class assured communications® products, systems, and services. Additional information about Harris Corporation is available at www.harris.com.# # #
Contact Information:
Brian Galante
Dimension PR
brian@dimensionpronline.com
570-425-2315
Thursday, March 08, 2012
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Sainsbury's using QR codes
Sainsbury's launched today a new initiative to help show customers the difference that buying Fairtrade products makes to the lives of farmers and growers in some of the world's poorest countries.
The supermarket features QR code technology across key Fairtrade own-brand lines that will allow customers to instantly find out the story behind the products in their basket, according to a company press release.
Using their smartphones, customers scan QR codes which instantly link them to the Fairtrade page on Sainsbury's Live Well for Less website, where customers can learn about Sainsbury's Fairtrade growers and how Fairtrade premiums are making an essential difference to businesses and communities around the world. From here, further information can be found about Sainsbury's Fairtrade lines of bananas, roast and ground coffee, tea, plain cotton T-shirts and roses.
By shining a light on how Fairtrade premiums are improving the lives of those helping grow the products, Sainsbury's hopes to inspire more people to switch to Fairtrade for those everyday essentials. One of Sainsbury's leading suppliers of Fairtrade bananas, the Banaeras de Uraba farm in Columbia, exported 1.2 million boxes of Fairtrade bananas to Sainsbury's in 2010, generating an investment of $3 million that has been used to improve the quality of life of workers, their families and the local community, Judith Batchelar, head of brand for Sainsbury's said in the press release.
"As the world's largest retailer of Fairtrade products, Sainsbury's knows just how important Fairtrade premiums are to the farmers and communities that they supporting," Batchelar said. "By introducing QR code technology to our Fairtrade packaging, we want to help our customers to understand the huge difference Fairtrade products make in helping to improve people's lives in developing countries around the world."
Read more about technology.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
Interesting Take. From MusicThinkTank.com | The Real Reason Why SOPA Didn’t Pass: Marketing
I’d like to believe that the two recent controversial bills, SOPA and PIPA, were stopped because they were poorly written but the real reason had to do with the power of messaging and branding.
Let’s face it: bad laws are passed everyday. In 2009-2010, Congress passed 8,970 bills alone. Most of the time, things go by unnoticed. SOPA and PIPA had great intentions (even praised by their strongest opponents) to deter piracy but their problem had to do with messaging. Both bills had been making steady progress for months with bi-partisan support and hardly any opposition. However, during the last several weeks, things exploded online when major Internet companies such as Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook got involved. A lot of things were said about the bill that weren’t true…but by then, it didn’t matter. People were buying the new story: SOPA and PIPA would “break the Internet.”
This is what they did wrong from a marketing perspective:
- They didn’t share the stories of those affected by piracy. Some of the bill’s biggest supporters, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), vouched their support but the messaging came from their executive staff. They didn’t tell the story of the thousands of workers affected by piracy: film hands, aspiring writers, the struggling artist. People launched attacks against the entertainment industry’s wealthy while ignoring the possibility that multi-billion dollar Internet companies probably have their own lobbyists influencing legislation as well. People don’t mind hating a big corporation but it’s hard to dismiss the power of a single story.
- They Communicated in the Wrong Places. Nearly all of the messaging supporting SOPA were featured on industry sites (such as ASCAP and BMI) but that information wasn’t being shared much outside of that. On the other hand, anti-SOPA/PIPA messaging prominently featured on social media and Internet sites (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.), making it easy to spread quickly and effectively.
- They Focused on the Wrong Message. People don’t care about industries or companies, they care about themselves. When the entertainment industry talks about lost revenue or lost jobs, eyes glaze over (they’re tired of hearing that tale). It’s why piracy continues to rise. On the other hand, hen someone hears “the Internet will break” or that they could lose their favorite social media site, they begin to listen and more importantly, want to take action.
- The Brand Suffered but They Didn’t React. The bill supporters assumed that people would use reason and read the bills themselves (especially as they got updated throughout the process) but in reality, most people didn’t care enough to follow. They had one poor impression and it was enough. In the customer service industry, if manage negative touch-points aren’t managed, customers are lost. By then, it’s too little, too late. Many of the bill’s supporters began jumping ship simply because they didn’t want to be associated with SOPA or PIPA.
Even if the bills undergo major overhaul, I doubt they’ll get the support that they need. My recommendation would be to change the name (the brand) and begin with fresh messaging, highlighting the stories of the people who would be affected by its passage. Have independent artists reach out to their fans, show case budding directors and fashion designers. Show that it was more than the entertainment industry who had a stake. Share the a real story that people could relate to and spread.
Most of the bill sponsors involved never expected such a strong reaction since major laws are nearly ignored everyday. However, when you mess with the largest supply and delivery information services in the world, expect some sort of retaliation. In the end, it’s just business. But remember, a lot of spending, just like voting, is emotional and not necessarily rational. The story or idea that spreads and sticks is the one that wins.
——————————————————————————
Simon Tam is owner of Last Stop Booking, a full service agency that offers tour booking and music consulting services. Simon has appeared on stage at over 1,200 live events and has traveled North America presenting ideas about the music industry. Simon’s writing on music and marketing can be found at www.laststopbooking.com
Friday, December 09, 2011
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
This just emphasizes the need for DOOH to go online. From DailyDOOH » Focus Media Group Accused Of Fraud
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
‘Focus Media Sinks in Muddy Waters’ writes the Wall Street Journal, ‘Focus Media Shares Crater; Analyst Alleges Fraud‘ writes Forbes (there are many more) and there have even been regular bulletins on CNBC.
There seem to be three main allegations: -
A “significant overstatement” of the number of screens in its LCD network ”Olympus-style acquisition overpayments” Focus Media insiders selling at least USD 1.7 billion worth of stock since its 2005 IPO On Monday at one point, shares in Focus Media Holding Limited (Nasdaq: FMCN) fell well over 60% in trading.
I know it is easy to be wise after the event but there is a reason why the Greater Fool Theory has never been proven wrong.
With keywords like ‘China’ and buzzwords ‘digital’, ‘advertising’ there were many who (literally) bought in.
However many screens they are (finally) proven to have or have not, it will be interesting to see how they count them all as the whole network is run by Sneakernet.
If we remember correctly their CFO was a speaker (via the web, not in person) at one of the Digital Signage Investor Conferences many years back (at least 4 years) and we don’t remember him coming across particularly well.
This entry was posted on Monday, November 21st, 2011 at 19:37 @859 and is filed under DailyDOOH Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
This is inspiring. From SFGate via JPJ: This 28-Year-Old Is Making Sure Credit Cards Won't Exist In The Next Few Years
advertisement | your ad hereThis 28-Year-Old Is Making Sure Credit Cards Won't Exist In The Next Few Years
Alyson Shontell, provided by
Thursday, November 10, 2011
There's a tiny 12-person startup churning out of Des Moines, Iowa that most people have never heard of.
Dwolla was founded by 28-year-old Ben Milne, and it's an innovative new way of thinking about online payments that sidesteps credit cards completely.
Milne has no finance background, yet his little operation is moving between $30 and $50 million per month, or about $350 million per year.
We interviewed Milne about how he is building a credit card killer and Square rival from the middle of the nation where VCs and press are scarce.
I'm told you're pissing off credit card companies. How are you doing that?
Ultimately we're trying to build the next Visa, not the next PayPal. We're building a human network based on how we think the future of payments will work. The current model needs to be blown up.
Dwolla started out of my old company. I owned a speaker manufacturing company and we sold everything directly through a website. I got really obsessed with interchange fees and how not to pay them. Every time a merchant gets paid with a credit card, they have to give up a percentage. In my case, I was losing $55,000 a year to credit card companies. I felt like they were stealing from me -- I was getting paid and somebody was taking money out of my pocket.
So I thought, how do I get paid through a website without paying credit card fees? We pitched a bank, and amazingly enough they said, "We'll give it a shot."
That was three years ago, so we've been working on the project for a really long time. In December of last year we figured out how to legally do what we do.
How many transactions are you doing?
The average transaction volume for Dwolla is right around $500 dollars. We move between $30 and $50 million per month
What's your story?
I'm 28. I started my first company, Elemental Design, when I was 18. I dropped out of University of Iowa and built that.
I started college because I thought that's where I was supposed to go. I applied to one college, I got in, went, and realized it wasn't for me. I had customers so I stopped going to class.
We grew that company from a $1200 investment to over a million in revenue in 4 years with 3 or 4 people without outside investment. We were doing a million and a half a year and the company was running itself; I wanted to work on another project.
You don't have a finance background and yet you built Dwolla?
It's been helpful in some strange ways. I think the first financial institution we went in to only listened to me for entertainment. They let me get in and pitch the full executive team at the bank.
I don't look like a banker, they knew I didn't have a banking background. They actually agreed to work with Dwolla after two hours of arguing with me and me scribbling on a whiteboard about how the whole thing could work.
Had I been more typical, maybe they wouldn't have listened to me. In that respect, I think that probably not knowing how the mechanics work is good -- we just know the way we want them to work.
What did you do for the first two years when it wasn't technically legal?
For the first two years we built out the platform. We did a sh*tload of testing and did it small scale because legally we couldn't do it nationwide. We spent two years inside of Iowa fine-tuning Dwolla with the financial institutions, building out some of the initial models, and trying to figure out how to legally do what we do.
How'd you find a legal loophole?
Moving money is an exceptionally regulated business. We're in Iowa, which is sort of conservative -- I don't know if that helped us or hurt us, but long term I think it helped us. We figured to do this legally, we had two options: We could take in a tremendous amount of money and go out and get licenses, which is how most people do it. But we didn't have access to that kind of capital here. The other option was to bring in really strategic investors, which is what we did. One is a financial institution, one is a financial services company.
Our investors do credit and debit processing for banks. So when you get a credit card from your bank, it's being issued by companies like this. Our investors are also distributing our product to financial institutions. So we've been building a network, and we can do it legally because of who our investors are.
We launched in December of last year and started moving $50,000 a week. Now we're hovering around $1 million a day now. We hit that milestone in June or July. Now we've quieted things down. We had to tap the breaks because the way you handle money needs to be managed correctly. We have some new partners on board and we're going to hit it hard in December again. We've got some stuff coming out in December that we think should be really big.
How does Dwolla work and how is it different than PayPal?
With Dwolla, payments are made directly from your bank account. No credit or debit cards are allowed. And because they don't exist in the system, we don't have to bring the fees into the system.
You can spend any amount of money and when you do that, the person on the other end doesn't have to pay 1, 2, 3 or 4%. They only pay $0.25 a transaction, which is especially helpful when it's $1,000, $2,000 or $5,000 transactions. Obviously PayPal becomes very cost prohibitive with those larger transactions.
The biggest difference between ideas like this and a PayPal -- and PayPal is a phenomenal idea, Square is too -- is that those are built on top of networks like Visa and Mastercard. We're building our own.
Can users only send money to Dwolla members?
No, you can send money to anyone. Only the person sending it has to have a Dwolla account to initiate the transaction. The person receiving it will have to sign up for an account, but we've been surprised at the conversion there. It's worked relatively well. We leverage social networks really heavily as contact lists, which is one thing we do really different. You can send money with an email address or with a phone number, but the most popular way to do it is to connect to Facebook and type in a friends name.
We think, in the long term, sending money should be as easy and effortless as finding a friend on Facebook. That's really a behavior we try to mimic when it comes to peer to peer payments. When someone does not have a Dwolla account, they get a wall post that says, "You've got money." If a friend sent that to you and it was their name and their face, you would have a different emotional connection to that than an arbitrary email from hellokitten32@aol.com. It's a totally different interaction and one that's been really helpful for us in converting users into the system.
What kind of purchases and money transfers are Dwolla being used for?
We do pretty well in B2B; 11% of our business is person to person, and the large majority is business to business, consumer to business, and business to consumer. The platform was originally built for taking in payments through websites, and we have APIs that allow you to do that. We haven't experienced the scale on those quite yet.
Where we've seen a ton of transactions right now is with people paying monthly rent. If I'm a landlord and I want to collect it, taking a credit card payment means missing out on 3% of a $1800 charge. Dwolla is $0.25 cents.
The average Dwolla transaction is right around $500. PayPal takes 2.9% plus $.30 a transaction.
Why hasn't anyone side stepped the credit card companies before?
I think a lot of it is timing and luck. And a little bit of getting your foot in the door. One of our investors is a $1.8 billion financial institution. That's atypical anywhere, let alone in Iowa. Having them on board allowed us to get into a lot of rooms.
We serve everyone from the landlord taking in one payment to the individual buying a coffee with their cellphone, to billion-dollar corporations. Because we're so atypical and look at mobile payments differently, we got in the room with the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury who allowed us to have a conversation, not only from a corporate standpoint, but from a government monetary distribution standpoint.
All banks are connected by one APH system. Credit card companies utilize that same system to pay off your credit card charges. Banks internally set along that same system to move money in their own banks. This system in it's own right is riddled with flaws -- tons of fraud issues and waste and delays. If you've ever had a payment take a few days to clear, its because they're waiting on that APH system.
We want to fix that system between the banks, take out the delays and make it instant. If we can create this ubiquitous cash layer of distribution between consumers and merchants and developers and financial institutions, that actually fixes the problem.
No one has built a payment network in 30 years -- since credit cards. Everybody has concentrated on how we build a portal for credit cards, from digital wallets to Square.
We don't believe in credit cards. We believe in authorization and in lower cost transfers. Our generation actually understands that when you buy sh*t, it comes out of your bank account and you have to pay for that.
Since you're hooked up to bank accounts, users don't have to have money in a Dwolla account to make a transfer?
You can hold money inside of Dwolla but you don't have to. We're finding a lot of consumers want to hold it there. There is actually a positive average balance inside of Dwolla for each consumer. We also have businesses that use Dwolla to do payroll, so they'll keep a balance in there to cover the cost.
You could have an account of $0 in Dwolla and their would be no fee?
The only fee would be if someone paid you. We take a quarter. We really want that quarter. It's all we want!
How do Dwolla's mobile payments work?
We built out mobile facing system; your mobile phone is just a different view of a website, so a mobile payment is just an authorization on your cell phone.
We take the website, plop it into the cell phone, start adding proximity solutions so you can to see what Dwolla merchants are close to you, and then make it easy to pay once you go into a store that accepts our system. Dwolla uses the GPS feature and allows you to make a payment in real-time.
So you're saying if a Starbucks accepts Dwolla I'll be able to see that on a Google Map, go there and charge the coffee to my phone?
Yes, you'll just walk into the store and pay. It's like checking in on Foursquare, you're just paying instead of checking in.
We started in one coffee shop and now we're working with 400 or 500 merchants. Part of us scaling out is we have to pick inflection points and then do some hiring to actively pursue those communities and integrate with them. We'll be beginning that in December.
Do banks have to pay to be integrated with Dwolla?
No, we just give them the service and then your bank account comes with Dwolla. There are 16 banks across the country that come with Dwolla. We're talking to some huge financial institutions about doing the same thing.
Banks are going to have trouble being relevant in mobile. The fundamental issue with mobile payments is: how do you get to your cash regardless of where you bank? No one has cracked that nut. I truly feel like we've not only cracked that nut but we're already selling it into financial institutions.
You don't have to pay the banks anything to log in and access accounts?
Nope. We built a web service that connect with the financial institutions and we do not have to pay them to work with them. We're a service provider to them and we work at the same time to make their customers happy.
Who are your investors?
We've raised $1.3 million.
You ever hear of John Deere Tractor? They have a bank, Verdian Credit Union, but essentially it's John Deere's bank, Verthian Credit Union. Verthian is one of our primary investors. The other investor is a company called The Members Booth which provides credit, debit, and security solutions to banks and credit unions.
How big is the Dwolla team?
We're about 12 people -- that's a beast of a startup in Iowa. We were smaller last December, about 2 or 3 people, so we've had pretty good growth. Most everyone is in Des Moines.
We've experienced strong early stage validation and have generated revenue that says "Hey, this thing can work well." We've got this little fire and now we're trying to figure out how to pour a sh*tload of gas on it, and really make this scale out. The beginning of that is in December and right now we're trying to ensure we have the right partners to really kick that thing off really hard.
What happens in December?
Oh, it's going to be good.
What is it?
We've got this product coming out in December that solves a whole bunch of really big problems inside of the ACH system, which all banks are connected to, and it does it in a way that's never been done before.
Are you raising capital?
We have a lot of really positive conversations going on at the moment and we're trying to figure out who the right partner to work with is. We're fortunate that our current investors are very supportive of what we're doing.
How are you doing all this from Iowa? It seems like this company should be on Wall Street.
Maybe. Right now Des Moines is the right place for us to be. In the future there's going to have to be a lot of business development outside of Des Moines and there are some things we won't be able to do from here.
If we can convince people in Iowa, who are more conservative by nature, to use Dwolla then my personal feeling is we've really got something there. Had we been outside of Iowa, maybe we would have tried to scale things up too quickly and maybe it would have blown up in our faces. Maybe not.
In my own naive way, I would never build a company anywhere but Iowa so maybe I just don't know any better. My personal feeling is, if you want to build it, where you are is just an excuse. Figure out ahat the area has to offer you and then leverage that. Hustle your ass off and make it work.
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