Music Business Blog by Jason Feinberg

A quick update from the road, as I am in Boston with my fiancee’s family for the Holidays. I hope all of you have a wonderful Holiday and a spectacular new year.

I get the strong feeling 2006 is going to be a big year in the biz – so much has happened in 2005 that has set the stage for some amazing new developments, especially in the digital music realm. Can’t wait to see what we all come up with!

So be safe, and hope you get some good gifts… I got a few XBox 360 games tonight, can’t wait to get home and play!

[ Editor's Note: Today we're very lucky to have a guest post from Vernon Neilly. He is an accomplished guitar player, instructor, CEO of Boosweet Records, and he even occasionally finds time to sleep! Enjoy! ]

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SHOULD I GIVE AWAY MY MUSIC FOR FREE!
This is a question that independent artists still grapple with as they create their music, and spend all of the money that they have saved just to create their projects. The reason why independent artist still have a hard time determining this is because they are focused on trying to make back their hard earned cash that took them a 100 gigs or more to finance the project. Now when I speak of giving your music away for free, I am not talking about standing on the street corner handing out your CD’s as people come by, but deciding what is your very best song from your project, and loading the mp3 of that song to sites(there’s a million of them out there right now) that allow you to do so. Notice I said your best song from your project, this is because generally if people hear something they like they are going to want to hear more, so dont worry about giving you best song away. This is going to be the thing that will get interest in the rest of your project. Major record labels have been doing this for decades, and are still doing it at great expense to their labels, but the digital revolution allows independents now to do this for free or minimal costs at some member type sites, if you take the time to research what sites will be the most effective for your music to be heard. Also remember to let your fans, music industry folks, promoters know where they can go to hear your music, “You have to give to receive” !

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For more info on Vernon and his label, please visit: www.boosweet.com

My fiancee recently got the new video iPod. And after spending some time loading music videos, tv shows, home movies, photos, and an enormous CD library, she finally got the video iPod.

I have been drooling over this device since the rumors first started flying earlier this year. As someone who works in digital media, I am a strong believer (and have been since my days as a Palm-Pilot software developer) that portability and digitization is crucial to the future of the entertainment industry. Although I do love my CDs and DVDs, I need my media in a digital format that can be accessed, transferred, edited, modified, and squashed as I wish and when I wish. Other than the media that cannot be modified due to license restrictions, I spend a lot of time conforming my digital media libraries to my own specific preferences. Compressing digital video, transcoding from MPEG-2 to H.264, converting from AAC to MP3 and back… the list goes on. Call me an enormous geek, but I do these things every day.

And finally we have a device that lets me store, transport, and enjoy all forms of my media that does not take up a desk or laptop bag. Sixty wonderful gigabytes of storage space for all my digital treasures.

So, if you haven’t quite figured out the beauty of this device (for example, saying “who would watch video on that small screen?”) you simply haven’t experienced the possibilities that it opens up. Trust me.

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