- There are 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide as of September 2009.
- There are 1.4 billion e-mail users worldwide, and on average we collectively send 247 billion e-mails per day. Unfortunately 200 billion of those are spam e-mails.
- As of December 2009, there are 234 million websites.
- Facebook (Facebook) gets 260 billion pageviews per month, which equals 6 million page views per minute and 37.4 trillion pageviews in a year.

Learn more by watching this video right here:

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

I read plenty of music biz news sites and blogs, and it helps keep me aware of what’s on most of my colleague’s minds. But if it’s in those blogs, people are already talking about it and you can’t do it first.

What I care about is figuring out what’s next. Finding more efficiency. Creating something that hasn’t been done before. Taking an old concept and applying it a new way.

The best wisdom often comes from sources far from obvious. Find the tools you need, combine them with the wisdom you can find, and create something bigger than you thought.

Read Seth’s Blog to get perspective.

Use Evernote to boost productivity.

Fire up Chat Roulette for creative purposes instead of just showing people your junk.

RSVP for every single SXSW party, but don’t get there before me and take my spot.

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2010/02/rent-vs-own-the-streaming-music-debate-continues036.html

I basically sum up the current state of the debate, the players, and what it will take for mass adoption. A quick and hopefully informative read to catch you up on where things are at in the streaming/subscription world.

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2010/02/rent-vs-own-the-streaming-music-debate-continues036.html

Focuses on recent and upcoming topics such as acquisitions, direct-to-consumer, ISP tax, Spotify, analytics, and more. Would love to get input from all of you as to what you think are the key digital music moments of 2009 and what’s next.

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/12/the-year-in-digital-music-and-predictions-for-2010350.html

I cannot stress enough how these conferences have been such a key part of growing my business. Between SFMT, Bandwidth, SXSW, CMJ, Digital Music Forum, and
any others, I get more done In a few days than in a month of sending emails and phone calls. For those of you pondering the value of conferences, I can assure you the networking opps are almost always worth the price of admission.

So, if any of you will be at SF Music Tech let me know, be great to meet up and discuss all things digital music.

After using it for a day (I bought the six month subscription, bringing it down to just over $4 a month) I am really digging it. There are albums from all the majors and a great selection of indies; I’ve found most of what I was looking for so far.

The playlists offer a radio feature, which allows for solid music discovery. The feature most people are talking about seems to be the artist slider, which provides the ability to decide how much variety you get in your playlists. If you have it all the way to the left (Artist Only) it will automatically add songs from the artist’s catalog to your list. The further to the right you go (Similar Artists) the more variety it adds. This offers serious customization of the music discovery feature and to what extent your playlist is randomized. Or you can simply turn radio off and it functions as a straight-ahead playlist.

So as I am thumping R. Kelly’s new album (after listening to the Dead Kennedys “greatest hits” I couldn’t bring myself to buy) I am definitely feeling good about this service. But as a digital marketing professional, I’ve personally felt good about a number of streaming services that haven’t ever lived up to their expectations. Streaming has always been plagued by the inability to provide “everything everywhere” service like downloadable content (mostly) offers. But as an industry, we’re getting there.

The key to survival here is keeping the price low, adding a mobile service (coming in the next few months), and continuing to offer innovative user experiences.

More here: http://mog.com/

http://www.google.com/analytics
http://www.rockdex.com/
http://www.bandmetrics.com/
http://www.nextbigsound.com/
http://www.trendrr.com
http://www.radian6.com/
http://www.soundout.com/

We also run many campaigns with http://www.topspinmedia.com and they have an excellent backend analytics system. Their platform also integrates with Google Analytics quite well.

Any others I’ve missed? Any favorites out there?

“We were claiming super-unique user growth while we knew we were just getting users to bounce off our site. Our approach was not far from hiring Internet users in India to click on our home page.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10303994-93.html?tag=mncol;txt

http://mashable.com/2009/08/02/customize-youtube-channel/
http://www.artistdata.com/us/casestudy
http://neich.in/2009/07/01/direct-to-fan-marketing-music-advocacy
http://www.audiblehype.com/diy/entry/10_highly_effective_ways_to_market_like_an_asshole/
http://blogs.openforum.com/2009/07/08/5-things-small-businesses-can-learn-from-big-business-social-media-campaigns/
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1773988/how_to_use_facebook_insights_for_your.html?cat=15
http://zanesafrit.typepad.com/zane_safrit/2009/04/please-dont-evangelize-our-products.html
http://www.clickz.com/3624847
http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles.htm
http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?30,767183
http://deepdivemarketing.com/2009/07/20/the-new-music-business-model-imogen-heap/

I am a firm believer in the D2F space, and my company is working with many artists and labels to leverage the power of the channel. As I have discussed before, OTMG is also a certified Topspin marketing partner, of which we are very excited and proud.

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/06/the-time-is-right-for-direct-to-fan-marketing-of-music175.html