News Blog

Music industry blog Coolfer has an interesting post this week about online tools for do-it-yourself musicians in which he points to a relatively new service called Speakerheart. I checked out the service, and while I agree with his assessment of the interface--it's based on Adobe's Flex (an offshoot of Flash) and is very slick and easy to use--I think that Speakerheart, like most other digital distribution start-ups, is going to have a very hard time.

An example of a Speakerheart shelf on the MySpace page of Nashville band The Bird Ensemble.

(Credit: Speakerheart; The Bird Ensemble)

The process is pretty straightforward: Artists sign up with Speakerheart to sell their songs through a digital storefront on the site. Artists have complete pricing discretion, but Speakerheart takes $0.25 per song. Speakerheart's big differentiator, though, are the widgets (known as "Shelves") that offer streaming samples ("Speakers") and the ability for listeners to bookmark songs that they like ("Hearts"). Musicians and fans can place these Shelves on any site that accepts Flash, including MySpace pages. For artists, the idea is that users will be able to stumble across your music on a wide variety of sites, sample your music, then proceed to your storefront to buy a song or two.

The problem with Speakerheart and other digital distribution start-ups is a lack of critical mass. Artists with labels or a significant fanbase don't need the service--they can sell digital downloads through their own site or the label's site. In either case, they (or their label overlords) will keep a greater percentage of the sales price. That means that Speakerheart will continue to draw relatively obscure acts, which means that few listeners will have any reason to visit the site or place widgets on their personal pages, which will keep the service too obscure to draw any acts with a significant fanbase, and so on--a sort of obscurity death cycle. The only way to break this cycle would be for Speakerheart to get a few name-brand artists to place their songs with the service, but that requires big marketing bucks or a lot of luck (a formerly obscure Speakerheart artist becoming the next U2, for example).

The folks at Speakerheart might say "But look at other services that started with independent artists, like eMusic and CD Baby--if they can do it, why can't we?"

In the case of eMusic, the site had first-mover advantage: it's been around for almost 10 years (!), and has been able to sign up a lot of independent labels with rosters including multiple acts. With 2.8 million songs available, fans of independent music already know to look there, and new labels (or the aggregators that serve them, like The Orchard) strive to get their music placed there. With CD Baby, the service started by fulfilling a difficult role for most artists--online distribution of physical CDs, including packaging, shipping, tracking, payment processing, and so on--and only later expanded into a digital aggregator (placing its artists' music on services like iTunes) and direct digital distributor (selling MP3s on its own artist sites).

My point: if you're a beginning artist, I still think the best recipe for success is to give full downloadable samples away on your home page or MySpace, then sell your music through a service like CDBaby or TuneCore (another aggregator that resells your music through iTunes and other services). You've got to go where the people are.

You won't read this in the glossy ads of a pregnancy magazine, but motherhood often leaves women feeling burned out, disappointed at times, and confused about who they are anymore.

As a writer on this topic, one of my major conclusions is that it's not our reality that is necessarily so difficult, but rather the gap between our expectations and reality that drives us crazy.

BabyPlus ad from Fit Pregnancy magazine

What creates this gap? It begins with the romanticization of motherhood, the buildup to the "big day" of childbirth, like the idealization of a wedding as opposed to the reality of a marriage. Mothers-to-be are marketed to like crazy, and I am concerned that high-tech gadgets have a particular role in this problem. The marketing of gadgets raises the bar of expectation even higher, and gadgets tend to promise new parents an unrealistic level of control and certainty.

Take the BabyPlus "prenatal education system." Hey, I guess a regular baby isn't good enough any more. You need to produce a baby PLUS. This little pod is the latest gadget that a pregnant woman is supposed to strap to her belly to give her fetus a jump-start on academic achievement. The device "introduces patterns of sound to the unborn child in only the language he or she understands - the maternal heartbeat." The promised benefits include better sleep, better nursing, more self-soothing...right up to improved school readiness.

Now I can't say whether this program has any effect or not, but the marketing really bothers me.

I've written about CD Baby before. It's a great way for independent musicians to sell their recordings.

For a one-time fee of $35 per album, it will set up both mail-order distribution (for which it takes $4 per CD) and digital distribution through all the major music stores, including iTunes (for which it takes 9 percent of what the store gives its artists, which is usually about 60 percent of the list price).

A couple days ago, CD Baby began offering direct downloads from its site. According to an e-mail I got from a representative, CD Baby takes only 9 percent of the list price--its standard cut for all digital downloads. But there's no other party involved, which means that the artist gets to keep 91 percent of the revenue from sales through the site.

As with physical CD sales, the artist gets to set the price. Downloads are unprotected MP3s, lacking digital rights management (DRM) technology, which means that they'll play on any computer or portable device. iTunes still offers better exposure--direct integration into the software used by more than 100 million iPods--but this puts CD Baby into the same space as eMusic, which recently surpassed 100 million downloads.

eMusic works with independent labels, so its artists are probably more prominent than those on CD Baby--musicians on indie labels might get some radio play on college radio and perhaps national press coverage, while unsigned bands almost never do.

Nonetheless, if you're interested in a broad array of music and like to support artists (particularly favorite local acts) well before anybody else has discovered them, CD Baby is a great place to start.

Baby naming has suddenly become a hot topic. News sources from Salon.com, to conservative commentator David Brooks have recently weighed in on the significance of a baby's moniker. The Wall Street Journal even framed the naming decision as "the art of 'branding' your newborn."

Parents' stress levels may be rising as the naming the baby becomes a high-stakes decision. Expensive consultants have even cropped up. The Today Show featured a self-proclaimed "nameologist," who charged a couple $300 to help them choose among combinations of Charles, Robert, and Matthew. I say keep the three hundred bucks and choose a name out of a hat if you are that undecided.

Luckily there are many free or low-cost naming tools that can add to the fun rather than the stress of baby naming. In addition to the many books on the topic, from the thematically-organzied Beyond Jennifer & Jason, Madison & Montana, to the encyclopedic 100,000+ Baby Names, there are many free resources available online.

Last week the new "Baby Einstein" study came out suggesting that "educational" baby videos are ineffective teaching tools. The most memorable conclusion from one of the researchers: "I would rather babies watch American Idol than these videos."

Over the weekend I was invited to debate BabyFirst TV co-founder Sharon Rechter about the relative merits of these products. BabyFirst TV is a 24-hour cable channel that broadcasts "educational" shows aimed at infants and toddlers. Their programming includes the Brainy Baby video series, some of which were included in the recent study.

Unfortunately, a technical glitch meant I didn't get to participate in the discussion as planned, but preparing for the segment gave me a chance to examine the culture behind these products. Why are these videos so appealing to today's parents? As I thought about it over the weekend, and re-read Susan Gregory Thomas' new book Buy Buy Baby I came to realize that there is a perfect match between the marketing messages coming from companies like BabyFirst TV and Baby Einstein, and the culture and socialization of Gen X parents in particular.

When I wrote about "marketing to your reptilian brain" on Tuesday, I was just hearing the news breaking about the new study that suggests that babies' viewing of Baby Einstein videos may hamper rather than accelerate language acquisition. Since I was writing about unconscious marketing techniques, I ran with the McDonald's Wrapper research rather than the Baby Einstein findings.

The runaway reporting of the Baby Einstein story caught me by surprise, because I had assumed that on some level we all knew these videos were just a crutch we used to keep the kids occupied while we took a shower, cooked dinner, or blogged. Apparently the educational marketing messaging has been much more effective than that. As Stefanie Olsen reported in her CNET blog on Tuesday, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood released a statement that said, "The No. 1 reason parents allow babies to watch television and DVDs is the mistaken belief that the programming is educational and, or good for brain development."

As a neuroscientist, I had a brief fascination with video-based learning back in the 1990s. I was impressed by Dr. Patricia Kuhl's research demonstrating that babies are born with the ability to hear and distinguish phonemes from other languages that can't be heard by adults. For example, Japanese-speaking adults can't hear the difference between the English "r" and "l" phonemes, but all babies can. But infants' brains make a commitment to the sounds of one language around their first birthdays. I considered developing a video-based learning system that would expose babies to all phonemes and help keep the window of language discrimination open longer.

I'll never know whether that would have worked on a scientific level (Kuhl's subsequent research suggests that videos are less effective than human interaction), but it could have been marketing gold. Well-intentioned, science-based efforts to promote the "first three years" of life as an important time for brain development created a market that was extremely receptive to "educational" toys and videos. The marketing legacy of "play" being replaced by a "curriculum" remains today. If you walk down any toy aisle in a major retailer, you'll find that toys right down to birth are sold with specific learning objectives. The irony of course, is that kids who receive loving human interaction and attention can learn in just about any situation. The specific objects don't really matter and, in the case of television in particular, can be worrisome.

There's a growing consensus among medical professionals that television is not great for kids. But parents are left in a bind. The two forces that need to be detangled in the Baby Einstein story are that 1.) the American Academy of Pediatrics says that children under age 2 should watch no television and 2.) in the wake of this new study, Baby Einstein founder Julie Aigner-Clark responding that the Baby Einstein company "doesn't make claims about developmental abilities increasing."

From my perspective, I will ding the AAP for being unrealistic, and Aigner-Clark for being disingenuous. After all, the company isn't called "Baby Couch Potato."

To the AAP, yes, people survived for eons without television, but it's become a fact of life in modern society, and there are times that parents turn to it to entertain their kids to get a break. But given that television-watching has become rampant, with 40 percent of parents with young children reporting that the TV was on "most" or "all of the time," and a quarter of kids under age 2 having a television set in their bedrooms (according to the book Buy Buy Baby), I will give the AAP credit for encouraging us to tone it down.

As for Aigner-Clark, a quick study of the Baby Einstein Web site shows that the marketing language is careful, not making overt promises of genius, but evoking a feeling of edutainment at every turn, selling itself on the point that it "uses music, art, language, science, and nature in playful and enriching ways." I would argue that the strategy of segmenting of the DVDs into different levels every 3 months also implies a developmental progression that may or may not actually be there.

The Baby Einstein site and Aigner-Clark emphasize that the "right" way to use these videos is to sit alongside your child and interact the whole time. On The Today Show this morning, Aigner-Clark called the DVDs a "digital board book," saying that "You don't put in a video and leave the room. It's all about interacting with your child. You want to sit with your child in your lap, watch the video together, use 'parentese' and talk to them as if you were reading a picture book."

For a reality check, I asked my husband, Michael, what he thought about that, to which he replied, "That sounds like the worst of both worlds."

Leave it to a Dad to cut through the hype and tell it like it is.

New York Times workplace trendspotter Lisa Belkin writes today about the culture clashes arising now that four generations are in the workplace at one time. The World War II generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y have very different values and expectations that are not always compatible co-existing in the workplace. Think belly rings clashing with Brooks Brothers, or flex-time worship versus yuppie ladder climbing.

Belkin writes about programs designed to translate workplace standards and communication styles across these boundaries: "Summer is the season of culture shock in the working world, when the old guard comes face to face with a next wave of newcomers, and the result is something like lost tribes encountering explorers for the first time."

This trend story feels a little pat and overgeneralized, but Belkin's article made me smile because I had just been thinking about what it means to have four generations online. In this case, the tables are turned with the younger generations as the experts who have grown up with online technology as their native culture, and senior family members more or less along for the ride. In our family, the grandparents are online, which is a good thing, but I have run into my own case of culture shock when my father reads my blogs.

Intergenerational tech musings today: The New York Times has an interesting report about new advances in hearing aid technology. Companies are motivated to meet the needs of aging baby boomers facing progressive hearing loss.

But how to overcome the stigma of hearing aid use for this potential market of 78 million people? Recent innovation has led to new devices that look more like Bluetooth headsets or iPod headphones than older models that resembled "a chewed Circus Peanut."