There are so many great ways to discover and enjoy music that didn’t exist 10 years ago.  Internet radio, music blogs, social networks, recommendation technology.  The prevailing wisdom is that we need all these new forms of music discovery because Clear Channel killed terrestrial radio in the 90s by rolling up all the good old stations and programming them from an office park in Dallas with lowest common denominator corporate schlock.  Which they basically did.

But it turns out you can’t kill great radio completely.  We Angelenos are fortunate to have an incredible station in Indie 103.1.  Ian Rogers (who knows I dig the alt-country and other forms of cool roots) first tuned me into Chris Morris’s excellent Sunday morning show Watusi Rodeo a few years ago.  Its still my favorite program.  Excellent week in and week out.

Dwight Yoakum – Close Up the Honky Tonks

Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band – Harlan Man

Johnny Adams – Hell Yes I cheated

Another solid program on 103.1 is Big Sonic Heaven weeknights from 10-12 PM.  I usually tune in a few nights a week while reading or playing Wii.  Its heavy on the Sigur Ros, Portishead and other chill out type stuff.  I bet Mick O tunes in regularly.

Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols has a show called Jonesy’s Jukebox at noon and 6PM. He gets some great long format interviews and guest DJs (Robert Plant, Public Enemy, Spoon, OK Go, Harry Shearer as of late) and plays some great R&B, soul, etc. as well as pre through post punk.

There is also a great DJ (forgot his name) who plays around 7 or 8PM midweek who is totally geeked about rareties, the vinyl-ier the better.  He doesn’t pre-announce the tracks he is going to play,  but he gives a great post-play synopsis including how to find the rare tracks.  They don’t appear to have a page for him on the site so I’m not sure what the show is called, but he’s turned me on the some great rare stuff in the past few weeks.  His setup for Makanda Ken McIntyre’s Cosmos was “get prepared for 5min and 26 sec of sonic perfection.”  I thought so too – check it out (loud works better).  It’s off an Complete United Artists Sessions compilation which is only available new on Makanda’s site (the vinyl is amazing and also hard to come by).

Tenor Saw – Ring the Alarm

Makanda Ken Mcintyre – Cosmos

If you are like me and had given up on ad-supported terrestrial radio, start tuning into 103.1 on your stereo or checking out their live stream on their site.  They run fewer ads than most stations by a longshot, and a lot of the ads they do run seem to be promoting local music events and festivals – like this tribute to Johnny Ramone in Hollywood next weekend that I want to attend (as long as it doesn’t interfere with Broken Ocean’s gig that night at Viper Room).

Amazon links:

Dwight Sings Buck

The Mountain

Hell Yes I Cheated

Tenor Saw Lives On

Posted: July 25th, 2008 under digital music, internet radio, live music, mp3blog.
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Two sites that I frequent (Huffington Post for political updates and Boston Globe for Red Sox updates) monetize their site using the annoying (but effective) pop under, where a new browser instance is opened and placed under your existing browser with an (usually Netlfix or Orbitz lately).  They were considered bad biz for a while but they are making a comeback (Boo – that sucks).  For some reason Firefox/toolbar pop-up blockers aren’t blocking all of them them. Both sites are using Tribal Fusion (Update: or caselmedia) to traffic their pop unders. If you use Firefox to surf the web (and you should), here is an easy way to block the pop unders at any site you hit.

1. Install the BlockSite Add-on
2. After it is installed Navigate to Tools>Add-ons
3. Select Options on the BlockSite Add-Ons
4. Click the Add button next to your “blacklist”
5. Enter http://a.tribalfusion.com in the dialog box, then click OK twice.
6. Repeat for any other domain serving pop-unders

Posted: July 24th, 2008 under politics.
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or “How to Throw Away Billions in Brand Equity Away Picking Up Pennies” *

Something has changed. Or maybe it has changed back. The customer is king.  Super brands are developing in markets big and small – brands with fanatical followings, unheard of loyalty, dedicated employees.  And brands that were only a few years ago considered “great” have the lost a great part of their luster.  Customers are becoming so much better informed about their options, and know how to reward companies that treat them right, and punish those that screw them over (see note about Netflix below).

There are objective measurements that try to assign value to brands by comparing the market valuation that a company should have based on the free cash flow it is generating (and other valuation models like P/E etc.) to the market capitalization it actually has.  The difference in the two values are attributed to the value of the pure brand.  There are other survey-based qualitative methods.  And hybrids of the two.

It’s not important to  bother with trying to actually quantify a brand value in dollars and cents unless you are working on an M&A transaction (or trying to sell marketing consulting contracts!).  What’s more important as an executive or manager is to understand the velocity of your brand’s value.  Are your current business practices creating or destroying brand value?

What not to do – Dell Inc.

While surfing the internet recently I found this article from ‘04 in which Dell is actually cited as an example of a world-class brand.  Certainly from ‘95 through ‘02 Dell was a juggernaut from a brand perspective, consistently ranking at the top of quantitative and qualitative brand value surveys.  By 2004 though, the Dell brand velocity was clearly negative.  They abandoned any brand levers except low price, which cut into margins and forced their hand in operations.  They moved to outsource their customer support to India, which was a disaster.  They started relying on making money with gimmicky financing packages.  They didn’t respond when the competition began redefining the form factor.  For the 2 years their competition has been personifying them as oafish buffoons all over the place, and they haven’t been able to respond.  This year the NY State attorney general got a judge to say this about them.

“Dell has engaged in repeated misleading, deceptive and unlawful business conduct, including false and deceptive advertising of financing promotions and the terms of warranties, fraudulent, misleading and deceptive practices in credit financing and failure to provide warranty service and rebates.” OUCH.

Simply put, if you are earning margins by tricking your customers, you are destroying your brand value.  Misrepresenting your level of customer service and whacking people with unseen service and financing charges have been OK in the past, but it won’t work anymore.  Your customers are way too well informed, and they have means of retribution for a bad customer experience that didn’t exist 10 years ago.

Building a brand right – Zappos

By any rational evaluation, building a company selling shoes (they also sell clothing any other accessories) online should be impossible.  Amazon sells shoes.  Shoes have to be tried on, you’ll get killed on the return rates.  There are a million other reasons why selling shoes online is a terrible business.  Zappos is making it happen by being slavishly devoted to building their brand by closely managing every aspect of customer interaction, which is really, really hard.  Do yourself a favor and buy your next pair of shoes from Zappos, and take note of the experience at every touch point.  Its amazing.

The only way to pull it off is to develop an entire corporate culture devoted to improving your consumer facing brand.  State your core values and let them inform everything you do as a company.  Offer trainees a bonus to quit.  Zappos are so confident in their employees they even encourage them to tweet, and aggregate their employees posts. (I follow their CEO and am finding out that they are featured on Nightline tonight).

The good news for my dear readers is that so many companies have negative brand velocity, and even the best brands are miles away from being able to capitalize on the latest technologies to constantly test and improve their brands.  Get out there and help them turn it around!

Brand Death Watch (companies with valuable brands that routinely screw their customers and provide shoddy customer service)

• DirecTV and cable TV companies (can’t wait to cancel my subscription forever)
• Wal*Mart (just say no to cheap crap)
• Starbucks (at least they know it)
• Netflix (mainly because they are killing multiple user queues per account Update:  Todd informs me that Netflix listened to their customers and reversed this decision.  Strong! This is why you leave comments turned on for your corporate blog.  I’m leaving them on the list because of their reliance on pop-unders for customer acquisition.  Everyone knows they are effective, but we stopped using them cause they are so damn annoying.  This is a bigger problem for Huffington Post and Boston Globe who are monetizing with pop-unders via Specific Media.)

Brands making it happen

• Apple (taking brick-and-mortar retail high-end for everyone)
• Amazon (I buy everything here, except shoes)
• Netflix (they do some things right see above)

Who am I missing?

Posted: July 7th, 2008 under social networking, work.
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Sometimes art and music makes you scratch your head   I didn’t think I much liked The Replacements all this time.  I even went to college in the midwest while they were still together in the late eighties and had lots of friends from the Twin Cities.  I bought their studio greatest hits compilation a bunch of years back and listened to it a few times and basically thought it was unremarkable.

Then last week I pulled a DownThemAll from Aquarium Drunkard straight to a playlist on my ipod for a flight to Denver last week. (Highly recommended quick iPod refresh technique – we can call it Raymonating your iPod).  Luckily for me it included the entire Shit, Shower and Shave compilation, which is a “long-traded compilation” from some live 1989 shows opening for Petty (which wikipedia calls a disastrous tour for an unknown reason).

Holy shit shower and shave, I’m a huge fan!  Sort of a Springsteen everyman point of view (switch out Asbury Park for Sheboygan) with a Waits gift for turning a great metaphor, combined with a Drive-By Truckers brawling drunken coming straight at you live personality and a Ramones intensity.  I can’t get enough of it.  How did I miss these guys for so long?

Chalk up another victory for the mp3blog era – I will definitely be rounding out my collection from some timely reissues of their studio stuff – a positive activity music economy-wise the lousy label greatest hits compilation didn’t trigger 10 years ago.  But I’m preaching at the choir.

I’m not going to bother to rehost the tracks, head over to the AD if you want to check them out.

Posted: July 2nd, 2008 under digital music, live music, mp3blog, portable devices.
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