I’m pumped to announce availability of Rock Show 2.0.  This is the first version of Rock Show that works on the iPad and both the iPhone and iPod Touch.  A lot of fixes and tweaks are in this version of the application, along with some new posters as well!

Two articles are up about the release, Padgadget is hosting one item and a second can be found at IntoMobile.  For a full low-down and updated info on the app, visit its page: http://www.rockshow.fm

Aaron Fechter the President of Creative Engineering, Inc has been reprogramming a working animatronic bear-band set up.  It looks like the company created it for a line of restraunts similar to Chuck E. Cheese.  He’s currently taking cash bids to do syncing or “choreography” for the band members.

The way the performance is filmed and presented are awesome.  Shakey prolonged shots, quick pulls outward.  The overall video quality is low and the colors look a bit washed out.  Everything is blurry and the bear with the guitar has a spooky shadow.   Great media.

I had the distinct and rare chance to be in the audience for the Jandek / Thurston Moore show at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland this past week.  What follows is an introduction to Jandek and a debrief of what the show was like.

What is Jandek?

Jandek aka the Representative from Corwood Industries is an obscure, uncompromising musician who creates music where many would hear only noise.    His recordings have been prolific, releasing at least one album almost every year since 1978.

Jandek has given two phone interviews, one with Irwin Chusid in 1980 and a second with Spin in 1985.  In 1993, Kurt Cobain’s interview with Spin addressed Jandek: “He’s not pretentious, but only pretentious people like his music.”  Someone managed to track him down in 1999 but they were asked to have no one contact him again.

It wouldn’t be until 2004 before he revealed himself at a performance in Scotland. Since then Jandek has performed only a few times a year.  The Hollywood Theatre in Portland hosted Jandek once previously in 2006.

The Representative is private, and shields himself from press and fans by  the P.O. box of the label, Corwood Industries. You can learn a lot more about Jandek from his wikipedia page, though I would recommend Aaron Goldberg’s Postcards from the depths of a subrban wasteland, which serves as an approachable entry point for learning about Jandek.

The Tickets

I feel somewhat compelled to mention tickets for the show, which were sold only as physical items by the two Jackpot Records locations.  Given the hype around the matchup of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore with Jandek, you would have thought the tickets would have sold out earlier than the day of the show. Alas, before the show started there was still someone outside trying to lose their extras.  The show began a few minutes after 7pm with no opener.

The Setup

Jackpot Records owner, Issac Slusarenko took the stage and took a moment to read off a fairly lengthy list of sponsors of which I remember none.  Our seats were third row center, so we had a great view.  It was clear that Mr. Slusrenko was just a tad on edge, but who wouldn’t be giving an introduction for a living legend.  MC confidence aside we likely have Mr. Slusarenko to thank for the LP reissue of Jandek’s original release, Ready for the House.

Mr. Slusarenko made an appeal for everyone to turn off their ringers and that no one take photos or video of the performer.  He mentioned that the show was being recorded. I didn’t notice anyone misbehave, in fact people sat very still.

The stage was setup with amps and monitors for both Thurston and Jandek.  When they entered from stage right, they both carried their guitar cases and patch chords with them.  The audience applauded for a time and silence ensued as they spent about four minutes setting up their equipment.  They did not stop to retune instruments.

The Performance

Jandek wore lightly shined black shoes, black pants, a dark red shirt a watch and a hat.  Jandek is very thin.  His movements on stage seemed deliberate and could be broken up thusly: he vigorously played his guitar with his right hand.  His left was used to build chords.  He tapped his foot, though not in beat necessarily, and he bobbed and swayed seemingly independent of all other motion.

During the third and final song, Jandek sat down cross legged, somewhat facing his amplifier.  I got the sense that this was his natural practicing position.  Craning his body over his guitar, letting the loud sounds wash over his compacted physical form.

If you like Jandek I think it is important to watch him perform.  You need to be there and watch for when he finds a bit of the song to fixate on.  At those times, despite the dissonance and fog of war created by Thurston, you could hear progressions repeated. Hidden in the noise but set by the pace of his strumming I heard rock and roll.  Although sometimes the more trackable Jandek’s strumming would get, the more Thurston would challenge the audience with his own layer of sound.

Thurston Moore was a pleasure to watch, he seemed truly at home on stage with Jandek, which must speak to his own eccentricity as it does his knowledge of Jandek’s style.  On the second of the three songs performed, Jandek stopped about twenty seconds before Thurston, giving the audience and Jandek a chance to observe the musician close a song.  I’d say there would be a lot of pressure to make the right sounds yet Thurston made the the action seem easy.

I was lucky enough to be accompanied by my friend Lauren, who had heard about Jandek only the afternoon prior to the show.  In our ensuing discussion of what had transpired, we came to an agreement that Jandek’s music is sort of “sexy ugly.”  Sexy ugly is described by the Urban Dictionary as “someone who is not conventionally good-looking, but possesses an appealing personality, style or talent and is thus considered sexually attractive by many.”  Jandek’s music is something you might love to hate.

The End?

The end of the performance was very interesting.  A couple of things happened.  Jandek and Thurston stopped playing roughly at the same time.  During the applause, Thurston held his guitar and for the first time and looked intently at Jandek to see if the show was truly over.  Watching Thurston’s face you could see recognition that both the show was over and that Jandek was beginning to take down his equipment.  People were still clapping.

For the first time, Thurston walked across the stage and spoke to Jandek.  I am almost certain that he told Jandek to leave his guitar and that someone would come and take care of it, and that they should leave the stage.  Jandek appeared to smile and otherwise respond non-verbally, leaving his equipment and following Thurston back across the stage down the stairs and exiting stage right to continued applause.

The After Party

The set clocked in around 80 minutes and no one seemed willing to move until house music faded in indicating that no encore was forthcoming.  As people departed, I could not tell what the general reception was. It was like after a serious movie where people quietly share their opinions while filing out the doors. We did not linger, but instead proceed to the nearby Moon and Sixpence tavern.

Once arriving, I was told by a staff member that the table I had chosen was reserved.  I thought nothing of it and moved to another table in the bar sitting with my back to the front door.  We were nearly done with our drinks when all of a sudden Lauren’s eyes got really big and her body language said a lot.  Something big was happening behind me.

I waited quietly and low and behold a party of six took their seats right next to us, one of whom was Jandek himself.  I tweeted afterwards that the energy of having him come in and sit down and see him up close was pretty incredible.  It was strange to know that most of the people in the bar had no idea how rare and strange it was to see Jandek in a casual environment.  After a while the weird Jandek spell seemed to wear off so we stuck around for another drink to witness Jandek somehow blending in to the bar scene.

Epilogue

Seeing Jandek was something of a dream come true and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in exploring the edge of alternative music and capturing a rare performance.

Since the concert, I had a chance to visit with Gary Houston of Voo Doo Catbox to talk about Rock Show, an iPad app I’ve been working on.  Gary coincidentally did the limited run of 100 screen printed Jandek / Thurston Moore posters.  You can currently pick these up at one of the Jackpot Records stores here in Portland.

Something I liked about the article was that it gave context to a technical social mashup idea I’ve been exploring, which is the increased use of near field communication (NFC) to increase one’s visibility in a meaningful way.  More specifically, people will use RFID tag readers in a mobile device like the iPhone to alert the world of their participation in entertainment experiences.

In The End of Solitude, Deresiewicz suggests the culture of celebrity is connected to the video camera, which I connect to broadcast television.  Regretfully, in the year when we could least afford it, reality TV gave rise to pointless distractions like the Balloon Boy and the White House Party Crashers.  But the article also describes the culture of connectivity as a product of the evolving use of computers and mobile communications in society.  As something of an evangelist for new media and a critique of old media, it is somewhat humbling for me to read Deresiewicz’s grouping of celebrity with connectivity in the contemporary self:

“Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known.  It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity.”

The value of different participatory entertainment activities runs the gamut.  A film at your local movie theater requires you to only buy a ticket before the film is sold out and ensure you show up at the scheduled time.  Getting yourself twenty feet from the stage at The Dead on July 4th at Rothbury Music Festival in Michigan requires a significantly greater level of planning.  But the relative interest in the social grid in any given activity is less important than the simple declaration to the post modern self that you “did it.”  People want to shout from the top of their literal or figurative mountains, “I am about to (or have just)  ____ at _____.”

Given that a lot of people love to share their experiences, many are simply limited by the inconvenience.  I’ve given some detail to my sense that there is a big splash still yet to be made by Apple’s touch platform.  And that the Touch lineup of the iPod Touch, the iPhone and the iSlate we will see a revolution in mobile computing.  They will allow us to enjoy the impulses of the modern self which are to take part in connectivity and some element of celebrity.

A topic that hasn’t been explored enough is the effect of including an RFID reader in a breakthrough device like the iPhone.  There is reason to believe that an RFID reader will be incorporated in the near future.   I believe that the inclusion of such hardware will open up opportunities to more quickly identify and disseminate interesting information about the entertainment spaces we’re inhabiting.

To illustrate a point, when I was writing the above paragraph I searched twitter for “Sherlock Holmes” which premiered this past weekend.  The third tweet from the top was from a student I’ve never heard of or met named Nicholas King.  From his Twitter bio, we know Nicholas is a student at Eastern Michigan and studies business.  Quite simply, Nicholas tweeted:

A quick search reveals that Trillium is a cinemas in Grand Blanc, Michigan and Nick was keeping his followers up to date with a text message from his phone.  While a text message accomplishes the goal of updating his thirty or so followers, it falls down for a few reasons:

1. Part of being fully connected is also having your information quickly sorted and grouped with similar data.  Twitter provides a reverse method for grouping information through its search.twitter.com functionality.  Users are capable of directly grouping their tweets with hashtags.  Both of those methods suffer the potential for data entry error.  I wouldn’t have known about Nick’s experience achievement if he had spelled it “Shelock Holmes.”
2. Manually updating your followers with the activity you’re participating in requires extended effort.  If you’re walking in the door of an RJD2 show you might have a drink in one hand and a gaggle of pals pulling you forward with the other. It isn’t always possible or at least socially acceptable to whip out your phone and type out an update.

The concept is this.  Sherlock Holmes is being distributed to theaters by Warner Bros Pictures.  In addition to sending out reels of film, Warner Bros would also send a small stand up display that is to be placed near the entrance to the theatre showing the movie.  If Nick carried an iPhone with an RFID reader, he would need only to wave his phone at the entrance and it would automatically pick up his preferences for sharing his location and the movie title he’s seeing via Twitter or Facebook.  More interesting things would be to automatically enter you in a contest for people who attended an Sherlock Holmes on opening weekend.

Another illustration to the benefits of adding an RFID reader to the iPhone in the realm of participatory entertainment is in live music or very large public entertainment events.  For instance, scanning the RFID tag in your section at a football game will identify the mobile capability to an application that could cue everyone to hold up their phones at a given time, display a particular set of images on the screen and turn the entire stadium into a megatron.  At a music festival like Rothbury, it might allow people to collect virtual zoo keys which turn an already amazing Sherwood Forest into something that is digitally enchanted.

The total extent to what could be done with connected devices incorporating RFID tags in combination with the impulse to reinforce personal visibility is impossible to see right now.  What is clear is that culture, technology and the increasing value of participatory entertainment rapidly is converging with all-in-one devices like the iPhone and iSlate.

Update 12/30/09:  A few additional things: 1. There is a strong sense that RFID will be most valuable for payment and wireless financial transactions.  The basis of my interest in RFID has been from seeing the NFC-enabled registers at places like McDonalds and Regal Cinemas.   When I first started seeing them, I would ask how often they took payment using the NFC at POS and I’d get blank stares from the employees.  MasterCard’s PayPass and American Express’s ExpressPay have been around for a while but have mostly only survived market tests as far as I can tell.

To look at how NFC/RFID payments and entertainment overlap, I love what it could do to damage the secondary ticket market.  I’ve long felt that secondary ticketing and scalping does more harm than good on the average would-be live entertainment participant.  Locking tickets to phones is a great way to help track and possibly reduce scalping while still allowing some flexibility in transferability.

There are some articles about how an RFID, NFC enabled phone are useful outside of entertainment which are worth linking to.  Here’s one that simply gooses the idea.  Here’s a second article that talks explicitly in terms of marketing opportunities.

In order to beta test, you first create an id Software user account, and then you have to create a second beta tester account just for Quake Live.   Both accounts require you to go through a registration/authentication email loop.

The gameplay is quite good, it feels just like Quake 3 Arena with a number of the original maps available for play.  The most impressive thing is that the game runs smoothly within a browser tab.  You can easily change game settings, including resolution changes on the fly, with a brief loading routine by the app.

Another interesting feature is that the statistics from your matches are immediately available in other pages of the Quake Live site.  So, you can play a game, then click out and navigate directly to a list of people you played against recently and add them to a friends list.

There aren’t very many people playing yet.  Apparently, the beta has been going on for several months.  The public can apply for a beta key right now, but I don’t know how many requests are getting granted.  I think that this is the closest thing I’ve seen to putting a franchise gaming release up in the cloud.  When you can have a high calibre game, a tool like the Zoho CRM, gmail, and a Google Docs spreadsheet open in the same browser it sort of makes the OS look a little thin.

The game will pay for itself using live in-game advertising provided by IGA Worldwide.
Here’s the Quake Live Beta email in full:

QUAKE LIVE Tester!

Your name has been submitted to id Software to help us test a new multiplayer project underway here at the studio. We are working on QUAKE LIVE and would appreciate your help as we progressively test technology systems, user interface options, and gameplay changes.

What is QUAKE LIVE?

Originally dubbed “QUAKE Zero” when we announced the project at QuakeCon 2007, QUAKE LIVE will be a freely available, updated version of QUAKE III Arena that you access and play through your web browser.

As a beta tester, we are asking you to help us test the game delivery mechanism and core game technology, and to provide feedback on gameplay and game levels. The servers are always available, but you are encouraged to join us for our regular focus tests and special events (you will receive email notifications).

Please note that QUAKE LIVE is a work in progress and your experience as a beta tester does not reflect the final set of functionality that will be available. We encourage you to post comments, issues, suggestions and other feedback to the QUAKE LIVE forums. As a beta tester you are asked to keep your personal key, login information, account information, and all other information related to your participation in this program private and confidential.

What’s Next?

Simply use the personalized key below to setup an id Beta Tester account and gain access to the QUAKE LIVE website where you can begin playing.

You will be asked to agree to a non-disclosure agreement and we ask that you keep your personal key, login information, account information, and all other information related to your participation in this program private and confidential.

Visit http://quakelive.idsoftware.com/ to start playing.
Key:
<cut>
Thank you for your time,

The QUAKE LIVE Team at id Software

I had chosen WoW for as my topic for three reasons.  One, it was among the suggested topics Professor Rao offered for the assignment, two, I love sci-fi and I played Magic in high school,  and three, my sister has played some WoW and she’s cool.

After spending a few hours working on that paper I realized that I should really have a crack at the actual gameplay for the good of scholarship.  Not because I have a lot of serious work to do that I’m trying to avoid.  Not that at all.

With a 10 day free trial, I couldn’t go wrong, so I started the download of the game and it was 3.6 gigs of data streaming over some type of resumabale http stream.  Oh well, I thought, I’ll let it go over night and try it out in the morning.

Little did I know that the application was going to require a half dozen patch updates.  Each update requires hard drive space for the patch itself and the uncompressed installation of the the patch’s data.  Most of the updates were less than a hundred megs, but I have had at least three downloads of a gig or more each requiring an additional 1-7 gigabytes of free space for the installation.  I’m sure that the requirements to download and install the game are greater than 20 gigs at this point, which is out of control.

So far, I’ve used two days of my free trial just trying to get the game installed on my D630 here and I’ll be honest the service experience has been something of a let down so far.

Suggestions for improvement:

1. Blizzard should offer the fully patched W0W version 3.2 available for direct download in the first place.  Rebuild, repackage and release that to your new customers.  Don’t give them the runaround with all these silly patch releases.
2. If you can’t do that, offer a real estimation of the amount of disk space involved.  This has been a really cleansing exercise as I’ve purged a ton of non-required data from my 150 gig laptop internal, but I would have much rather known what I was getting into from the get go.
3. Offer your patch releases as torrents.  I like that Blizzard’s direct download allows you to resume, but the speed overall is too slow.  Blizzard should host a bunch of seeds and suggest that we torrent via an official tracker rather than serve the data in a direct pipe.  It is just too slow.

I think the most troublesome issue is that I assumed that since I was installing via the web that the original download would reflect the current state of the game.  Instead, I had to go through the complete patching process from 2.x to 3.2 just as I would if I had bought a DVD from a game store.  What is the use, Blizzard, if you’re going to offer an ancient build as your foundational game download?

In his 2006 interview with Pitchfork Media, Krohn gave some important details about the album that would become The Third Hand. Specifically, the album was a huge transitionary work for him, moving from sampling to performance both in instrumentation and his own singing. In addition he moved labels from Definitive Jux to XL Recordings in an outwardly symbolic movement from hip-hop to a destination between electronic and pop music.

The show tonight was in good form, thanks in part to the early sell-out the crowd was tuned in and attentive. Krohn came out on stage and performed some of his classic tracks from his Definitive Jux period live using turntables and a synthesizer. After a few songs the drummer from his support band came out and began adding fills for a track spinning on vinyl. Not long after the band was off and running as a live PA, a literal demonstration of Krohn’s move towards a more traditional performance. Another peculiar aspect of the show was repeated returns to music from Nintendo Classic video games, including musical interludes from the Mario series and Zelda.

After the show, I had a chance to speak with Krohn. I asked about his recent work, as The Third Hand hit the street a full year ago and I wasn’t aware of any forthcoming work from him. He said that he has been recording regularly, but that it was largely unfocused work. I asked about how it felt to be on XL Recordings and his response was fairly general, suggesting that to some extent record labels offer the same services. In response I asked if he felt he had creative freedom on XL and he replied in kind that he felt he did.

I’m impressed by Krohn because of his ability to sell out the Paradise so early on publicity that is really a year old at this point and his cool responses to my questions about his work and the current tour. I highly recommend anyone interested in the electronic/pop/rock genres to make time to listen to The Third Hand and attempt to catch the show.

I’ve been interested in writing for Facebook for some time because I believe that companies need to be expanding their online presence into applications built for major social networking platforms. It is easy to say that people should pay attention to things like OpenSocial or Facebook’s API, there have been plenty of articles about it. But nothing can convince you like building and running one yourself.

My application began with only allowing users to choose a photo for their profile. Then I added the ability to select prior Dave Matthews Band shows. The problem came when people said they wanted to show their tour history further back than 2007.

I’ve been sourcing my data from the DMB Almanac, a site that I promote fairly heavily through the Weekly Davespeak’s front page and in the forums. I have a feeling I send them a good portion of traffic.

In order to get the application out as soon as possible, I decided to create my own numbering system for the shows–2007′s data was IDs 1-86.

The reason I didn’t use the almanac’s Show ID numbering was because the show id’s do not iterate consecutively. The band’s management adds shows out of chronological order. For instance they’ll announce the complete summer tour and DMB Almanac adds that–then additional dates like benefits get added.

Download Rock Show, the Concert Posters app for the iPhone and iPad

Using my own consecutive numbering meant that I could For loop through the list on a number of functions and random-access show information directly from the user’s show list. The refactoring meant building a translation table and script to update the old Show ID data, then change a number of functions from For to while loops that would handle non-sequential iteration the tour data.

Writing the translation script was a hurdle, I did a lot of debug output on the data I was generating to make sure it was working correctly.  You can see a bit of the verbose output here.

The application has just under 800 members now. I hope to have several thousand before DMB’s 2008 dates are announced. As the image above shows, the page has resulted in 163 new visitors, 21% of whom were new to the site. This is a low number compared to other site sources, but that may be because the app has not been in the wild for long and the skew is towards those who found out about the app from the Weekly Davespeak forums.

The article separates the types of leaks into three categories: the malevolent, the benevolent and the accidental.

Grim’s article includes eleven leak sub-categories each with a different intention. If you are plan to communicate with or be a part of the fourth estate, you should probably take a moment to read them each in detail. Instead of touching on each sub-category here, I would like to highlight how fair-weather leaks are used as a method of strategic media control.

Fair-Weather and Bad-Weather Patterns

“When an organization is being run well, people tend not to look at things as leaks, but they tend to look at things as information specifically being put out for some strategic purpose. When things are not well, the information getting out there is perceived as leaks.

-Chris Lehane, of the ’92 Clinton campaign and later the White House.

This seems like a subjective impression to me, and I wonder how it could be quantified without defining exactly what it means for an organization to be “run well.” And Lehane’s idea seems to create a chicken-or-the-egg scenario: a well run organization incorporates strategy into leaks, while strategic leaks also seem to be the hallmark of a well run organization.

The In Rainbows Fair-Weather Leak

A recent example of strategic leaks that I noticed had to do with information surrounding which record company would score the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows. Just days after the digital release of the album, Tiny Mix Tapes was reporting on Billboard news that Radiohead was considering signing with ATO Records / Side One Recordings.

Realize that no one at Billboard or anywhere else could guess that Radiohead would look at ATO with a high enough degree of confidence to publish it as an industry rumor let alone a news story. So this was clearly a strategic leak. According to Grim’s article which type of leak was it?

Of the benevolent leaks Grim writes about, here are a few that could apply:

• The Trial-Balloon Leak
  This would only make sense if Radiohead’s management was behind the leak of the information. They tossed the ‘rumor’ to Billboard to gauge industry reactions to the news prior to going forward with it.
• The I-Scratch-Your-Back-You-Scratch-Mine/Relationship Leak
  This type of strategic leak could have come from either ATO or Radiohead’s management and would suggest that one of them was either buying back favor or investing in favor from Billboard, Hits, Tiny Mix Tapes, or perhaps all of them. Unfortunately, I’d say that the real news with In Rainbows was not the label signing, but rather the surprise announcement of the digital release. No one had the jump on that, so if media relationship needed to be built then sharing a whisper of information on the digital release would have been a lot more effective.

• Because-They-Wouldn’t-Say-It-on-the-Record-It-Must-Be-Newsworthy Leak
  This assumes that ATO/Red Light was behind this one. I think this is more likely because Radiohead’s management was focused on drawing out hype on its decision to go digital, not an impending traditional release.If the In Rainbows label signing leak falls into this category it likely means that the deal had been inked before the time Billboard and Tiny Mixtapes were reporting on it. ATO was worried that an official announcement would not bring the adequate attention. Instead the leak of a “possible” signing makes it appear that the band is in some underground bunker furiously debating whether to take the big money and sign with either Warner music or EMI or go with the progressive and responsible alternative of ATO.

When it comes down to it, I think that this last category is the most likely one. Was it effective, and does it demonstrate that a well run organization? I’d say yes. Not only did a ton of media outlets pounce on the news, but some of them tied the story to Radiohead’s quiet decision to do a live webcast for its fans.

Live Nation currently operates three areas of business, Events, Venues and Digital Distribution. Venues and distribution needs happen to be where musicians and artists will be needing help as they leave or avoid major record labels.

A major rift is scheduled for 2009, where Live Nation will be selling tickets for all of its venues without help from Ticket Master. According to the Wall Street Journal the major breaking point was that Live Nation wanted to be able to sell Ticket Master tickets directly through the Live Nation website. Clearly Ticket Master wasn’t willing to give up the brand identity.

Live Nation Hit a 52 Low Yesterday Thanks to a Bad Market and Slow Quarter As It Works To Expand Operations

Or perhaps, Live Nation was simply asking for more than they possibly could have recieved because Music Today’s ticketing operation is ready to scale to replace Ticket Master by 2009. Dave Matthews Band’s official fanclub, The Warehouse distributes barcode-laden tickets to its members that are scanned in parallel with Ticket Master tickets at its shows. Getting that integration right is a small example of the learning curve Live Nation bought when it picked up a majority stake in Music Today.

The Q3 press release from LiveNation highlights the hiring away of Madonna from Warner Music Group as a big win for the company. Some people have been been piling on the decision as a bad one. Warner’s Edgar Bronfman Jr wrote his employees that ‘We remain committed to maintaining financial discipline. We simply will not enter into agreements with artistes that fail this test – whether or not the artistes are well-known, and regardless of media reaction.”

However, Madonna means a lot more to Live Nation as a symbolic first step towards building the Artist Nation division than she did as simply a money maker at Warner. In Live Nation’s press release claims her to be “one of the most influential artists and business women in the world” meaning they intend to position her as a savvy person in the music business as much as a veteran entertainer. Most likely Live Nation expects her to be a catalyst in signing more artists to the company.

No doubt, Radiohead turned just a few heads when they released their album in a new and unexpected way recently. All artists took note, and with Madonna appearing to lead the way for full service deals with Live Nation it may be that 2009 is very successful for Artist Nation.

So what about 2008? I think that next year will be a growth period for the company where it works to lure more artists and work out the kinks of its scaled operations for the first time. It will make mistakes and also make and lose deals to bring over some big names. However, it will not hit its mode for at least another year.