One of the best recent articles I’ve seen about the future of the entertainment biz online comes from this CNET interview by Greg Sandoval with Big Champagne CEO Eric Garland, whose company tracks the unauthorized downloading that’s given the music industry so much grief.  The thing is, many of these companies also hire Garland to track which downloads are hottest (knowing that they can’t ignore this sector). 

Because of his work, Garland understands much more about the Net age and downloading that just about anyone else in the biz.  He concludes that pay-walls (for places like Hulu) and RIAA lawsuits ain’t gonna save the industry (and of course DRM was ridiculous).  Though he doesn’t have specific solutions himself, he generally sees that the labels/companies need to provide the goods in the quickest and easiest fashion possible.  And the cheapest too, so that they can compete with the free model.  As such, his thoughts should be required reading for anyone in the biz.  Whether they’ll actually listen or take to heart what he says is another matter…

—Jason Gross

A colleague of mine who works in the non-profit world made this prediction: “it’s my belief that, within the next year or two, Facebook or some other social networking service will completely replace email as a way… to reach out to our audiences.”  Mind you, he’s not saying that e-mail itself is gonna die and Facebook will replace it. But the thought that the way that non-profits plus marketers, magazines, promotion (PR), bands and all sorts of other businesses will rely on social media rather than e-mail is an interesting idea to ponder.

The whole idea of social media taking over from e-mail as a way to reach out to audiences almost makes e-mail seem like an antiquated 20th century idea that’s on the way out in this early part of the new millennium. Can we gaze into our collective crystal ball and see how this will shake out?

The rise of social media has been stunning, becoming one of the fastest-growing sectors of the Internet. MySpace (only six years old now) was once the king of the hill but has been overtaken by Facebook, which is only five years old, but Facebook itself is now being challenged by Twitter, which is only three years old now. See the pattern here? Obviously, something is overdue to come and knock down MySpace, Facebook and Twitter off their perches. And a year or two after that happens, something else will take over as the new kind of social media world.

—Jason Gross

If you’re infuriated by Bob Lefsetz, you’re not alone.  When this industry insider and now writer moons about his favorite classic rock albums, he can be pretty moving.  But when he does his all-caps rants, I just wonder why I’m wasting my time reading his childish, ill-informed B.S..  If you want to hear an ol’ guy rant ‘the music industry is dead’ 100’s of times and then show how little he knows about rap, country, metal or several other non-rock genres, then he’s your man.

If you’re a little saner and you’d rather hear someone more thoughtful and intelligence try to dissect the latest music biz news and shenanigans, then you’d be much better off with Roy Trakin.  A nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn (he was once half of the jokey Yid-rap duo M.O.T.) who’s called the other coast home for a while now, he’s senior editor at trade magazine Hits (going back to the mid-80’s).  His weekly ‘Trakin Care of Business’ column comes out on Thursday nights/Friday mornings and is definitely worth reading as he delves not only into new releases but also industry issues, TV, films and other pop culture tidbits.  You may not always agree with him (I don’t) but unlike Bobby L, you never feel like you’ve wasted your time reading him- he obviously puts a lot of time and effort into his columns and always has at least a few interesting insights into his subjects.

Please do yourself a favor and check out his work at Hits.  You can also get his ‘daily dose of Boomerangst’ at Sonic Boomers.

—Jason Gross

He wasn’t at the VMA’s as Lane Brown explains in a recent New York magazine article.  But Brown also latches onto a good point, which is that Kanye had a point when he made an interruption so rude that it made Obama-heckler Joe Wilson look sane.  The VMA’s are kinda B.S. and Taylor Swift really didn’t deserve the award over Beyonce and the fact of the matter is that nowadays, the VMA’s mostly exist for incidents like this (remember Eminem’s stunt on the last show?).  Then again, how many entertainment award shows really pick the best all the time?  And with the advent of YouTube and amateur video, how relevant are the VMA’s otherwise?

—Jason Gross

Even if you’re not an Aerosmith fan (I happen to like ‘em), you have to feel for a band that’s had such bad luck on their recent tour, or rather, they’ve fallen victim to a common condition for classic rockers now—it’s called age and it ain’t always pretty, especially for a set of heroes who are supposed to be forever young (but can’t be).

It started recently when singer Steve Tyler took an accidental fall off of a stage (not a stage dive, mind you).  The poor guy had to go home to recuperate and the news that slowly dribbled out included show cancellations and the threat the rest of their recent tour could be scrapped.

And this wasn’t even the start of the recent health problems that the band’s had on this tour. Read the list of ailments from the last link above and you’ll see a leg injury, knee infection and surgery, head injury and ‘non-invasive surgery’, not to mention throat cancer and hepatitis C bouts in the last few years. So far only drummer Joey Kramer has escaped maladies recently.

—Jason Gross

If you’re a music and writing nut, you’ve no doubt combed through Jonah Weiner’s Spinning in the Grave article at Slate about the recent ongoing death of music mags. It’s a good, thoughtful article (disclaimer: he used to edit me at Blender), but it’s also incomplete, missing out on some fundamentals of why these magazines are crashing and burning.

Mulling over print-based magazines’ demise has been going on for years now, with some thoughtful pieces popping up recently. Culled as an except from his book Say Everything, Scott Rosenberg’s How Blogs Changed Everything (Salon) talks about how blogs not only reshaped the whole media landscape, but also how they’re akin to phone technology in their reach, influence and social capacity. One point that comes up briefly there, and is worth exploring more is that blogs are part of Web 2.0 media. In other words, instead of the static pages that dotted the early web landscape, they’re interactive with the user.

The whole idea of an interactive web is passe because we’re so immersed in it now, but when you think about it, it’s really a big break from the old model. It’s not just the way that users can participate in it, but the way that it’s constantly updated, even by the second (which you rarely saw in the early days of the web). Print media is closer to the old web model and for that reason, maybe more than any other, it’s dying out now.

—Jason Gross