6.12.11 Adam News & Info
Jun 12, 2011 0:18:47 GMT -5
Post by Q3 on Jun 12, 2011 0:18:47 GMT -5
Adam at KFest June 6, 2010. Nice summery look for the US’ heat wave.
Fox All Access CATCHING UP W ADAM LAMBERT- NEW ALBUM UPDATE & MORE
Taped 5.25.11
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Stalking For Dummies: A Guide For Fans
6/12/11 by NoAngel
Adam has been keeping a low profile lately as he diligently works on his next album, and sightings in the wild have been rare. We’ve learned that he can literally turn up anywhere in the world at any time. Thus, it is important for fans to be on the lookout and prepared for an encounter at any moment. A little homework can save you and other fans much angst and heartache, so I’ve prepared a little guide for all of us.
Plan ahead: First, never leave the house without looking fabulous, and always carry a well-charged smartphone with camera function, equipped with a Twitter app.
What to look for: Remember, when he is roaming free amongst humans, Adam is often in clever disguise. You may think it would be easy to spot a 6’1” guy with freckles, nail polish, and a shock of black hair. It’s not. When seeking Adam, look for the ugliest headgear in the area—something of the baseball cap or knit beanie persuasion. See a guy wearing glasses with lenses as large as dinner plates? Could be Adam. If all else fails, check the footwear. Sneakers or oxfords? Keep looking. Boots that cost more than your mortgage payment? You’ve found your man. Another tip: in any given crowd, Adam will be the man wearing the most clothing. In winter time look for a leather jacket over a suit jacket over a drapey sweater. In summer time look for a leather jacket over a suit jacket over a drapey sweater.
What to say: You want to impress Adam with your sanity and #realness, so find a way to convey your fanhood without tipping over into BSC territory.
Wrong: Oh hey, dude, I loved your version of Heartless on American Idol. Whatcha been doing since winning?
Wrong: OMG jmdxoiaoixejskfal!!!!!!!!!!! I’ve been dying to ask—when you did your show in Peoria, I noticed on the vids that you brushed something off your left knee at the1:47 point during Aftermath. What was it?????
Correct: Introduce yourself politely (keep your name written on your hand at all times because you’ll forget it in his presence) and praise his necklace. Hopefully he’s wearing one that day or you’ll sound a bit silly. Don’t bother asking for specifics about the album, since he’s
What to do afterwards: Faint.
Once recovered, promptly find a nice quiet place with internet access. Be proactive and crop yourself out of the pic, thus saving fans the time they’d have to spend doing it themselves. Leave in plenty of background, though, for identification purposes. Write a nice narrative, á la the fan from London, with plenty of detail and an appropriate amount of flailing. Focus on the particulars that fans want to know: hair color and style; facial hair or lack thereof; outfit/jewelry; companions if any; his mood and exact emotional state; vocal tone and pitch; all words spoken and implied. Tweet out the story and the pic.
Good job! Congratulate yourself on a successful Adam encounter and know that you have contributed to the happiness of thousands of fans around the globe. (Now immediately delete your Twitter account and start over fresh with a completely different identity for your own safety.)
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Sheet Music – Player Piano Rolls – Albums – and the new world of music
6.12.11 by Q3
A week ago, the major album of 2011 essentially became a free gift to introduce people to Amazon’s cloud music service. (I am, of course, referring to Amazon’s sale of Lady Gaga’s much anticipated album for $0.99.) Normally, superdiscounted sales of recorded music are not counted as retail sales for Billboard but much to the surprise of many people in the industry, Nielsen Soundscan changed the rules and counted these sales as retail sales. To me, this entire event, signals the end of the music world as we know it.
Business models usually shift slowly and they are hard to see until you look in the rear view mirror. But often there is an event that signals the change. Counting a $0.99 album as a retail sale is that kind of event. Music no longer needs to be sold for a meaningful amount of money to be counted for the Billboard 200 chart.
The first wave
The modern music industry was really born In the 19th century when sheet music publishers began to make lots of money. In the United States, a group of New York City-based publishers and composers known as "Tin Pan Alley" really controlled the business. They produced sheet music which could be performed by amateur pianists and singers.
Tin Pan Alley composers started out producing melodramatic ballads and comic novelty songs, then cakewalk and ragtime music. As jazz and blues became more important, they produced sheet music that were jazzy. Since improvisation, blue notes, and other characteristics of jazz and blues could not be captured in conventional printed notation, Tin Pan Alley manufactured jazzy and bluesy pop-songs and dance numbers. Much of the public in the late 1910 and the 1920s did not know the difference between these commercial products and authentic jazz and blues.
The era of sheet music and songwriters has left its mark on the music industry. A group of Tin Pan Alley music houses formed the Music Publishers Association of the United States on June 11, 1895. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) was founded in 1914 to aid and protect the interests of established publishers and composers. And even today, songwriters get special royalties and often make more money than performers from recorded music performances.
The second wave: A slow transition to the record industry
The phonograph was invented by Thomas Edison in 1877. In the early 20th century the phonograph and recorded music grew greatly in importance but the catalyst of change was the widespread availability of radio in the 1920s. The power of radio allowed even performers to become popular on a nationwide and sometimes worldwide scale – with extraordinary speed.
Slowly the dominance of the sheet music publishers faded, and the record industry replaced the sheet music publishers as the music industry's largest force by the late 1940’s. Now a broad audience was exposed to new forms of music – jazz, blue, modern country, rock, new wave, hip hop, and even disco. The rate of musical innovation accelerated as the audience demanded more new music.
The record industry and radio controlled the music business for over 60 years – and they still do.
Times they are a changing
But sales of recorded music reached a peak in the 1990’s. According to the IFPI worldwide sales of CDs, vinyl, cassettes and digital downloads dropped 25% from $38.6 billion in 1999 to $27.5 billion in 2008. The US alone accounted for over $4 billion of the decline. The industry has been restructuring for the past 10 years with waves of layoffs, music retailers have almost vanished first replaced by mass merchants who are now losing share to direct and online retailers.
Here are a few numbers that give some perspective to the situation:
In 2002, 1,963 albums sold over 10,000 units in the US.
In 2010, only 1,215 sold more than 10,000 units in the US.
(That was down from 1,319 in 2009 and 1,515 in 2008. Down 20% in 2 years!)
And the most stunning numbers: "in 2010 98,000 new records sold at least one copy in 2010, only 17% sold more than 100 copies, only 5.5% sold more than 1000 copies, and only 0.085% sold more than 250,000 copies. That would mean that only about 85 artists made more than $250,000 or more based on US album sales. Sure we know that the market has shifted to singles, but since the earnings per sale of those are <10% of an album, it just shows how few people are ‘living the rock star life’." (Link: www.geardiary.com/2011/02/24/music-diary-notes-is-10000-albums-the-new-bar-for-success/)
The record labels respond as the second wave comes to a close
Adjusted for inflation, the 45% sales decline of the last decade is actually a 64% collapse! The record industry is selling less, so they are investing less in total. But because they have fewer new releases, it is more important than ever that those albums are big sellers. So they narrow their exposure, invest in fewer new albums and go with a winner-take-all approach. Similar to the movie industry, now they need blockbusters.
And more than ever, the record labels need artists who can earn money in ways other than selling albums and tracts. They need artists who write and compose music, who are great live performers, who can build online communities of fans who will watch videos (with ads) and who can sell merchandise.
Welcome to the age of clouds – the third wave
For over 60 years, the major labels and radio really could make or break an artist. A mere handful of independent artists managed to become stars without one or both supporting them. (Note: Many of the famous “indie” artist are less indie than they seem. For example, Grateful Dead, Green Day and Phish were/are all with Warners, a major label.)
Digital music presented a real challenge to the music industry. As the power of centrally-controlled media like radio diminishes and user-controlled media alternatives – web-based boardcast, P2P music sharing, subscriptions and clouds – have grown in importance, a new power structure is forming. At the same time, the expanded media spectrum is making the publishing divisions of the major label groups very attractive and shifting the power within the major labels from the record music divisions to the publishing divisions. The web, subscriptions, clouds and so on, all require content and the publishing divisions are set up to license content.
The global entertainment conglomerates like Sony and Universal will survive. The fate of Citibank-owned EMI and Warners which is in the process of being taken private is uncertain but they may end up combined into one company with some parts sold off to Universal or Sony. Details of the Warner Music Group sale: www.thedeal.com/magazine/ID/039705/2011/when-the-music-stopped.php
Now to really change everything the world’s best subscription music service, Spotify, is coming to the US. Universal Music Group is reported to have signed a deal with Spotify for the US. www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/10/us-spotify-idUSTRE7596M020110610?type=smallBusinessNews
Then add a few clouds including the new Apple iCloud: www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_18248585?nclick_check=1
And the Clouds will change everything….
The licensing deals that record labels and publishers struck with Apple to initially make music available in iCloud allow them to share in the value of an Apple product or service, beyond the mere purchase of music itself.
Since the dawn of the iPod and iTunes, the music industry profited from those platforms only when someone actually bought music on iTunes. But by Apple's own admission, only 3 percent of the music stored in the average iTunes user's digital library was purchased from the Apple music store. The rest came from ripped CDs or was downloaded from peer-to-peer (P2P) services or elsewhere. As such, the industry saw only a fraction of the value in the iTunes/iPod ecosystem -- what one music executive called a "tip jar."
With iCloud, the labels share in it all. Apple will store 5 GB of music bought from iTunes for free in iCloud. It also charges $25 per year to scan and match users' existing music collections for songs not purchased from the iTunes store against the iTunes library, and then let users redownload up to 25,000 tracks in 256 kbps quality to the same devices.
So labels get paid both ways. Buy a song in iTunes, labels get a cut. Store a song not from iTunes in iCloud, labels get a cut too.
Link: www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/10/industry-us-icloud-idUSTRE7596TK20110610
Since the dawn of the iPod and iTunes, the music industry profited from those platforms only when someone actually bought music on iTunes. But by Apple's own admission, only 3 percent of the music stored in the average iTunes user's digital library was purchased from the Apple music store. The rest came from ripped CDs or was downloaded from peer-to-peer (P2P) services or elsewhere. As such, the industry saw only a fraction of the value in the iTunes/iPod ecosystem -- what one music executive called a "tip jar."
With iCloud, the labels share in it all. Apple will store 5 GB of music bought from iTunes for free in iCloud. It also charges $25 per year to scan and match users' existing music collections for songs not purchased from the iTunes store against the iTunes library, and then let users redownload up to 25,000 tracks in 256 kbps quality to the same devices.
So labels get paid both ways. Buy a song in iTunes, labels get a cut. Store a song not from iTunes in iCloud, labels get a cut too.
Link: www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/10/industry-us-icloud-idUSTRE7596TK20110610
There are other important Clouds out there – Google and Cisco have massive cloud investments, Amazon has launched its music cloud, and now we have iCloud. No matter which model wins, the result is that not only is the music industry’s model being transformed as the entire way we use technology is changing. The PC that was central to personal digital access and power for decades is becoming unnecessary. And once people start storing music centrally, it will be possible to allow controlled sharing while reducing the risk of piracy.
Whether the model that "wins" is clouds, or streaming media subscriptions, the source of the money will be changing and the music world is likely to shift to look more like cable TV than the what we have today. Music buyers will become subscribers with some rights to share their music.
The 21st Century Artist
To survive in this new world, an artist will need to be a performer-content creator-community builder. This third wave future requires someone who is a visual performer and can make an impression in multi-media, rich content environments. It requires an artist who is a content creator and can generate licensing revenue. And, most importantly, the successful artist needs to be a community builder.
So as social commerce and technology come together to transform the music industry, the artists who have the talent and flexibility to adapt to this world will be massively successful.
Adam has already proven to be an irresistible performer. And he has created a global community that is passionate and engaged. Now, all he needs to do is create quality, commercial content. This is not a simple task but it is where the money was 120 years ago, and content is where the money is today.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
The above proverb is of French origin and was used by the French novelist Alphonse Karr (1808-90). It also appears in George Bernard Shaw's 'Revolutionist's Handbook' (1903). Listed in the 1946 'Macmillan (Home) Book of Proverbs, Maxims and Familiar Phrases' by Burton Stevenson and in the 1992 'Dictionary of American Proverbs' by Wolfgang Mieder et al." From "Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings" by Gregory Y. Titelman (Random House, New York, 1996). Source: www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board
What does that mean??
6.4.11 by Q3
We now have migrated the Adamtopia Dictionary from old ATop to this site.
Thanks to miachihu (AKA Mia) for consolidating the old ATop and my original PF dictionaries into one reference set, then adding in many missing items. The consolidation incorporates the work of many fans and the original actually goes back to March 2009, long before anyone had conceived of Adamtopia.
There are three sections:
1. DICTIONARY (of Adamized words)
2. ADAM-RELATED ACRONYMS OR TERMS
3. STANDARD CHAT, E-MAIL, WEB, TWITTER AND COMMENT SLANG AND ACRONYMS
So check out this amazing piece of work and post if you have additions or an alternate definition. Here is the link to the thread: www.adamtopia.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=announcement&thread=350&page=1
Upcoming Events
Check the Adamtopia calendar for more events and links to more info.
6.19.11 Toronto, ON Canada MuchMusic Video Awards
Adam's IIHY is nominated for Most Viewed Video, not expected to attend.
6.21.11 Sydney Australia 2011 APRA Music Awards
Adam Lambert¡¯s ¡®Whataya Want From Me¡¯ is nominated as 2011 Australasian Performing Right Association Limited (APRA) Music Awards ¡®International Work of The Year¡¯.
Adam is not expected to attend.
APRA Music Awards ¡®International Work of the Year¡¯ (list)
California Gurls ¨C Katy Perry (Calvin Broadus/Katheryn Hudson/Martin Sandberg/Lukasz Gottwald/Bonnie McKee/Benjamin Levin/Brian Wilson/Michael Love)
Fireflies ¨C Owl City (Adam Young)
Hey, Soul Sister ¨C Train (Patrick Monahan/Amund Bjorklund/Espen Lind)
O.M.G ¨C Usher (Will Adams)
Whataya Want From Me ¨C Adam Lambert (Alecia Moore/Martin Sandberg/Johan Schuster)
July or so: Behind the scenes video of Adam #2 recording sessions to be released.
7.29.11 Adam performs at the St. Agathe en Feux Festival in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, QC, festival concert.
ATop Quebec concert thread: www.adamtopia.com/index.cgi?board=adam2performances&action=display&thread=321
Late Summer 2011 New single released
October-November 2011 Adam's second album released
Every Saturday from New Zealand -- Adam Lambert Hour -- Live 7:00PM EDT US.
Link: www.adamlamberthour.co.nr/
Check out the ALH page for podcast of previous shows.
This is the only weekly Adam Lambert show in the world.
Voting Opportunities
I have changed my recommendation on VH1 Do Something Awards to DO NOT VOTE
5.27.11 by Q3
On 5.25.11 I recommended voting in this competition. Since then I have done some additional research and testing.
1. Voting for the celebrity online awards is just a way to build awareness for the real awards show.
2, Adam is not nominated for any award. The only way to vote for Adam is as a write-in. It takes much longer to cast a write-in vs. voting for a nominee. There is no limit on voting. So 10 minutes of Adam fan voting time can be wiped out in about 1 minute by someone voting for a nominee.
Poll rating (0=lowest rating, 10=highest rating)
Adam benefit: 3 ¨C a win could raise awareness of The Trevor Project.
Fairness: 3 - there is an attempt to limit voting for just one category but it is very easy to work around.
Potential to win: 9 ¨C The voting structure makes a write-in vote very timeconsuming.
Fan value: 2
RECOMMENDATION ¨C vote only if you are willing to work really hard.
About the awards: DoSomething.org and VH1 have partnered to present The Do Something Awards to honor young people's commitment to social change. VH1 is doing a series of online contests to promote this event ¨C they have nominees but also accept write-ins. One of the celebrity categories could help Adam but, more importantly make a difference.
The category: Charity Song
The write-in: @adamlambert for "Aftermath Remix" and mention the Trevor Project.
You need to sign in on Twitter or Facebook to vote.
Below the SUBMIT button, it says:
¡°Did we miss your favorite?
NOMINATE YOUR OWN!¡±
Clink on ¡°NOMINATE YOUR OWN!¡± and you will get a voting pop-up window.
Link to cast a write-in: www.vh1.com/shows/events/do_something_awards/2011/
Note: If you send a really clever tweet, VH1 may retweet it.
More information about The Do Something Awards
Broadcast: Thursday, August 18, 2011 @ 9/8c Location: Los Angeles, California
Link: www.vh1.com/shows/events/do_something_awards/2011/about.jhtml
The Much Music Awards - Most Watched Video of the Year[/color]
Award is issued on June 19, 2011.
Adam is up for a Much Music Award in the muchmusic.com most watched video of the year category. Just click on the category and click on Adam's pic. Adam won last your for WWFM and we can win him an award for IIHY this year.
Poll rating (0=lowest rating, 10=highest rating)
Adam benefit: 5 ¨C could result in a TV mention and video clip being played during show.
Fairness: 6 ¨C spamable but bot/automated voting prevention.
Potential to win: 2 ¨C There are 25 videos up for this awards -- it will take a lot fan effort.
Fan value: 5 ¨C yes, this one results in a mention of Adam on an important Canadian award show.
RECOMMENDATION ¨C This is worth some effort. Play when you get a chance.
Link to vote: mmva.muchmusic.com/nominees/
Fuse Battle of the Fans:
Adam vs. Bruno Mars[/color]
At 3:00AM EDT 6.11.11 Adam was barely ahead.
Which heartbreaker has the best fans?
Adam Lambert 50.28%
Bruno Mars 49.72%
Of course, the only correct answer is Adam Lambert has the best fans.
Poll rating (0=lowest rating, 10=highest rating)
Adam benefit: 2 -- no real benefit.
Fairness: 2 spamable and bots can vote.
Fan value: 3 -- at least it is something to do while Adam hides --- errrr I mean works.[/color]
RECOMMENDATION ¨C Play for fun, this means little of nothing.
Link to vote: fuse.tv/music/polls/battle-of-the-fans-heartbreakers/poll-646.html?poll635=again&scrollTo=poll635
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