The UnSub

My first love is not computer science but audio engineering. The process of capturing and reproducing sounds was something fascinating as a teenager, so much so that I wanted to be an audio engineer after I flunked my 1st O’levels attempt. Somehow the practical self back then wanted to play the safe way and chose an electronics-computer engineering course instead.

Making noise/music (depending on the audience) was very much part of me during the school days in the concert band. This interest has since outgrown to business and marketing aspects of the industry as I started playing with the Internet and various enabler technologies that are within the reach of hobbyist. So long one has the right talent and inclinations, cutting your own tracks/album and marketing yourself is no longer a fantasy.

There are times I’d like to pretend to be the boss of a let’s say CD store and ask how would I survive the disruptive changes brought about by ever increasing network speeds and popularity of peer-to-peer file sharing technologies. I believe the best move is to turn the threats into opportunities, in this case by leveraging on internet and technology. Instead of selling what is easily available online, I would choose to sell good music that are hard to buy and find online and use internet blog marketing to the get the word out.

It would be interesting to have a store that plays good local independent music that needs marketing. A store with social network accounts for consumers to add so as to receive latest merchandise and product news. How about a simple system within the store that allows consumers to download the current song in promotion wirelessly into their phones. Targeting the youth and young adults wouldn’t be something that difficult since the adoption of technology is highest amongst these two groups.

Having a web store that sells at track-level and comes packaged with a personalizable CD cover would be a good complement sales channel. The consumer can either ship it to their place or have an excuse to go down-town to the store to collect and buy more stuff. I am not quite sure of the current indie music scene in Singapore. But I am pretty sure if local stores help to promote promising bands more along side with mainstream. We too can have our own brand of music.

Likewise, I am not 100% sure what I’d described will work. Most people have tonnes of reasons why things would not work, few can creatively come up with ideas that work. But I am certain that the old-school-easy-way-out of getting a shop front, bringing in some CDs and waiting for sales to happen is definitely a road to business grave.

Amazon has just launched Amazon Widgets for their associates. Click here to see all of these widgets in action. Recently I wrote about BlogRush, which is coincidentally (or maybe not) a widget based system. Comparing the two companies, I feel Amazon’s array of widgets is really impressive.

Adding these widgets was really a breeze with the Ajax powered builder tools! So far I have only added a “product cloud” as you can see on the side bar.

Among all the widgets, “Context links” widget is most interesting as it will automatically identify and link contextually relevant phrases within your content to Amazon products.

A cool idea to monetize for bloggers and it is almost effortless to put a piece of javascript code near the end of my template just before </body> tag. The big winner will be Amazon as she taps into the masses of blogs out in the wild.

Will spend some time exploring the other widgets…