After watching it a few times, I’ve found that the video’s effectiveness comes down to a few things: whether they have a good street view shot of the location you input initially; whether you have a powerful computer or not (it works flawlessly on my hackintosh, but falls apart on my laptop); and if you’re on a Mac, whether you use Apple’s window-viewing Exposé feature in the middle of the video, which can kill the multiple-window experience. Regardless, head on over and check it out, and let me know what you think of personalized video experiences like this. 3rd Rail is similar in that we’ll premiere a video project wherein everyone’s experience is slightly different. Was The Wilderness Downtown able to find your hometown location?

Link: The Wilderness Downtown

While the concert film is similar in its crowdsourced nature to the Beastie Boys’ Awesome: I Fuckin’ Shot That!, Radiohead’s release is worth noting because the fans took it upon themselves to shoot it — and then Radiohead stepped in and donated the sound board masters (without which the film would be unwatchable). Because this is “strictly not for sale – by the fans, for the fans,” you can find it in its entirety on YouTube (I’ve embedded some songs below), or you can head to the downloads page where you can get it in HD quality from BitTorrent, MegaUpload, and other distribution methods that one normally associates with illegal content.

When it comes down to it, an act like this can gain one more fans and generate more good will than a thousand publicists. And you can only do it if you retain ownership over your creations – which I’ve harped on in the past.

15 Step

Nude

True Love Waits / Everything in its Right Place

Link: Radiohead Live in Praha

First let’s look at a crop of the musician infographic (the entire image is at the bottom of the post because it’s so long):

The column on the right is a bit confusing; it’s a pie chart of the total profit from a sale. So for a $10 self-pressed CD, the pink (artist) slice is only $8 because the CD presser took $2; for a retail album sale neither the gray (record label) nor pink slice are very large because the CD presser, shipper, and brick-and-mortar store collectively took home the majority of the sale.

The statistics show, if you’re a musician, to make a barely livable wage, every month you need to do one of the following (I’ve indicated in parenthesis if this is independently or under contract to a record label):

• Sell 150 CDs yourself (no label)
• Sell 1,200 albums through iTunes (label)
• Sell 1,500 tracks through CDbaby (no label)
• Sell 12,000 tracks through Amazon MP3 (label)
• Stream 850,000 tracks through Rhapsody (label)
• Stream 1.5 million tracks through last.fm (label)

Now, the key of course is to take more than one approach, so that a few self-sold albums, several hundred track sales on iTunes, and a bunch of streams all add up to collectively keep the lights on. I also suspect some of this information is dated (though he only published this last month) because some indie distributors today aren’t taking as aggressive a cut of sales as “traditional” labels. Here’s the full infographic, which illustrates in no uncertain terms why most folks feel that the music itself is just a loss-leader these days for profits from live shows and licensing:

I’d love to see this graphic created for filmmakers with theatrical, DVD, TV rights, VOD, download-to-own, etc. illustrated in the same way. Unfortunately I don’t have much to add yet, but this is why I’ve started sharing analytics. Sooner or later these analytics will be film-related instead of (or in addition to) blog-related numbers.

[image by David McCandless at Information is Beautiful]

In this vein, SXSW offers a great opportunity even for those filmmakers who aren’t attending the conference. Bands playing at the festival typically release a free MP3 in advance of the show for promotional purposes; every year for the past five years, these MP3s have been collected and released as an unofficial torrent. This is a great opportunity to listen to a lot of music, from bands signed and unsigned. Of course, there’s no guarantee that an unsigned band will agree to let you use their music in your film, but the chances are certainly better in the situation where you can ask them directly, rather than deal with a label.

It’s my understanding that, because all of these songs have been publicly released gratis, this torrent is legal. I may be wrong, but either way no one’s going to get mad at your for downloading this compilation of over 1,000 free and current MP3s. If you need a bittorrent client, for the PC try uTorrent and for the Mac try Transmission.

Start that iTunes playlist in preparation for your next project, or just enjoy the tunes!

Link: SXSW Torrents