Using Square To Process Credit Card Payments On Your i Phone:

Using Obopay On Your iPhone:

Got a PayPal account? Got a Twitter account? TwitPay makes paying someone as easy as updating your status.

Square uses a small swipe device that plugs into your iPhone and allows you to accept credit payment cards without a contract or monthly fees. They also donate a penny of every transaction to the cause of your choice.

Kwedit lets you buy digital content and virtual goods and pay with cash. You can pay at a 7-Eleven, pay with cash through the US mail, or “Pass the Duck”, which means letting a friend or family member pay on your behalf using a credit card or other Kwedit Direct option.

GetGiving is a downloadable mobile application that creates a frictionless method for making a contribution to charity via your iPhone, Blackberry, or Windows Mobile device

Zong lets users buy things by putting the item on their monthly mobile phone bill.

OboPay lets you add money from your bank or credit card account to your Obopay account, and then send money to anyone with a mobile phone number.

Google asks New Yorkers to tell us the difference between a search engine and a browser:

If you want to die on your next flight, take an Aeroflot DC-9 from the United States to Russia in August, and make sure to get a seat in First Class. At least that’s what this interesting chart suggests. Sometimes an infographic can say so much more than words, which makes the fact that I’m writing about it a little ironic (see infographic below). As I’ve pointed out before, 78.6% of all statistics mentioned in casual conversation are inaccurate. But I still find infographics and flowcharts fascinating. How else could you really wrap your mind around what a million dollars looks like ? This set of graphics, for instance, speaks volumes about how projects really evolve, and in a way that almost every guilty party involved would probably find amusing. And in spite of all the hype about Twitter (including the info in the clip at left) this set of graphics quickly puts things in perspective. The GOP/Dem debates about war and health care that I recently mentioned in this piece can also be summed up more quickly with two photos and some simple copy. What I’d really find interesting though, is if someone made an interactive graphic of how people from a broad set of  demographics use their time throught the day. Oh wait. Never mind. Have any interesting infographics of your own to share?

If you really have an interest in succeeding in pop music, there’s one way to avoid having to do many of the things we’ll suggest in this piece: be an absolutely f***ing brilliant songwriter with solid musicians to play your broadly accessible music. Then some top-notch management will find you, and your only battle after that will be not getting screwed by all the deals you’ll be offered. Since you almost certainly don’t have that particular set of attributes in your possession, ask yourself a few more questions about why you’re seeking to promote your music: Do you want to make a living at it? Are you convinced for some reason the world just needs to be exposed to your genius? Do you think you might have some reasonably marketable music, and wouldn’t mind getting paid for it? Have you been hitting the crack pipe pretty hard again? The fact is that even the established music industry has one of the highest failure rates of almost any business, and you’ll be entering one of the “noisiest” markets on the planet, alas, with a “naked” product. For some interesting thoughts about the new marketplace, check out Digital Music Can’t Be Marketed, which points out that you can’t really package and deliver your music, your only hope is to be “found”.

So out of the thousands of sites on the web that focus on indie music distibution, which one should you focus on? The simple answer is: Don’t worry about it yet. You have a long list of things work on first. Unless you’re a Lo-fi artist, get a decent master. I did live sound for several years, have had a home studio, and have worked with some great engineers in “real” studios. Give up the idea that you’ll create market-ready music on your cracked version of Logic Studio. Devote the first part of your budget to having tracks that are actually worth releasing, something you almost certainly won’t achieve without real studio time and quality mastering. While you’re busy breaking up the band by fighting over final tracks and money, get a UPC Bar Code. You’ll be using those a lot. Also make sure you’ve gone over a legal checklist like this one, because to actually make money, you’ll need copyrights and you’ll probably want to join BMI and ASCAP, among other things.

If this first round of work hasn’t “knocked the stew outa ya”, think about the realities of the current marketplace. The same thing that makes the fantastic new indie marketplace possible makes it almost impossible to cut through the noise. The buzzword for a while has been Social Networking, a phrase that is quickly becoming the next most-overused and utterly meaningless phrase in the business world. Use the term, and people immediately say “oh, like Twitter and Facebook, right?“, which is kind of a brain-dead view. You can’t overlook this as a marketing angle, but you’ll have to find the type of networking that works for you. MySpace Music is currently a no-brainer, but in terms of actually putting social networking to work, you have to have a sense of where your likely audience is active, and focus there. What makes a lot more sense is to have a decent product in the first place, and to use any guerrilla or viral marketing method at your disposal. In an ideal world, you would get written up in a top-level site like PopMatters.com,  DrownedInSound.com,  or PitchforkMedia.com, but without some smart management and PR, this isn’t likely to happen early on. Think about video, and think about YouTube. The indie band Matt & Kim – while relative uknowns a year or so ago – are now making the decisions that any indie artist would love to be struggling with, like: should we sell out to Mountain Dew ? One of the things that propelled them into the pop press was simply getting naked, and putting it on YouTube.

Granted, perhaps neither you nor your potential fans want you naked, but there are other clever approaches to this kind of marketing. We’ll cover that topic, explain why you shouldn’t waste money on your own web site, and provide a roundup of digital distribution channels in Part III.

Sometimes I feel like my friends and I are living a fictionalized version of our lives as products. How many times a day do you hear someone reference what they said or heard on Facebook or Twitter that day, rather than talking about something that occurred in reality? How many times a day do you hear someone who doesn’t even have a job in advertising or marketing talk about branding, or someone who does have a marketing job talk about utilizing social media as if they have the secret that makes it work? We live in a culture that thinks itself so media-savvy that the best source of news is a comedy show , the most revered art form is reality shows, and the hippest people totally aren’t. I mean, once you move to Williamsburg to be hip, how hip are you? I love metafiction, in fact, I have a half-written novel (Don’t we all? Here’s an excerpt of mine, 116KB PDF) which uses the narrator’s time-traveling and alcohol abuse as the device to explain the writer’s block that prevents him from resolving the story for you. To add an extra layer of “meta” to the whole thing, I plan on not finishing the novel. This kind of hip media self-awareness was cool back when AdBusters was new, or when William Shatner acknowledged his own absurdity in things like this parody trailer for the movie Seven, but now it’s so pervasive that it’s actually cannibalized back into advertising. It’s gotten to the point that I honestly can’t suspend my disbelief about my own life any more, let alone a movie or a product. My fourth wall is gone. I want my Verfremdungseffekt back.

A classic example of “Meta”:

To me, the most interesting thing about the recent leak and subsequent publishing of secret internal documents from Twitter was not the information revealed about Twitter – we all know they fancy themselves to be in a deathmatch with Google and Facebook – but how TechCrunch’s decision to publish them raises once again a slew of questions about journalistic practices. The death of Walter Cronkite on Friday was a timely sort of metaphor for the kind of questions to which I’m referring; Cronkite’s famous We Are Mired In A Stalemate broadcast during the Vietnam war was a symbol of everything I admire about great journalists, and why, in decades past, I might have actually wanted to be one. TechCrunch’s decision to publish is an excellent 21st century example of 19th century British newspaper and publishing magnate Lord Northcliffe’s statement that “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising“. After pointing out that Twitter is their largest source of outside traffic after Google in June, TechCrunch has turned around and bitten the hand that feeds them. Which raises a couple of interesting questions: Are they somehow upholding some value of journalism by informing the public, or are they merely capitalizing on a tremendous traffic generator? And will it backfire? While this is in fact one of the biggest stories no-one cares about (it was barely even a hot topic on Twitter, ironically), it still highlights one of the key problems faced by journalism which is outlined in one of my favorite books of the past few years, The Elements of Journalism. And that question is: if news makes its money from ads, how can it hope to maintain any kind of integrity?

A few years ago, my friend Terry Osterhout had a great idea: a zombie movie called “Hybrid”, completely produced with user-submitted material. Although a lot of buzz was generated, the submissions never really poured in. I think he was a little ahead of his time; crowdsourcing seems to be the hot new thing now, thanks to the rise of social networking, especially Facebook and Twitter. We recently wrote about the crowdsourced video for the the Japanese pop band Sour’s song “Hibi no Neiro”, but there’s much more afoot: after considerable success launching the project “Live Music” (see the clip at left) via Facebook, the project is being backed by Sony and Intel for release this fall. There’s also This Movie is Broken, a movie about the Canadian band Broken Social Scene and (this will turn out well) Star Wars Uncut which slices “Star Wars: A New Hope” into 472 separate 15 second clips, to be filmed by 472 different users. This kind of “socialist filmmaking” can have beautiful results, as when Israeli artist Kutiman Remixed YouTube or when a non-profit assembles a project like Playing for Change. But can this kind of project really shape up without a healthy injection of capitalist greed? The most successful project like this so far has been Live Music, and as this CartoonBrew article points out, it’s heavily funded by corporate sponsorship. I guess there’s always crowdfunding as an alternative. This Mashable article asks if it is in fact the future of journalism. There’s been a lot of talk about Free Stuff lately, and I have to say: few know better than I how little people who like your work will pay you when you don’t directly charge for it.