MySpace Names Holt. Do Indies Stand A Chance?

 

Same subject as the Billboard.biz post but slightly different angle focussing on Indies.

From Hypebot.

As rumored for weeks, Courtney Holt has been appointed the President of MySpace Music. Holt will relocate from his NYC MTV office to new digs in LA beginning January 5th.  In the meantime, you can friend him of his very own MySpace page.

Holt could probably use a few friends in the independent music community. MySpace Music got off to a rough star with indies when the service, which in many ways was built on the backs of independent musicians, launched without offering them the same equity stake that it used to lure the majors.  Like a bride left at the alter, many indies cried foul. “It certainly makes (MySpace CEO) Chris DeWolfe’s public statements, that the ‘indie bands are really the heart of MySpace’, ring extremely hollow,” indie trade group Merlin CEO Charles Caldas said on launch day.

Since then, The Orchard, IODA and a few others have forgone equity and signed on.  But thousands of labels represented by Merlin including many larger indies like Beggars and Koch have yet to make deals. MySpace Music has also not offered a d.i.y. sales or income solution for artists not affiliated with a label or distributor.

Could new leadership offer new hope for independent music on MySpace? On the surface, Holt’s resume at MTV Networks and as SVP of New Media at Interscope Geffen A&M suggests that his point of view is decidedly mainstream and major label. But indies, who have privately complained about the pace of negotitions, will at least know that someone who understands music is finally in control.

Future Trends in Business Comm

I don’t know about you but I have been observing a significant shift in how people communicate, professionally as well as socially and privately.  While only 7-10 years ago, most of the work was done on the phone (I recall living in) .com boom-town numero uno, San Francisco, and using up all my 2000 AT&T minutes every single month!), eMail soon became big with everyone, and now eMail is still pretty much the prime vehicle of business communications – thus the rise of blackberry mania. Use of the phone declined heavily as a result.

Now, it seems that… well, eMail is for old people.  About 18 months ago, the use of ’social’ business platforms such as LinkedIn became more prevalent, and all of a sudden people started to have ‘professional’ conversations on LinkedIn, Ryze (remember??), Xing, and then, soon, Facebook, Myspace, and now… Twitter, Skype and GTalk.  Now, for me, it has already become the No. 1 method of how people reach out to me: rather than calling (ouch) or even emailing (ehem), people ping me via my various networks – and I think this will increase drastically because it provides a build-in filter as you have to be in my network to ping me via the Network.

This, below, is how I see this developing – and this will have vast consequences for business communications, going forward. Needless to say… I do have some ideas, here. Talk back!