Getting Away From It All

By Carl Weiss

Spring has sprung here in Florida, although you wouldn’t know it if you live in the Northeast.  Soon another school year will be ending and families will be looking forward to summer vacation.  Most people have already begun the hunt for things to do and places to go.  While some will opt for more traditional destinations such as theme parks, national parks, beaches and campgrounds, others are interested in finding those out of the way, off the beaten trail kind of trips that extol "The Road Less Traveled" mantra.  While travel magazines and Sunday supplements are renowned for publishing articles that give you a peek at exotic locales, when it comes to getting away from it all, nothing can put you in touch with unusual vacation destinations quite like the Web.

Where Getting Away From It All Began

Pitcairn Island – Yes, this is the south Pacific island nation started by the mutinous crew of the HMS Bounty. Today Pitcairn Island is inhabited by the 56 descendants of that ill-fated voyage.  It also has the distinction of being the least populous nation in the world.

Pitcairn Island was originally put on the map on July 3,1767 by the crew of the British sloop HMS Swallow, and was named after Midshipman Robert Pitcairn, the fifteen-year-old crew member who was the first to sight it. Fast forward twenty three years and the isolated island was chosen to be the last refuge of the six men and eleven women who purposely marooned themselves there when they chose to set fire to the Bounty.  While an act of desperation, the ploy worked, since it wasn’t until September 14, 1814 when a British flag ship landed a boarding party on the island. 

Today tourists can venture to Pitcairn for stays of up to 11 days aboard the Claymore II, which also serves as the islands supply vessel.  Private yachts are also invited to anchor in Bounty Bay.  Not exactly a tourist mecca, the island only averages visits by 25 yachts per year.  Of course, this is precisely what makes it such a terrific destination for some.  If you do arrive by yacht, a $35 landing fee per person is charged, plus a "Taxi Service” of US $50.00 is charged for the trip in and out. 

Once there, the island offers 14 choices of accommodation, including private 2 or 3 bedroom chalets or stays in the home of local islanders.  Rates range from $70-$120 per person/per day.  Additional services such as telephone, Internet access, and guided walking or bike tours can be arranged.  Fortunately for American tourists, the coin of the realm on the island is the US dollar.  For more info, visit http://www.visitpitcairn.pn/

Wet & Wild

While an excursion to a tropical island is just the ticket for some, others are looking for something a little more wet and wild.  If you are a bit more adventurous and are not afraid of the water, check out the option of checking into an underwater hotel.

Jules Undersea Lodge, Key Largo Florida – Located 30 feet below the Emerald Lagoon, Jules  

Undersea Lodge named after "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" author Jules Verne, was originally designed to be an underwater research facility.  Since 1986 when it was converted into a sub-sea lodge, accommodations for up to six paying guests at a time has been available.  While patrons do not need scuba gear to move around inside the lodge, it is a requirement for arriving and departing from the facility.

Jules' Undersea Luxury For Two

Our JUL for TWO package is $800 and includes our world famous Papa John's pizza delivery dinner. Breakfast includes coffee or tea, orange juice, and your choice of cereal. There's plenty of water, soda, and snacks as well. Dive gear is included in your package.

Check in: 2:00 PM Check out: 8:30 AM

Group Economy Packages
Group of 3-4: $350 per person
Group of 5-6: $300 per person

For more information see http://www.jul.com/Jules.html

How Low Can You Go?

If staying underwater doesn’t float your boat, there are a number of other subterranean destinations that can be had including ...touring Paris' Sewers! There is a dark underbelly to the City of Lights and you can book a tour that is like none other.  What I am talking about is a tour of Paris’ sewers.  (I am not making this up.)  If you think that visiting such places as the Louvre, the Eifel Tower and Notre Dame is so outré, for less than 5 Euros per person you too can experience the sordid history and architecture of the underbelly of Paris.  The tour spends an hour winding through the tunnels beneath the French capital as well as taking you to the heart of the system, part of which has been converted into a museum.  (You won’t find this thrill ride at the European Disney World.)  For more info go tohttp://europeforvisitors.com/paris/articles/paris-sewers-museum-exhibits.htm

Looking for a Cool Vacation Destination?

If you are looking for the ultimate in “cool”, allow me to recommend an ice hotel.  Located in such locales as Norway, Finland, Sweden, Romania and Quebec, these places are actually built from ice.  With global warming now a hot topic, this is one vacation destination that could literally have a limited shelf life.  For more information, go tohttp://www.theworldroamer.com/best-ice-hotels-in-the-world/

Icehotel, Jukkasjarvi, Sweden

The Icehotel in the Jukkasjarvi village in Sweden is THE ice hotel, being the first one in the world, opened in 1990 by Yngve Bergqvist. The hotel is opened to public every year, from December to April and more than 1,000 tons of ice and snow are used for the construction that, in the end, features rooms for around 100 guests, a bar and a church among others. And at 64,000 square feet (6,000 square meters), it is widely recognized as the largest ice hotel in the world. http://www.icehotel.com/

Looking for a Trip That’s Out of This World?

White Knight 2 - showing us the 'eye' (Photo credit: rob-the-org)

"Space Tourism" is a term that was coined to describe those lucky few who have had the financial means to pony up between $20-$40 million to spend a few fun filled months aboard the International 

Space Station.  While these seats are hard to come by, the allure of outer space  has also spawned something of a cottage industry that promises to take people to the its inky edge. This includes a venture by Sir Richard Branson, who has offered  those with $250,000 to spend a sear aboardVirgin Galactic’s SpaceShip Two.  However, while deposits are being taken, at the time of publication, there still has yet to be a launch date announced. http://www.virgingalactic.com/

For those who don’t want to wait, apprentice astronauts can currently experience what it’s like to be weightless aboard G-Force One for around $5,000.  While this thrill ride won’t take you to the edge of outer space, it will provide you with the sensation of what it’s like to experience zero gravity aboard a specially modified Boeing 727.  While it ain’t exactly Buck Rogers, it can save all you wanna-be space farers more than a few bucks.

http://nogravity.com/index.cfm

While there are those of us for whom a trip to Las Vegas provides adrenalin enough to get us through another year, for those who are looking to get away from it all, the best place to start checking out exotic locales near and far is the World Wide Web.

When he isn't surfing the web, Carl is Working the Web to Win, which is both a digital marketing agency in Jacksonville, Florida and a weekly online radio show on BlogTalkRadio.

Making It Mobile

By Carl Weiss

NEWSFLASH: There are 6.8 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide.  This is surprising, considering the current world population is just a little over 7 billion men, women and children.  More surprising is the fact that mobile has jumped more than 1 billion during the past three years alone. Of that, more than one billion subscribers are now Smartphone equipped. 

http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats/a

What this means to business owners and managers is that if they have yet to embrace mobile marketing, they could be missing the boat.  The problem for many is the fact that it took them nearly twenty years to learn how to add the Internet to their marketing mix.  Now many are reluctant to jump on the mobile bandwagon since they believe it will require the expenditure of yet more time, energy and money.

HTML 5 to the Rescue

While it is true that Smartphone users can and do surf the web, most websites created before 2012 rely on code that forces most people to squeeze many websites down to size in order to read them.  This is

 not only inconvenient. It usually means that most people will choose to surf elsewhere almost immediately.  What HTML 5 does is create a site that can detect and reconfigure itself to make it easier for tablet and Smartphone users to view without having to manipulate the site to make it fit their particular platform.  Better still, HTML 5 works with most browsers.  Plus, it makes embedding video on html 5 as easy as embedding images was with HTML 4.

http://janderson99.hubpages.com/hub/HTML5-is-Here-Now-HTML5-Benefits-for-Users-and-Developers

Of course, it can still be a chore for Smartphone readers to view a site if it has a lot of text.  I know I need a 12-inch tablet to make reading practical.  That’s why I still recommend that every business owner and manager spends a few bucks to create a .mobi site that uses video to showcase their business in a size that anyone can view.  Add to this the fact that there is at least one other advantage to creating a .mobi site, since many prime urls are still up for grabs that can help your business generate more traffic.

There’s an App for That

Some businesses have embraced mobile marketing in a big way by having mobile apps created that not only allow them to get a jump on the mobile craze, but also allows them to do some pretty sophisticated things online.  Whereas in the past many businesses relied upon radio and TV ads to generate a buzz about their products and services, today it is all too easy for someone to change stations or filter their TV viewing to eliminate all those annoying 4-minute commercial breaks. (Darn TiVo.)

This is where mobile apps are changing the way in which businesses engage their customers.  Offering everything from interactive coupons and contests to games and built-in customer appreciation programs, many businesses are capitalizing on the public’s infatuation with Smartphones by developing apps designed to interact with customers and prospects. 

·         Unlike standard email, a text message is more likely to be read right away. 

·         Using push technology an app can deliver relevant information to individual prospects.

·         Apps can also take advantage of GPS technology to geotarget customers.

Of course the downside is that it can be fairly pricey to develop a sophisticated app from 

English: Myurbanspot.com is an online mobile coupon app to find local businesses in the area. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

scratch.  This makes many apps unapproachable for smaller businesses.  There is also the added factor that taking an app to market can take months.  Even once in the marketplace you are forced to compete with millions of other apps.

“It's no accident or surprise that more than 2 million cumulative apps are in the Apple App Store and the Google Play store. While creating an app has been a great gateway into mobile, and still is a valuable tool to deliver content, reach is limited by the number of people who download and use the app.”

http://www.retailcustomerexperience.com/article/230843/How-to-ensure-a-symbiotic-mobile-marketing-strategy

Before you plunk down a wad of cash to develop an app for your business, you need to consider several factors, including:

1.      What is the app going to do for your business to give you an edge over the competition?

2.      How big is your anticipated audience?

3.      How long of a shelf life will your app have?

4.      How are you planning on distributing your app?

5.      Is there a third-party app available that can do a similar job?

English: Graph showing global smartphone market share for Q2 2011 When updating this graph, please check its usage and update the captions and refs in articles which link to it. Thanks. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With two million apps on the shelf it is highly probable that someone has already come to market with

 an app that can do the same or similar job.  Why pay retail when you can access many of the same benefits for pennies on the dollar through a developer?

Speaking of old-school marketing, mobile can enhance virtually every form of print marketing you currently employ.  Have a business card or brochure?  Add a QR code.  Spending money on a newspaper or magazine ad?  Add a QR code.  Quick Response codes allow you to send any prospect with a Smartphone to a website or video.  When you consider the fact that a QR code takes up less than one square inch of space, not adding one to every print ad is tantamount to throwing money away. 

Far from being reluctant to add mobile marketing to your current marketing mix, once you consider all of the benefits that mobile has to offer, you will soon wonder how you ever lived without it.

Carl Weiss is CEO of Working the Web to Win, a digital marketing agency in Jacksonville, Florida.  You can interface with Carl every Tuesday at 4pm Eastern when he airs his radio show on Blog Talk Radio.

Does Internet Ranking Really Matter Any More?

By Carl Weiss

Having been in the business of working the web for the past 19 years, I can still remember a time when search engine ranking was the be-all end-all of internet marketing.  Before the year 2000 it was possible to generate a page one ranking on a number of search engines with names such as Lycos, Alta Vista, LookSmart, Infoseek, Hot Bot, Excite and more in as little as 24-hours.  Better still was the fact that everything you needed to make the grade online before the turn of the century resided on your website.  No blogging, social networking or video required.

English: a chart to describe the search engine market (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back then while Google was part of the scheme of things, they were a small part, not having yet become the 800 lb gorilla in the room that they are today.  In 2000 Yahoo was the big kid on the block commanding more than 40% of the search market.  (Today that figure is down to around 12%.) While many of the lesser known search engines didn’t exactly dominate the Internet, a number of them could boast significant traffic.  What this meant was that no single entity had a stranglehold on the market. 

Fast forward to 2014 with Google controlling 80% of search and the rules have changed.  Now instead of taking 24-48 hours to produce a page one organic search, it isn’t unusual for it to take 3-6 months to get on page one.  And getting there is no longer an injection of on-site SEO.  It’s now a process involving daily social network feeds, weekly blogs and monthly videos all of which need to be as organized and optimized as your website.  What this also means is that there is no longer any quick fix that will enable you to generate prime search engine results.  Add to this the fact that no sooner do you get a bead on what Google wants when they up and change the rules.  The result of this is that one day you are on page one and the next you find yourself on page twenty one. Sound familiar?

Who Keeps Changing the Channel?

Love it or hate it, the Internet is a game.  Play it well and you will be rewarded.  Play it poorly and you might as well not play at all.  The problem is that in this game the rules not only keep changing, they aren’t even posted.  That can make it hard to determine a winning strategy.  While Google posts information including videos that purport to tell us mere mortals what they want in terms of content, their explanations are more than a little vague.  The reason they (and all other search engine operators) do this is to keep anyone from being able dominate search. 

If you read about any of Google’s recent updates that sported adorable names like Panda and Penguin and Hummingbird then you know that their aftermath was anything but cute and fluffy.  That’s because when it comes to updates, the search engines aren’t simply trying to improve their search algorithms, they are also out to shake out the rug to eliminate anyone who is trying to cheat the system in order to beat the system.

Got Game?

In 2000 it was common for professional optimizers to game the system by using black hat techniques such as link farms and keyword stuffing to make their client’s sites seem more valuable to the search engine spiders.  Of course back then the spiders weren’t all that savvy and it was relatively simple to trick them.  Today the spiders are much smarter, being able not only to read text but to understand its meaning.  This means that they can determine how well your posts and blogs are constructed.  They can even figure out if you are plagiarizing other written material (which is why auto-blogging can be so dangerous to your ranking).  Worst still, once the spiders determine that your site is not playing by the rules, not only are they ready, willing and able to relegate your site to the backwaters of the web, but they can also blacklist your site so that you will find it nearly impossible to climb back out of the hole you have dug.

Being a professional digital marketing consultant I have known clients that have come to us seeking help once they realized that their site had become blacklisted.  While we  were able to help some of them rectify the situation, we literally had to tell others that they were going to have to start from scratch.  So what I tell everyone who asks my advice is that you need to be very careful with whom you allow to promote your business online.  If anyone comes to you and states that they can generate a page one organic result on Google in days or weeks, run do not walk to the nearest exit.  These black hatters are going to do more harm than good in the long run, which is the only thing that matters online nowadays. 

If you want to make the Internet part of your business marketing scheme, then you need to do the work.  Or, you need to decide how much of the work you would care to do then farm out the remainder.  Either way, if you want to create a rock solid pate one presence on the search engines you are going to have to take the long view and commit to creating content, content and more content every day of the week, 52 weeks of the year.

There’s More Than One Way to Skin a Search Engine

Not that there aren’t a few shortcuts to getting onto page one that do not ruffle Google’s feathers.  Here are a few that you can take to the bank:

1.      Press Releases – Online press releases are an excellent way to get your business featured on page one of Google in a hurry.  Just don’t expect to stay on page one for more than a few days.  When it comes to search, old news isn’t considered good news. 

2.      Optimized Blogs – Particularly if you use Blogger (owned by Google) to write article optimized blogs at least once per week, it is quite possible that your blog could find its way to page one in as little as 24 hours.  Like press releases, expect this position to quickly erode.

3.      Video SEO – Have you ever done a Google search only to find a thumbnail image that led to a YouTube video?  This is another example of cross-platform SEO in action.  Since Google owns YouTube, a properly optimized video can sometimes wind up on page one of the world’s most popular search engine.

Not only are blogs and videos a great way to jump onto page one of Google, but they can also generate 

Image via CrunchBase

a following of their own.  In fact, there are some enterprising people who make a comfortable living by publishing either blogs or YouTube videos.  Even if your videos don’t generate millions of hits per month, having hundreds or even several thousand motivated followers hanging on your every word can be a great way to generate results online. I can tell you from personal experience that we have had several clients generate more conversions from their blogs than they did from their page one search engine listings.  The reason is that on the search engines you are one of the herd.  On your blog you are the star.

So when it comes to putting search engine ranking into its proper perspective what you have to do is ask yourself one question, “Are you ready to do what it takes to play this game to win?”

When it comes to playing to win, Carl Weiss co-wrote the book on the subject.  He is also co-host of the weekly web radio show of the same name as well as the YouTube series.

All the News That's Fit to Stream

By Carl Weiss

Garrison Keillor (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“A good newspaper is never nearly good enough, but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.” At least that’s the way that Garrison Keillor saw it.  Through the years many notables have weighed  in on the veracity of newspaper reporting, their opinions formed mostly by the way in which they were portrayed by the media.

President Lyndon Johnson’s opinion of reportage was framed by this quote, “The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.”

The late actress Bette Davis on the other hand quipped, “With the newspaper on strike, I wouldn’t consider dying.”

Love them or hate them, newspapers in the US have been a source of controversy since the first newspaper was printed in Boston in 1690.  (Coincidentally, only one edition of this newspaper was published before the paper was suppressed by the government.)  However, it wasn’t long before a longer lived successor made it into print in 1704, followed by other weeklies in New York and Philadelphia.  For the next two hundred years, newspapers ruled the roost in cities and towns as the place where everything from curiosities, calamity, births, deaths and ads were made available to the masses.

While the broadcast media of radio and television made a bit of a dent in the armor that newspaper publishers wore, so popular and powerful a medium was it that by 2007 there were 6,580 dailies in the world with a combined 395 million readers.  During its heyday newspapers turned a number of publishers into moguls and a number of writers into celebrities.

“Newspaper readership is declining like crazy.  In fact, there’s a good chance that nobody is reading my column.” – Dave Barry

Just two years after the newspaper business reached the above mentioned high water mark came its sudden implosion.  On Independence Day 2009, Business Insider reported,

“As you may have noticed, newspapers have had a rough 2009.  But you may not quite appreciate the magnitude of the collapse. So far this year:

·         105 newspapers have been shuttered.

·         10,000 newspaper jobs have been lost.

·         Print ad sales fell 30% in Q1 '09.

·         23 of the top 25 newspapers reported circulation declines between 7% and 20%”.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-death-of-the-american-newspaper-2009-7?op=1#ixzz2xSpbCMrm

While the Great Recession had something to do with the problems that many print venues faced in 2009 it was by no means the entire story.  Since the early years of the twenty-first century, the rise of the Internet had caused a major decline in circulation and advertising revenues at major dailies around the world.  No longer a monopoly for such things as classified advertisements, free classified ad sites such as Craigslist, began to undermine the very foundations upon which newspapers were built.

“The decline in advertising revenues affected both the print and online media; print advertising was once lucrative but no longer is, and the prices and effectiveness of online advertising are often lower than those of their print precursors. Besides remodeling advertising, the internet has challenged the business models of the print-only era by democratizing and crowdsourcing both publishing in general (sharing information with others) and, more specifically, journalism (the work of finding, assembling, and reporting the news). In addition, the rise of news aggregators, which bundle linked articles from many online newspapers and other sources, influences the flow of web traffic.” – Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers

Decade this far wealth vs internet growth (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The double whammy of economic decline combined with the rise of the Internet was like the perfect storm to the newspaper industry.  The years 2009-2013 saw not only the demise of a number of newspapers that had been printed for many years, but it also saw a number of prominent dailies changing hands, including most recently the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times.  The Globe which had been owned for twenty years by the New York Times was sold on October 24, 2013 to John W. Henry (owner of the Boston Red Sox) for $70 million in cash. 

Other dailies were not so fortunate.  Overall, the industry has lost more than $40 billion in revenue in the past ten years alone.  And the trend is not predicted to end any time soon. 

The Pew Research Center’s annual State of the Media 2013 report, which came out this morning, suggests the industry’s fundamentals are still somber:

·         Print advertising fell again, and not by a little — down $1.5 billion in 2012 to dip below $20 billion for the first time since 1982.

·         Classifieds losses are no longer the culprit. National advertising, already weak in 2011, fell by roughly 10 percent. That suggests that the shift of budgets to a range of digital marketing options is accelerating. The exception is preprinted inserts, for now still an essential part of the marketing mix for major retailers.

·         Digital advertising, its rates ever lower, grew very slowly (3 percent) and came nowhere close to covering print losses (one dollar gained for every 16 lost in print). Audience for smart phone and tablet news reports continues to grow quickly, but accompanying advertising is largely a no-show.

Statistically speaking, even a sagging economy is not enough to account for the industry’s fate.  In fact, the revenues didn’t so much disappear as relocate.  If you look at the biggest online advertising winner during the same time frame (Google) you will notice that since 2009 their revenues have soared to $46 billion while the newspaper industry has seen its revenue decline to around $20 billion.  Coincidence? 

The numbers don’t lie and neither do publishers who are desperate to find a way to stem the slide 

toward dissolution.  A number of dailies have accomplished this by gutting their reporting staff, while others have taken the “If you can’t beat them, join them” stance by attempting to merge print and online venues.  Every daily under the sun has commissioned an online version where they stream some stories and offer ads.  While this has helped stem the tide somewhat, it is still unlikely to turn the financial slide around for most print venues.  What is needed is innovation. Here are a few ideas being touted within the industry.

1.      E-Readers - Hearst, which owns the Seattle Post Intelligencer, is experimenting with the idea of creating a Kindle-like electronic-reader device for its publications. People would receive the gadget when they subscribe, and it would regularly download issues. While there are still questions about how cheaply Hearst could create such a device, it shows that its executives are thinking outside the box, rather than just throwing in the towel. http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Tech-Culture/2009/0311/newspaper-failures-are-old-news-it-s-time-to-focus-on-solutions

2.      Erect a Pay Wall – A number of dailies including the New York Times and Newsday offer readers a limited number of articles for free.  Those who desire more access pay a subscription fee to gain access to the publication’s electronic version.

3.      Create Interactive Newspapers - The idea would be to bring interactivity to the newspapers and indulging the reader into it. A similar kind of thing has been once done in India by Volkswagen where they attached a recorded message, which played whenever a reader unfolded the last page [1]. Touch screens of suitable dimensions with some flash memory would be stitched into the newspapers, which would be pre-programmed. A user would just need to touch the screen to get the video played. Similar would be the audio player, which on selection would read out the particular news. To get an idea how it would look like, recall the scene in Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone where one can see that characters in movie while reading newspapers whose layout and content is changing magically. Today newspapers would like to make it happen digitally. http://www.slideshare.net/ankitmahapatra22/interactive-newspaper-the-next-big-thing-in-newspaper-industry

4.      Create new reporting models - New online models will spring up as papers retreat. One non-profit group, NewAssignment.Net, plans to combine the work of amateurs and professionals, to produce investigative stories on the internet. Aptly, $10,000 of cash for the project has come from Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, a group of free classified-advertisement websites that has probably done more than anything to destroy newspapers' income. http://www.economist.com/node/7830218

While the problems in the newspaper industry are many and the solutions few, what is clear, is that if 

print venues hope to survive in the digital age they need to find a model that can cross the generation gap to deliver all the news that’s fit to stream.  To do this they are going to have to start innovating as well as interacting with and listening to their readers.

“While editors and newspaper owners currently fret over shrinking readership and lost profits, they do the one thing that insures cutting their own throats; they keep reducing space for the one feature that attracts new young readers in the first place; the comic strips.” Elayne Boosler

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/elayneboos559209.html#Br6DfqR2pTgDjCqd.99

Carl Weiss is president of Working the Web to Win, a digital marketing agency in Jacksonville, Florida.  He is also co-host of the weekly web radio show of the same name as well as the YouTube series.

It's Time to Face the Music

By Carl Weiss

It was 50 years ago in this February that the Beatles changed the music industry forever when they first made their way to the US. So I thought it appropriate to start this week’s blog with a couple of stanzas from their hit single, “Taxman”:

“Let me tell you how it will be. 

There’s one for you nineteen for me.

If five percent appears too small.
Be thankful I don’t take it all."

The lyrics lament the fact that British performers at the time were getting hit with incredibly high taxes on the royalties they earned. However, there was an even more insidious hand taking a huge cut of many recording artists’ pies at the same time, which had nothing to do with the tax man. And that was the cut that the record labels were taking from artists under contract.

While a number of stories about artists who were burned back in the early days of rock and roll are legendary, that doesn’t mean that the practice has stopped.  In fact, the past few years has seen a number of lawsuits against record labels by several notable songsmiths:

1.       In 2007, pop legend James Taylor initiated an audit and lawsuit against Warner Bros., which uncovered underpayment of royalties in the amount of $1,692,726 for the period spanning 2004-2007. (Warner subsequently paid only $97,857 of that balance.)

2.       In 2009 jazz great, Chet Baker, sued Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada and Universal Music Canada for releasing his music on Canadian CDs without compensating him.

3.       In 2011, Peter Frampton sued A&M Records for unpaid digital royalties. He hired music attorney, Richard Busch, who previously helped Eminem successfully sue Universal, the parent company of A&M.

What is even more noteworthy is the fact that many of these suits are seeking compensation for “digital distribution” of music. Translated, this boils down to “online distribution” of recordings.  And if the recent newsfeeds are any indication, not all of the ire being vented by recording artists is directed toward record labels.

“In 2012, a federal court reinstated a $222,000 damages award against a Minnesota woman accused of illegally downloading 24 songs, Reuters reported that the music industry victory in a case stretching past its sixth year. The U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Paul, Minnesota, rejected Jammie Thomas-Rasset's argument that the fine – $9,250 per song – was excessive and violated her due process rights under the Constitution. She has said her ex-boyfriend or two young sons were probably responsible for downloading the songs.”

She was hardly alone, since some 18,000 people were sued between 2003 and 2008 by the Recording 
Industry Association of America (RIAA). It didn’t stop there, as talk show host Ellen DeGeneres found out a year later, when she was sued for copyright infringement when she broadcast more than 1,000 songs during the “Dance Over” portion of her popular show.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/ellen-degeneres-show-sued-by-record-labels-over-copyrights-20090911#ixzz2wEuSKM9Q

This does not encompass the most litigious online music case of all time: Napster. Launched in June 1999 by Shawn and John Fanning, Napster was the first large-scale, peer-to-peer music sharing site. Wildly popular with the public, the site quickly ran afoul of a number of popular bands (such as Metallica) that took issue with having its music given away royalty free.  On top of that, the band accused Napster of leaking at least one of their songs (“I Disappear”) before it was even officially released.  Shortly afterwards, a number of other labels piled onto the suit, trying to force Naptster to monitor its service and block access to copyrighted material. A year later, the Court of Appeals decided in the record labels favor and issued an injunction. In June 2001, Napster was forced to shut down its business in order to comply with the ruling.

Nobody was Napping

A side note on Napster: After filing for bankruptcy in June 2002, Napster announced plans to sell the 

Timeline of file sharing (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

service, since it had hundreds of thousands of members at this point.  However, the judge blocked the sale and ordered Napster to liquidate. Less than a month later, Roxio, the digital music software purveyor, bought the Napster brand and logo for $5 million. Roxio then leveraged the popularity of the Napster name to revamp a failing music subscription service named Pressplay, later selling Napster once more (in August 2008), this time to Best Buy for $121 million. Best Buy then sold Napster’s customer base and other intellectual property in September, 2011 to Rhapsody for an undisclosed sum. (At the time of the sale, Napster reportedly had more than 700,000 customers.)

While the kind of services offered by Napster went against the grain of the music industry, the popularity of being able to download music online did not.  What it did was spur the imagination of a number of entrepreneurs to take action in order to capitalize on this efficient means of bringing music to the masses.

“With all the buzz around Spotify and the absolute dominance of iTunes since 2003, it's easy to forget that Napster was the first big name in digital music, and introduced computer users to the idea that they could listen to nearly any song in the universe, any time, on demand. The only problem: the people who made that music wanted to be paid for it, and it took about a dozen years to figure out how that would work to all parties' satisfaction.” Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/napster-is-finally-dead-heres-a-look-back-at-what-happened-2011-10#ixzz2wFNZ8XOa

Steve Jobs Gets Ready to Jam

No sooner had the fur begun to fly in the courts over Napster when Steve Jobs at Apple Computer realized that if he could find a way to deliver music to the masses in a legal and profitable venue, then he would be sitting on the next killer app.  The only problem was the fact that he didn’t want to waste a year or more developing an app from scratch.  After looking at and rejecting another potential solution, Jobs approached Robin Casady and Michael Greene to discuss their SoundJam app.  Their powerful digital encoding program had a couple of things going for it, chief among it being the fact that the interface looked remarkably similar to Apple’s QuickTime player. After negotiating a price, Casady and Greene sold the rights for SoundJam to Apple and Jobs immediately got ready to jam by creating iTunes.

Excerpt from MacWorld: “About 10 months later, at Macworld San Francisco in 2001, Apple debuted iTunes alongside iDVD and the CD-RW-enabled Power Macs. While it wasn’t exactly a show-stopper (though 275,000 copies were downloaded in the first week), the "world’s best and easiest to use ‘jukebox’ software’ definitely raised the bar for music players on the Mac, which were relatively sparse and rather pricey (SoundJam cost $40). By offering iTunes as a free download and installing it on every new Mac, Apple essentially cut down the competition at the pass — or at least put a good scare into them. “Apple has done what Apple does best — make complex applications easy, and make them even more powerful in the process,’ said Steve Jobs at the time. ‘iTunes is miles ahead of every other jukebox application, and we hope its dramatically simpler user interface will bring even more people into the digital music revolution.’”

http://www.maclife.com/article/feature/complete_itunes_history_soundjam_mp_itunes_9

After racking up more than a million downloads in the first month alone, Apple knew they had a hit on their hands.  It also spurred Apple into creating hardware that could give their customers the opportunity to take their tunes with them. Thus iPod was born. More importantly for singers, songwriters and aspiring musicians, this gave them a whole new lease on life. No longer bound by record labels to record, produce and, more importantly distribute, their music, iTunes (and other services that soon sprang up alongside it), enabled musicians to deal direct and cut out the middleman.

Leave it to Bieber

Since then, a number of previously unknown artists have not only sprung onto the scene, a number of 

them have done quite well for themselves. Take Corey Smith, a country folk musician, who went from high school teacher to high-paid recording artist, grossing more than $4 million in 2010.  More importantly, he did it DIY style, without signing up with a record label.  Mashable had a feature a couple of years back entitled, “15 Wannabes Who Found Fame on YouTube.” This included Julia Nunez, Chantelle Redman and Justin Bieber. http://mashable.com/2011/01/23/found-fame-youtube/

Some other industrious souls have found online fame by posting musical parodies. One such success story is the Gregory Brothers who turn press conferences into ersatz operas with the help of some clever voice altering computer software.

  

The Brothers insert themselves into news footage to sing along with political leaders. Early videos saw Hilary Clinton singing about Somalian pirates, while the US Congress debating climate change turned into gospel song. While the Gregory Brothers and other parody producers like them aren’t likely to win any Grammy® Awards, their large fan base on YouTube makes sure they earn a comfortable living by monetizing their channel via AdSense ads. And unlike a lot of starving artists, these talented performances have found a way to face the music and thrive online. That’s more than many musicians can say.

Carl Weiss is president of Working the Web to Win, a digital marketing agency in Jacksonville, Florida.  He is also co-host of the Blog Talk Radio show that airs live every Tuesday at 4 pm Eastern.