We're in exciting times with the growing popularity of jQuery and now Microsoft releasing MVC 2. I feel as psyched now as I felt when ASP.NET Webforms first came out. For some odd reason, I miss the direct approach of classic ASP development. Webforms offered a refreshing new model that made things easier and hid many of the low-level elements of a web application. With that though, also came the bloat of ViewState and other beefy components under the hood.  Now we have MVC, which to me, is the best of both worlds.

The first thing you'll notice about Professional ASP.NET MVC 2, is that it was written by rock stars from the Microsoft team that actually conceptualized and built the MVC framework. Obviously, they know their stuff, yet the variety of personalities of five authors subtly interrupted the flow of the book. This ranged from straight to the point chapters, to chapters that were injected with Hanselman's trademark humor. This isn't a deal breaker, but made for a some-what choppy read.

The book starts off with a rundown of the infamous Nerd Dinner website. The application is a beginner primer that showcases basic CRUD pages along with some Javascript map wizardry. It would of been nice to read about an application that digs a little deeper, but for a first-time primer, it works. The middle chapters of the book go into detail about the main components of an MVC application. You'll read about routing, controllers, views and filters. I was disappointed with the thin AJAX chapter. They bounced back and forth from using the ASP.NET Ajax framework to using jQuery. The chapter could use some more examples.

After explaining the main MVC components, the book has a couple chapters on testing. A pleasant surprise for me, was the chapter on securing your application. The author offered deep insight into the mind of a hacker and showcased some vulnerability tricks to look out for. That was a fun chapter to read.

Ending things off, the book shows you how to mix Webforms and MVC in the same project.

All in all, I recommend this book to ASP.NET developers who want to dive in head first to MVC. If you are familiar with MVC 1, this book can still be useful, with all of the new material explaining MVC 2 features. Oh, and Wrox, thank you for finally updating the look of your books. Nerds are sexy, but they make bad book covers.

For those that don't know, Tony Hsieh is CEO of mega-shoe store Zappos (they sell more than shoes now). Before reading this book and from videos I saw, Tony came off as a monotone soft-spoken company leader with sharp focus on long-term goals.

After reading the book, I learned there is quite the story behind this guy and his entrepreneurial adventures. He's like a typical college party buddy with a nerdy edge.  And like Bill Gates once said, "Don't make fun of nerds because you'll probably end up working for one some day." I think this is one guy I wouldn't mind working with or for some day.

Rather than being a boring dictionary of cut and dry business concepts, the book relies on experiences and story telling. The first 3/4 of the book has an easy flow and I found myself getting engulfed in relating his adventures to my own experiences with our business. The latter 1/4 has almost too many guest interjections from other employees that expound the "Pro-Culture" position the company lives by, making the last part of the book choppy. All in all though, I respect how Tony wasn't afraid to shine light just as much on his failures as he did on his successes. I also like the fact that he revealed numbers that are normally top-secret for companies, like the cut he was entitled to with the sale of LinkExchange. Those of us who dream of swimming in a pool of money some day can drool over the monetary numbers he throws around like it's just another walk in the park. Yet later down the road, he does a good job of demystifying the delusional correlation between true happiness and boat loads of money. There's a weird mix of arrogance and modesty going on here.

The core values that Zappos employees stand by are really common sense if you think about it. Yet, unless you've bounced a beach ball around a conference room or dared a coworker to shave his head and get his body painted blue with your boss's approval, I guarantee you have never worked for a company that comes even close to the extraordinary culture they live by. They definitely work hard and play harder and if you tour their compound, don't expect to see any bubblegum chewing employees in their cubicle twiddling their pen, bored out of their mind staring at the ceiling. Dead-end job isn't in their vocabulary and they pride themselves on incubating personal growth.

As a business owner in the trenches of a first year startup, I found Tony's roller coaster ride a valuable read. If your dream is to not only run a successful business, but to reach farther and actually stand for a cause, then you can learn a lot from this book. I definitely see things at a different angle now and probably won't be using the words "money" and "happiness" in the same sentence ever again.

**Note to reader: I refer to Electronic Press Kits and Digital Promos as the same thing**

So, you have a fresh slab of music from your newest Artist that you are positive the world will love. You know that with the viral nature of the webzine/blogsphere, every review and writeup you get can compound over time and give your music great exposure. Your Artist has a MySpace page and now you are ready to take your pre-release promotion strategy to the next level. Traditional methods of promotion, like manufacturing 1000 CDs with branded cardboard sleeves, printing 1000 information sheets and then all of that postage from mailing the packages out to the media is way too expensive and time consuming. You heard that many record labels are beginning to go digital with their press kits. What's that all about?

Let's start out by agreeing that your Artist worked really hard on their music and Journalists work very hard on publishing good content. Music-related websites, magazines and radio stations can't survive without fresh music to talk about and at the same time you depend on their publications for exposure.

With a good electronic press kit, there needs to be a healthy balance of security and easy consumption so that both sides feel fullfilled.


So what goes into an electronic press kit that has successful returns?

1. Journalists have said the biggest benefit from getting a physical promo in the mail, is the fact that they can page through the CD booklet, read the lyrics and look at the pictures. Your electronic press kit should support photo and video galleries. Take a few minutes and scan that CD booklet in so that Journalists can get a good sense of the total package.

2. Even though most electronic press kits have an area on the webpage for a "general description," attach an information sheet to the promo. Information/bio sheets can easily be printed and if they are branded professionally, it shows the seriousness of the Artist as well as adding weight to the total package.

3. If your press kit supports streaming only, don't expect to get a big return. That's like giving a Journalist an appetizer to taste, when what they really need, is to eat a full meal and let it digest properly over time and away from the dinner table.

4. Going along with #3, your press kit should have multiple methods of consumption. That includes, streaming, zip-file album download, individual track downloads and podcasts. Give the Journalist some options based on their personal preference.

5. Make your press kit easy to find. Most likely, you will be inviting the media to view your press kit by way of email. Make sure their login experience is as painless as possible and make the download links easy to find. Let them download the music without too many hurdles to jump over, eg. requiring a rating or review before they can download. Give them the music fast and let them go off and do their thing; every Journalist consumes and reviews differently.

6. Now onto security. Record labels, in this day and age, you would be foolish not to watermark your tracks. There are high-end watermarking technologies out there that are not only inaudible, but very hard to get past when re-encoded. Inaudible watermarks have a 0% interference factor when listening to the music, yet they are powerful enough to contain data that can pinpoint a leaker. Watermarking should be as common as the locks on your house's front door.

7. Efficiency is much easier with a digital promo versus mailing out discs to the media. Your promo administration software should support tracking and reports. Use the tracking capabilities to be aware of who is and isn't writing about your artists. If you find Journalists that are downloading the kits but not holding their end of the bargain, confront them about it or remove them from your contact list all together. This sure beats the traditional method of mailing out the promo and then wondering if it made it to the destination.

8. Last but not least, if a Journalist received an early email invitation to download an album, they were in and out of the download process within painless minutes and after tracking, you found out they put time into a writeup (good or bad), send them a quick email and thank them. A little praise goes a long way, and you can bet they'll be in line to consume your next electronic press kit.

With our latest website design, I took a slightly different approach. When I began the process, which was about a week ago, we had a Crowdspring logo project being worked on parallel to the website design.

As the logo was being created, I started out by looking at random websites on the net. Like a sponge, I wanted to soak up as many ideas as possible and convert that to inspiration, which I could then mix with my own expertise. After about an hour of browsing, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do. I grabbed a fat black marker and a piece of paper. I slid the keyboard to the side and started sketching. At this point, it's semi-high level design.

As I was sketching, I changed my mind on a few things, hence the scribbles. This sketch literally took no more than ten minutes and then I was ready to jump into Adobe Fireworks and start mocking this thing up.

Although we were pretty strict with the color combinations we wanted, a few artists submitted logos with alternate choices and at first, they influenced my design. We never used red before, so I gave it a try with a rough logo that a designer submitted at Crowdspring. I wanted to see if his logo would work with our design. Here is what I came up with.

From there the team here discussed each area of the design. We ended up cutting a lot of stuff out and adding a few new things at the same time. After sleeping on the color red, we had second thoughts and went back to our original color scheme. After a few more mockups and discussions, we ended up going with this design and logo. The logo took about a week to get designed and the website was done in about two to three days.  The third day, I sliced up the design and wired it up in an ASP.NET MasterPage with CSS driving layout.

In celebration of our new website, we are offering 1-month of FREE services to anyone who registers between now and July 2, 2010.

Combined with our 30-day free trial, you will get 2-months of free service total before your first payment is due. Cancel at any time.


To sign up, visit our price plan page and select a plan. 

Upon registering, enter the coupon code HAULIX2010 for the 2 months of free service.


Cheers!

I'm not going to name names, because all we really care about, is making our easy to use software and bending over backwards for our customers.


Labels, when researching digital promo services, please use caution:

An "Industry Leader" in media delivery charges $1.95 PER RECIPIENT for digital promos. You gotta be fucking kidding me! We've got customers who have 2,500 media contacts. So, that would make one digital promo going out to all contacts $4,875?!

At Haulix, you can send promos to an unlimited number of recipients, as long as you are within your bandwidth quota.


Isn't one of the main reasons for going digital, to save money you would normally spend on physical CD mailings? There are services out there that are overpriced and overrated at the same time. Research wisely my friends.

Here is a great primer on getting your music on blogs, written by Alan Khalfin:

http://evolvingmusic.mixmatchmusic.com/2010/05/26/how-to-get-your-music-on-music-blogs/

We've got a review on Discovering Startups. If you've got a minute, check it out and vote for us.

http://www.discoveringstartups.com/haulix-com-easy-promo-distribution/

We keep a close eye on the music industry and it's blatantly obvious to us that DJs and Heavy Metal labels are the majority adopters of digital promos. My theory on why that is goes like this:

1. DJs tend to be on the more tech savvy side.

2. Metal Labels (like everyone else) got hit by the downward economy and like a big wave, they realized the value in going digital with promos and how much money could be saved. (We're wondering when other genres will catch on.)

3. As more and more albums are being sold in digital format, it makes sense that digital promos would be a natural byproduct.

4. Many DJs and Metal labels operate in small teams. They are lean and can make quick decisions and strategy changes. The larger labels have the corporate bloat that makes turning the ship a much bigger endeavor.


We're curious to hear your thoughts. Why are DJs and Metal labels the early digital promo adopters?

Although digital sales are on the UP, piracy is still a huge problem in the world.

"Music companies are investing over US$5 billion a year in developing and marketing artists..."

"Physical sales fell by 12.7% globally."

"Digital music sales rose by 9.2% to US$ 4.3 billion, more than ten times the digital market value in 2004."


http://www.ifpi.com/content/section_news/20100428.html