I’ve been on nonstop deadlines since iSummit wrapped on Friday in Toronto, so haven’t had time for my final blog post.
Here are a few photos I took. (That’s Joe Kennedy, CEO of music recommendation service Pandora.) Just used Flickr’s bulk upload tool for the first time — worked like a charm.
A couple of highlights from the conference:
During the panel on the future of music business models, a speaker polled the audience: A dozen people (out of 200 or so) had heard of Pandora, but only one (um, me) had heard of on-demand radio station Mercora.
Loose consensus: radio is not dead, but “interruption radio” is.
Andrew Michael Baron, the founder of Rocketboom (whom I finally had a chance to spend quality time with), seemed to be the most prescient speaker at the conference on several levels. He described Rocketboom’s new approach to advertising:
“Putting the ad at the end and using our own aesthetic filter did not make the advertisers very happy. But it created more value for the audience and thus for the advertisers. People are happy that we’re not force-feeding them at the beginning. We’re creating the ads too, and they like it because it has the same integrity and spirit as the content. … We’ll never do product placement and we’ll never compromise the authenticity of the show. … Transparency is our watchword. … Rocketboom is looking at millions and millions of dollars in annual revenues with just two people. What does that say?”
By the way, last week I mentioned Steve Levy and Brad Stone’s “Putting the ‘We’ in Web” cover story in Newsweek but forgot to provide a pointer.
An hour later: Just received this: Mercora, the Internet’s largest and fastest growing user-contributed and user-programmed digital radio network, today introduced Radio 2.0 — the next generation social radio and music platform.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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