kidmercury

DJ Ashba is a guitarist currently in the bands Sixx AM and Guns n' Roses.


A few observations on how he relates to the future of music and digital publishing:

Ashba has put up guitar lessons on his YouTube channel, teaching people how to play his songs. Online lessons is a revenue source I think could work well for some bands, and perhaps more importantly, a great way to sell gear/instruments, which I definitely think could be a big revenue generator for some artists.

Ashba apparently is pretty savvy about new media, as he also runs his own new media marketing agency, AsbhaMedia. And so he is quite cutting edge in the sense that he has a 3D virtual world for his fans; the software application for his virtual world can be downloaded from his web site, which also has a very slick design.

But I think it is a bit early for these 3D virtual world things, they're not easy enough to use and the value proposition is nowhere near as compelling as it needs to be. The more immediate opportunity, in my opinion, is in a greater social media experience. Integrating gaming elements into forums, blogs, and digital content is where I think we'll find a big opportunity for disruption, as well as business models that can leverage free distribution of media.

The song for the post is the Sixx AM song "Life is Beautiful." I always like happy, uplifting lyrics. There's always a marketing opportunity with those tracks!

Yang

agreed. With new ideas its all about Keep It Simple Stupid or better known as the KISS method. I think this is one of the main reasons why the people who come up with the idea are often times not the ones that are successful with it like friendster you know. Its like if a person is smart enough to come up with the idea then they are too smart to exectute it because executing it is kind of like "oh this is like stupid easy" once you have the idea that no one else has.

Keep the ideas flowing man, loving it, loving it.

Yang