AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

NewTeeVee

Josh Catone over at ReadWriteWeb has an interesting suggestion for Warner Bros. to get folks interested in the upcoming superhero feature, Watchmen: Take a page from Trent Reznor’s book. The Nine Inch Nails front man has been experimenting with innovative distribution and marketing schemes ever since his band said farewell to Universal Music, giving away songs and even uploading an album to the Pirate Bay. Catone admits that Warner can’t completely follow the NIN model, and our resident superhero expert Chris Albrecht had some other good reasons why the Watchmen plan might fail, but Hollywood surely could use some new inspiration.

Now, the music industry isn’t really known as a big innovator. In fact, record labels have long been the lemmings in the coal mine for Hollywood, stumbling from one disaster to another and showing what mistakes should be avoided at all costs. Remember that glorious idea to ship audio CDs complete with Windows malware ? But bands and online music startusp have started to innovate at last, developing a new type of music industry, oftentimes referred to as music 2.0, that is dominated not by brick and mortar, but by MP3 blogs, Last.fm and pay-as-much-as-you-want online sales. Maybe it’s time Hollywood took another look.

Here are five things the studios could learn from the new music biz:

Embrace Facebook And not just as another place to dump your trailers, either. New music startups like iLike and Imeem have been winning over users by the millions with innovative Facebook applications that make it possible to stream a vast catalog of songs in full length. The studios, on the other hand, make widgets that only promote one movie at a time with trailers and “behind the scenes” videos you’ve seen on TV already, boring the hell out of the Facebook audience. Case in point: The iLike app has around 300,000 active daily users on Facebook, whereas the much-hyped Indiana Jones widget only attracts about 85 users per day. Go figure. Or even better: Give me my Hulu app so I can watch and share complete shows and movies with my friends, already!

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