Fun Video About Houseboating with Premiumbeat.com Music

Jamie Pearson at Travel Savvy Mom created this really fun video about Houseboating. You may want to try this for your next vacation!

Thanks for using our music Jamie!

Social Media and Media Convergence

From The Economist – An excellent overview of the evolution and convergence of media. As we know Social Media is in rapid expansion. The figures presented in the video are staggering! This is more than evolution or transformation, this is a total revolution in many ways and we are all active participants. Meanwhile the International Olympic Committee wants to limit Olympic events photo sharing on the Internet.  The photographer in question – Richard Giles -  wrote an extended blog post about this issue. In this era of accessible technologies supporting people-to-people communication through Social Networks this is going to be virtually impossible to control.

3 Videos To Show The Difference Music Can Make

The following 3 videos by club de creativos demonstrate the importance of the music mood in videos. The images are simple scenes from daily life but the music itself gives a powerful mood to the scenes. (Thanks Carla!)

A Little Math from Seth Godin for a Change…

I like Seth Godin (who doesn’t?) and I read his posts everyday. Today he tickled our minds with a simple math problem. Think about it…

Several people seem confused with the mathematics involved in his post:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/08/not-so-good-at-math.html

Not so good at math

A simple quiz for smart marketers:

Let’s say your goal is to reduce gasoline consumption.

And let’s say there are only two kinds of cars in the world. Half of them are Suburbans that get 10 miles to the gallon and half are Priuses that get 50.

If we assume that all the cars drive the same number of miles, which would be a better investment:

.        Get new tires for all the Suburbans and increase their mileage a bit to 13 miles per gallon.

.        Replace all the Priuses and rewire them to get 100 miles per gallon (doubling their average!)

Trick question aside, the answer is the first one. (In fact, it’s more than twice as good a move).

We’re not wired for arithmetic. It confuses us, stresses us out and more often than not, is used to deceive.

—————

Actually it is very simple:

The Suburban gets 100 miles for 10 gallons

The Prius gets 100 miles for only 2 gallons

With option A the Suburban gets 130 miles for 10 gallons or 100 miles for 7.69 gallons. A saving of 2.31 gallons per 100 miles

With option B The Prius gets 100 miles for only 1 gallon. A saving of 1 gallon per 100 miles.

Option A is 2.31 times better at reducing gasoline consumption.

—————

But please don’t get a Suburban! Don’t forget this assumes 50% of the people are using Suburban and 50% are using Prius. To reduce gasoline consumption it would be immensely better to get  the Suburban drivers to switch to Prius each saving 8 gallons per 100 miles. This is 3 times better than Option A!

Music & Science: Brains swinging in concert – brain synchronization while playing guitar

Interesting research about musicians playing music together. They do not just “play” together – their brain waves actually get into synchronization. Now how cool is that?!

PACE - a Premiumbeat.com musician

Background

In this study, we simultaneously recorded EEG from the brains of each of eight pairs of guitarists playing a short melody together to explore the extent and the functional significance of synchronized cortical activity in the course of interpersonally coordinated actions.

Brain waves - musicians

Results

By applying synchronization algorithms to intra- and interbrain analyses, we found that phase synchronization both within and between brains increased significantly during the periods of (i) preparatory metronome tempo setting and (ii) coordinated play onset. Phase alignment extracted from within-brain dynamics was related to behavioral play onset asynchrony between guitarists.

Brain waves 2 - musicians

Conclusions

Our findings show that interpersonally coordinated actions are preceded and accompanied by between-brain oscillatory couplings. Presumably, these couplings reflect similarities in the temporal properties of the individuals’ percepts and actions. Whether between-brain oscillatory couplings play a causal role in initiating and maintaining interpersonal action coordination needs to be clarified by further research.

Read complete article at  Biomed Central

Science – Musique / Des cerveaux à l’unisson

(Click here for English text)

Le fait de jouer une pièce musicale en groupe ou en duo ne permet pas seulement aux interprètes d’être dans une même ambiance, il leur permet aussi d’être sur la même longueur d’onde… cérébrale.

Des chercheurs allemands et autrichiens ont découvert que les électroencéphalogrammes des cerveaux de guitaristes qui jouent ensemble étaient presque identiques. Les résultats montrent que des actions interpersonnelles coordonnées sont précédées et accompagnées par une activité électrocérébrale semblable. Selon Ulman Lindenberger, de l’Institut Max Planck, les cerveaux de musiciens avaient déjà été étudiés, mais jamais en interaction. Ces travaux ont été menés sur huit duos de guitaristes de jazz jouant jusqu’à 60 fois la même mélodie.

Fait étonnant: les ondes électrocérébrales étaient semblables avant même que les musiciens commencent à jouer, pendant qu’ils écoutaient le métronome.

Ces travaux sont publiés dans le journal BMC Neuroscience.

Source Radio-Canada

Jean Gralley’s tribute to her 80 year old friend Marianne Carus

Jean Gralley tells wonderful digital stories. She also made a sweet tribute to her friend Marianne Carus, publisher of Cricket and several quality magazines for children, who recently turned 80.

Turn up the volume and watch her tribute while you listen to Handel:

http://www.jeangralley.com/carus2

A great Blog Post about Music Player Troubleshooting

Who said reading about troubeshooting is boring? Here is a truly fun-to-read Blog post about the Premiumbeat flash music players. Very useful and informative too. Actually Helborama posts are so well written, you may want to subscribe to the feed . I know I did!

“This is going to be a ‘Mistakes I Made and How to Avoid Them’ post – mainly due to the fact that when I made these mistakes I was searching for solutions and couldn’t find any blogs with details of similar experiences. This could, of course, be because everyone else is more on-the-ball than I am and didn’t make them, but just in case anyone has similar problems, I’m going to write them down… So here is the story of my adventures with a little website gadget called the Premiumbeat flash music player.” Keep reading here…

How Music Licensing Works – a good article

The following article gives a good broad view of the Music Licensing world. Licensing music is complex… unless you use Royalty Free Music where you only pay a very reasonable fee for excellent premium quality music. Typically you can license Royalty free Music online, pay for usage on the spot and download your music immediately.

Here is the article from How Stuff Works

Let’s say you are reading Rolling Stone magazine, and you find an article about an ad campaign that Phillips has launched. The ads feature the Beatles hit “Getting Better”. In the article you read this:

But according to the licensing expert, the company no doubt “paid a fortune” for the Beatles hit: an estimated $1 million. The source suspects Gomez made no more than $100,000.

This ad campaign is using the Beatles song as the theme music. It is also using the voice of the lead singer of the band named Gomez laid on top of the Beatles original. The speculation is that Philips paid $1 million to use the song, and that Philips paid the band Gomez $100,000. This is the world of music licensing — a world where the rights to use music are bought and sold every day. Click here to keep reading this article…

Twitter – Am I doing it all wrong?

I naively thought that following people meant I was really going to “follow” them and actually read what they write. But no – now I am learning Twitter is basically a way to acquire real estate space on the Web by having your name showing up on other people’s Twitter page. All along it seems I wrongly believed it was about networking, connecting and communicating – not real estate.

I thought I would choose to follow some people because I actually want to know what they think. But strangely this appears to be an unwise decision. I read you are supposed to follow high level re-tweeters (people who will transfer your own messages to their network of followers), that you should follow people with large groups of followers expecting they will follow you back and become your ambassadors. Again I have been doing this all wrong since I did not choose who I follow according to these criteria – nor did I expect them to follow me back. For example I am following @jowyang and @mitchjoel, and they are not following me back. Why should they? They write about social networking – a topic of interest to me, but I write mostly about our music business, a topic probably not of interest to them.

Unfollowing people – now that’s really wrong! I actually un-followed few people because I was not getting much out of their Tweets. I  even thought of unfollowing top guru @guykawasaki, a big mistake I am told. But why is that a mistake exactly? Most of his posts are just not grabbing my attention. And I am sure he’s never read any of my posts. Nothing personal – I just want to manage my social networking time as best as possible. But I am told I should never do this – that I should never unfollow anyone, that it is very rude.

I am also advised to never bother to read any tweets unless it comes in the form of private messages or @ messages addressed specifically to me. Otherwise I will waste too much time. I must only respond to Direct messages. So is it all about Me, Me and Me – and not Them or Us as a community? Ha! I have been definitely wrong here too. I have been reading many tweet messages from people I follow. Damn.

I have been using the private messaging option with some success only to learn it is a better strategy to reply always with @ because visitors will look at my Twitter page and will see I am an active community member if they notice lots of @ replies. But they won’t know it if I reply with a “d” for Direct which is private. Oh! I see. Arrrgh! Wrong again.

And one last thing… I read you should always use a picture of yourself as your avatar. People, I am told, want to see real people – not an organization logo. Since I signed up as an organization I thought I would use our easily recognizable logo and there would be no mistake in identifying immediately where the message is coming from. That would also eventually allow others within our organization to Tweet as well. But I must be doing it all wrong.

So what do you think? Is there any right way to do this?

My intention is to use Twitter as a useful and direct business communication tool, to respond personally and interact genuinely with individuals as a person, like I have always done in all my businesses.

Is Twitter a good option for this? Should one get 2 accounts – one for business newscast and one for personal interactions?

Twitter…
A networking tool or Internet Real Estate?
Should everyone follow everyone back or not?
Unfollowing – is it rude?
Private messaging – when is it most appropriate?
A human face or a logo for avatars ?

Thank you for your feedback,

Gilles Arbour
@premiumbeat

PS: See my previous post about Twitter