Just to give a little update on what I have been doing...

Those last weeks we have been working mostly on the preparation on my new release “Human Motion”. It’s a track I started working on in 2010, with a vocal recorded while I was in India – but I only finished it this January! We have been looking for a remixer and preparing the music video.

We have now finished auditioning models and fixed the locations of the shooting; but with the recent drop in temperature we chose to delay the shooting of a few weeks as it’s between -8°/+2°C here in the day, and shooting outside in those conditions would really be not comfortable for the model and for us as well.

Besides the new track, we have now installed the new comment system on the site – so you can finally join the discussion and let me know what you think!!!

I have also just started my Twitter profile, follow me!!! https://twitter.com/Leinender

This whole MegaUpload thing is starting to look really ridiculous... And to add more, artists saying “that was the day they were all waiting for” or that “they suffer so much from illegal downloads”... LOL?

Those types of statements really show the mentality of a certain segment of the industry; and at which extent they take their audience for granted. For them it is so OBVIOUS that people want to get their content (because it is so good!).

The music industry today is an over flooded market where there is MUCH MORE supply than demand, so it is really not at all obvious that people will want the content of artist x or y. In fact it is totally against the odds and should be considered like a “privilege” to the artist that somebody will show interest in their content (in such market conditions).

The sole fact to get people’s attention is already a victory for an artist or a record label, it’s the bigger part of the work. Rest is to find out how to monetize that interaction. As Gabe Newell from Valve puts it: “The key isn't to stop piracy, because piracy will never stop. The key is to provide a better service than the pirates and bring them on over to your service.”

And I couldn’t agree more, that’s what I have been doing since 2006 with Frozenforce and I have really no problems at all with “piracy” like they call it...

But coming back on the Megaupload case, other aspects are far from being funny. All I see is a businessman who got his business taken down and arrested without any trial, on the basis of funny charges like “money laundering”, “global criminal conspiracy” (they even refer to his company as the “mega conspiracy”) and the list goes on... What happened to “Innocent until proven guilty”?

In my country, murderers, dangerous criminals and drug dealers can almost operate freely without any disturbance from the legal system (and the police don’t even bother anymore, they’ll get released shortly after anyway – if at all they get charged)... But this man who simply operates his company and do not seem to be particularly dangerous - will be arrested by a giant police raid with helicopters and everything?

I’m not saying copyright infringement is a good thing. But come on, there are more important problems in this world than shutting down an online file-hosting company...

And what about Youtube and all other websites based on the User Generated Content business model? They still make A LOT of money out of millions of un-claimed copyrighted materials (from small indie artists for example)...

There is nothing so black and white, but a lot of grey...

Also see this interesting article, another side of the story...

I can’t believe we are already in 2012! It seems my perception of time has changed, as if time is accelerating year after year… It sometimes feels like a race against time to get things done! No matter what, I never have *enough* time…

Anyway, here it is – we are now engaged into 2012 and the good news is that we have lots of exciting things coming! Here is an overview of some new changes we will implement in the coming months:
 

YOUTUBE

We know many of you turn to Youtube to listen to your favorite tracks, and I think as an artist and record label it makes sense to be on Youtube.  At Frozenforce we always aimed at making our content easily accessible to everybody, so we have decided to open a Youtube Channel so you can stream our tracks, make playlists/favorites etc…

Over the coming months we will upload the complete Frozenforce catalogue to our newly created Youtube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/frozenforceMusic

Check it out !
 

TWITTER

People constantly ask me what’s my Twitter; and when I answer them that I am not on Twitter they look at me as if I come from another planet… I never bothered much to open a Twitter page, because I thought that people on Twitter are also on Facebook anyway, so I didn’t really see the point.

But with the recent problems we encountered with Facebook, I am more willing to give it a try. And I know many of you are crazy about that site… so I guess I’ll join the madness too!
 

BLOG COMMENTS

With the recent (re) creation of this blog, you can now know more about what I think/do etc… But I wanted to complete the equation, and also know what YOU think! A lot of people are sending me emails – which I try to answer on time, but it’s not really easy sometime to keep up with all those emails…

So we have decided to make things more interactive, and implement a system to allow comments on this blog. That way if you have something to say about a certain blog article, news or whatever – you can simply post a comment on the site!

I am sure it can lead to some interesting conversations and will be definitely interesting to hear different people’s opinions.

That’s about it for now! We have taken in consideration many of the requests we got through emails, and what people say in general – in order to implement changes that would be good for **YOU**, while being interesting and easily manageable for us at the same time.

Thanks to all of you who have sent your suggestion/comments, we really appreciate and value your input! Hearing from people directly allows us to fine-tune our strategy and shape the future of Frozenforce in general…

For many years I have discarded Youtube as a marketing platform, and the logic behind that is that I always considered Youtube as a “video hosting portal”; it wasn’t making sense to spend time and $$$ maintaining a profile on a third party website just to host some videos, while Frozenforce had the technology to easily host and stream videos…

I realize now it wasn’t a very wise move – not for the video-hosting side of it – but more for its social and marketing aspect. As a business we need to really think what is the best time and place to reach potential customers. What is that specific moment when they are actually interested and looking for what we have to offer?

Nowadays, when somebody wants to consume medias (ie.wants to be entertained, listen to some music, watch videos etc); what’s the first site that comes in mind? Youtube!

So that's indeed a good place to be for an artist or a record label – to have the music available when and where people are looking for it!