The Raging Tech

Bye Bye, DRM - Hello Manageable Music!

Since the legitimate sales of digital music downloads began, record labels and recording artists have been looking for ways to protect their intellectual (ha, if you can call it that) property. Copyright law alone was not enough to enforce rights protection, so before many would let their music be sold online, they required a system to prevent copying and distribution.

That’s where Digital Rights Management (or DRM) came in to play. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or DMCA) was passed in the United States, making the circumvention of any digital or electronic system designed to prevent copy or distribution of works illegal and prosecutable with huge fines. These DRM systems qualified under the DMCA, and that made the RIAA and MPAA very, very happy.

Unfortunately, there was no standard on DRM, and so each online retailer of digital media invented their own proprietary system. This lead to issues with media not being accessible on all PC platforms, mobile devices, or other arguably Fair Use methods of enjoying your purchased content.

As a result, more people turned to illegally downloading content to get higher-quality, DRM-free media that could be played (or at least converted to play) virtually anywhere. Also, the delivery times from Peer2Peer networks was faster, and often lead to movies and music being leaked before their official release.

From a marketing perspective, what was the community at large saying about how it wanted its media? Free is obviously nice, but people know free either means advertising or lack of legality. Some labels and artists and film studios started to realize that customers want media fast, in high-quality, early releases, and they want to be able to enjoy that media on anything that will play it.

iTunes led the way towards the DRM-Free movement with higher-quality iTunes Plus music unencumbered by DRM or other restrictions. They have by no means released the entire iTunes Store in this format, but offer many artists already. Amazon followed up next by making their entire store DRM-Free mp3 format downloads. And just recently, Rhapsody joined the pack by offering DRM-Free downloads on a per-track basis.

Also, Verizon Wireless is jumping on the bandwagon by partnering with Rhapsody, and will soon allow VCast customers to download music from Rhapsody DRM-Free, by way of a $15 / month subscription for the music rental, or a per-track purchase just as you would from Rhapsody’s program on the PC.

Will DRM-Free music turn more “pirates” into legitimate customers? Will you purchase music, video, etc. that you’ve previously downloaded from Peer2Peer networks? What devices do you use to play your media besides your computer? Let me know in the comments.

-The Raging Tech

Network Solutions offers PerformanceClicks

If you’re easily confused by terms like CPM, PPC, keyword purchasing, SEO, and the like, you’re probably not quite ready to manage your own internet marketing campaign. If you’re a small business or website operator, or even a large corporation, you’ll want someone helping you put your business out there for people to find, both in search engines and on web sites.

When you need performance advertising, you want to pay for your results. This can happen in one of two ways: you either pay someone to show your advertisement in “Bill Board Mode” where you pay every time it’s shown, or some systems are a pay per click program.

Network Solutions, the company most people know for their domain name registrar services, is promoting their PerformanceClicks program. This is perfect for people who don’t have time to manage their own keyword and internet search engine marketing. They can customize an AdWords or Yahoo campaign, or both, and get your business in local and global search results.

With enough information about you and your business, they can customize a marketing solution to drive only the targeted customers you want to your website or business. Why throw advertising dollars away on a hit-or-miss guessing game when you can have experts efficiently target your ads and write effective copy for you?

You can choose either a full-featured custom plan for around $400 a month, or if you’re on a tighter budget, there are several pre-packaged starter plans for around $125 a month. Hiring a full-time internet marketing agent or a firm to do this for you would cost you almost that much an hour, instead of per month.

Plus, you can order up customized landing pages, which means whatever topic your ad was on is what page your visitors will land on, making it easier to turn clicks into sales. And ultimately, sales, or ROI (Return-on-Investment) is what it’s all about.

Honda Commercials Are Awesome!

I’ve posted some Honda commercials here before - but you should realize by now that Honda has a pretty good marketing group. They have some funny commercials, but you’ll also notice they have some that show off how bad-a their cars can be.

I have owned my Acura TL 3.2 for about a year and a half now, and I couldn’t be happier with it. It drives like a dream, gets good fuel economy in both highway and city traffic, and very little maintenance required. Not to mention with the V6 engine inside, it roars like a race car when I accelerate on the highway.

Honda’s commercial, “Difficult is worth doing” reflects Honda’s attitude towards vehicle making. The best, most innovative new features and safety design, are all worth the time and painstaking effort required to create them, in order to bring you the most astounding vehicles on the road today.

DepositNow! Online Check Deposits

A relatively new service called DepositNow! (they’ve been around since 2004) allows small business owners, eBay power sellers, online retailers, and other people who might need to deposit a lot of checks, scan their checks and deposit them online from a normal computer.

This technology has often turned people off, because previously when you purchased a check scanner, that’s all it could do: scan checks. DepositNow! has developed their own check scanner that’s about half the price of other check scanners (about $225 USD) and can be used as a regular scanner as well.

Unfortunately, depositing checks online is only available to customers who bank in the United States. However, this could be a really useful service to anyone who has to daily make bank runs to deposit checks, especially in light of the recent rise in gas prices. The savings on gas almost make this scanner pay for itself after a month or two!

Think not only about the money you’ll save, but the time: instead of wasting time running to the bank before opening your store, you could be done in less time without leaving the office, and tend to other things that might need more attention. Or maybe just use the time to sit and have a cup of coffee and relax!

Visit DepositNow to sign up for online check depositing, use promo code “THE RAGING TECH” and you’ll receive $25 off the price of the scanner. That’ll also get me $25 if you become their customer, which will help me put gas in my car!

Officially Registered for the GMAT

I am officially signed up for the GMAT, which I need good scores on to get into Grad school. I have applied, and they contacted me and said they needed my scores, so I’m taking it. I didn’t realize this was a $250 test until the other week. That’s a huge chunk out of my not-well-filled-wallet.

Thankfully, my mom was able to give me a loan for the money, so huge thanks go to her for helping me continue my education! Love you Mom!

If all goes well, I’ll be taking the test on June 21st, Saturday, at 8:00am in a nearby city. I’m not looking forward to waking up and taking it, but hopefully the studying I do between now and then will pay off.

Oh, and Mom, I have a test prep book, and I am going to study my butt off so that you will know you’ve made a worthwhile investment in my future.

You Can Sell Almost Anything on eBay

Did someone you know recently die? Funerals are expensive, and so are coffins. But in today’s buy-everything-on-the-internet tradition, you can absolutely find it on eBay. I first got this idea when my uncle died a few years ago. I was trying to bring some levity to give people a chance to laugh. We all missed him dearly, and he always made us laugh.

I was at my mom’s house sitting at her computer and I said “Hey, I bet we can save the family some money and order the casket online, and get it rushed. That’s probably faster and cheaper than picking one out in the store. I’ve never bought a coffin before, do they come in sizes?” and my family burst into laughter. Then they came over to see the screen, and were amazed to actually see the item for sale.

Some caskets can cost thousands of dollars. This is a substantial savings over what you’d be pressured into buying from the local funeral home. This is especially helpful if your recently deceased loved one hasn’t bothered to purchase life insurance, or they owe so much you can’t afford to bury them.

If people can sell anything on eBay, so can you! Brick-and-mortar iSold It stores are setup especially for people who don’t want to bother learning to post their own auctions or handle their own money collection. You basically pay the iSold IT store to sell it for you, and they give you what’s leftover after eBay and their fees and shipping costs.

Build SEO with .EDU Backlinks

If you looked at that headline and went “Huh?” - you’re probably brand new to the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There is an entire business industry setup around helping web site owners, blog authors, and online publications optimize every page - make that every word of every page of content - highly optimized to be indexed by search engines like Google or Yahoo!.

Search engines each have their own algorithms for indexing and ranking pages - there are books, seminars and get-rich-quick schemes all surrounding the cult of Google Page Rank. Businesses seem to live and die by their Google PR. The better optimized your site, the higher your page rank will be. A page rank is what determines how high in the results your listing is when customers are searching on certain keywords.

If you want people to find you, you want to be earlier in the search results, right? If your competitors are in front of you, your potential client might go with them first, and that means lost sales or ad revenue. Google and other search engines want their search results to be the most relevant, so they check things like your site’s meta-data and description and match it to keywords.

Back-links are when a site with more credibility or popularity than you links to your site. If it has a higher page rank than yours, it helps your page rank grow. Search engines rate links from sites with .EDU addresses as more relevant, because only educational institutions are allowed to have them. Since school teachers and administrators and professors are likely to be more researched (or so they think), an edu link is worth a lot to growing your site’s relevance within search results.

Also, just a link on a .EDU site isn’t going to help. Search engines look at the content around a link, so a link on the side of a page not surrounded by content is going to be less relevant than a link surrounded by content in an article, for example.