Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0

The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get creepy.

"Hi, this is Mike from Yelp," the voice would say. "You’ve had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You’ve had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those."

This wasn’t your average sales pitch. At least, not the kind that John, an East Bay restaurateur, was used to. He was familiar with Yelp.com, the popular San Francisco-based web site in which any person can write a review about nearly any business. John’s restaurant has more than one hundred reviews, and averages a healthy 3.5-star rating. But when John asked Mike what he could do about his bad reviews, he recalls the sales rep responding: "We can move them. Well, for $299 a month." John couldn’t believe what the guy was offering. It seemed wrong.

In fact, something seemed shady about the state of his restaurant’s negative reviews. "When you do get a call from Yelp, and you go to the site, it looks like they have been moved," John said. "You don’t know if they happen to be at the top legitimately or if the rep moved them to the top. You don’t even know if this is someone who legitimately doesn’t like your restaurant. … Almost all the time when they call you, the bad ones will be at the top."

Read the full story at East Bay Express.

The Presidents of the United States of America Unleash Multiple-Album iPhone App

Dave Dederer, former frontman of nineties hitmakers The Presidents of the United States of America, has fashioned quite a second career for himself as the vice president of business development for Melodeo, which makes nuTsie, a software application that can stream your iTunes playlists to any web-connected PC, your Blackberry and your Facebook profile.

Dederer has neatly dovetailed his past and present with Melodeo’s release of a $3 app for iPhone and iPod Touch (iTunes link), which contains the four Presidents of the United States of America albums whose rights are owned by the band. The app includes rare, exclusive material that can be updated from the server side.

"IPhone apps are exploding, including for musical artists, but nobody’s done anything like this," stated Dederer. For a mere three bucks, fans and interested parties new to the band will get four albums, "lost" recordings, live tracks, demos, and whatever else the band can think of to put in there.

Read the full article at Wired.

MySpace Music v. YouTube: Who Really Drives More Impressions…

The music video is enjoying a newfound renaissance, thanks largely to YouTube.  Once upon a time, music videos were played on MTV, VH1, and BET, and that was that.  Now, music fans are calling the shots online, and the music video is arguably bigger than ever before in its history.

But how many views are we talking here?  Universal Music Group is the most viewed channel in the history of YouTube, with 3.4 billion views on a stock of more than 9,200 clips.  Sony Music and Hollywood Records own the second and third-place slots, respectively, and ChrisBrownTV, JonasBrothersMusic, RCARecords, and even michaeljackson are not far behind.

Suddenly, the brouhaha between Warner Music Group and YouTube makes more sense.  People love music, and even a diversified site like YouTube draws serious traffic from music-related clips.  But take a look at MySpace Music, and something interesting emerges.  Because it turns out that listening levels on MySpace Music eclipse comparable viewing levels on YouTube, often by a factor of 7-to-1.

Full story at DigitalNews

Promoters wary of Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger

Live Nation Inc’s rivals in the rock concert business worry that its planned merger with Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc would mean they would lose control over business secrets — an issue that could complicate chances of antitrust approval.

These complaints by Live Nation’s competitors add to the woes piling up on the proposed merger. There are also calls for a federal investigation into Ticketmaster’s relationship with subsidiary TicketsNow because of incidents where fans were told by Ticketmaster that concerts were sold out but then were offered tickets on its subsidiary — for considerably more money.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee will hold hearings on the merger next Tuesday.

The latest concern is that the shrinking number of independent promoters, many of which use Ticketmaster for selling seats, fear that the company’s deal with the world’s biggest promoting company, Live Nation, would hurt the independents.

See the full article at Yahoo! News.

Survey Of Insular Social Media Elite Says: Twitter Is Better Than Facebook For Businesses

If you were to ask “over 200 social media leaders” which social media site they would pay for if they had to, as Abrams Research recently did, Facebook would come out on top, with 32.2 percent saying they would pay for it. (Yeah, right). LinkedIn was second, Twitter was third, and MySpace and Digg tied for last place (with only 1.5 percent of respondents saying they’d pay for those services).

But if you ask, which one would they recommend for businesses to pay for (if they had to), Twitter beats Facebook by more than two to one (39.6 percent vs. 15.3 percent). LinkedIn again comes in second. Why did Twitter come out on top. It is seen as an efficient way for companies to get their marketing messages out there.

For the full story visit TechCrunch