Philosophy, Psychology & Strategy

How to Love Mean People and Embrace Failure

September 22, 2009

First off, thanks for putting walternaeslund.com and honesty.se at two out of the three top positions for fastest growing sites in Sweden on SIS-Index. Awesome! They weren’t very big to start with, but success is not an absolute, but a relative. Today I really don’t feel like talking shop. It’s just one of those days. [...]

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Is Spotify the Darth Vader of Music?

September 8, 2009

As Spotify launched their iPhone app, the crowd cheered. The talented SEO-expert (and comedian) Simon Sundén publishes the follwing graph of Spotify Premium sales that went viral amongst us nerds. Half us us thought is was true, and who knows, it may be. But even if this graphic joke isn’t true, it illustrates something quiet [...]

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Never Ever Ever Piss Off Creative People!

July 21, 2009

If you break something, you fix it. If only United Airlines would have had this moral policy when they broke Dave Carroll’s Taylor guitar, they wouldn’t have suffered. But they did. Oh, they did. Because creative people aren’t like ordinary people. They don’t fight back with legal action that huge and rich organizations can defend [...]

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Spotify Goes Mobile and Offline!

May 28, 2009

When I lectured at Stockholm School of Economics about the future of music and video I remember receiving a few critical questions about mobility: “What about when you’re mobile?”, “What about when you’re on a plane?”, “What about when you don’t have an internet connection?”. Ladies and gentlemen, here is your answer: And by the [...]

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Checkmate. Spofity Opens Up API To Developers.

April 7, 2009

Finally it happened. Spotify released libspotify, thereby making it possible to develop third party applications to interact with the Spotify platform. I know we’ve all been talking about it since the start, and that it has been a long time ambition, but we were never quite sure if they would make the move or when. [...]

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Think Twice Before Even Dreaming About Using IPRED. Or Associating With Anyone Doing It.

April 5, 2009

We are now starting to see the effects of the Swedish IPRED-law, which states that copyright holders can go after individuals downloading protected content. Apparently, Swedish internet traffic has now dropped by nearly half. And since when is that a good thing? I thought traffic was valuable? I believe that you can never be quite [...]

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Viasat Pushing of Against Ipred Towards a Better Positioning

March 31, 2009

I‘ve written quite a bit about the Pirate Bay trials and how the music industry is undermining itself and its own business. As of tomorrow we have a new law in Sweden, the IPRED-law, allowing copyright holders to go after downloading youngsters. Any such attempt is of course entirely in vain. I’ve written about it [...]

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Clarity, Censorship, and a Confused Editorial by Hanne Kjöller

March 20, 2009

In this morning’s newspaper (DN) I read an editorial by Hanne Kjöller about government communications. What has upset Hanne is the fact that the government office Stockholm’s Stad have developed rules for how to talk to the press, and distributed small reminder cards to remind of these rules. Granted, this could have been a problem [...]

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I Never Want To Be Anything But An Amateur.

March 15, 2009

I‘m sitting here reading a blog post by Ted Valentin where he reminds me of a quote from Chris Andersson’s The Long Tail: “… In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the combination of the electric guitar, the arrival of cheap multitrack recorders, and the fine example set by Sex Pistols gave licence to a [...]

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Will The Workspace of The Future Be Designed By Nintendo?

March 9, 2009

I think the Siftables demo at Ted is just incredibly cool. As much as I love computers, I’ve never really come to terms with the user interface. It’s just not physical enough for me. Sure, I’ve tried Wacom tablets and what have you, but it’s just not enough. The same way we saw Nintendo turn [...]

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Is This The New Music Industry?

February 28, 2009

I‘m not so sure record labels have a role anymore though. Artists need production, distribution and marketing. Production is cheap and easy today. Perhaps this “new production” will change the sound in some direction, but just like there is a sound of the 70′s for instance, this will be the sound of today. Distribution will [...]

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Kids Don’t Spend $30000 On CDs.

February 25, 2009

In an account of the Pirate Bay trials by Dagens Nyheter, Peter Althin, Peter Sundes lawyer asks IFPI’s chairman and CEO John Kennedy whether Kennedy really claims that everyone who illegally downloaded a record would have bought it if it wasn’t available at sites like Pirate Bay. Kennedy answers yes to this question. I can’t [...]

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Augmented Intelligence And 3 Other Ways of Saving The World (And The Music Industry) From The Internet

February 23, 2009

A few days after the fact I read this article on Realtid.se. The contents of the article are nothing jaw dropping. The comments on the article however, reflect the fact that so much of this discussion is taking place well outside the realm of relevance. People are talking about whether or not artists should be [...]

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Feminist, Masculinist, Humanist, Love.

February 20, 2009

I‘m excited about the new LOVE-magazine. It fills a void that has been apparent for a while. It’s just like when the gay movement got proud. An attitude of “here I am” is always sexy. And I mean sexy in the best possible way. But it’s also a symbol of something else. The feminist movement [...]

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Forget About Pirate Bay. Go After Apple!

February 18, 2009

In the Pirate Bay trials, it seems to be troublesome for the prosecutor to prove that Pirate Bay has made money off of copyrighted material. But since I always try to be optimistic, I have a suggestion for the prosecutor: Go after Apple instead. An iPod Classic retails for $249. It has a capacity of [...]

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It’s Not About Pirate Bay, It’s About The Bigger Picture.

February 17, 2009

I really think that the Pirate Bay trials are a big waste of money. Possibly worse. What is the music industry hoping to achieve? Will people start buying records again? Buying DRM-sabotaged (yes, that is what DRM is) digital files? Hosting them on their own hard drives? It’s the worst of two worlds. In the [...]

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Heated Debate on Communications Strategy and Social Media.

February 16, 2009

I haven’t written much here for a while because I’ve been busy commenting this post, which has become like a little blog in its own right. Check in there for what I think is a pretty interesting discussion. Ciao!

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The Labels Are Playing a Dangerous Game With Spotify

January 29, 2009

Yesterday Spotify announced that they are removing songs from their database, and imposing country restrictions on others. Again, we see the record labels showing off their power. But it’s really a dangerous game to play. As I’ve said before, both in lectures and on this blog, the only way to properly fight piracy is to [...]

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True Blogging

January 23, 2009

I think it’s interesting to see how the Insider’s Journal-blog of Björn Borg is posting pictures from their work on the SS10 collection. I think this is the way to do a blog. Very open, very involving, taking your customers with you on the journey. Screw secrecy, and tease the nextopia nerve by being smart, [...]

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2009 Free Spotify Advice

January 2, 2009

Dear Spotify, Here is an idea that I would like to see implemented: When I go to the URL spotify.com/walternaeslund I get this: Instead, what I would like to see here is a feed containing everything I have shared (songs, playlists, etc). Easy piecy, expected, and very handy. How about it guys and gals at [...]

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