Flabbergasted.be » Pieter

Another one bites the dust…

Pieter — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:37:36 +0000

It’s been quite a while though, but it seems like it happened only yesterday. Musicstore Bilbo closed shop and claimed bankruptcy. But now, owner of the mother chain has claimed bankruptcy aswell. The S.A. Sonica has been placed under curation. The reason for this bad turn of events has to do with a lot more than what has happened to the business of selling music since the coming of the digital age. They had an enormeous debt standing out, that could never get repaid and they were unable to get loans from banks anymore. Another one bites the dust due to bad financial management.

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This is my view on the product of music:

While we all know that the music business got ugly when peer-to-peer networks started threatening its sales, there is still a lot of music, dvd’s and videogames that are getting storebought. People still care about owning a physical copy of a record, dvd and cd and that hasn’t changed in the last couple of years. I, myself like to own physical copies of music too because of it being tangible and of course also due to the fact that I don’t listen to one-hit wonders. So, for me a record, be it a cd or a vinyl still has a lot of value. But seeing what digital content like mp3’s and other lossless codecs like .flac have done to transform the music business saddens me deeply. When just looking at the music business, there hasn’t been a lot of quality output for the past couple of years. I’m going to refrain from giving examples of music, but alot of it being rehashes.

Can anyone imagine the Beatles releasing Sgt. Pepper’s lonely hearts club band in this day and age? I, for one cannot. And that is simply due to the fact that Sgt. Pepper’s only works as a whole. For me, a record used to be a musical ‘journey’ and anno 2009 it’s reduced to 13 mp3’s you can download for 1 euro a track or 12 euro for the whole cd. So the basic idea of sequenced music or media has completely guttered.

I’m not against the digital revolution, don’t get me wrong. But what used to be quality gets watered down to giving people bread and circuses. The quality levels have been dropping and lots of artists have been oversaturating the market into something resembling a crackwhore (e.g. Lady Gaga). The tide has turned and we’ve noticed that the current distribution models that are being used by traditionals are being threatened because of the digital revolution. While Digital downloads have provided a new platform to get ‘better’ quality music, there are also downsides to this revolution as I noted above.

And the fact why they are failing to comply with the user demands of today in this digital day and age is simply because of the fact that they missed the boat. Itunes was the first ‘decent’ digital content platform that offered high-quality downloads. And because of the fact that most labels didn’t dare to step foot into this market because of the high-risks has only made things worse. Because right now as I see it, we only have Amazon, Itunes, emusic, Beatport, bleep… but one has to wonder, what would’ve happened if they all offered digital content? Then we would’ve had a saturated market with too much offer and a fragmented demand? Or maybe we would have niche-sellers who only sell a small catalogue of the same music? It makes me wonder… past is present and the future is now.

Does the music business need to rethink their business model? Of course, the reason why we see a lot of business failing in this new world of internet born globals is because of their failure to comply with the demands that come with this new day and age. I’m confident that things will get better in the near future.

Here’s at least one article that gives a different view on the ‘format wars’:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/big-music-will-surrender-but-not-until-at-least-2011/

Pieter + (potential) new internship = (could be) a great match.

Pieter — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:18:50 +0000

Unlike my collegues of ‘wijblijvenbuiten.be’ I don’t have any fancy marketing schemes or tricks up my sleeve to put myself in the spotlights. I only rely on the good judgement of the people at my ‘new’ internship to give me a chance. So who am I and why should you give me a chance?

My academical career

My name is Pieter Ophals and for the past three years I’ve been studying marketing communications at the Erasmushogeschool Brussels. I took up the branch of study of Marketing communications and have been enjoying it so far. It’s been a rollercoaster sort of, offering a window of opportunities to work for national and sometimes even international brands who turn to college students to help them with their communication problems.

Before I started my studies at the Erasmushogeschool I studied graphic sciences at the Don Bosco Halle instituut. After finishing my high school I went to the West of Flanders to study Multimedia communications and technology (MCT). In my first year of college and without ever having to use anaytical skills to program new applications I failed to pass my programming classes. After this study, I started studying communication at the Erasmus Hogeschool Brussel.

All-in-all I’m a very computer savvy and technology interested person. I absolutely love how the past few years have forever transformed the ways brands are communicating. The world has become a little bit more ‘hiphop’ and brands finally need to consider user demands, whereas they used to dismiss them. This has been extremely interesting to see, tools like the internet, twitter, facebook and even instant messaging transforming the ways in which we used to communicate. If that’s a good or a bad thing, nobody really knows, but it’s here to stay.

What interests me?

I’m very much interested in culture and creativity. By saying that I’m talking about culture and creativity with the big “C”. I love music, more than life itself to be exact. Let my last.fm guide thee in an insight as to what I like and what I don’t like. And next to music I’m a sucker for old black and white movies. I also love vinyl records, and the sound of a worn-out groove. I like going to the theatre aswell but sadly I frequent it too little.

Describing me in a few words: analytical, philosophical, thinker, rationalist, creative, passionate and always looking for new experiences.

Are you passionate like I am?

whenever I get really passionate about a subject, I can’t let it go. This summer I went crazy about ‘the blues’. I bought a book written by Etno-musicologist Tony Russell about the origins of blues and the best blues recordings one must hear before he passes away. So far I’ve listened to a lot of these recordings and figured out where Moby got the vocals he used on his album “Play”. And rather unsatisfying he made money off of slavery songs, you can imagine my disappointment in Moby, right?

So that’s about all I have to say here. If you’d care to get in touch with me, you can always drop me an e-mail or leave a comment here. I’d surely appreciate it. I hope I’ve given enough insight as to what kind of a person I am.

Sincerely,

Pieter Ophals

Videogame marketing fail of the year: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Pieter — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:13:21 +0000

These are certainly exciting times for Videogame developers. While the videogame business keeps expanding and videogaming has become more than ever a social experience, marketing isn’t considered to be very important nowadays. One of the most anticipated titles in gaming history ever “Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″ is about to hit the shelves on wednesday. Now, what did they do to mess up the launch of the game?

The people at Activision sure did mess up their marketing for the pc version of the game. A few weeks before the launch of the game they communicated to the target audience of the videogame that there wasn’t going to be any support for dedicated game servers. The whole reason why people buy a computer videogame is mainly because of the customization. You can run your own servers and customize the hell out of the game using the developers console. You even get better graphics because a graphics card in a computer is able to generate way better imagery than the ‘obsolete’ graphics card in a console that’s already 2 years/or more old. Now, what did they do to ’sell’ their target audience on the fact that there wasn’t going to be any customization… they made clear to the target group that you can – I quote: “Mackey-IW: No, PC has custom stuff like mouse control, text chat in game, and graphics settings.”

This isn’t the worst that can be said about the game developers though. Infinity Ward launched their own system of online play called IW.net. People who play videogames know that there is a gaming latency when you play online games and that a latency should never really exceed a 100 or even more miliseconds. The wonderful people at Infinity Ward said this in a Q&A: “Mackey-IW: I’ve been playing mainly with around 100ms ping and it was great.”

There are even more reasons why this game is giving gamers the notion that it will suck on the computer, but I’ll stick to this minimum of reasons as to why it won’t give as good a gaming experience than any other FPS out there on the market. I’m just trying to point out that this has to be the worst case of videogame marketing in the short lifetime videogames have been enticing us.

Something different:

A few weeks prior to the launch of the videogame… a youtube video had leaked onto the internet showing imagery of a “call of duty” character being part of a terrorist group killing innocent people at an airport site. This footage was shown across the world and was regarded to be very offensive. Activision made a youtube copyright claim to get the video removed from youtube. The people at Infinity Ward even made a statement about the videogame saying that you as a videogamer will have the possibility to skip this mission.. this was certainly not the best PR either. The video footage can be seen here

In conclusion:

Graphical depictions of violence have always put quite a stir on how the media links them to mass killing of people, like the Virginia Tech incident and lots of others around the globe. Games like GTA and Manhunt (banned in the UK) have been proven to have a link to mass killings, so there is a ground of truth in these statements. Nothing can however be attributed to them directly.

I myself, have been anticipating call of duty’s release and was pondering about buying it before the launch of the videogame. Now I am postponing my purchase before I read something about how it plays out to be. Maybe the videogame makers and the marketing people at Activision will see the error of their ways. It’s rather their own fault to do multi-launches on various platforms, because therefore they cannot give the best service for each platform on which they launch. In short, the worst pc game launch ever.

Identity crisis…

Pieter — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:16:20 +0000

Dear blog readers,

For a long time I’ve been inactive on the subject of blogging. Nonetheless I’ve been busy behind the scenes and way too occupied to blog, but that’s about to change.

My first post on this new blog is going to be a very interesting youtube video about the paradox of choice. Watch it below…

The Paradox of choice by Barry Schwartz

or here:

More posts to come in the near future. Future posts will also be more elaborate on a subject. until the next.

P.S: From now on I will be blogging in two languages, switching intermittently between dutch and english whenever I feel like it.

Greetings

Pieter