Steve Meyer-Millenium Man

Steve Meyer is a thirty-five year music industry veteran. He spent 24 years working in executive promotion capacities at both Capitol Records and at Universal Studios' MCA Records. Recognized as one of the industry's top professionals, Steve was a recipient of many awards during his industry tenure, including Billboard Magazine's Award for Excellence in National Promotion, as well as Sr. VP/Promotion, and Record Executive Of The Year awards.
In 1992, Meyer left MCA to form his own consulting company, SMART MARKETING and since then has provided consulting services and marketing strategies to many in the entertainment, media, technology and broadcast industries. A respected authority on pop-culture and the entertainment industry, Steve has been interviewed by Martin A. Grove, now a columnist for The Hollywood Reporter and a CNN Entertainment reporter, for three separate books on pop music.
Read his column (HERE)
Click on"Interview" when you get there. Read Steve's interview with Pop Culture Specialist and AAA Radio Expert, Mike Lyons, when you go there. A great read.

DAVID MARTIN and LEE ABRAMS

You may have noticed the Links to the right on this Blog. I would like to point to 2 of them in particular.

Dave Martin

When I worked for Doubleday Broadcasting as PD of WLLZ in Detroit, Dave was Doubleday's VP Programming. I never worked for a more supportive or insightful boss in all my years in broadcasting. Dave continues as a Top resource to some of the smartest and most successful broadcast leaders in our business. His wealth of experience melded with the rare quality to see the future makes him a one-of a- kind. The wisdom that he makes available at his Blog for free is invaluable. (DAVE'S BLOG)

Lee Abrams

Lee, like Dave, has always been a soothsayer and futurist. His years as a founding partner at Burkhart, Abrams and Associates are a blueprint for how to make a true difference.
He helped transform Underground Radio into a viable, profit making, ratings winning Radio Format called Superstars. His Programming leadership then and his current function as the MAN at XM Satellite have cemented his place in Broadcast history. His Blog is always a great read for Radio Managers all over the world.
His insightful view of what makes listeners tick and his advice on how to connect with them is truly invaluable. I had the pleasure of working with Lee at both 98 Rock in Tampa and WAAF in Boston. We also spent 4 months together in England at the close of the 1970's, working on an album project together. Those were heady days. (LEE'S BLOG)

Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll

It’s been a long time since there was a true generation gap, perhaps 50 years—you have to go back to the early years of rock and roll, when old people still talked about “jungle rhythms.” Everything associated with that music and its greasy, shaggy culture felt baffling and divisive, from the crude slang to the dirty thoughts it was rumored to trigger in little girls. That musical divide has all but disappeared. But in the past ten years, a new set of values has sneaked in to take its place, erecting another barrier between young and old. And as it did in the fifties, the older generation has responded with a disgusted, dismissive squawk. (MORE)

MTV LETS GO 250

Bloodletting at MTV
From: Office of Judy McGrath Sent: Mon 2/12/2007 6:17 AM Subject: Our Organization

I want to let you know about some organizational changes we are making this week.
Over the last few years, we've changed the way we operate, to become a truly multiplatform content company. We are creative leaders who continue to invest in our television and digital future, and to keep winning in this revolutionary environment, we have to refine our business and organizational models as well.
With that as a backdrop, we will be fine-tuning how we operate in each of our groups - Music and Logo; Kids and Family; Entertainment; International; Sales and Strategic Services - in ways that will allow us to better share resources across our brands, and to invest in our linear channels and other key growth areas. In the U.S., we will build resources against some new businesses - our interactive properties and some of our new networks - and we will make reductions in others. Separately, International is also looking at new ways of working, and exploring new business models for television and online, which will be evaluated over the near term.
We've carefully reviewed all aspects of our business, and these moves are necessary to best align us for the future. Unfortunately, this means that approximately 250 U.S.-based staff employees will be leaving the company. Over the next few days, department heads will be meeting with those employees whose positions have been affected. The majority of this process will be completed by the end of the week.
The close-knit culture we have at MTV Networks makes this especially tough. Everyone here makes invaluable contributions to the company every single day, and it is painful to see hard-working, dedicated people leave us. Please know that we are committed to helping our colleagues who are leaving during this transition in every possible way.
Our industry is at an inflection point and many companies are going through the process of adapting their business models and organizations to the new realities.
Especially in this challenging time, I want to thank you for your hard work and continued committment to MTV Networks.
--Judy

Teraflop Chip Hints at the Future

A chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflop) has been unveiled by Intel.

The Teraflop chip is not a commercial release but could point the way to more powerful processors, said the firm.

The chip achieves performance on a piece of silicon no bigger than a fingernail that 11 years ago required a machine with 10,000 chips inside it. (MORE)

THE BUDDHIST IN THE BOARDROOM

Want to improve at work, the Marshall Goldsmith way? In his new book, "What Got You Here Won't Get You There," Goldsmith offers four exercises. He calls them "stealth techniques" that will "identify the main problems in your workplace behavior."

1. Make a list of people's casual remarks about you. For one whole day, write down all the comments that you hear people make to you about you. At the end of the day, review the list and rate each comment as positive or negative. If you look at the negatives, some patterns will emerge. Do this again the next day and the next. Eventually, you'll compile enough data about yourself to establish your challenge.

2. Look homeward. Your flaws at work don't vanish when you walk through the door at home. If you really want to know how your behavior is coming across with your colleagues and clients, stop admiring yourself in the mirror. Let your colleagues hold the mirror and tell you what they see. If you don't believe them, go home. Pose the same question to your loved ones-the people in your life who are most likely to be agenda-free and who truly want you to succeed.

3. Turn the sound off. When my clients get bored in meetings, I ask them to pretend they're watching a movie with the sound off. They see how people physically maneuver and gesture to gain primacy. They lean forward toward the dominant authority figure. They turn away from people with diminished power. They cut rivals off with hand gestures. You can do the same for yourself: turn the sound off and watch how people physically deal with you. Do they lean toward you or away? Are they trying to impress you or are they barely aware of your presence? If the indicators are more negative than positive, you'll know you aren't making the right impression.

4. Complete the sentence. Pick one thing you want to get better at. Then list the positive benefits that will accrue if you achieve your goal. For example, "I want to get in better shape. If I get in shape, one benefit to me is that . . . I will live longer." That's one benefit. Then keep doing it. "If I get in shape, I'll feel better about myself." That's two. Keep going until you exhaust the benefits. As you get deeper into your list, the answers become less corporately correct and more personal. That's when you realize you've hit on an interpersonal skill that you really want and need to improve. (More)

Number 1 News Site...Digg.com

SINCE the dawn of the Internet, one site has reigned over all others as the Web's official rounder-upper of the day's news: the Drudge Report. As anyone who works at a news website can tell you, the best driver of viewers to one of your stories is a link on Drudge. The second-best way is — there is no second-best way. For years, if a news story broke in the woods and Drudge didn't link to it, it didn't break.

Many, including such otherwise favored Web tycoons as Arianna Huffington and Gawker media's Nick Denton, have launched sites positioned as rivals to Drudge, but none has made a dent — until now. Welcome to Digg.com, the czar of social news — a kind of cross-pollination of Drudge and MySpace. The site's main function is fairly straightforward: Users post links on the Digg site to news stories. Other users look at the story and vote to either raise it up to the top of the site or bury it at the bottom. (More)

DON'T FORGET. CLOCKS SPRING FORWARD EARLY THIS YEAR!!

A reminder from the folks at The Washington Post.

It seemed so simple and familiar: Spring forward, fall back. For 20 years, that's what Americans -- and their technology -- have done with their clocks on the first Sunday in April and the last Sunday in October.

No longer. When few people were paying attention in August 2005, Congress lengthened daylight saving time by four weeks in the name of energy efficiency.

The change takes effect this year -- on March 11 -- and it has angered airlines, delighted candy makers and sent thousands of technicians scrambling to make sure countless automated systems switch their clocks at the right moment. Unless changed by one method or another, many systems will remain programmed to read the calendar and start daylight saving time on its old date in April, not its new one in March. (MORE)