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Songs capture a moment in time. They play in background as soundtracks to our lives. Games become pastimes. TV episodes, appointments. Movies remain our escapes and fantasies. At water coolers and barstools, we critique and borrow their dialog : “Here’s looking at you, kid.” “Phone home.” Don’t believe it? Fine, “No soup for you.”

From blogs to movies, webisodes and clips to comics and film, from ha-ha funny, to tear-jerker sad, we live in a world hungry for media. We feed that hunger with mass media and the alternative; with songs and sound bytes, in features and micro-chunks. We engage with it on computers, at home, at work, in the car, on the go. We consume it. On a phone. On a TV. Via consoles and portables, real-time and “time shifted” too.

“Content is King” or at least, esteemed royalty. Today, in acknowledgment of how the media world continues to evolve Metue presents a third brief collection of recent notable quotations, this time on “Content,” the manna that fuels our entertainment appetites:

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Touch screens, video-on-demand, GPS, Portable Entertainment, taxi’s with TV, highway rest stops with WiFi hotspots …. Entertainment technology is reaching into our travels and changing fast.   No where are these changes more apparent than airlines.  New planes have new technology and are trying to keep up.

Last week Virgin America, the newly launched U.S. low fare airline chose a handful of prominent Internet personalities and blogger’s as cartoon faces to front their new ad campaign.  They included people like Kevin Rose (Digg) and the team at popular blog Boing Boing.   I wasn’t among the chosen few – Metue is a good ways from the scale of audience to draw that kind of attention -  but I have flown VA twice this month and the time seems right to take inventory and do a review; a closer look at the entertainment technology aboard the newest company to take flight.

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Mix Hollywood Dreams and Sandhill’s Green and you get a lot of would be movie moguls focusing their creative powers on Internet video.

The latest to add to the growing list is Deca, a Santa Monica based studio that’s billing itself as “the best of Hollywood, Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley.”

Deca will start out with $5m in funding from Mayfield Fund, General Catalyst Partners and Atomica Partners, a fund from Joost co founder Niklas Zennstrom. The financing was closed in July using the name Digital Entertainment Corp of America. Deca, being the obvious acronym. CEO and Co-Founder, Michael Wayne was formerly a VP for strategic alliances at Sony Pictures.

Internet Video Studios (“IV Studios”) like Deca are popping up like weeds. Click to Read More

From earnings announcements to press releases to interviews, they said it. Collected recent quips and clips from the executive suites On Gaming, On Mobile, On Internet Video, On Advertising and On Business:

“Video-game consumers are the single most sophisticated shoppers in the entertainment industry, despite their age and what you might think. People go to a movie or buy a book on a whim. But buying a video game is a much more methodical and judicious process. Next time you’re in an airport, look at how many magazines are dedicated to video games. And they’re not writing about the sex lives of game designers. They are writing about the content.” –Jeff Brown, vice president for corporate communications at Electronic Arts (New York Times)

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“It’s rough out there. Anyone who tries to say otherwise has never taken money from a venture capitalist or candy from a child” Anonymous.

Not long ago, out having a drink with some friends, I was treated to the unsolicited rants of a stranger at the bar. He was an entrepreneur and he was vocally unhappy with the direction his investors were trying to drive the company he helped found.  He was just making conversation but listening to his unsolicited rant inspired this unsolicited reply.

VC’s aren’t saints (and some are indeed sharks) but they sometimes get a bad rap because, like movie studio executives, talent agents, and publishers, they sit in a position where their job requires them to evaluate an idea’s odds of success, and the decision they come to in that evaluation effectively positions them as a toll collector on one dreamer’s bridge to success.  Click to Read More

It’s official. Yesterday, as expected, the boards of News Corp and Dow Jones each met to approve News Corps buyout offer. With sufficient support from shareholders secured, the deal will go ahead. It will likely take about four months to transition. Once complete, Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation will reign over what is arguably the largest single owned territory of business media in the world.

There’s nothing like a map to show how big something is. So here it is, a visual layout of the mammoth that is News Corp. (Click the map and a page will launch with a larger image to display. If that image still is not large enough, a downloadable PDF or MS Word version is hosted on Scribd.)

(Metue Celebrity Endorsement Lists are now live on the site. Read the article below or follow the links at the bottom of this article  for more information)

You can’t legally download a Beatles song online yet but you can hear “All You Need is Love” play on TV in support of Luvs diaper sales.   Put off by that? Change the channel but beware, across the channels, TV and radio, famed songs, and new releases from Janis Joplin (Mercedes) to Queen (Bohemian Rhapsody) to John Mellencamp (Our Country) all play in marketing campaigns.   The song Our Country even debuted in advertising months before it was available as a single.

We live in Billboard Nation; a consumer culture.  Celebrities looking to stay in the public eye can do it by selling products. They can market themselves and get paid to do it at the same time. Popular songs can be soundtracks to a sale.   Turn on the TV and that voice selling cars may be one you know (Kevin Spacey, Gary Sinese). Similarly open a magazine and chances are you’ll see a recognizable face on the pages promoting a product.  The guitar riff in a commercial? Not necessarily a jingle.

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