Archives For Business

Should You Join a Photography Cooperatives or Collective?

January 20, 2014 — Leave a comment

Excellent article about why you should join a Photography Cooperatives or Collective over at NPPA.

 

“The “dizzying” pace of change in the photography industry has pushed many photographers to seek ways to reorient their approaches to business and find firmer financial footing. Some have turned to photography cooperatives or collectives, joining forces with like-minded photographers to market their work, seek out assignments and support each other creatively.

The lone-photojournalist model is harder and harder to sustain. Challenges include increasing costs, decreasing revenue streams from traditional sources, such as magazines, newspapers and stock sales, and the need to call attention to your work in a world that is inundated with images from myriad sources.

The question: How do you meet the promotional, sales and administrative challenges of photojournalism today and still find time to develop project ideas, shoot and process your work?

The cooperative business model is an old one. Individual businesses with similar interests come together to sell their products more efficiently. They join forces in marketing and delivery, often under a single brand. They share in profits based on the participation of each member. The bottom line behind cooperatives is economic safety in numbers”….

via https://nppa.org/page/photography-cooperatives-and-collectives

 

Should You Join a Photography Cooperatives or Collective?

In Business, Documentary, How To, Photography , ,
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Finally Make The Internet Work for You With ifttt.com

December 18, 2013 — Leave a comment

Want to give a great gift? Give the gift of TIME.

 ifTTT stands for If This Then That That and is one of those sites that looks simple but makes profound connections between just about anything you want to do, schedule, remind or post. Think icon based scripts for all your to do lists and every site on the Internet. Think automatic everything. If you want to stop repeating posts to all your social networks IfTTT can do it in heartbeat – but that is just the beginning.  See the examples below to help understand this service has endless possibilities. Warning: some of these apps ask for too many permissions to your information.

 

via: https://ifttt.com

Finally Make the Internet Work for You With ifttt.com

In Business, Design, How To , ,
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Beyonce Attempts to Change the Music Business

December 14, 2013 — Leave a comment

ITunes sells more music than anyone on the planet. They put just about every music store out of business with their new model of single song sales for .99. ( The same thing happened in the photo world via Getty Images and Shutterstock) In other words all the profit for most artists on this planet is now going into the hands of corporate America.

Beyonce did something that has never been done on iTunes. She struck a deal to release a full length album with not a .99 cent single to be found – anywhere.  In other words for the first time in years you have to purchase an entire album to hear her new music. She did this without so much as a tweet of advertising and something no record company would of allowed. Now granted this album contains 18 videos as well – she wanted to do a visual album was how she put it (and of course she was influence by the last person to attempt anything this big which was her king; Michael J).  One has to mention the millions of dollars that were spent to do this kind of thing is not within any normal musicians reach or reality. So can this be repeated by anyone else on the planet?  Not really I am afraid…

What does this suggest for the future of music and images on the web? We have to wait and see but still it gives some hope to all visual content now being devalued on the web. Maybe photography has to create musical content to sell a still image? Maybe it’s all going to a video/music combo hybrid? What ever the new paradigm is it involves adding lots of expensive content to get a $15.99 sale apparently. That would be more bad news for the artists everywhere, musical or visual.

 

Beyoncé Attempts to Change the Music Business

In Business, How To, Music , ,
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The Rise of the David Zwirner Gallery

December 2, 2013 — Leave a comment

Nice profile about the rise of the David Zwirner Gallery and a excellent fly on the wall view into the obtuse workings of the art world by the folks over at The New Yorker.

“One of the reasons there’s so much talk about money is that it’s so much easier to talk about than the art,” Zwirner told me one day. You meet a lot of people in the art world who are exhausted and dismayed by the focus on money, and by its dominance. It distracts from the work, they say. It distorts curatorial instincts, critical appraisals, and young artists’ careers. It scares away civilians, who begin to lump art in with other symptoms of excess and dismiss it as another garish plaything of the rich. Of course, many of those who complain—dealers, artists, curators—are complicit. The culture industry, which supports them in one way or another, and which hardly existed a generation ago, subsists on all that money—mostly on the largesse and folly of wealthy art lovers, whether their motivations are lofty or base”

via The New Yorker article:

Dealer’s Hand

by Nick Paumgarten

via: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/02/131202fa_fact_paumgarten

In Art, Galleries , ,
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Selling Your Photographs Online

November 30, 2013 — Leave a comment

Really interesting posts here from Paul Melcher who has been in the biz for years: (Keep in mind he is head of biz development at Stipple) He explains why selling your photographs online might be not a great business plan for the single artist web sites.. you should read all of the posts as they are spot on.

“Publications are no longer the place where photography is consumed, social media is. The so called professional market has become an infinitesimal portion of the marketplace. The big Internet companies have understood it and are waging a take no prisoners battle to control it.”

“Exactly like TV, who creates shows to attract viewers who are then sold to advertisers, photography is used to attract traffic, which in turn, is monetized by advertising. But none of these photos come from a professional photo licensing outlets. Photographers and their photo agencies have been completely overtaken by a marketplace shift that is making them more and more irrelevant. Only two companies have understood this and have recently make deals that will guarantee their future relevance. Shutterstock, by providing images to Facebook’s advertising channel and Getty images, by monetizing their content posted on Pinterest.”

 http://blog.melchersystem.com/2013/10/30/escaping-the-wall-gardens/

In Business, How To, Photography ,
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