{"id":902,"date":"2007-08-22T12:41:58","date_gmt":"2007-08-22T20:41:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/archives\/2007\/08\/22\/how-long\/"},"modified":"2007-08-22T12:43:15","modified_gmt":"2007-08-22T20:43:15","slug":"how-long","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2007\/08\/22\/how-long\/","title":{"rendered":"How Long"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thank god the Eagles&#8217; fans are not tech\/web-savvy.<\/p>\n<p>First lesson, OWN YOUR URL!<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a story here, as to why the URL is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eaglesband.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">www.eaglesband.com\/<\/a>, not eagles.com, or theeagles.com (sure, the band hates the &quot;the&quot;, but most people don&#8217;t know this). Yes, a search will turn up the right site, but will it turn up the right MySpace page?<\/p>\n<p>No.<\/p>\n<p>My Google search on &quot;MySpace Eagles&quot; didn&#8217;t turn up the band&#8217;s MySpace link on the first PAGE of results. I could go further, but who goes further?<\/p>\n<p>But I know the band&#8217;s got a MySpace page, I was there once before. So I search on &quot;MySpace Eagles band music&quot;. And the site comes up. It&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.myspace.com\/eaglesmusic\" target=\"_blank\">www.myspace.com\/eaglesmusic<\/a>. Now, that&#8217;s so far from intuitive, maybe that&#8217;s why the band&#8217;s new song &quot;How Long&quot; only has 33,333 plays, even though it&#8217;s been available for almost a week.<\/p>\n<p>So, does this mean the URL sucks? Or that the target audience doesn&#8217;t know to go to MySpace to hear the song? Or that no one cares about a new Eagles record.<\/p>\n<p>I think the target demo does care about the music, they&#8217;re just not hip to the fact that you can hear all bands&#8217; new music on MySpace. But, I also believe plays are reduced because of the bad URL.<\/p>\n<p>If you go to <a href=\"http:\/\/eagles.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/eagles.com\/<\/a>, you get a Network Solutions page. Was the name really unavailable? The Eagles couldn&#8217;t afford to buy it? Irving Azoff couldn&#8217;t INTIMIDATE someone into coughing it up? As for <a href=\"http:\/\/myspace.com\/eagles\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/myspace.com\/eagles<\/a>, it&#8217;s owned by someone named &quot;Jack&quot;. You couldn&#8217;t make him an offer?<\/p>\n<p>I mean help yourself out. If you&#8217;re too stupid to own the URL of an almost forty year old band, at least come up with a URL that makes intuitive sense, and pay someone to make it come to the top of Google results if anyone puts appropriate search terms in.<\/p>\n<p>But it gets worse. The Eagles site has POP-UPS! Which are blocked by Firefox! And, although they appear in Safari, the QuickTime movie never loads.<\/p>\n<p>How did this happen? Isn&#8217;t anybody tech-savvy over at the management company? Didn&#8217;t anybody think about the pop-ups being blocked? Didn&#8217;t anybody test the site?<\/p>\n<p>Utterly ridiculous.<\/p>\n<p>If a boomer is too stupid to go to MySpace, or find the MySpace site, and can actually find the band&#8217;s homepage, they expect to hear the new record. But they don&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>Don Henley is famously tech-averse. But he&#8217;s only hurting himself here.<\/p>\n<p>I do believe boomers are the last audience into physical product. That many want the CD. But plenty have iPods. And they&#8217;ll pay for music at the iTunes Store. But &quot;How Long&quot; isn&#8217;t available there. What, are we living in 1973? How long does a track have to be in the marketplace before you can BUY IT?<\/p>\n<p>Well, maybe you need to go to Wal-Mart&#8217;s site.<\/p>\n<p>But if you go to the Wal-Mart page, if you&#8217;re savvy enough to know that the band has made a deal with the mega-retailer and it&#8217;s actually selling music online, you find pictures of everybody BUT the Eagles, and a site that&#8217;s ultimately incompatible with Macs. Couldn&#8217;t the band make a deal with Wal-Mart to sell this ONE track at the iTunes Store? Maybe cough up a few extra pennies to make it happen?<\/p>\n<p>The band is trying to come back. But their digital strategy stinks.<\/p>\n<p>As for the track itself&#8230; First time through, you&#8217;re disappointed. You&#8217;ve waited all these years for THIS? A lightweight trifle? The most famous Eagles cut is not &quot;Take It Easy&quot;, but &quot;Desperado&quot;. The Eagles can come with a ballad, hell, &quot;Love Will Keep Us Alive&quot; was the big hit off of &quot;Hell Freezes Over&quot;, not &quot;Get Over It&quot;.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;How Long&quot; grows on you with multiple plays. But does one even GET multiple plays of a boomer act anymore? Too much second-guessing results in a mistake.<\/p>\n<p>Or else they&#8217;re waiting for the second track for the killer ballad. Proving the band is living in the EIGHTIES!<\/p>\n<p>You don&#8217;t even get a second track most times today. You lead with your best. And, if &quot;How Long&quot; is their best, we&#8217;ve waited a long time for nothing.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thank god the Eagles&#8217; fans are not tech\/web-savvy. First lesson, OWN YOUR URL! There&#8217;s a story here, as to why the URL is www.eaglesband.com\/, not eagles.com, or theeagles.com (sure, the band hates the &quot;the&quot;, but most people don&#8217;t know this). Yes, a search will turn up the right site, but will it turn up the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business","category-online"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-ey","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}