"When did TED lose its edge? When did TED stop trying to collect smart people and instead collect people trying to be smart? (...) What began as something spontaneous and unique has today become a parody of itself. What was exceptional and emergent in the realm of ideas has been bottled, packaged, and sold back to us over and over again. The whole TED vibe has come to resemble a sales pitch."

Mining Subcultural Attention / Impersonal Secret Handshakes / Patterns of Social Organization / The Taming of Subcultures / The Fabrication of Subcultures / The Fortune at the Bottom of the Attention Pyramid

"As anyone who follows the business of culture is aware, the profits of cultural industries depend disproportionately on the occasional outsize success — a blockbuster movie, a best-selling book or a superstar artist — to offset the many investments that fail dismally. What may be less clear to casual observers is why professional editors, studio executives and talent managers, many of whom have a lifetime of experience in their businesses, are so bad at predicting which of their many potential projects will make it big. (...) It may be true, in other words, that “nobody knows anything,” as the screenwriter William Goldman once said about Hollywood. But why? Of course, the experts may simply not be as smart as they would like us to believe. Recent research, however, suggests that reliable hit prediction is impossible no matter how much you know."

"I don't like the fact that rappers I worked with five years ago no longer rap because they're not gonna make any money, so what's the point? Not everybody who made great music got into it for the love of art: some of 'em got into it as a means of making a living, and some of the music that they made along the way changed people's lives."

"The artist whose debut, the oft-praised 1996 album Endtroducing…, bore the footnote "this album reflects a lifetime of vinyl culture" has often struggled to navigate a coherent path through the digital world. This is why he is undertaking an almost stubbornly obscure negative image of a conventional marketing campaign – wandering into a handful of charity shops in the West End of London to covertly plant his new music on their shelves, leaving it to be uncovered by fellow musical archaeologists and vinyl obsessives."

Looks like this is the only place on the internet where you can read "The Ten Commandments for Menu Success".

William Poundstone's book on the psychology of pricing.

NYTimes article about the trend of menu engineering.

"New York Times columnist and author (Letters from New Orleans, 2005) Walker makes no pretense at being a master of modern marketing. But he does, through intuitive, savvy observations of human and corporate behaviors, solidify his argument for what brands mean in today’s society. His claim that brands such as Hello Kitty and the iPod, among others, balance our need for both belonging and individuality is not revolutionary. So what’s new here? That Walker is one of the prime analysts dedicated to probing our minds, our behavior, and, specifically, our buying patterns. He addresses the demand for authenticity and the nearly accidental formation of consumer communities, almost in spite of commercial persuasion campaigns, creating a real connection that many Americans are seeking." -- Barbara Jacobs

streaming, downloads, merchandise.

“Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds…Not news but olds, telling people that what they think they already know is true.”
-- Terry Pratchett through the character Lord Vetinari from his novel, “The Truth: a novel of Discworld

"Dr. Luke doesn’t know why he hears so many No. 1 songs. But for now, the producer behind “I Kissed a Girl” and “Tik Tok” has more tunes than anyone else vying to claim the “Song of the Summer.”"

Videos of speakers from the Business of Software 2008 conference: Steve Krug, Jason Fried, Seth Godin, Cory Doctorow.

In his new book, 'Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)', author William Poundstone dissects the marketing tricks built into menus—for example, how something as simple as typography can drive you toward or away from that $39 steak.