Tag: cloud

5 Ways The Cloud Can Make Your Business & Personal Life Easier

Kelli Richards February 3, 2015

How can you use the Cloud to be more productive at work, to enjoy and share music and video, and to stay in touch with family and friends? Here are 5 ways the cloud will make both your business and personal life easier:

The cloud allows you to store data remotely, rather than on your home computer, giving you easy access to your files from anywhere. This can keep you productive when you’re either in or out of the office, and also allows you to collaborate with others on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The cloud really benefits small businesses because it allows for such great flexibility. You can access your data from anywhere, on any of your devices. Because you can update and share these documents on the go, cloud-based apps enable you to brainstorm with business colleagues as well as personal connections no matter where they are.

There are cloud services that offer easy ways to keep track of your appointments, schedule meetings, take notes and help you to organize your day. To-do lists can help ensure that daily tasks are not forgotten. This certainly ups your productivity in business, and can keep your personal schedule running smoothly. No more missed anniversaries!

You could say that web-based email was the original cloud. Instead of downloading electronic messages to your computer, cloud email lets you log in and view them from anywhere. As far as social media, when you like, retweet or pin something, and whenever you use a messaging app, you are doing it in the cloud.

For entertainment purposes, streaming music and video on demand from the cloud affords you access to millions of files, as opposed to relying on what you could store locally on a specific computer. Gone are the days of burning cd’s or placing large amounts of media on your hard drive. You can host your own files to share pictures or home movies with family and friends, no matter where they are.

Many data experts remotely recommend backing up those precious memories and important business documents and using a private cloud is a great way for individuals and businesses to securely store files. No more worrying that hard disk failure or computer theft will mean the loss of your important files. When you make use of online storage and syncing services like Dropbox, you have been involved with cloud computing. The cloud also offers a disaster recovery solution in the event of an outage.

The cloud is becoming a bigger part of our everyday lives. Use it to enhance your business and personal life, increase productivity, and to give you peace of mind when you store and back up your most important files.

Until next time,
Kelli Richards
CEO of The All Access Group, LLC

PS: Always remember that your goals are possible to achieve. Believe in yourself and your ideas. Your intuition got you this far, so trust it. Don’t ignore your own excitement. Keep the passion burning and your vision front and center at all times. It’s the perfect fuel for your dreams. Visit: https://allaccessgroup.com

Two Steps to Creating Collaborations and One to Surviving When they Go Wrong.

Kelli Richards February 24, 2014

Today I had the privilege of interviewing Ian Miller. Ian is an expert brand and marketing strategist with 30 years of experience building hugely competitive brands and the CEO and Founder of The Brand Practice, a business and brand strategy consultancy. A recognized expert / lecturer in Ingredient Branding, Ian Miller has led the creation and global launch of the ingredient brand, NutraSweet, and worked closely with over 50 partner brands, including Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi – creating great synergy and collaboration around the business world.

One of the most important questions I got to ask Ian was about the subject of collaboration – something near and dear to my heart, as a consultant in the music and digital arenas and as a coach. Today, I wanted to go over the two largest pitfalls of being involved in collaborations that just don’t work and what we do to get out of them.

1. Imbalance. One of the greatest pitfalls of any collaboration is that it is not reciprocal. There’s no win / win – just hard work for one party and limited rewards for the other. The truth is that any collaboration can only succeed if all the parties involved are givers AND takers. If any one party involved has nothing to offer, they’re simply a drain on the whole. Be sure that all parties invited into any project are clear about their deliverables – even if it’s just to bring a creative edge to the process – and that nobody is “dead weight” in the group, just along for the ride.

2. End Game. Another pitfall to successfully working with other artists, mentors or business alliances is that we are simply NOT all cut from the same cloth. We don’t all have the same work ethic or goals – just ask Beyonce about the original Destiny’s Child members. BEFORE any collaboration goes wrong, in fact, before it even gets started, you have to be very honest with everyone involved. Before you set out on any journey you must know that what is obvious to you may look like murky waters to the people you’re working with. In addition to making sure you have the right team (number one, above), definitely take the time to carefully go over the goals and endgame of the project.

3. What to do when it goes wrong? No matter how great the team, sometimes things start out fine but go way off course along the way. Before you jump overboard, step back and measure what you can do to salvage your part – to bring the best you can to the project. It might not be great, but it’s possible that showing up for your part of the work – to preserve your future relationship with the other artists or parties involved – might be the best solution.

Collaborations are definitely NOT easy, but they are worth it. The bottom line is that we are in the people business, and tapping into that most important resource – the HUMAN resource is an important part of our industry. So DO collaborate. Take the risk. But no matter how “big” the names and other parties are, be sure to keep it simple, to keep your goals clear and to have definite accountability for every collaborator, every step of the way. If you do, the rewards can be well worth it.

Kelli Richards
CEO of The All Access Group

You can sign up for an advance copy of my ebook at https://allaccessgroup.com/services/ (just click ebooks when you get the confirmation).

Complimentary Access to NARM Webinar Thursday 9/22

Kelli Richards September 20, 2011

I will be offering a 45 minute presentation with NARM this Thursday 9/22 at 1pm PST.

The team at NARM has graciously given me 15 free “seats” at the Webinar to share with my followers and colleagues. The topic will be “Taking The Crowd to The Cloud – Social Media for the Music Industry,” which was the focus of my recent eBook.

Please use code WEBINAR-15-narm when you register to get your free access to this exciting Webinar. https://netforum.avectra.com/eWeb/DynamicPage.aspx?Site=NARM&WebCode=EventDetail&evt_key=74695d42-1584-4595-ae87-e36c1e3822ef

***NOTE: You go through the entire registration process before you get a chance to enter your code and save the $29 fee. But it’s there, don’t worry. Hope all 15 seats get used!

Kelli Richards,
CEO of the All Access Group

Best Practices for the New World of Live Music

Kelli Richards June 22, 2011

In my ebook on Social Media for the music industry (Take the Crowd to the Cloud), I begin with the following statement: The landscape of how audiences are built has completely, thoroughly changed in the last decade – in fact, it has redefined itself more than once. Being malleable enough to “grow” with the flow can mean the difference between big successes or devastating failures in the music and digital arenas. All of us, whether we’re artists or authors or thought leaders, must recognize that, in order to succeed, we must also think and act like CEOs and marketing mavens.

That idea, however, of becoming marketing mavens, must be tempered by a deep understanding of where your fan base is – not only insofar as location, but also where they’re at economically. Of course, this specifically refers to live music, digital music and digital distribution are a different issue, and one that I address often.

If your next live gig is in Los Angeles or New York, then have at it, your ticket buyers are at least in a city that has jobs to offer, giving them a fighting chance at a healthy ticket price. But if you’re playing in Rhode Island or Flint, Michigan, you have to seriously consider what the market can bear. A lower ticket price doesn’t have to mean you’re eating PB&J for a week either, it means you have to get creative, so that those who want more contact or have more expendable income, can choose to participate on a higher level. Consider a paid meet & greet before you go onstage, or an after party with some free merch to go with the separate ticket price.

Whatever you do, you have to do what Bob Lefsetz recently shared in his newsletter, the Lefsetz Letter: You have to align yourself with your fans.

Kelli Richards
CEO of The All Access Group

You can sign up for an advance copy of my ebook at https://allaccessgroup.com/services/ (just click ebooks when you get the confirmation).

Michael Robertson Talks about DAR.fm, MP3tunes, Amazon and the Cloud Music Industry…

Kelli Richards May 1, 2011

Excerpt of Kelli Richards’ Q&A with Michael Robertson, the Bad Boy of the Digital Music Industry. Michael Robertson is a longtime provocateur of the music business and the founder and former CEO of MP3.com, one of the most popular Internet music sites ever. His newest startup, DAR.fm, is a centralized Web-based TiVo for radio. Users can search the programming schedules of over 600 music and talk-radio stations and schedule DAR.fm to record up to 4 hours of any broadcast. Robertson sees this as the savior of the radio industry, and he may be right.

Michael Robertson has fought more high-profile battles with the record industry than anybody in technology, and his experience in digital music is nearly unmatched. Over his career he has raised more than $100 million in private capital and orchestrated transactions with a combined value of nearly a billion dollars. This is definitely one of the best fireside chats in a great series of impactful interviews. (To hear this entire interview, visit the Resources Page on my Website.)

Kelli Richards: Let’s jump right into present time, Michael, because it’s so compelling – later we’ll go into your remarkable background in digital music. Although it could be a big competitor to MP3tunes, Amazon’s choice to enter the “locker” business is huge. Let’s ask two questions about that. First, would you talk about the basic structure of MP3tunes and how it changes the digital music world – why it’s a better product than what Amazon’s launching – and finally, explain to our audience why, in this unique case, Amazon could prove to be more of an ally to MP3tunes than a competitor.

Michael Robertson: Amazon recently launched a sort of personal cloud music server that, on first glance, is very similar to what we’ve been doing on MP3tunes for years – in that it lets people store music online. But there are some really big differences that consumers should know about. One of which is that MP3tunes lets you put your music in and get your music out. Amazon will happily store your music, but it’s kind of a sinkhole. So if you get a new computer or you want to download your music to an iPod, etc., it’s almost impossible to do with Amazon. They literally make you click on every single song to get your music down. With MP3tunes it’s quite different. We literally give you software to get your music out in one click. We’re not holding you prisoner. I believe it’s YOUR data – whether it’s your music, photos, whatever – and that should always be in full control of the consumer.

Another important difference is that we have an API. What this means is that you can connect to your music in a myriad of ways. With Amazon, today, you can only stream your music to Android. So maybe they’ll make an Apple IOS application and maybe they won’t, but you’re completely at the whim of Amazon. With MP3tunes it’s the exact opposite. We publish to the whole world how anyone can make an interface to their library. What this means is you can use your Android Phone to hear your music, or your iPhone, or a Windows 7 phone, or your Palm App, or even Internent Radio – Logitech or Audiovox – stuff like that. So we’re really trying to build an open approach – an open platform that isn’t controlled and dictated by any one company.

On the legal side, while MP3 and Amazon may be competitors on the consumer mindshare front, on the legal side they need us to win. We’ve been a lawsuit for nearly four years with EMI music that says we’re in a state of copyright infringement when a consumer stores their music in our application. Obviously, I disagree. Like us, they don’t have licenses either; Amazon is an un-licensed application. So in this regard, they are likely to be more of an ally than a competitor.

Kelli Richards: Michael, what do you think happens with Apple and Google in this niche – now that they’re said to be jumping into the cloud / locker mix?

Michael Robertson: I think that the really fascinating part of where the industry is at, is that there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of stories about what Apple and Google are going to do, but neither has done anything so far. I think for sure they’re working on it on some level. I’m fascinated by the state of the industry. What I mean by that is this: Amazon has basically flouted the industry and said, “You know what, we’re not going to get a license, we’re just going to launch a service.” So the industry is now in a tough spot. If they don’t take a legal stand against Amazon, why would Apple agree to pay them a licensing fee? Why would Google agree to pay a licensing fee? Let’s put this another way: Imagine two competitors decide to have a lemonade stand. Imagine one guy gets all his lemons for free. And the other guy wants to compete, but if he has to pay for his lemons, his lemonade is going to be more expensive and he’s not going to be able to compete. And that’s sort of where the industry is. If I’m Google or if I’m Apple, well, the music industry is very onerous. They want up-front money, guaranteed. They want restrictions and limitations and regional restrictions and things like that. And you don’t get any of those if you go for an unlicensed structure… So the music industry is really in a perplexing situation. If they don’t take a legal stand with Amazon, they’re going to see a big response in the industry. A lot of companies are watching this and will be over the next six to twelve months, to see if they move toward a licensed or unlicensed approach. If I were the industry, I’d wait and see what the consumers wanted.

(To hear this entire interview, please visit the Resources Page on my Website.)

*To get your own 2 GB of online music storage at no cost, visit https://www.mp3tunes.com

Kelli Richards, CEO, The All Access Group, LLC

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Tag: cloud

5 Ways The Cloud Can Make Your Business & Personal Life Easier

Two Steps to Creating Collaborations and One to Surviving When they Go Wrong.

Complimentary Access to NARM Webinar Thursday 9/22

Best Practices for the New World of Live Music

Michael Robertson Talks about DAR.fm, MP3tunes, Amazon and the Cloud Music Industry…

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Topic Areas & Guests

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Join our mailing list

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