Wise & Young: The nuances of Gen-Y marketing, branding, advertising, trends, & more

I love the new Skype feature/partnership on Myspace. The simple feature allows users to visit their friend's profiles and call them up just like they were sending a message or an IM.

This move is great for both, due to the different markets each service controls. For example, Skype is a huge phenomenon overseas, and for one reason or another, has not taken off in America — especially with Gen-Y. By connecting Skype to Myspace users, Skype has a great chance to expand on the gen-y American market.

However, I think Myspace was the brilliant one here, because it gives them a huge handle on a massive overseas market that Myspace still hasn't conquered. I feel they are at the end of their essential first run in America, there isn't much they can do to add any other American users.

Murdoch has known of this problem since he bought Myspace, and from at least 2006 and on he's pushed for Myspace to cater to European, Asian, and other lager foreign markets for good reason - at least 800 million more possible Myspace users! By adding Skype, they have one more enticing reason for overseas users to sign-up or leave other weak networks like Bebo and hi5.

Lets hope the new Myspace Developer Tools work just as well, I want to see a blood-thirsty competition between Myspace and Facebook!

Since 2004, Arcade Fire has demonstrated the power and dynamics of the web. It helps that they have a great product and superb brand (band) execution on all fronts, furthemore, you have to commend them for continually coming out with innovations left and right.

Their latest innovation is the future of the music video; an interactive website featuring their single "Neon Bible." You can view that here: b eoNline B. This is the only song from the album that was turned in to a "music video" and it's an exciting approach and something that should have been established a while ago. As most know, MTV and VH1 have almost completely stopped playing music videos, leaving musical artists paying millions of dollars in hope their video gets a good amount of YouTube hits.

With Arcade Fire's model, fans can interact with the video and create an emotional connection to the music. In essence, the music video has become a viral website! I wouldn't be surprised if many others soon followed and dropped the video format altogether. However, I feel others will make their videos easier to share, post, embed, and otherwise viralize.

Hail to the thief! The music industry is changing!

Yet as of last week, the income segment with the highest percentage of visitors to the iPhone site was 18 to 24 years of age, earning less than $30,000 per year. Could Steve Jobs have been aware of that when he lowered the price of the 8GB iPhone to $399 on Wednesday? We can only guess.