In The Butter Room / Jane Copland, Search Marketing Consultant Ah, so this is The Butter Room … it’s everything I imagined and more! Seriously, though, I am excited to be a part of such a talented group of professionals and I’m even more excited about my first contribution to this unique site. First, allow myself to introduce … myself … I’m Gary Cope, the In-house Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Professional for a company in Roanoke, Va. I also founded and run CWI Media & Marketing. If you want more detail, check out my bio. The bottom line is, I spend about 10-14 hours a day working on search engine optimization. SEO is a never-ending learning process, mostly in part because the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Ask, MSN) are constantly modifying their algorithms to adjust for changes in the SEO landscape and to combat Black Hat SEO practices. The biggest part of my job is keeping up with those changes and that means reading a lot (and I mean A LOT) of SEO-related blogs. And that brings us to our interviewee Jane Copland, a Search Marketing Consultant for SEOMoz.org. Jane has established herself as one of the most respected search marketing professionals in the business. SEOMoz is a Seattle-based SEO company that serves as a hub for search marketers worldwide, providing education, tools, resources and paid services. Photo of Jane is Property of SEOMoz.org. The Butter Room thanks Jane for her time and response.

For those who may not be familiar with your background, can you give us a quick overview and a little bit of info about SEOMoz?

Jane Copland: SEOmoz is a search marketing company based in Seattle, Washington. We specialise in creating both SEO tools and in creating educational content for the search marketing community, as well as maintaining a popular Q&A service and a daily SEO blog. I started working here in September 2006. Looking back, I was incredibly lucky to get this job: there were over 100 applicants, many (most?) of whom were way more qualified to work here than I was. However, I made it through the rather grueling interview process SEOmoz had set up and have been working here for almost a year and a half. Before that, I attended Washington State University and competed on the school’s swim team for four years. I’m originally from New Zealand, but I’ve been living in the U.S. for six years now.

You’ve been in the SEO business for about 18 months, yet you have established yourself as one of the industry’s most respected SEO professionals in such a relatively short period of time. With apologies to Michael J. Fox, what is the secret of your success?

Jane: I’m very lucky to be working at SEOmoz, really. The blog was very visible and respected long before I walked through the front door, so I had a good place from which to start! Along with that, I’ve fallen in love with my work, which makes it easy to learn fast.

What is your favorite part of SEO and why? Your least favorite and why?

Jane: My favourite part is probably figuring out the reason why something isn’t working and fixing it. I love material results like that. My least-liked thing in SEO is when the “pieces don’t fit together” and I can’t work out why something is happening. Sometimes, you’ve done everything right, you’ve been smart and clever and you’re sure something will go right and it doesn’t. I don’t like it when there is no explanation or foreseeable way to fix a problem.

SEO, relative to other industries, is in its infancy and as such, there do not appear to be any universally recognized code of ethics or standards. With respect to SEMPO (of which I am a member), there doesn’t seem to be a professional organization that has taken a commanding lead to create such standards and ethics for our profession. Do you think there should be a set of standards and ethics to govern the rapidly growing SEO industry?

Jane: That’s a tough question in regards to the Internet as a whole and not just SEO. How much should the Internet be regulated? I believe we’ll see some codes of ethics popping up over the next year or two: it will be interesting to see whose standards are adopted as authoritative.

Following up on the previous question … more and more colleges and universities are beginning to offer courses focusing on search engine marketing and optimization, but without a set of standards and ethics, are there concerns or even discussions amongst the current SEO professionals about what is being taught in these courses?

Jane: It’s scary to think what people might teach college kids about SEO. I was in college two years ago (so, two minutes ago!) and there was enough disagreement amongst my professors about older industries and practices. I’d hate to think about the conflicting messages students could get when they’re being taught about an industry that is so young. The sad thing is, I have friends who graduated with marketing and advertising degrees and they were never taught anything about SEO or SEM. So people with degrees from 2006 know next to nothing about online marketing.

Web 2.0 is everywhere, but what the heck is it. Was there even a Web 1.0? Kidding : ) What is Web 2.0 and how will it affect SEO going forward?

Jane: Web 2.0 is too big of a phenomenon to sum up quickly. Basically, I don’t think there is a “Web 2.0”; rather, there’s just the progression of the Internet. Unfortunately, we’ve already named our Web 2.0 Awards and branded them accordingly! In terms of how this affects SEO, it highlights how important it is to keep learning and not to become too attached to any particular way of doing things. The industry has changed remarkably since I joined and if I did the same things I did in my first month or two here, I’d be failing.

Social Networking is another popular buzz word with regards to the Web … what does it mean and what is its role in SEO?

Jane: Honeslty, social networking means far less to SEO than it does to SMM, or social media marketing. You can promote a brand very effectively with social network marketing, but we’ve found that search engines aren’t keen on using social networks’ data. Of course, they can’t even use Facebook data, and Facebook is by far the best social networking service. In terms of establishing oneself within any industry, social networking can be very useful, however.

What is the biggest myth about SEO?

Jane: That playing around on Digg all day is a legitimate SEO practice ; )

Free style time! This is your open forum to tell our readers about - well, about anything that’s near and dear to your heart. SEO, swimming, being a Kiwi, whatever - have at it.

Jane: Well! This sounds like a good place for a “things you don’t know about me” list, since I’m finding it tough to come up with a good paragraph!

1. I nearly didn’t open SEOmoz’s job post and apply for the job because it was 1am and I thought it might be time to go to bed.
2. I held the New Zealand record for the 200m breaststroke for four years. My mother ran for Great Britain in the 1970s and yet neither of us particularly like sport.
3. For two years, I lived in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
4. I have a degree in English, not marketing, computer science or anything related to SEO. I couldn’t even write basic HTML until two weeks after I began working here.
5. I haven’t been back to New Zealand in five years (my parents live in Florida), but I’ll get a few days in Auckland on the way back from SMX Sydney in April. It will be really strange to be surrounded by New Zealanders again.

Last question: What is your favorite Kiwi word/saying that most Americans may not have heard.

Jane: Ooh, gosh… I have to share more than one! Some of them are British as well.

1. Bob’s your uncle - translates as, “and there you go” or “everything will be okay.” Used in a sentence. “You stick the keyword in your meta keywords tag 42 times and Bob’s your uncle.”
2. Trolleyed: drunk.
3. Whinging Pom: Englishman who complains a lot.
4. Yank tank: Large American car.
5. Prang: small car accident, usually involving another car. Consider it a translation for “fender bender.”
6. Piss-up: party where everyone gets trolleyed!

Closing notes from Gary: Jane was extremely busy this week preparing for the upcoming Search Marketing Expo (SMX) West Conference next week in Santa Clara, so she went out of her way to make time for this interview. Thanks again Jane, we really appreciate it! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go get trolleyed at a piss-up, but don’t worry, I promise not to drive my yank tank home - I’ll take a cab and, well, Bob’s your uncle. G’night everybody - I’ll be here all week!

(This was originally published on our old platform on January 23, 2008)

Marco Arment is the Lead Developer at Davidville, which is the development company that is the brainchild behind Tumblr, the very popular tumblelog publishing tool. If you are not familiar with Tumblr, I encourage you to sign up for an account or at least, read my attempt at a Tumbler 101 column that I posted earlier in the week (and then sign up).

Marco’s bio on his website reads:

I’m currently the Lead Developer at Davidville, a software development consultancy in New York City. (East Midtown Manhattan, to be more precise.) We design, build, and maintain web applications primarily for local startup companies, and offer advisory consulting for internet business and trends.

From 2004 through mid-2006, I was a Software Developer and the Chief Firefox Toolbar Architect (they never let me put that part on my business cards) at Vivisimo, the company behind Clusty, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In my time at Vivisimo, I developed strong knowledge of search engine technology and the search business, as well as an unhealthy proficiency in C and XSL.

I graduated from Allegheny College in 2004 with a B.S. in Computer Science.

Photo of Marco is property of Marco Arment.

The Butter Room thanks Marco for his time and response.

***

I discovered Tumblr about a month ago (I forgot how) and am completely hooked. I don’t know if I am considered an early adopter since Tumblr has more than 200K users, but I only know two other people who have Tumblr accounts. Yet, I have about 100 friends on Facebook. I know Facebook has a billion members, but my point is that some of my friends know how to use the internet. Therefore, as the Lead Developer of Davidville how would describe Tumblr to my ignorant circle of friends so they will sign up tomorrow?

Marco Arment: Tumblr is a publishing tool, first and foremost. Like Blogger or WordPress, we run a hosted service for people to publish content online. Instead of blogs, we let you create tumblelogs. Our Help page defines tumblelogs well as “more structured blogs that make it easier, faster, and more fun to post and share stuff you find or create.”

Keeping up a good blog is a lot of work - millions of people have started blogs and abandoned them because they got tired of the constant need for long, original, editorial content that hardly anyone would actually bother reading.

Tumblelogs encourage shorter content and don’t require complete originality in every post. Instead of spending two hours every day writing one giant article, you can quickly post a handful of smaller items as you browse the internet normally. It takes almost no additional time or effort - you’re just clicking the bookmarklet and typing a few words here and there.

And at the end of the day, you can look back with pride and say, “Wow! I made that!” It’s very fulfilling.

I read here that you were considering several opportunities when you joined Davidville in June 2006. Since Tumblr was still in the idea stage and Davidville was primarily providing consulting services, what attracted you to work for Davidville at the time?

Marco: David’s very persuasive! (I hope he never learns that there’s this other industry called “sales”, because he’d be very good at it, and it would be a complete waste of his talent.)

When the time came that I wanted to move, I had to choose between a high-paying, big-company job in the finance industry (Bloomberg) or working for this random guy, younger than me, who had really good ideas. My family encouraged me to take the more secure position at Bloomberg, worrying that this random guy wouldn’t be around in 6 months and my paychecks would bounce.

I program financial software I didn’t care about in FORTRAN on weird custom Windows PCs with a bunch of people who rubbed me the wrong way. Or I could make web applications in my favorite language (PHP) with this cool guy and he’d buy me a brand new Mac of my choice to use full-time.

My family lost that one.

Tumblr 3.0 was released November 1 full of new features. Which features did you develop and/or lead the development for?

Marco: David designed all of them and I programmed all of them. Nothing was done entirely by just one of us. That’s part of the beauty of small teams: everyone does everything.

Most of my time was spent splitting apart the database schemas and back-end code to enable 3.0’s new features. It was massive - more than half of Tumblr’s code changed between 2.0 and 3.0. Some features were completely scrapped and rewritten.

Which features have received the most positive feedback from the user base since the release?

Marco: We got positive feedback on nearly everything. The new interface, audio and video uploads, and private posts are probably the most popular improvements. We added Markdown support, which is very popular among power users. And we made some architectural changes that helped people’s tumblelogs index better in search engines.

The biggest gains in 3.0 were the dramatic improvements of the existing functionality. Image quality was dramatically improved. Mobile email parsing was completely rewritten to support more phones, services, and file formats. The entire architecture was made much faster, and the codebase is better structured to support better and faster feature development.

What’s being worked on for the next release? Can you give the Butter Room a sneak preview?

Marco: No, sorry. You’ll have to wait for David’s keynote speech at Tumblrworld ‘08 in June.

About the same time I signed up for Tumblr, I also joined Twitter. Then I found this post on another tumblelog a few days ago. I agree with it 100%. I don’t know why anyone would use Twitter instead of Tumblr. The user experience is so much richer. Do you view Twitter as a competitor or a service that augments Tumblr? or something completely different?

Marco: Twitter isn’t a competitor to Tumblr. It serves a very different function, and they’ve optimized their site to do that one thing extremely well.

Twitter isn’t for publishing, and Tumblr isn’t for sending all of your friends SMS alerts whenever you eat breakfast. Both services excel at completely different things. There isn’t much overlap.

Since I only have 2 friends using Tumblr, I currently pull my Tumblr RSS feed into Facebook. The Tumblr users group on Facebook is growing at a steady pace (330 members last I checked). Is there a plan in the works to develop a Facebook app for Tumblr?

Marco: Not at all.

Facebook apps have their place. Tumblr can’t even let you poke someone, yet alone Super-Poke them. (My probably-incorrect capitalization and punctuation of that word shows how much I’m involved in Facebook.) They’re great for marketing and light fun.

But the risks and restrictions on Facebook apps makes them unsuitable for serious development. What if Facebook decides to change the rules or remove your app, and you have no recourse? What happens when the social trends shift next year and everyone moves to something else altogether, leaving you with an empty platform?

Facebook is a big website, sure. But in the young, web-savvy community, it’s easy to mistakenly assume that *our* community’s preferences and opinions reflect those of the entire internet-using population. And that’s simply not true. While it may seem to us that “everyone” is using Facebook, millions of people don’t. By developing an application exclusively for their walled garden, you’re unnecessarily limiting your potential audience to a small fraction of the people out there.

The standard, open internet is an excellent application platform with a massive audience. I’m not looking to leave it.

Being new to Tumblr, what tumblelogs would you recommend new users to follow?

Marco: Can’t go wrong with these:

http://tumbl.us/
http://cubicle17.com/
http://www.peterwknox.com/
http://cameron.io/
http://jakoblodwick.com/
http://numblr.nostrich.net/
http://lonelysandwich.com/
http://livejamie.com/

Also, I hear these guys have some inside info and Tumblr rumors:

http://www.davidslog.com/
http://tumblelog.marco.org/

Besides world domination and cold hard cash, what motivates you every day to work on Tumblr?

Marco: It’s a product that I love and use every day. That’s motivation enough.

When I’m working on projects that I don’t care about, I have no motivation. It’s a miserable experience. I’d rather turn down money than force myself to do something I don’t care about.

This mindset, obviously, didn’t do me any favors in school.

Changing gears …

The Butter Room is a mixture of technology, sports, and media. Therefore, what’s the best sporting event you ever attended?

Marco: I’m the worst person in the universe to ask about sports. I see how so many people in the world have these powerful, visceral reactions and emotions toward sports, and I just don’t understand the correlation. How do these games cause those effects?

Sports are one of the mysteries of the world to me - something I’ve accepted that I’ll never understand, even though millions of other people understand it perfectly. Like marketing language, fashion, and faith-based spirituality.

What is the best live music show you’ve been to? (I know it’s not the Almond Brothers. What’s up with that?)

Marco: My friend wrote that article and is still pretty annoyed that I didn’t fix it. He’s a smart guy, but a careless typer. It could have just been one wrong “Replace All”. But it’s pretty funny.

I haven’t been to a lot of shows myself, but my favorite was SR-71’s show in 2001 (touring “Now You See Inside”) in a small club in Columbus, Ohio (where I’m from). I’m a huge fan of 90’s rock (recognizing fully that they were in 2000 - that still counts), and most other shows I’ve seen were in giant amphitheaters where you can hardly even see the band. At that point, you might as well just listen to the CD at home for free. But SR-71’s show was energetic, fun, and personal. And it was only $15.

Any good books you’ve read lately that you would recommend?

Marco: I’m currently reading Scott Adams’ “The Dilbert Principle”. He’s a great writer - very entertaining, yet incredibly smart and thought-provoking. He could (and does) write about absolutely any topic, and it’s great.

More relevant to the trade, I also recently finished Jakob Nielsen’s “Prioritizing Web Usability”. That should be required reading for anyone making websites.

Red Sox or Yankees?

My sports preferences tend to be whatever has the lowest chance of causing me harm in my current location. I lived in Pittsburgh when they won the Super Bowl in 2006, so that was easy. But usually I’m the guy at the Super Bowl party asking, “Are we voting for the red team or the blue team?”

Since I currently live in New York, if I was forced to answer this question, I’d have to go with the Yankees on the basis that there are probably more people willing to come to my aid around here if I offend someone with that choice.

How is the back? Are you still standing all day while you code?

I do still stand, even though I’m about 50% back to normal. (Anything involving your back changes very slowly.) I probably could sit for at least half of the day and still be fine, but I don’t want to risk it. I’d rather get 100% better more quickly.

It’s really just a minor inconvenience at this point. It made me improve my posture, lose weight, strengthen my legs and core, and exercise regularly. There are plenty of worse things that happen to people. In the grand scheme of things, I have it pretty well. I really can’t complain.

(This was originally posted on our old platform on 12/30/97)

With the end of the year upon us, we reached out to the hardest working man on New Years Eve, Brad Serling of Nugs.net. Brad will be in Atlanta for New Years with Widespread Panic for their annual NYE gig so LiveWidespreadPanic.com can serve up FLAC and MP3 downloads of their show 48 to 72 hours after Panic finishes their encore. In addition to Panic, nugs.net will also be offering New Years shows from Umphrey’s McGee, moe., The Radiators, Yonder Mountain String Band, Tea Leaf Green, and Hot Buttered Rum.



The New York Times described Nugs.net as “A Johnny Appleseed of online concert recordings.” In case you are not fan of the jambands, Nugs.net offers soundboard recordings of complete live performances for a whole host of artists from the Grateful Dead to Metallica. I had the opportunity to work with Brad back in ‘03 on Musictoday’s Digital Download platform.

Kevin and I thank Brad for his time and thorough response.
***
2008 will be 15 years since you founded nugs.net. What’s the biggest thing that has changed in your experience with music downloading and music distribution since 1993?

Brad Serling: Ubiquitous broadband. My initial concept for nugs.net was a place to facilitate tape trading. In fact, the real genesis was a project I did with the guys who ran the Grateful Dead public FTP site at Berkeley. This was an unofficial Deadhead’s repository of all things Dead. I set up a folder there for tape traders to upload 30 second samples of their best Dead tapes as .AU files (the defacto audio format of the day). This was pre-MP3. The project never really took off, but it illustrates what a limiting factor bandwidth was back then. Now you can download a three hour concert in MP3 format in under five minutes. Pretty amazing leap!

What has been the best day and the worst day for Nugs.net?

Brad: The best day was New Year’s Eve 2002 at Madison Square Garden when the lights went down at Phish’s return from hiatus. I was set up next to one of my heroes, longtime Phish sound engineer Paul Languedoc, at the soundboard with my laptop, ready to capture that night’s show at 24 bit / 96KHz resolution, which Phish had never done before. I was so excited to see the band come back from hiatus, and frankly could not believe that they were allowing me to record the show and sell it the next day on LivePhish.com. The worst day was 24 hours later. I was frantically trying to get the New Year’s show up on LivePhish.com, bandwidth at the hotel was spotty, my wife somehow got a 24 hour flu, and I realized there was a major bug in my code which would prevent all those who pre-ordered the Phish New Year’s run from downloading it. Somehow we had to get on a plane to Hampton, VA for the next three shows and start the process all over again. We got to Hampton later that day and found a data center there who let me upload the shows on their high speed connections in exchange for tickets to that night’s show. By the next day the first two shows were up and I was able to patch the bug in the code after taking a beating from hard core fans in the forums and mailing lists. The deluge of emails and posts saying “I could’ve made a better LivePhish.com” was brutal to say the least. Talk about peer review. After all, I had been a taper since I was 14, and here I was living the tapers’ dream: officially engaged by the band to record and distribute their shows. High stakes for any starry eyed fan.

You are going to be in Atlanta for the Widespread Panic New Years Eve show, which will be available for download shortly after on LiveWidespreadPanic.com. Can you walk us through the entire process of producing a show for download?

Brad: The process really runs the gamut for each band. With Widespread Panic we do more production than most of our other artists. Panic’s front of house engineer Chris Rabold and system tech C.W. record the show in a variety of formats and hand off a 24bit / 48KHz stereo mix to me on DVD after the show. The mix is an on-the-fly blend of the house PA and stereo mics positioned at the soundboard. After the show I’ll usually forgo the typical beer and chicken wings backstage and head back to the hotel and start working on the show. I’ll load the full show onto my laptop and first make sure the show is complete, with no cuts or dropouts (it happens). Then I will drop markers for each song, add fades at the start and end of each set, and start the mastering process to even out the levels in order to make better sounding MP3s. Once the show is edited and rendered down to 16bit / 44.1 KHz WAV files for each track, I encode to MP3 and FLAC, tag all the files with artwork and metadata for that show, create the MP3 30 second samples, generate MD5 checksums for each file, and begin the publishing process. Once it’s staged on our servers, I test the download from start to finish and then send it live to the public. Then I will schedule an email announcement to the Live WP list to let fans know the show is ready. The Live WP site then auto-features the latest show on the homepage and show catalog, and auto publishes to LiveDownloads.com and nugs.net to increase traffic and visibility. Our art department then creates the downloadable labels and creates a set for the physical CDs. I then burn off a set of CD masters to fedex to our mastering house to fulfill all the CD orders for that show. If I’m lucky I’m asleep before daylight.

If I’m not at the show, the process takes several days as we’re waiting for the fedex of the DVD to come from the road. Bands who do their own editing and mastering can upload directly from the road, but for Panic we handle all the production and mastering so an upload of the raw files would take too long.

Is Panic going to dip into their archives anytime soon?

Brad: Absolutely. The band has already begun the selection process and we will be releasing shows on LiveWidespreadPanic.com as MP3 and FLAC downloads, as well on CD and CD+MP3 bundles where you can download the MP3 immediately and get the CD in the mail.

LivePhish.com had to be a significant event for Nugs.net. How did your relationship with Phish develop?

Brad: It’s funny, that’s probably the question I get asked most often. People assume I must have been buddies with the band or a friend of a friend, which is not the case at all. I was a fan just like everyone else, and even though I had been seeing Phish since 1990 I did not know anyone in the band or Phish organization. I was just a fan who did a really good job of releasing their music for free with their permission and without ripping them off. That’s what drew them to me. Actually, the Grateful Dead were the first to reach out to me. They called me up one day in 2000 and invited me up to their headquarters because they loved what I was doing with the nugs.net fan site. Three million free MP3 downloads a month of their music certainly got their attention. The fact that I was clearly doing it as a labor of love is what sealed the deal. The Dead hired me as a consultant and they had passed my name on to Dionysian, Phish’s management company. John Paluska, Phish’s manager, invited me to dinner before the “first last show ever” at Shoreline in 2000 and the rest, as they say, is history.



Can you give us a glimpse of what Phish might release in 2008 through LivePhish.com?

Brad: Currently Phish Archivist Kevin Shapiro is working on remasters of some of our most popular archive releases, like Nutter 97 and Durham 93. The remasters will come out on CD and new downloads and CD+MP3 bundles like our previous six releases. Aside from that, there are of course many shows in the queue. I keep pulling for Hampton 97, but it has yet to see the light of day. Kevin did play the epic Halley’s on our anniversary Phishcast yesterday, so thanks Kevin!

You launched the Nugs.net download service for The Philadelphia Orchestra earlier this year. What has been the level of interest in comparison to your rock n’ roll client base? Has it met/exceeded/fallen short of your expectations?

Brad: The Orchestra was a great opportunity and a great client, but certainly a grand experiment for us. I am from Philadelphia and my partner still lives there, so it was a natural connection. Incidentally, the Philadelphia Orchestra was the first orchestra to make an electronic recording of their music in the early 1900s, so it was a natural for them to be the first orchestra to directly distribute their performances to fans on their own web site.

In terms of quantifying success, Metallica it ain’t, to say the least. I have never done any market research on the classical music download market at large so I really have nothing to compare it to in order to gauge the success. My criteria for success is simple: is my client happy and are they reaching their fans and making them happy? By those metrics, the Orchestra is a huge success.

What are your top 3 recommendations in the nugs.net catalog?

Brad: Wow, that’s tough. I’ll stick with what my go-to shows I suppose—the ones I find myself listening to most often. (1) Hot Tuna from last year’s Merlefest. Just a spectacular recording and great acoustic performance. (2) Umphrey’s McGee New Year’s 04. I think I’m addicted to their cover of Sledgehammer, which is funny because I was never a huge fan of the Peter Gabriel’s original version. But the whole show is phenomenal and it’s another great sounding recording. (3) Grateful Dead at Family Dog from 1970. I’m a sucker for any 1970 Dead, and this is an awesome snapshot of the band in their prime with some nice filler thrown in from later in the year for good measure. And, of course, it sounds great too because it was mixed down from the multitrack tapes they literally found one day in the corner of the Vault.

When not seeing shows or working, you are __________?

Brad: Listening to shows ;-) Either that or playing guitar or attempting to play the mandolin.

What plans do you and Nugs.net have for 2008?

Brad: If I told you, I’d have to kill you.

How much horsepower does it take to serve up all of that audio? What’s the platform?

Brad: I’m platform agnostic, and I’ve learned the hard way not to put all my eggs in one basket.

What’s your ideal solution to copyright, fair use, and the controversies surrounding DRM?

Brad: How much time do you have? Honestly that’s beyond the scope of this discussion, so I would simply state that in any economy there are those who will always steal no matter what the price and those who will always pay given a fair price for the product or service they are interested. It’s called capitalism. The music business is no exception. Nugs.net is successful because we offer a reliable service of selling you last night’s show at a fair price. People rip us off all the time by illegally posting our artists’ intellectual property on file sharing sites, but those people would never pay for it anyway. Nevertheless, plenty of people want to support their favorite artist and know that by giving us their credit card they are putting money directly in their heroes’ pockets. That’s the intersection between art and commerce and we operate in that crosshair.

Is your business threatened by piracy? If so how and from where? If not, how do you manage to avoid it?

Brad: You’d be burying your head in the sand to say you can avoid piracy or that you have a way to prevent it. It’s not a study in ethics but rather factor of market forces.

Did you have an “aha” moment that gave birth to nugs or is it more like an idea you’ve nutured over time and whose time has come? Did you just look around the expanding taping sections, see hundreds of mic booms, and say “yeah, there’s a market here?”

Brad: I wish I could claim to be that smart. In reality, it was really more self-serving, yet selfless at the same time. When I hear something I like, my first thought is that I need to play this for my friends and turn them on to it. That’s the genesis of nugs.net. When I launched the nugs.net web site, it was a way for me to share my tape collection. I couldn’t keep up with all my friends’ requests for copies of my tapes so I built a web site to let them download copies themselves. I used to spend entire weekends in college copying tapes for people (this was before you could burn CDs). Once I entered the real world, I didn’t have that kind of time anymore so I needed a way to share my music more easily.

What is your favorite period or episode in history and why?

Brad: Right now. I can’t think of a more exciting time given all the technology at our fingertips. Politically and socially it may be the scariest time since the dawn of man, which might explain why we’re living in a tech-wonderland right now.