Musical Chairs
Groove Addicts, West Los Angeles, has unveiled Full Tilt, a composer scoring series specifically designed for major motion pictures, trailers, DVDs, and TV marketing programs. The Full Tilt music inventory of stylized music scores has been released in 5.1 Surround as well as stereo and can be licensed exclusively for a specific film or TV campaign, according to Groove Addicts VP, general manager Cindy Rosmann. Full Tilt is a musical collaboration between film/TV composer Kaveh Cohen and TV sitcom theme composer Michael Nielsen….Composer Chris Mann and executive producer Becky Blasband have formed music/sound design house The Collective in Los Angeles. Mann, who earlier had been at Machine Head, Venice, Calif., is creative director of The Collective. Blasband’s past affiliations include Machine Head and bicoastal Elias Arts….Composers Marta Victoria and Eddie Freeman of Icarus Music, Lakewood, Calif., demonstrated how to score to picture during a session at the recently concluded 2005 Santa Barbara Film Festival. The Icarus principals used their work on The Octopus Show–a National Geographic films that aired on PBS–as a case study. Best known for scoring TV series, Icarus is diversifying into the spot arena….Sound Lounge Radio, New York, is sponsoring a new contest honoring the best writing in radio advertising. Dubbed The Olives, the competition is designed to recognize new, unproduced radio scripts. The contest is open to writers and art directors working at ad agencies. Spot entries can be for any product and in any genre, but they must be previously unproduced. Scripts can either be written for The Olives or for client work that, for whatever reason, hasn’t been produced. Judging will be done by a panel of agency creatives and media critics. Winners will be announced in June, receive cash prizes up to $3,000–and have their scripts produced by Sound Lounge Radio and exhibited at an awards ceremony in New York. Complete details and entry forms are available at theolivesawards.com; entry deadline is March 31…..Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More