In case you have not heard, Panasonic recently announced an awesome upgrade to their great G7 camera; the new G85: 
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/panasonic-lumix-dmc-g85-first-impressions-review

I knew I wanted this, but that would mean I would have to sell my G7 which came with a 28-280mm lens.  Amazon would buy back this camera kit for a very fair price and I would take those funds to buy the new G85 with the included 24-120 lens.

The problem is that I LOVE the reach of the 280mm and not sure I could replace it with a lens that could only reach 120mm in distance.  At the same a 24mm range for the new lens is a HUGE difference in getting a wider angle shot.  Here are some examples of the different zoom ranges I took this past year: 28, 60, 280:

The big question was: Do I really even use the lens at the zoomed in range?
Let us Find out! In order to do so I went into the past year's worth of photos that are were marked as "5 Stars" meaning these photos would be printed out at the end of the year in my annual photo book. I then copied the metadata of these shots into an excel document.

The next steps were to figure out what graphic representation can best convince me that I fully utilize my 28-280mm lens to it's full potential.
1. A very straight forward breakout of all of different focal lengths and the # of shots taken at each one. 

I can obviously see the two most used focal length were the very wide shot @ 28mm and the long shot @280mm.  Overall this is too much information, lets group all the focal lengths into the potential new lens which would be 28-120mm and then the extra length of the current lens which would be 121-280mm.

Much better.  I can now easily see that 70% of my shots would be satisfied with the new lens.  At the same time, I feel that I still do not have a sense of my shooting habits related to the different focal lengths; and this is where the Pareto comes in to the save the day: 

This graph really helps me understand the rate of photos I take relative to the maximum focal length I have available.  After the data, I was curious to see which 5 star pictures were shot at the longest 280mm length. I cringed, because the majority of them were all AIRPLANE shot from two airshows I attended. DOH! I mean, the shots are great! But I really should have removed them since they are a subject I could care less about in getting "that shot." (Plus I have another camera system for that kind of work). 

Doing this exercise supplied me with a big surprise in that I fully thought most of my shooting was done at the long focal range.  The data shows that since the majority of my shots were taken at the widest angle of 28mm, it questions how many shots could have been "better" or photos that were missed since I did not have a wider lens like a 24mm lens.

So I sold the G7 and 28-280 lens to amazon, got the cash and now I am just waiting for the new camera and lens to be released!

One of the primary formulas that was needed to create all of these graphs was the DAX accumulative formula which I have a separate posting on.  This is one of the most basic formulas, yet by understanding the details, it helps unlock the mystery of the "evaluation contexts."

I recently attended the Budweiser Made In America Music Festival in Philadelphia, PA and one sponsor really caught my eye: Tidal (The streaming music service). They did a great job promoting their product from interactive tents to having one of the stages named "Tidal".  The thing that tipped me over was that they were recording the entire festival, every stage with what looked like very high end video gear.  We are talking dollies, cranes, perches, zooms in the back... let us just say it looked very expensive.

As a paying Spotify customer I went home and signed up for the free Tidal trial, looked at the concert videos and honestly have not logged back on in almost 2 weeks. WHY!? I really could not see the value let alone the "extras" that would have me leave Spotify.  The concert videos were "eh" and it made me realize that watching "Live Concerts" are HORRIBLE compared to the real thing. And as far as the underlying product I am consuming, both services provide the same thing: music to my ears.

Loving Tidal's advertising at Made in America, trying them out, yet never signing up for their service got me thinking of the book, 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing which is now 22 years old(1994), yet reads like it was published this year. 

I took my own thoughts on the two companies to see how they stacked up against the 22 laws:

One thing that stuck out was that in my opinionated analysis, Spotify is doing AMAZING, but I will get to one aspect that authors Al Ries and Jack Trout did not anticipate in the crazy no profit billion dollar valuation games.

​As far as Tidal, I think 3 huge laws that they have broken will pretty much explain why they will most likely have to fold in the coming months/years.

1. The Law of Hype:  Everyone remembers when Tidal first launched.  Famous artist changed their twitter/profile avatar to a turquoise  square and announced a soon to be MUSIC HISTORY game changer will be coming.  Huge parties were thrown around the country to celebrate with some of the top celebs and what came? Another streaming service.
2. The Law of Success: I love this one.  You had some of the MOST SUCCESSFUL musicians become investors in this new service with Jay Z leading the way.  I mean how can this new service fail with all this talent!  Simple: selling music is different than recording music.  Hubris is a bitch. 
3. The Law of Duality: In most markets and categories there will eventually be only two very large players in the room.  And it is currently Spotify and Apple who are #1 and #2.  Tidal broke to many other laws to try and crack this duality.

Now, going back to Spotify. Though they are leaps and bounds the #1 Market leader with no signs of slowing down, it still will not matter if they can not make money!  The last law is 22 The Law of Resources: It says that you basically need money to make money to become the marketing leader.  But what if the market you are in was never going to make money.  Where the bigger you became, the bigger the loses? I hope Spotify will turn a profit, because I love listening to my all i can listen music.