Musos slam proposals for disconnections

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/rock-stars-slam-disconnection-plan-for-pirates-20090907-fdtd.html

This will be interesting......

...... when i get the time to read it.

http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/9-The-State-of-Music-Online-Ten-Years-After-Napster.aspx

"The In Sound From Way Out": EMI Australia’s official music and mp3 blog???

I recently came across to this newish Australian music blog The In Sound From Way Out.

The nonsense of this blog is the fact that,  it is the "Emi Australia's official music and mp3 blog". 

Blogs are by definitions grassroots media, byproducts of participatory culture trends empowering the audience, counter voice of the dominant  news industry. 

Blogs set themselves in explicit opposition to mainstream media conglomerates, whom EMI is part of. 

The purpose of music blogs is to serve niche audiences and subcultures, usually ignored by mass media. Blogs give exposure to unsigned artists and provide a very subjective and personal opinion on news, facts, etc.. 

Music blogs are primarily authored by music fans which commit to it because they are passionate about music, not for economic reasons. That's why people like them: they are authentic, spontaneous, and true.

How can possibly a major label's blog be considered as authentic and true?  

The about session states: 

" As far as we can tell, we are the only label with this level of openness"

Level of openness? 

Then it continues:

"Written and curated by EMI staff, we post only the most interesting, lively, original content to the blog"

This really makes sense: they are open but they will only post  comments they believe to be appropriate and relevant to the blog.

One of the great thing of music blogs is that readers can freely participate in the discussion, expressing their opinions, creating flows of discussions. In other words, blogs create a community around them of people sharing a common interest on a particular music genre. 

EMI is obviously neglecting this community aspect of blogs, further confirmed by the fact that in the "friend" section there are only a couple of other music blogs. 

I understand that the music industry is in crisis, sales are declining, labels are desperately attempting everything to remain economically viable but, this ridiculous EMI's attempt to look cool and "open" with the hope of tapping into non-mainstream fans networks is a mere joke.  

Making the most of online music fandom

The two-day MidemNet conference in Cannes, dedicated to the digital music business, brought up a lot of insightful discussions to the means of monetizing the artist-fan relationship. Of my particular interest was Nancy Baym presentation about the social activities that motivate fans to interact to one another, and how the internet transformed those activities in ways that empower fandom. Hypebot caught the main points of her presentation.

Important behaviors:

Sharing emotion
Building social identity
Collective intelligence (set lists, fan reviews)
Sharing interpretations (analyzing lyrics)
Creating for each other (fan videos, remixes, playlists)

How the net empowers and changes fandom:

Transcends distance and extends reach
Provides group infrastructure
Supports archiving
Lessen social distance

If It Doesn't Spread Its Dead

But with so many choices how do you know where to put your effort? Baym, always a big supporter of widgets, showed some examples featured by Reverb Nation.

Mutually beneficial ways to connect with fans:

Make personal connections
Use multiple platforms, but only as many as you can maintain well.
Provide social resources
Encourage their creativity

A&R Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourced music financing site Slicethepie will launch today a new web service called SoundOut. Apparently the service will crowdsource the A&R-type ratings of music. SoundOut is aimed at labels and artists who want to test a song prior to release in order to understand what the audience will like. For $20 to $50 users can upload a song and have it rated anonymously by Slicethepie users. 24 hours after uploading the song the uploader gets a detailed report that rates how various target markets reacted to the song (screenshots of a report are available to see here via Wired). The founder ambitiously claims that SoundOut should enable labels to efficiently test the market prior to signing/recording/releasing an artist.
From the report, labels should be able to understand whether a song caught on with listeners, measure the market potential of an artist as well as get an objective view on which songs work with which audience. According to wired, no major label has committed to use SoundOut program yet, but TuneCore plans to offer SoundOut to its users. Artists will have the option to invest TuneCore revenue in a SoundOut test without dealing with the withdrawal process. We will have to wait and see if labels will embrace the service. Wired says:

Record labels desperate to cut costs while still signing the occasional new
artist have ample reason to try Slicethepie's SoundOut service. Whatever's left
of their A&R departments can almost certainly use the help. And if they need
further evidence that A&R can be crowdsourced, they need look no further
than American Idol. By listening to the crowd before investing, American Idol
creator Simon Fuller has consistently outperformed "experts" who rely solely on
their own ears.

Creating, serving and monetising the artist-fan relationship

MidemNet 2009 conference will take place in Cannes the 17-18 of January brining together leading experts from all over the world discussing opportunities and solutions to enhance the artist/fan relationship. The conference will try to address the following issues:

"What are the most promising ways to foster this relationship further? What are the most up-to-date organisations, services, social media and digital platforms for artists to better connect with their fans? How can the music industry create value and generate new revenue streams out of this relationship? " The full program is available here. Nancy Baym will also participate with a master class called “Making the Most of Online Music Fandom” in which she will talk about the social activities that motivate fans to interact to one another.

Bloggers, the new Digital Gatekeepers?

In a music world were artists increasingly find themselves competing for attention and listeners have endless opportunities to discover new music, bloggers are gaining trust and credibility among other fans in recommending new music. Most bloggers are true music fans who want to discover great new music and share it with other fans. They can serve a very crucial role of promoters and filters, becoming, in fact, real taste makers and directing new listeners toward new music. Acknowledging the fact that bloggers can truly help bands to get attention is the first step for artists and labels toward a less hierarchical relationship with their audience. Bloggers are also more approachable then most print journalists. Fans respect bloggers because they are passionate about music and they write for love instead of a paycheck. Hypebot confirms this opinion in this recent post and in another post of a while ago where they mentioned about a study made by New York University's Stern Business School which monitored blogs chats for 108 albums for four weeks before and after their release dates. According to Hypebot the study showed that the volume of blog posts led to future sales, but that large increases in an artist’s Myspace friends had a weaker correlation to sales. You can access the whole report here. It would be interesting to know to which extent bloggers are receiving any sort of pressure from record labels to talk about their artists.

Happy New Year, Just Like the Old Year!!

2009 begins with the news that album sales are down, and iTunes sales are up. Move along people, nothing new to see here :-)

The Music Middle Class (Contd.)

Interesting Model created by Kyle Bylin (available on Hypebot)

The Music Middle Class

A couple of weeks ago, at the Grammy Northwest Music Tech Summit, Ian Rogers from Topspin Media held an interesting keynote about the new music marketing model and the truly existent middle class artists.

Nothing really new but I thought that his keynote gives a very clear and concise overview of the actual situation on the music industry.

His speech can be summarized in few points:

1. The old model is dead.
2. The definition of an hit and success have changed.
3. What it really matters is the artist/fan relationship.
4. A new middle class of artists is emerging.

Following there are some of my favourite quotes but you can read the full talk here.

"Continuing to talk about the health of the music industry on these terms is as if we’d all been crying about the dying cassette business in 1995"

"There is nothing wrong with the music business, the problem is with the CD business (PE's Chuck D MIDEM, 2008)"

"Artists: do a 360 deal with yourself"

"There are only two players in the music business that matter at the end of the day: the artists and the fans. The rest of us either add value or get in the way [..] every player needs to either understand how it truly adds value or it needs to get out of the way, Topspin included. Our business does not operate on lock-in, ownership of copy written work, or long-term contracts. We either add value today with a compelling service or we die. And I’m perfectly happy with that" .

The Alive Drive

I was just checking out my mate's Web site at http://www.newfoundfrequency.com. The site is currently on hold waitng to be relaunched in 2009. One thing that grabbed my interest was a URL in very small text on the animated gif on the homepage - thealivedrive.com. The site doesn't tell you much at all, something about a USB wristband. Sort of innovative, but been done before, then I wondered about the "alive" part of the name and thought wouldn't it be great if it was wireless enabled. A quick Google search later turned up this:

A few months a go, the now 68-year-old Ringo Starr made his new album available as a USB bracelet and now the 52-year-old Jimmy Barnes gets a slap on the wrist, he has also made his new Alive Drive available in the same format. The Alive Drive is a USB wristband that includes his latest album Out of the Blue and a bonus live album. It connects to exclusive Barnes content via the Internet and can be updated to alert fans to Barnes news and upcoming gigs. Over the next 12 months, extra Barnes tracks will be made available to owners of the Jimmy Barnes Alive Drive. No doubt about those codgers keeping up with new technology for their grandchildren. No mention if Jimmy's is available in colours as loud as his voice!

I put the really interesting bits in bold. This is an interesting concept. A personal storage device, no built in playback tech as far as I can tell, but a device that literally ties you to a particular artist. I'll be looking for more information on this and keeping an eye on its development.

The Aura Music Explaura

Another newish music recommender whose peculiarites are:

1 Provide motivation why a particular song/artist was recommended;

2 The system can be pointed toward the right direction expressing what you like but also what you don't like (ex: I like heavy metal but I don't like monster voice).



Watch the demo here.

You Are In Control Symposium

At the "You are in Control" Symposium in Iceland, which just ended yesterday, Laura Seach, head of Digital Marketing at the electronic label Ninja Tunes, had a very interesting presentation about digital promotional strategies.
She discussed the specific case study of the band Roots Manuva and the launch of their new album Slime and Reason.
She says that every digital campaign starts with researching the fans base:
"I need to know how they consume digitally, where they consume digitally, which sites they're on, how old they are, if they are streaming or downloading" .
She mentioned widgeting and channeling, using platforms such as Ilike and Kyte, as the main online expansion tools.
According to Seach, and I strongly agree with that, the critical aspect of an online campaign seems to be ability to create a fully interconnected campaign across several platforms, one that can reach a dispersed and floating fan.
She overcame this problem by creating a totally interlinked campaign, including the artist main website, which update every hour using feeds from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blogs and other sources.
Other tactics include the use of mobile platforms and a Bluetooh-based content delivery at shows.
You can read more here

Electrofringe Presentation online

For those who didn't make it to the presentation at the Electrofringe, we uploaded our slides on the website.
This is the link:
http://musictwopointzero.net.au/research.php

Lessig in the WSJ

A piece in the Wall Street Journal summarising Lessig's latest thoughts on remix culture. Nice comment in the context of the Prince/Youtube case:

How is it that sensible people, people no doubt educated at some of the best universities and law schools in the country, would come to think it a sane use of corporate resources to threaten the mother of a dancing 13-month-old?

"In Rainbows" 1 year anniversary

It was the 10th of October 2007 when Radiohead launched what would have changed the configuration of the free music economy, the beginning of a new way how music can be distributed online.
A year after, what can be concluded in terms of the impact of Radiohead's move in the music distribution industry?
The "chose your own price model" has for sure revolutionized the independent distribution model. However, saying that this is how the future of music distribution will be like it might be too naive.
Radiohead is not the first band on the planet to exploit internet distribution but they probably were the first famous band to do it.
The experiment worked very well for Radiohead especially for the considerable amount of publicity they received but, at the end, it is just one of the thousands ideas bands are trying out to get their slice of attention.
I doubt that an average indie band would have received the same degree of attention.
For sure Radiohead set up an example for other bands to follow but their model can not be considered as a template solution for the struggling music business. It was more of a solution for Radiohead than for the entire music industry.
Probably the real lesson to be learned is that there are as many ways to sell music as musicians.

I also wonder if Radiohead would have planned the launch slightly differently, by providing a streaming version of the album for people to try out before downloading it, things would have evolved in a different way.
By not providing a streaming version, the only way for people to judge how much the album was worth to them was to download it.
And many people probably did it for free since they didn't know if it was worth it more than that.

MySpace Music launch tonight!!

It is finally happening.
The over discussed re-launch of Myspace Music it is happening tonight (Thursday morning in the US). However, it will be available internationally over the following months.
All the majors are in the deal (EMI joined last minute) plus The Orchard and few more indies.
According to Hypebot, new services will include:

• The new ‘MyMusic,’ personal music management toolset
• Free and unlimited ad-supported, full-length audio streaming
• Free and unlimited playlist functionality
• Free discography and content catalogues for SONY BMG, UMG and WMG artists
• DRM-free MP3 music e-commerce downloads powered by Amazon MP3
• Ringtone e-commerce powered by Jamster
  

Interesting point, raised by Techcrunch, is the fact that they are keeping unclear how record labels will be compensated. Do they have a special deal with majors which let them avoid pay-per-stream fees or pay a "special" fee?
Other streaming services (lastfm, iMeem) pay between $ .005 to $ .01 per song. If labels will allow Myspace to pay less, that could raise some legal concerns in terms of preferential pricing, antitrust, and price discrimination due to the fact they own stock of the company.
Read more here

A Strangler Flips

From techdirt

Musicans Self-Financing

Quick post from Techdirt with some interesting links to self-finance models for musos.

Birthday Songs

OK. This one is totally frivolous - but it's kinda sorta about music discoverability: Go to this website and you'll find a list of the Number One song for any day going back to 1891 or something - complete with links to itunes where available. (Billboard, US charts if you really must know - does Billboard really go back that far???) I'll leave you with the fact that the number one song on my actual birthday was Herman and the Hermits singing Henry the Eighth. Now go figure it out :-)