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.