Big Finish
Life, fun and music for end timesMySpace Music + Amazon.com vs. Facebook + iLike = win-win (divide by Apple)
It’s the most important time in digital music since Napster peaked in 2001.
In the short term, the equation is clear. Three elements remain:
1. MySpace Music/Amazon - News Corp. will dominate the upper echelon of the new music industry, where multi-platinum records are a thing of the past but a band with 1.7 million MySpace fans can move mountains all the way to the bank. Well, Amazon.com ships mountains, and MySpace’s massive but distracted audience, once exposed to ad-supported free music, will never look back. Yes, I know it’s crazy that a MySpace Music hater like me would herald their second coming, but barring a huge screw-up, it’s on. Print… radio… television… internet. Advertising goes with the flow, and keeps the media stream running.
Conclusion: The new platinum record is brought to you by McDonald’s.
2. Facebook/iLike - Having recently selected iLike as their preferred music service (disclaimer: I work for iLike’s sister site GarageBand.com), Facebook will gain traction as the more sophisticated social music networking site as MySpace caters to fanboys and girls. Its marketing demographic may slant upward in age, but new music consumption is stretching far into adulthood these days.
With iLike (teamed with Rhapsody) fueling Facebook’s fire, look for the service to redefine the art of finding music and tighten the connection between fan bases of modest size and the niche artists that find rock star status among them. These two companies define the idea of ‘agile development’ and will be on the cutting edge of future developments in both social networking and music discovery. Their platform is people, a fact that MySpace critically dilutes with the double-edged sword of ad-supported music.
Conclusion: The next big thing in music will be brought to you by Web 3.0.
3. Apple – The music labels were asking for it with their vast history of corruption, but what did the consumer electronics industry ever do to deserve Apple? Sony still licks its Walkman wounds as the iPod finds its way into millions of pockets the world over. I guarantee you that Apple’s brightest are at a whiteboard right now figuring out a way to make social networking device-dependent, but until that day comes, they will continue to own the way music is played.
iTunes 8.0 introduced the ‘Genius’ feature which serves as a music discovery portal to the iTunes Store. While at first this seems to step on the toes of the iLike Sidebar for iTunes, it is merely an upsell plugin. Apple will cash in for sure, but outside of their credit cards, fans will reside elsewhere.
But yeah — the credit cards. They’re with Apple.
And notice I didn’t say anything about this silly press-hyped MySpace Music vs. Apple battle that’s supposedly going down. For the next few years, it will continue to be a stalemate. No matter which company swipes the credit card, Apple will be playing the product. Music lovers own. Flirters stream. The curious sample. The clueless watch American Idol.
Conclusion: See illustration.
Footnotes of the new digital music movement?
Last.fm & Lala.com – I’m fans of both these sites, but they seem to be orbiting the established music industry’s main goals. Both offer full streaming clips and some interesting social networking features, and I still use Lala.com to trade CD’s through the mail. But they simply lack the juggernaut industry status of the aforementioned entities to have a paradigm-shifting impact on the way music is consumed.
Pandora.com – In dire straits due to the ass-backwards licensing regulations of the recording industry’s old guard. If not the company, then certainly the concept will reemerge as Pandora was arguably the most efficient and elegant way to discover new tunes. You just can’t simplify music discovery more than ‘thumbs up, thumbs down, skip to next track’.
Digital music distributors – Some were okay, some were awful, most are gone now and all of them were stopgap measures to the ultimate solution that the music industry is executing today. Napster bought by Best Buy. Rhapsody teaming with iLike. Even Amazon.com has picked a side. A new era dawns.
Discmakers/CDBaby – I’m hopeful at Discmaker’s ability to take CDBaby further and build their own brand while at it. They have a decent shot and I hesitate to call them a ‘footnote’ just yet. But it’s going to take some serious online savvy on Discmaker’s part, particularly marketing-wise. Their offering is solid, but their brand image as a clearinghouse of fledgling musicians still drives indie artists to seek out cheaper options with smaller merch-making outfits. Still, they are the household name in indie music duplication and their future has just begun.
The hits just keep on coming: music classification in 2008
The future of music is metadata.
Sonically speaking, each song has a fingerprint. Information-wise, there are any number of parameters to reference: release date, BPM, chart position, etc.
But so little of music’s power is about what we hear or what we think about it. What matters most is how we feel. In 2008, we still have woefully inadequate metadata for the emotion of music.
Genre classification systems were always a blunt object with which to delineate certain emotional themes and forms in music. With the advent of the Web, genres were further broken down into a cascade of sub-genres, as the sheer volume of musical information dwarfed a mere warehouse full of CDs.
These days, niches are getting more ‘micro’ and indie bands how thrive in a direct fan-to-artist industry economy with only a few thousand albums sold. Because the Web knows no limit to the quantity of music available, we’re gonna have to get this thing organized.
It’s already a mess: just look at MySpace Music. How can you find anything in there unless you stumble upon it yourself?
What would be some parameters that would help sort this all out?
My #1 argument for years has been to introduce a new classification system based around an artist’s ‘scene’. This may seem like an editorial designation, or something akin to serious musical taxonomy. AllMusicGuide‘s genres are so accurate as to approach a living history of ‘scenes’, but it lacks the element that would make a scene-based categorization work: a social network.
If you want to save MySpace Music from being the next MP3.com, start organizing it around music scenes. Cross-reference artists with similar top friends, in similar geographical locations, with similar-sized fan bases, playing the same venues together, etc. Have a street team interface where fans can get exclusive access to a band’s ‘secret MySpace’ (like ‘secret shows’) in exchange for being a super-fan and street promoter. Go nuts! Just do something!
This is not to say there aren’t great services right now using metadata to drive music experience, but most of them are recommendation engines, driven by fancy algorithm or friend network. Nevertheless, the opinion of the individual is a key piece of data for the modern listener.
iLike and Last.fm have great music discovery via social networking, but friends have been telling friends about new music for decades — the only thing new is the technology they use to do it (and, in the case of iLike, bringing artists and fans closer).
Pandora is the best example of the hybridization of human input and relational database processing. Witness the seamless magic with which it picks your tunes based on an elegant behind-the-scenes system that tracks who likes what. As highly that I prize it, Pandora is a one-trick pony.
Back in meatspace, we’re still using critical reviews and chart position to classify music. More caveman tools. Online, strides have been made. Sites like GarageBand.com sharpen these tools and hand them to a large community of peers, and the end result is that top-charting artists often go on to have at lease moderate success. Other companies like Pump Audio and Taxi.com combine this technology with the opinions of expert listeners to move higher quality music into the media stream.
One of the most exciting projects out there is Hit Song Science, which uses audio fingerprinting and genius algorithms to chart sales and airplay against the sonic character of your song. Just plug in a track and you’ll know right away if it’s going to be a blockbuster or a bust. Their next-generation algorithms (currently under development) go further by measuring ‘innovation/prediction cycles in musical structure.’ Cool.
Music. There’s so much of it being made these days, and the hits just keep on coming.
I started this post by saying that metadata was the future of music and that it needed to address the emotion of music. So after all these advances in metadata, why so serious?
The answer is: it’s complicated. Insanely complicated. Like 100 billion+ neurons in the human brain complicated. Like if you want to know more read this 500-page
‘Music and Emotion’ college textbook like I tried to do. It’s unbelievably academic but occasionally exciting.
People are thinking about it. There’s this crazy project called XPod, which tracks biometrics to collect “human emotion and activity information from the user, and explore how this information could be used to improve the user experience with mobile music players.” Another author imagines the device as like having HAL as your DJ.
Bottom line: the more music we have, the more metadata we need to make sense of it. The best metadata is based on the human reaction to music, and the more ways we have to measure that reaction, the better our browsing will be in the future. In 2008, when everyone is their own DJ, everything revolves around the music discovery process.
Pissing on the mainframe
Just got back from a 4-day tour filling in on drums for LiveFastDie, a band fronted by New Hampshire’s own Ethan Campbell, who was the guitar player for my old band Some Action.
We were in the supporting slot for King Khan & the Shrines, who are one of the most amazing live bands out there. Pure garage soul, like a punk rock James Brown fronting a German punk wedding band.
Highlights include:
- Seeing Khan’s junk on two occasions — once when meeting him for the first time (he was stretching it backstage for optimum length before taking the stage in his arabian bike shorts) and again when he ran out of the venue in the middle of the song to tell his friend he had just shit himself, and pulled down his pants to prove it before running inside as a police car cruised down the street. This was shortly before he jumped on a moving dump truck and rode down the street. To describe each and every crazy stunt he pulled would be exhausting, but nudity and interfering with scheduled garbage pickup always rank high on the punk points scorecard.
- Rocking out to hundreds of people — three of the four shows were sold out and overflowing. We had a frontline of fist-pumping fans and a packed house behind them. The sets were a Bud-soaked blur, and everyone just ‘shredded’ in between songs so there would be no silence. Sometimes Ethan would teach us how to play the songs on stage. The crowd was there to be entertained but also annoyed into remembering that all things are not comfy bourgeois yuppie Ikea peace symbol vinyl collection Starbucks okey-dokey.
- Always bring a chicken suit on tour, but burn it afterwards because you’ll never want to put your head in there again.
- On the first night we were partying on the Motel 6 balcony after trying to duct tape a plastic bag over the broken window on King Khan’s van in a downpour. It was late and we were loud, and suddenly our neighbor flung his door open and screamed at us to keep it down. After we all just kind of stared back, his tone became more forceful: “I mean, really guys. Let me give you a suggestion: for instance, SHUT THE FUCK UP!”. The door slammed behind him.
- The King Khan guys wanted to go to what they said was a ’50′s rockabilly diner’ down the street from the motel. It turned out to be a truck stop with a diner called ’50′s diner’. I caught a couple more hours of sleep in the van while the band went in and tried to order fresh-squeeze orange juice, mineral water and a green tea. “Orange juice? We got a jug,” was all the waitress could think to say.
- By the end of the tour, we had accumulated about three yards of reflective metal foil (retrieved from a dumpster in Boston and worn as a helmet by LiveFastDie shred guitarist Sarim), the aforementioned chicken suit (also often worn by Sarim to approach people stuck in city traffic) and a stolen Pizza Hut sign that said, “It’s all about the cheese” with the words “drugs in the” written between “the” and “cheese”. Of course there were various illustrations of crack pipes on the cheese and it was used as sort of a backdrop for the LiveFastDie merch table.
- (told in a completely exaggerated New Jersey nice guy voice:) “Hello, My name is Anthony Piscanelli, and I heard you like cheeseburgers! How do I know you ask? A little birdie told me! No matter! I’m here to tell you about a great deal from MacDonalds. Two cheeseburgers for ninety-nine cents! You can’t go wrong! MacDonalds. You can’t… go… wrong.” I’m probably butchering it but that was the funniest thing I’ve ever heard and if you don’t understand why, think about all the stupid shit you were laughing at the last time you had to drive several hours a day.
- Everyone was awesome yet again, from the people who let us crash to the random strangers who we found something in common with, albeit usually for only a few minutes. I saw a lot of old friends from the Some Action days and was glad to see everyone is doing well. In fact, we still had much more in common that I had expected, running along parallel paths as it were through getting older.
- To me, music is music. I don’t see any conflict in having a crazy pop-metal band on one hand and then go play with a power punk band on the other hand. All of these experiences feed off one another. I would love to be the one that figures out a way to bring both scenes together. But until then, on with the show…
I’ll be checking back in sometime next week as we’re entering the studio tomorrow to start tracking the new Dead Unicorn album, Global Thermonuclear War. Following that I’ll be wrapping up an EP with Morgan Evans under the Acid Arrow name, nailing down the Ads project with Joe Maggio and preparing the Stage Select debut LP. Oh yeah, and a little thing called writing an entire business plan before the week’s out… wish me luck.
The raidance of a thousand suns
The Bomb Shelter benefit was a huge success! Thanks to everyone who came and especially to Mike of the Kiss Ups, GU3, Kale and EMN, Justin Z., Tom & Tommy and everyone at Keegan Ales. Here is a cool photo my buddy Steve Hopkins took of the new look:
Albums as advertising, concerts as communion?
As the health of the recording industry continues to deteriorate, live shows have taken precedence as the focal point for a new music industry. Fans want unique experiences, and after all, an album is just a copy of a performance — whereas a live show cannot be duplicated. Sure, video or audio of the show can be recorded and distributed, but the experience of being there cannot be copied.
These days, many artists are saying the recording is less like a product and more like an advertisement for their live show. This doesn’t mean that your albums are any less important. In fact, the sound and look of your album matters more now than it ever did. Unlike the brick-and-mortar days of shrinking shelf space, in the Digital Age your album appears everywhere — from blogs to webstores to social networks. It is a single, shining beacon of your uniqueness as a musical act in a vast sea of aspiring artists. You should still be putting maximum effort into the production of your CD.
That said, as an unsigned band you may not see a significant revenue stream from physical CD sales right off the bat. Like any start-up business, bands (like mine) are willing to invest a little money up front in the hopes of making a profit in the future; but many bands are mistakenly viewing their album as their primary ‘product,’ which could lead to a money-losing investment.
Independent bands are small businesses, but in 2008, this business is not about selling CDs. The ‘product’ is actually the band itself. CD sales will follow naturally if you can sell your band.
When hundreds, even thousands of albums are released every week, your needle in a haystack can easily go unnoticed, no matter how ingeniously crafted or well-produced it is. For a fan to pick you out of the crowd, there has to be a personal connection. In this way, fans are truly becoming more like ‘friends.’ And just like friends, they’ll like you more if you like them back.
The relationship between fans and artists is what music (and the music industry) is all about. For independent bands, it’s not about ‘moving units,’ it’s about making connections.
Albums are gateways to establishing these connections. So are band websites and social networks. But as technology changes, one thing remains true: the best way to make a lasting personal connection is in person. Unlike the decidedly one-way experience of listening to a CD, a concert is a shared experience between bands and fans.
There are many reasons why your live show should be at the center of your band’s business strategy, and not the least of which is that concerts offer the best revenue streams (besides ticket sales, fans usually prefer to buy albums and merch from you directly).
The live event is where the money is, and there will be many different ways to get there. For some artists, live shows are where they hone their sound, songs and image — and almost everything that album embodies is a representation of their live act. For others, songwriting talent or studio production skills may be their strongest suit, and internet distribution may help them win live performance opportunities never before available to them.
Ultimately, it’s the fans that will make you popular. If you want to make your money as a musician, your best bet as an independent band is to play every live show you can. Create a legendary concert experience that others will strive to live up to. Your fans will not just follow, they’ll lead.
[This article was published in the late May issue of GarageBand.com's newsletter. Disclaimer: my views do not necessarily reflect the opinions of GarageBand.com or iLike, inc. Also, special thanks to CEO Ali Partovi for his indispensable editorial guidance.]
Keep your band and fans in tune with a steady stream of media
Too often you’ll see people videotaping and taking pictures from the audience, but after the show the footage and photos never see the light of day. Was the person was too busy or lazy to edit the video or download the images? Are they holding it in their private collection? Did they just plain forget they were there?
If you ask yourself these questions, you’re probably not doing enough to rake in all the media that your audience is producing. Even when you’re playing for only a few dozen people, chances are someone there is taking pictures, and possibly even recording the video and/or audio. Grabbing this content and sending it out to your fans is an essential element of any independent music career strategy. In this media-rich Digital Age, it is more important than ever to keep your audience interested.
There are a few simple things you can do to harness the power of user-generated content to keep all ears and eyes glued to your band:
this article was published in the early February GarageBand.com newsletter
