MIDEM(Net) Blog

Bruce Houghton: 3 Trends, 13 Companies & 1 Wild Card To Watch In 2009

2008 was a year of retrenchment and experimentation in the music industry. Many companies cut staff while at the same time more that 200 music startups were launched according to Music Ally.  As we look ahead to 2009, three trends - democratization, data and monetization - are dominating the conversations creating the new music industry. 

Here is a look a those trends and some companies that exemplify them that I will be watching closely in 2009:

• DEMOCRATIZATION - It's about giving entrepreneurs, artists and fans the tools to compete with the major labels and Topspin Media is one of the leaders. They've already graced the cover of Billboard and helped launch new music by Byrne/Eno, Paul McCartney and others. But I'm betting that Ian Rogers and crew didn't come together just to build a better digital delivery system. Plus the real fun will begin when Topspin finally opens their platform to a wider audience and creative artists and labels show just how much they can do with it.  Honorable Mentions: Project Playlist and all the services democratizing music discovery.  Record labels need to figure out how to work with them instead of suing.  Also Sonicbids, OurStage and others working to democratize live music. Tunecore gets kudos for all access flat rate digital distribution.

• DATA - How do you know what's actually working?  Where are the fans coming from? What avenues lead to sales?  Two companies bear watching in 2009: one new and the other old but trying to remake itself.  Band Metrics will debut at MidemNet (Disclosure: I just joined the advisory board.) It's all about crawling the web, crunching the numbers and providing actionable information.  EMI.com is part of that venerable label's effort to remake itself.  So far, I not impressed, but there's an strong new digital team and the concept behind the re-launch - observe fans online and gather data - is spot on. Honorable Mentions: ReverbNation, Music Today's fan ticketing platform and others who help artists gather and use fan data.

• MONETIZATION: Any company that doesn't effectively deal with monetization both for themselves and for rights holders may not make it to 2010. In a slumping global economy,that means looking beyond ads for revenue and lowering the expectations of investors as well as labels and publishers.  I'll be watching MySpace, YouTube, imeem and We7 to see how social networks, video, music discovery and ad supported music respectively work to improve income.

• THE WILD CARD: Bapapoo. Is it lawful to sell a "used" mp3 that you legally purchased?  The courts will inevitably be called on to decide and the result could re-value downloads and effect consumer confidence.

Sam Shemtob, MusicTank: Marketing Artists To The Millennial Generation

In this guest post, Sam Shemtob, associate director of UK music business development agency MusicTank, presents his organisation's MidemNet session.

It's no secret that renowned artist manager and Nettwerk co-founder Terry McBride puts much of his artists' success down to shrewd artist-fan-brand alignment, with authenticity at its core.  

As Terry himself has said: "The most important thing that an artist can have is to be real, honest and sincere and being exactly who they are."

In the summer of 2008, on the back of their seminal report, Meet The Millennials, written by Terry and former Nettwerk General Manager, Brent Muhle, UK music business network MusicTank hosted a unique one-day conference to generate a UK take on the report’s conclusions.  As well as providing insight into key areas of change, including social networking, mash-up culture, copyright and revenue streams, the report also included an indispensable marketing road-map for anyone hoping to succeed in tomorrow’s marketplace.

In what amounted to a conference ‘first’, Terry McBride kicked-off a unique year-long project in which the participating audience generated from scratch a mould-breaking, 360 degree road-map for an up-and-coming British act, artist James Yuill, live onstage in front of a 200-strong audience, thus putting Terry’s theory into practice.

MidemNet Blog readers can read the conference's resulting artist road-map here...meanwhile, those attending MidemNet have an opportunity to catch an update with Terry McBride and others...

Marketing Artists To The Millennial Generation – MidemNet, 18.01.09 - Auditorium K, Level 4, Palais Des Festivals

"...you want this whole brainstorming to go out from a room of 170 people to go into a room of maybe 3 to 4 to 5000 people, and you never want this process to stop" [Terry McBride]

Continuing in the spirit of Terry's philosophy, MusicTank at MidemNet 2009 will be the first opportunity to find out how the audience-generated road-map has progressed, with James Yuill's manager, Amul Batra, expanding on what worked, what didn't and what happens next, in conversation with Terry McBride.  Introduced by MusicTank Chairman Keith Harris, this update will also be an opportunity to hear how those attending the conference actioned aspects of the road-mapping exercise for the benefit of their own artists and businesses.

Full details about the report, Meet The Millennials, its resulting conference Face To Face With The Millennials and indeed, MusicTank itself may be found at: http://www.musictank.co.uk

Music Futures 2009: Slideshow for MidemNet Blog Readers

I made this just for you guys ;) using the amazing Slide.com. They even had a really nice soundtrack available, by one of my favorite artists, Alanis Morissette, entitled  "Underneath". Whoever licensed this to Slide.com - well done, and brilliant marketing!  The Music is not auto-on btw - so hit the PLAY button (i.e. speaker icon); it's worth it. And while I have your attention, here is my Christmas gift to all of you! 

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• Futurist Gerd Leonhard on making money AROUND the music
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Jeremy Phillips: Social Media and Music - Our Survey Said...

This is a guest post from Jeremy Phillips, COO of MidemNet Blog's intelligence partner, StrategyEye.

As you may have spotted in the MIDEM fortnightly newsletter, StrategyEye and Reed MIDEM have been surveying the music industry for current opinions on the best uses of social media. Our results are in, with respondents from right across the industry - it's an interesting "state of the nation" snapshot. Here are a few of our key findings:

How important are social networks to the music industry...

Well, clearly pretty important!:

- 100% of our respondents see social networks as an important channel for promotion and marketing (over 85% said "very important")

- Over 80% see value in social networks as a direct retail outlet

- .. and over 60% see social networks as a channel to source investment

Kyte brings vlogging to MidemNet Blog

MidemNet Blog is pleased to welcome Kyte, our new video web partner whose player will be a key feature of this blog from now until MidemNet... and beyond!

Prior to the main event, it will feature video posts from MidemNet contributors such as Ted Cohen (MidemNet chairman and digital music guru) and Gerd Leonhard (media futurist and insightful web/tech evangeliser), plus video highlights from MidemNet 2008.

And that's just for starters! Watch this space during MidemNet and MIDEM itself (January 17-21, 2009) for exclusive live content...

Meanwhile feel free to interact with the MidemNet Kyte channel:

- Chat about posts as they happen (you'll need to create a free Kyte profile to do this)

- Click on the "Get & Share" tab to share a link to the channel itself or to particular shows; to obtain the code to embed the channel in your own site/blog; or to send a text message to a friend, so they can watch the channel on their mobile phone!

- Add the MidemNet channel to your Facebook profile, here!

- And last but not least, sign up to the channel's RSS feed here.

Enjoy!

Gerd Leonhard: Music Industry: so now you are on Twitter - but what should you do with it (Part 1)

Last week, I wrote on why everyone in the music industry should try Twitter, and apparently some people have taken it seriously ;) since I did get a lot of new followers from within the music business; many of them first-timers. Great!  But now that you are tweeting (geek talk for sending messages) - what do you actually do there?  In my newly championed short-is-better style, here is what to do with Twitter and what to tweet about if you are in the music business:

1. Make sure you use a nice profile icon (i.e. your image) on your Twitter page, and that your info-box provides some short reasons (and one good link) why people should follow you. If you can, design your page background to be distinctly 'you'
   
2. To be able to tweet very quickly use the Tweetdeck software or just install the really cool ShareThis extension in your Firefox or IE browser. I post 10-30 times per day but spend very little time on the process, using these tools (I focus more on the actual conversations)
3. Follow other twitter users that are in the music industry, or in related fields. To find good people (pick your follows carefully!), try Twitterholic, twellow, twitter search, or AllTop or Tweet Directories
4. Answer the direct messages and pings that you will get from people that follow you. This is crucial to get a real networking situation going. Again, Tweetdeck is best for this.
5. Remember: it's all about LINKS. You must have blogs, myspace sites, photos or videos to link to -otherwise there is no point in tweeting. Always have a link in each post, and make it specific, too (i.e. not just the homepage). Note: if you don't yet have a lot of content to link to, you need to make sure it'll be forthcoming shortly - otherwise there is no point in tweeting. Tweets are teasers for something larger!
   

Paolo Olivi, MadonnaTribe.com: Artists, fans, and Web 2.0

In this guest post, MidemNet speaker Paolo Olivi, founder of fansite MadonnaTribe.com, explains how, from fanzines to web communities, fans have always led the way…

Once upon a time, we used to call them fanclubs. In most cases, an official artist’s fanclub was able to reach fans on a national or international basis, while fan-managed associations had a smaller, sometimes regional scale.

The most lively clubs challenged themselves in the editorial field, creating what were brilliantly labeled fanzines. Long time fans of artists who have been on the scene for more than 10 or 20 years look back at those times with a bit of nostalgia, a lot of self-indulgement, and the constant feeling of “how things were then”.

What happened next - no need to say - was the internet.

The peculiar characteristics of the web perfectly matched the aspirations of amateur fandom publishing. It was (relatively) simple, especially in the times when the web pages were all simple html, it was cheap, it was able to cross borders and languages, and it was quick.

Bruce Houghton: free music only has value if...

free music only has value if it sparks action

to contribute

to belong

to share

to buy

next time, think before giving your music away

7 reasons why everyone in the music industry should try Twitter

Image by via CrunchBase

 A lot of people ask me why I am so seriously into Twitter, why Twitter matters, and why I recommend that every music industry professional should give it a try.  

First, for the still-uninitiated: what is Twitter?  It's a so-called micro-blogging service that allows you to send up to 140 character messages (called Tweets) to people that 'follow you', both on the web as well as on the mobile phone. It all started out with the trivial question "what are you doing right now" - and believe it or not, millions of people started sharing those kinds of messages (e.g. 'drinking coffee at Starbucks on 46th Street') with each other. Today, Twitter has some estimated 5-7 Million users (and traffic of 30 Million+ uniques per month), and people are sharing ideas, links, news, videos, books, tour-dates, program updates, record releases etc with each other. All this updating is generating a huge flood of calls & responses (I sometimes call this 'the river') which is - ADD effects aside - starting to become a very important new way of marketing and promoting something  (sharing is caring, remember?).

Ok, ok, I know: who has the time for this?  But trust me: once you know how to juggle things like Twitter, you'll see first-hand what it does, and your time-wasting concerns will evaporate. You really do have to get wet to swim!

All you need to do is go to Twitter.com, sign up for a free account and start following people (here is my list of people that I follow, for starters) and post a few things every day. For handling Twitter traffic and pings I use Tweetdeck which is a great free software app that makes the Twitter user's life a lot easier. If you want to know more, here are some resources: Video on Twitter for Business (OReilly Webcast), video: Twitter in plain English

So here are my thoughts on why everyone in the music industry (really!) should get busy with Twitter:

Bruce Houghton: Vote For Top Music Site In Mashable's Open Web Awards

Mashable's Open Web Awards are a multilingual international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology. Voting in the music category has just moved into to the final round of three: Pandora, Last.fm and Noisetrade**. These sites and the other original finalists offer an intriguing global mix of established players and startups chosen by online ballot:

• 8tracks - social music networking site that lets you create 30 minutes of music, which roughly translates to 8 tracks.
• Amie Street - music discovery site with recommendations and the ability to view your friends’ playlists through an easy-to-read interface.  Amie Street was recently redesigned.
• Fairtilizer - music search and discovery site with tools for artists and labels to share their music with the rest of the world.
• imeem - social music network with free streaming from all four major labels. Also recently introduced a mobile application.
• JamsBio - allows you to share music and discuss it with the community.  Over 5 million songs have been added to the site and Mashable took a deep look under the hood in October.
• ** Last.fm - social sharing site that recommends music based on your listening habits.  Last.fm has a iPhone application and is owned by CBS.
• MixMatchMusic - social music community for both artists and listeners.  Artists profit from collaboration and can communicate directly with their fans.
• ** NoiseTrade - connects artists with fans to raise awareness of music and profits.
• ** Pandora - lets you create your own radio station and recommends music based on your personal preferences.
• Sellaband - tool for artists to promote themselves and to receive funding from their very own fans.

Vote for favorite music site in the final round December 3-15th: