“Data Is The New Hustle” – Is The Music Business Getting Any Fairer?

“Data Is The New Hustle” – Is The Music Business Getting Any Fairer?

During last Tuesday’s SF MusicTech Summit, I had the privilege of moderating a panel alongside several top minds within music and technology, where a short, yet powerful quote was said that resonated deeply with myself and several members of the audience. “Data is the new hustle,” pronounced BitTorrent’s Executive Director of Marketing Matt Mason. The traditional music business has never been rational (as Incubus manager Steve Rennie pointed out), nor has it ever been easy or straightforward. However, Mason points out that the democratized use of online tools and metrics is beginning facilitate a new kind of music business – one that is becoming fairer for artists.
“The music game has always been about hustle,” Mason says. “I've worked in the content industries since my teens, and have never seen a successful artist who didn't, at one time or another, figure out a way to get their stuff in front of people that mattered to their career in a really creative way.”
To Mason’s point, artists of yesterday would have to employ a hustle mentality in several different ways in order to get their music heard. The trouble was that in order to do so, one would have to go through a number of gatekeepers – many of which were nearly impossible to access without the right connections or a large enough bank account.
“In the music business, hustle has taken on many forms over the decades,” he continued. “We've all heard stories of payola, threats, favors and bribery, but there's also a negative side, to mangle a Hunter S. Thompson quote on the music industry. It's never been fair, it's never been rational, and it's always been dirty. Which is why data is such good news for the music business.”
Nowadays however, executives all the way up to the major labels are examining the very same data figures that we all have access to such as YouTube views, SoundCloud plays, and social media metrics. With data, popular artists can now prove they are popular. If they decide to approach labels, brands or other industry sources, they can now demonstrate that they really have an audience, and can even pinpoint exactly where they are and to what degree they engage and spend money with them.
“Artists now have so many tools at their disposal,” Mason said. “The real problem is knowing how to use them, knowing how to understand the right metrics and then act accordingly to get a better outcome. But that's a better way of hustling than paying off a DJ to play your record. Data means the music business is getting a little more democratic.”
While many would argue that artists continue to get the short end of the stick in today's music business (perhaps especially in regards to licensing with streaming platforms), artist data metrics can now prove to be just as powerful - if not more powerful - than any personal connection or bribe.
The proof is always in the pudding, as they say. If you as an artist claim to be remarkable, and you've got the stats to back it up, that data will certainly place the ball firmly in your court.
—
Hisham Dahud is a Senior Analyst for Hypebot.com. Additionally, he is the head of Business Development for Fame House and an independent musician. Follow him on Twitter: @HishamDahud

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The Most Important Problem The Music Business Must Solve

By David Sherbow (@MusicBizGuy) of My Life With Music.

What is the greatest problem which the new music business must solve to maintain it relevance in the future? In my humble opinion, it needs to figure out how to simply curate new music, filter it down to a small enough selection that is easily digestible and readily posted some place on the Internet, seamlessly accessible by mobile phones, where people will want to come, listen to it, own it emotionally and support it financially. When this happens, and eventually it will, the music business will be forever changed.
Artist development and new music discovery via the Internet seem to be incredibly lacking when it comes to finding a clear, defined path on which true artistic and financial success can be built. Where are artists mostly found hoping to be discovered? Major sites include Bandcamp, Bandpage, SoundCloud OurStage, Reverbnation, MTVMusic, and the new Myspace. Lesser sites include Tunezy, TastmakerX, WeAreHunted and TheSixtyOne. This list can go on forever as there are hundreds of sites out there that no one has ever heard of which have little or no traction and allegedly were built to discover new music. Streaming music services like Spotify, Grooveshark, Rdio, Deezer, Rhapsody, Songza, iHeartradio and Pandora are not in the business of new artist and new music development.
Former Topspin and now new Daisy Project CEO, Ian Rogers, made a telling point a while back when he guestimated, that the real market for serious bands and musical artists around the world was most likely in the vicinity of 30,000 serious artists making some kind of income. The Future of Music Coalition's artist revenue stream study certainly did nothing to shed any further light on whether or not this was an accurate number or what they thought the number actually was. Admittedly there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who have created profiles and posted music somewhere on Internet. At least 99% of these have no intention of ever making a career out of music. So how do we find the really good new stuff that could resonate with millions of people? This is the new music business' greatest question and it begs for an answer that no one seems to have except me.
There are lots of blogs that are more than willing to help with the curation process and which recommend new music for people to listen to on the regular. Some of them like Pitchfork actually can and do influence a large number of people to take a shot with a new song or artist. However, these trusted sources make a very small difference in the grand scheme of things. There is no longer in place a system of filtered choices and listener control. Occasionally a song or artist will pop up on YouTube, go viral and generate loads of activity and some income. If I were a talented artist, I could not reasonably rely on the fact that my music would ever go viral on YouTube and make me famous. Furthermore, all the web sites mentioned above combined have broken only a handful of new artists into the mainstream. When they actually have or lay claim that they did, there has usually been no rhyme or reason from their end for the success of those few artists.
Unfortunately, Top 40, Rhythmic and Country radio are where most people still discover their new music. This environment is carefully controlled by major labels and rarely sees a newly developed unique act because those chosen to be exploited are usually brought into the mix by major players with little vision and cookie cutter mentalities all about making money.
Very few real music business veterans are connected on a day to day basis with most of the above mentioned sites. Most have been built and are being run by technologists under 40 who have been in a band or worked in new media for a label but don't really, for the most part, understand the true mindset of a working musician and his or her actual needs nor what it's going to take in today's world to develop a casual listener into a true fan. Show me a site, any site, that has one million plus uniques a month or that has converted into paying customers a large portion of Rogers' 30,000 serious artists AND that is making more than just a little bit of money. Show me any site that has created an ecosystem for artist development and exposure that regularly spits out a stream of successful moneymaking artists and I will bow down to their genius.
I have been analyzing the music business Internet space for almost eight years. It is clear to me that there is one piece that has been completely missing: none of the alleged music discovery/artist development sites has any kind of meaningful and compelling value proposition for casual listeners that gets them to aggressively participate in a site's discovery process in large enough numbers to develop an emotional and financial bond with a particular artist to make them a successful mainstream artist who can live off their music. Without there being something substantial in it for the user why should any user change from their present course of music activity to a new one? For example, what's the Daisy Project going to do for the casual listener to make them leave Rhapsody, Pandora or Spotify?
Extremely well funded sites like Reverbnation, TopSpin, Bandpage, OurStage, Turntable.FM, Pandora and Spotify would have been bought up by now if they were really making money. None of these sites or any others that I can see have anything to do with new music content development and ownership. Content used to be king. Major labels and major publishing companies don't need to develop new content because for the time being they still control 95% of the content people want to listen to. Record promotion is broken like the rest of the traditional music business. In time, some company will figure out how it can successfully promote new music in the new music business and then the clutter overwhelming the music space will become manageable once again.
Most streaming services have access to 10-20 million songs of which only a very small percentage are listened to on a regular basis. Those songs actually listened to more than once are made up overwhelmingly by good to great songs from the past. How is the content of the future being discovered, developed and meaningfully exposed? Whomever or whatever entity figures out how to access, discover and control new and great future music content will have found the new music business' answer to the "Holy Grail."
At the beginning of this piece, I told you that I have a solution to this problem. My visionary idea for a startup has evolved over eight years of personal trial and error in the Internet music business space. Here is the link to my proposal, entitled "MusicWhirl.Com: A Weapon of Mass Music Discovery."
David Sherbow is a 35 year music business veteran, former artist manger, booking agent, indie label operator,urban independent record promoter whose companies have broken over 100 No.1 records, Internet music business entrepreneur and Adjunct Professor of Music Industry, Towson University, Baltimore, MD.

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YouTube For Musicians: Single Frame Music Videos, Free Analytics, Creator Updates

YouTube For Musicians: Single Frame Music Videos, Free Analytics, Creator Updates

YouTube continues to be a primary tool for many musicians and fans and third parties are here to help out. To create a quick single frame music video, see TunesToTube. Want to track your YouTube action across the web? Try Strike Social. Just need more insights into using YouTube? The Creator Playbook has been updated.

TunesToTube Creates Single Frame Music Videos

YouTube is not only a great way to market your music but, for many musicians, it's becoming a great way to monetize as well. And since making a full music video for every track you with to add to YouTube is probably out of the question, some musicians are creating videos with one image that then serves primarily as an audio player.

TunesToTube (via Musformation) offers a free service to combine an MP3 and an image into a music video that's then posted to your YouTube account.

For those who donate to the site, an upload to SoundCloud option is also available.

Strike Social Offers Free YouTube Analytics

Strike Social is a new YouTube analytics service whose current features are free and should remain that way. According to CEO Patrick McKenna, long-term plans include additional premium features for monetization.

Special features include:

"Strike Score" - One overall score based on "more than 100 data sets across YouTube, Facebook & Twitter."

Engage - Discover and engage with viewers across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Promote - Video advertising to increase viewership.

So the Strike Score gives you a quick overall take while you're also able to get more detailed, for example:

"Publishers can also look at what people are saying about the video, sort those comments based on the size of each commenter’s social media following, and respond to specific remarks from within Strike Social — in particular, McKenna says that the tools are 'more actionable on the Facebook side' than the competition."

YouTube's Creator Hub & Creator Playbook Updated

YouTube recently announced the update of their resources for videomakers, Creator Hub and Creator Playbook.

Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch/@crowdfundingm) also blogs at Flux Research and Crowdfunding For Musicians. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.

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Pulselocker’s Hybrid Subscription Music Service For DJ’s Takes Another Creative Step

Pulselocker's Hybrid Subscription Music Service For DJ's Takes Another Creative Step

Pulselocker launched last year as a subscription streaming service for DJs allowing them to download music to their computer more economically than the dominant pay-per-track model. Earlier this month they launched a web-based version combining on and offline access with special touches designed for pro and semi-pro DJs.

Pulselocker is a unique hybrid service with a smart solution to music subscriptions that include downloads:

"For DJs, what makes the service interesting – and unique – is that unlike other subscription music on demand offerings, users can actually take the songs they 'rent' and save into a special Pulselocker folder on their computer. From here, those tracks can be played with specific, whitelisted DJ’ing applications, like Traktor and Serato."

The service now includes unlimited streaming with pricing "based on how many tracks a DJ wants to save for offline playback, starting at $9.99/month for 25 tracks up to $59.99/month for 1,000."

Rights holders are paid in multiple ways as the founders note:

"As a company founded by artists, our goal was to create a business that gave DJs the freedom to access all the music they could, while keeping the artists’ interest top-of-mind. That’s why we developed our triple monetization strategy, which pays an escalating royalty each time a track is streamed, downloaded into the Locker and DJ’d for more than 90 seconds and purchased outright. While we won’t solve piracy, we’re focused on building a model that puts more money back into the artists’ pocket. "

DJ Pangburn explores some of the more interesting nuances of the system, such as the designation of micro-genres:

"Until 50 people use the same genre in a playlist, it won't become available on Pulselocker. While this will probably introduce some sanity into the micro-genre absurdity, it might not sit well with DJs trying to create their own movement. That decision, however, wouldn't rest with Pulselocker brass, but with its user base. If 50 users cannot be swayed, then so be it."

Perhaps micro-genres aren't the biggest issue around but it's another example of how the Pulselocker team are bringing their creativity to every level of a product designed especially for DJs.

Apparently deals are in the works with majors but, for now, Pulselocker is an indie-focused service

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8Tracks’ David Porter: The Radio Isn’t The Record

@evolver.fm
Articles
August 12, 2013 at 6:20 pmby Eliot Van Buskirk
8Tracks’ David Porter: The Radio Isn’t The Record

This guest post from 8Tracks founder and CEO David Porter seeks to distinguish between the two main variants of music streaming service: internet radio stations and on-demand music subscriptions. Given that so many articles out there confuse music fans by lumping these two very different beasts together, we’re in favor of clarifying the situation, which is why we asked for (and were granted) permission to repost this here.

Recent media coverage of the digital music sector has tended to lump all types of music streaming — notably, the radio-style delivery of Pandora and the on-demand access of Spotify — in the same bucket.

In fact, these two primary types of music consumption are quite different in terms of:

Value proposition
Market size
Competition
Business model
Royalty expense
There’s way too much to cover in one post, so I thought it’d be useful to drill down on each of these points of differentiation in a series of shorter entries. Let’s start first with the value proposition.

The Regency TR-1transistor radio
Radio

One helpful way to think about online music services is to consider their historical analogs. Internet radio — what Pandora, Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio, 8tracks, Songza, Slacker and others offer — is designed to function just like regular (terrestrial) radio: listeners pick a category of programming (e.g. music of a format or genre, for an activity or mood, or that “sounds like” one or more artists), hit play, and then tune in passively.

People who listen to radio — whether delivered over the air, via cable, satellite or internet — benefit because music has already been selected, reducing their time and effort. Listeners can be lazy. Unlike the 30-60 minute format of television or the 90-120 minute format of film, the five-minute format of music lends itself to “packaging” so that a listener doesn’t have to keep returning to his device time and again to pick another track. While the album accomplishes this objective to a certain extent, radio offers longer listening and greater variety.

Because radio is programmed by people or algorithm for long-form listening to a variety of artists, it is also the primary means for music discovery (for listeners) and promotion (for artists). This has always been true of traditional radio, albeit less so since the homogenization of the airwaves in the wake of deregulation in 1996. And it is even more true for internet radio, where spectrum isn’t scarce. Pandora plays a wider variety of music than terrestrial radio, and 8tracks extends even further down the Tail, with two in three tracks streamed from independent labels or artists.

As internet radio becomes increasingly ubiquitous, more artists have the opportunity for meaningful exposure, and more listeners have the opportunity for meaningful discovery.

The Technics SL-1200 turntable
On-Demand

While internet radio is the heir to terrestrial, cable and satellite radio, on-demand streaming—what Spotify, Deezer, Rhapsody, Rdio, Daisy/MOG and others offer—is the natural successor to older forms of interactive listening. From vinyl to (ahem) 8-track to cassette to CD to (most recently) digital download, sound recording formats have evolved relatively quickly over the last 50 years. But across all of these formats, the objective is the same: listeners pick a specific song or album or artist, hit play, and then tune in on demand, whenever and as often as desired.

People who listen to a CD, download or on-demand stream benefit from tuning into exactly the music they already know and love. Physical formats for recorded music are purchased and “owned” in the normal sense; digital downloads are sometimes purchased and may be hosted locally or in the cloud. A listener can stream a file she’s uploaded to a “music locker” in an on-demand manner. However, the most widely used on-demand services are those that offer a large, pre-populated catalog of music and require (or seek) a subscription rental fee.

The most voracious music consumers no doubt stand to see the most value from on-demand subscription services: rather than pay $1 for a track on iTunes or Amazon, they can instead stream it — and pretty much any other track that comes to mind — fully gratis on Spotify (subject to ads) or for $5-10 per month on any of the other on-demand services. The relative value proposition to an artist depends on how much a listener tunes in, as the rumored magnitude of Spotify’s sound recording royalty ($0.003 per play) suggests that ~200 plays of a given track would be required for an artist to earn as much revenue as they would from the sale of a download. By way of comparison, Last.fm scrobbling indicates I’ve listened to Moderat’s A New Error more than any other track, for a total of 144 times.

So, Basically…

Radio (Pandora) makes it easy to listen to a particular style of music, with less control but the ability to be lazy; once I’ve discovered new music through radio or friends, I can listen to exactly that track or artist, whenever I want, on an on-demand service (Spotify). The former promotes the sale or rental of music, while the latter — a rental model itself—largely replaces the need for listeners to purchase downloads on iTunes or another digital music store [ed. note: I agree].

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How To Use Facebook Graph Search Today to Find Music

July 8, 2013 at 10:15 amby Eliot Van Buskirk
How To Use Facebook Graph Search Today to Find Music

On Monday morning, Facebook announced that it is rolling out its “Graph Search,” including new pages for “Music my friends like” and more, to all users in the U.S. and beyond, over the next few weeks. Some people already have access to it, but if you don’t, there’s an easy way to get it without waiting for Facebook to add it to your account.

To use Facebook Graph Search now, go to facebook.com/about/graphsearch and click the “Try Graph Search” button:

Then, to see the music Facebook thinks you’ll like, go here.

For example, here’s my Facebook Graph Search music recommendations page (with my friends’ names blurred out), along with a link to the neat little tour Facebook includes to get you started with this:

These music recommendations are interesting, but in terms of giving me something to listen to, they don’t compare well to those of most pureplay music services.

For starters, Facebook does not appear to be suggesting music your friends have scrobbled to Facebook – just what they have Liked, with a capital “L,” as opposed to have liked in some other, non-overt way. That approach, in my case anyway, works well for recommending bands that friends of friends are actually in, bands that I have liked for years anyway, and a music festival I might like. As such, this music page just scratches the surface of what Facebook can do with music recommendations, because it sees your play activity in all sorts of places — it’s just not using those smarts here.

See Also: How To Unfriend Fans of Horrible Music on Facebook

Also, there’s no easy way to hear the music on Facebook, because its artist pages don’t automatically link out to MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody, Spotify, Deezer, and other on-demand music services with which Facebook integrates. However, at least this gives you an easy way to see what music your friends like most of all.

More useful for music fans is Facebook Social Graph’s ability to let you hinge from a band search directly to their photos and pages made for the band. As with all Social Graph searches, this one includes an automatically-generated dropdown list of stuff you might be looking for, even if you don’t know it yet:

Here are the first few My Bloody Valentine photos from Facebook (many more are listed):

Again, the music itself is conspicuously lacking. Fixing that would require deep integration with one or more of the music services that send play data — apparently unused, here — to Facebook.

So far, the new Facebook Social Graph feature rolling out over the next few weeks starting today — or right now, if you click the button here — look like they will increase Facebook’s utility as a search engine for the people, pages, and photos related to music, and help strengthen the social fabric of the service, as people (and bands, movies, etc.) have easier ways to find each other.

If that, in turn, leads to people Liking more things, the music recommendation engine could improve, even if Facebook doesn’t start using its play data.

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6 Income Stream To Become A Full-Time Musician

6 Income Streams To Become A Full-Time Musician [INFOGRAPHIC] and more...

6 Income Streams To Become A Full-Time Musician [INFOGRAPHIC]

The Seattle Office of Film + Music took a look at the annual revenue of up-and-coming fulltime local musicians and how they do it. Three musicians, each from different genres, opened up their 2012 financial records. "It was important for us to find musicians who modeled a middle class living," said James Keblas, the Director for the Office of Film + Music. "We are trying to show that this kind of a living can be done without having to be rockstar."

Top 6 Musician Income Streams & Infographic

From the financial analysis, six primary areas were identified which bring most musicians income. While the percentages varied, the categories held true. The musicians also shared tips on how to find success in each category:

1. Licensing and Publishing - Companies, TV, Film, Commercials buy your music. Tip: Send out a monthly digital newsletter of your music to music supervisors with new songs ready for licensing.

2. Music Sales - CDs, downloads, streaming. Tip: You and your fans give away one free song on social media platforms to hook folks to buy more songs.

3. Merchandise Sales - T-Shirts, branded band-aids, condoms. Tip: You will increase merchandise sales by over 50% if you're sitting at the table where the goods are being sold.

4. Live Performances - Concerts and touring. Tip: Don't dismiss the earning potential of busking. Musicians at Sea-Tac Airport and the Pike Place Market are averaging over $100/hour in tips.

5. Studio Work - Film & video game music, back up musician. Tip: Make friends with people in the tech world who need music scored for game or app development.

6. Instruction - Teach others music. Tip: Do group lessons and get the biggest paycheck for your time.

click on image to enlarge

The take away for Keblas from this research?

"It's clear that if you want to make it as a musician, you need to have a business strategy for a majority of these revenue streams, if not all of them. No one said it was easy, but if you have the musical skills and the perseverance, you can do it."

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Apple iTunes Radio Offers Higher Royalties Than Pandora

iTunes Radio, pictured here, launches this fall, which is why Apple is courting independent labels to join the majors on the service -- but for Pandora, revelations about Apple's terms came at an inopportune time.
As Pandora defends itself from public charges from Pink Floyd that it is trying to skimp on royalty payments, Apple has made it known that it will pay out higher royalties than Pandora. Pandora is the biggest competitor to Apple’s as-yet unlaunched iTunes Radio service.

Apple offered terms that would, in iTunes Radio’s first year, pay each label 0.13 cents per play coupled with 15 percent of advertising revenue proportionate to the label’s share of music played via iTunes. By the second year those terms increase to 0.14 cents per listen plus 19 percent of associated ad revenue. Pandora pays about 0.12 cents per listen under government-set rates.

According to the leaked contracts, which are being sent to individual labels rather than a label consortium such as Merlin, Apple plans to determine how royalties are distributed which includes how many times listener’s hear a song coupled with how much advertising Apple is able to sell through its iAds program. Apple has also stated that it won’t pay royalties when listeners skip a song before it has played for 20 seconds.

Apple plans to push iTunes download sales through iTunes Radio, sweetening the deal for itself and copyright holders, who will benefit from those sales — one reason Apple could be willing to pay higher royalties than the default, government-set rate. Pandora’s Westergren shied away from a comparison between the two services, telling the Wall Street Journal, “It’s apples and oranges.”

Pandora — the putative “orange” in this scenario — was criticized by members of Pink Floyd for trying to get help in lobbying for to sue ASCAP for lower rates, and joined a group of over 130 other bands that stand in opposition to Pandora’s policies. (Pandora pays royalties under a government-set rate, unlike Slacker or Apple.) In their USA Today op-ed, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, David Gilmour, and Nick Mason members claim, “For almost all working musicians, it’s also a question of economic survival. Nearly 90 percent of the artists who get a check for digital play receive less than $5,000 a year. They cannot afford the 85 percent pay cut Pandora asked Congress to impose on the music community.”

Pandora vehemently refutes that it is lobbying for any such thing. Pandora founder Tim Westergren hit back in a blog post at what he described as “a lie manufactured by the RIAA and promoted by their hired guns to mislead and agitate the artist community,” and also sought to empathize with the supposedly dejected artists, writing, “As a long-time working musician myself, I fully understand their emotions and concerns.”

This debate over internet royalties began during the last millennium, and could well last until the next one. It’s a complicated situation for several reasons. AM/FM stations pay no performance royalties, for instance, and internet radio companies are free to negotiate directly with rightsholders, as Apple is doing, even though using its dominance in one market to gain an advantage in another (so-called “vertical integration“) might raise antitrust concerns. In other words, pass the popcorn; this thing is far from over.

(image courtesy of Apple)

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