hypebot

There's Still A Place Where Albums Outsell Singles

Many say that the album is dead and they have the proof. According to Nielsen SoundScan, sales of individual digital tracks led digital album sales by 16 to 1 (1.07 billion to 65 million) in 2008. 

But there ares still places where the album reins supreme. Digital delivery and marketing platform Bandcamp says that their albums outsell tracks 2 to 1. 66% of paid downloads on Bandcamp are for albums, compared to only about 6% for the greater Nielsen reporting world. They postulate that a number of factors contribute to the stunning difference in album interest:

• Most Bandcamp artists are indie and attract fans more interested in complete works than the average Hannah Montana/Lady Gaga flavor of the moment consumer 
• You can listen before you buy via Bandcamp.  Not just 30 second samples, but rather the whole album.
• iTunes and others price most CD's at $10. Bandcamp artists have found that name your own price with a $5 minimum is a real sweet spot.
• iTunes and others encourage single track purchases with page layouts, buy buttons and featured tracks

But even on Bandcamp what constitutes an album is evolving. 

Read Chris Anderson's New Book "Free" For Free

Wired Editor Chris Anderson's new book "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" is already creating controversy and discussion  across the net.  "Free" has particular significance to artists and labels who use free songs to attract new fans, as well as, their entire industry which has been turned upside down by free access to music via file-sharing networks. The book explores the Free model from all angles ,both current and historic, and reading an advance copy inspired me to think about my own business ventures in many new ways.

True to its title, "Free" is being made available at no cost in a variety of formats over a variety of periods from limited to forever.  You can buy a harcover copy of "Free", download a free copy of the audiobook as a zipped mp3 file or read it in its entirety for free right here on Hypebot. The reader after the jump expands to full screen. Bookmark this page and come back to read more....while it's still available.  Free is not always free forever. 

The End Of The Era Of Celebrity?

The death of Michael Jackson has given voice again to the chorus claiming that the era of the celebrity is over.  There fall of mass media and the rise of niche sub-cultures would seem to preclude future megastars.  But Creative Class author Richard Florida writing for The Atlantic says that just the opposite may be true:

"The big mistake of most chroniclers of popular culture is that they see only one side of digital technology. It is true that new technology enables niche acts to reach larger markets, giving rise to the Long Tail phenomenon identified by Chris Anderson. But the long tail is only part of the story of the transformation wrought by high-speed digital networks...Now, Harvard's Anita Elberse and PRS's Will Page are finding that, in the digital age, even though the tail is long but thin, the head remains "fat." In fact, if you take power laws seriously, the head of the tail should grow in proportion to the length of the tail - getting fatter as the tail gets longer."

c/o pop Convention Gathers Momentum

With Popkomm taking a year off, the importance of the c/o pop - Pop Culture 2.0 gathering August 12-16 in Cologne, Germany has increased exponentially.

The organizers have risen to the challenge with an impressive array of speakers including the always opinionated Peter Jenner, Jim Griffin of Choruss, Band Metric's Duncan Freeman and representatives of EMI, SoundCoud, Mute and others. More are confirming daily, but you can read the current list here. China 2.0 is a topic seldom seen on conference agendas but covered at Pop Culture 2.0. A substantial schedule of live performances will also run concurrently.

(Updated) Just added:

Help Improve Our List Of Artists Who "Made It" Without Major Label Support

Two weeks ago I asked Hypebot readers to help me prove that all this music 2.0 marketing mumbo jumbo actually works.  Stories about Trent Reznor, Radiohead and Jill Sobule who have grown careers using all the 2.0 techniques after leaving a record label who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to break them are great; but for this list, they don't count.

I want to build a useful list that could serve as inspiration for other artists and entrepreneurs. Several  music bloggers encouraged participation and the response so far has been encouraging as readers suggested and debated several dozen artists who have joined the new musical middle class (or above) without label largess.

 But we need to do more.

I need your suggestions. I'm willing to do some work, find an intern or volunteer (anyone interested?) and even spend a little money (unless someone wants to sponsor) to create a useful ongoing database of new music success stories.

Gerd Leonhard: Music 2.0 In 60 Seconds

Self-described media futurist Gerd Leonhard shares his overview of Music 2.0 in a world record 60 seconds.  Just in case, like me, you can't read that fast there's a 3 minute version after the jump.

The Music Industry, Michael Jackson & The Zombieconomy

Consultant and big thinker Umair Haque took a look at some of the dollar figures being thrown around in the wake of Michael Jackson's death including reports that sales of his recordings have "generated more than $300 million in royalties...since the early 1980's". Haque did  little math and asked:

"If the world's biggest pop star only made $12 million a year from his recordings, why would anyone make serious music? Where did the rest of the money go? Why, straight into record labels' pockets. Did they make better music with it? Nope — they made Britney and Lady GaGa. And that's how they killed themselves: by underinvesting in quality, to rake in the take....

The world's top hedge fund "managers" regularly pull in hundreds of millions. That's an order of magnitude difference...

That's the big problem behind the zombieconomy. We don't reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just reward them for allocating the same old assets. That 's not an economy: it's just a game of musical chairs."

Video: How To Fight Zombies -

Overloaded With Data? Trendrr Launches Pro

 A First Look & How It Compares

Information and trends spread across the global net with lightening speed. Bloggers and fans love a show, hate a single, publish a photo, share an impression.  Each of these "events", whether they are on the rise or decline and where they are coming from all come together to create buzz.

Digital marketing agency Wiredset, who works with Last.FM, Capital, Sony BMG and Universal, as well as, tv networks, book publishers and brands, created a tool to track this activity and shared a piece of it with a free public service dubbed Trendrr that I've written about previously.

Today the company launched Trendrr Pro, a more sophisticated paid version which tracks and graphs consumption trends and activity across the digital spectrum, including social networks, blogs, torrents, Amazon, Craigslist, Twitter, Google, MySpace, and leading video sites.

I got an advance look under the hood of last week and saw the improvements:

Will The Browser & Mobile Apps Replace The iPod?

Could the growing popularity and sophistication of streaming services from Spotify to Last.fm and mobile apps from Pandora to Sirius unseat the dominance of the iPod? Gerd Leonard thinks so, and he's got some data to back it up. 

Most importantly Leonard warns the music industry to get ready for the shift: sell access not (just) copies, learn to bundle and package. As Kevin Kelly wrote, "When copies are free you need to sell things that can't be copied". More on the MidemNet blog.

Video: NARM Panel with Napster, Zune, Verizon, Rhapsody & Newbury Comics

Bill Wilson, NARM moderates Changing Models For Content Delivery: Surveying The Landscape. Panelists are Christopher Allen, Napster; Billy Alavardo, Lala Media; Christina Calio, Microsoft/Zune; Tom Constabile, Verizon Wireless; Dave Krinsky, Rhapsody; Carl Mello, Newbury Comics; & Craig Pape, Amazon Services.

Success Begins In The Niche

niche

a specialized market;  a place, employment, status, or activity for which a person or thing is best fitted;   a habitat supplying the factors necessary for the existence of an organism or species

In the new music industry, success begins in the niche.  Start where you are wanted. Use that base to build a bigger and broader audience. Then repeat the process.

Whether its Irish partiers, thoughtful thirty-somethings, redneck blues loving punks or you're church in South Florida, begin you're efforts wherever and with whomever you're most likely to find a receptive audience. If they like what they see and hear, they'll tell their friends. Their friends have friends and some of them are bloggers or DJ's; or at least they have other friends.

It can take longer to become successful this way and your definition of  success may need to be  adjusted. But the good news is that success built from the niches lasts a longer than the mass media, big hype, big hit success that barely exists any more.

Your niche is the foundation upon which your house is built; and if you're any good at maintenance, you can live there happily for a long time.

The Kind Of Music Startups One Venture Capitalist Would Like To Fund

And His Unusual Way Of Turning Them Into Businesses

Y Combinator a revolutionary venture firm that speciializes in funding early stage startups. 40 or so young entrepreneurs spend months together boot camp style developing their ideas into businesses.  In addition to support from each other, they are surrounded by advisers and visited by experts who help focus their efforts.

Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, sold his company Viaweb to Yahoo in 1998 and has since developed a large following for what the New York Times calls "lucid and contrary essays in a geek community more comfortable expressing itself through programming code than coherent paragraphs". One essay "How to Start a Startup" has become a call to arms for anyone contemplating starting a company.

12 months ago, Graham wrote about the kind of companies he'd like Y Combinator to fund and music topped the list.  His music startup wish list includes:

"A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom. Something is broken when Sony and Universal are suing children. Actually, at least two things are broken:

Killing Itself to Live: How the Record Industry Conceived It’s Own Demise

Kyle Bylin, Associate Editor

Throwaway culture, while, perhaps, not limited to commercialized music, appears to stem from highly and quickly popularized songs that are file-shared and listened to for a short period of time.  And are, then, later deleted or ‘disposed of’ from the listener’s computer or MP3 player, typically, once the song starts to fade into obscurity or has grown tiresome to the user, due to circumstances such as novelty, over-exposure, or a ‘change of taste.’

As I’ve argued previously, this can be partially attributed to what file-sharing changed about a music fan’s dynamic relationship with the culture that they consume and the numerous paradoxes of choice that are encountered within the realm of the Internet.  Most predominately, file-sharing has allowed fans simulate decisions not yet made, or economically ‘committed to’ rather, and has, in turn, caused them to become ever-more passive about their deletion.

"tastes which quickly increase in popularity die out faster."

Looking Beyond The Music Industry For Inspiration

It's easy to be critical of the music industry and far more difficult to offer solutions. As I wrote today on the MidemNet blog, from Bob Lefsetz to Hypebot, there are many of us who are ready and willing to share our "insider" perspectives.  But some of the most educated and informative opinions about our business is coming from outsiders.

Fortunately for all of us, some of the brightest minds in marketing, socio-economics, management, tech and other fields are also fans who sometimes find inspiration in music and the music industry. Just a few of the great:"outsider" minds that I've been inspired by lately include:

• Umair Haque
• Seth Godin
• Richard Florida
• Kevin Kelly
• Om Malik

There a more extensive list of people that inform and inspire me from both inside and outside of the music industry on the MidemNet blog here.

Read it and then please let us all know who is influencing the way that you think about the music industry. Who provides your inspiration?

Video: Techdirt's Mike Masnick Offer Hope For The Music Industry At NARM

NARM 2009 State Of The Industry: Michael Masnick from NARM on Vimeo.

The always insightful Mike Masnick on the state of the music industry and some digital music success stories. He shares 500+ plus slides in 30 minutes; so don't blink. (via Indie Music Tech) 

Popkomm 2009 Cancelled

One of Europe's largest music conferences Popkomm will not be held this year. "The digital crisis is fully on the music industry by. Many companies maybe due to the theft on the Internet no longer afford to participate in the Popkomm,"  organizer Dieter Gorny told the German media.

Attendance the the annual convention which is held in Germany each September was projected to be down 40-50% from the 14,000 who attended in 2008. Organizers hope to reintroduce the gathering in 2010 with more government support.

Help Build A List Of Music 2.0 Powered Artists

Yesterday, I started a list of artists that have built successful careers without the help of a major label.  The goals are to prove that its not only possible but actually happening and to offer these artists as examples that others can learn from.

The submissions so far have been great, but some of the comments have questioned what criteria should be used.  Bruce Warila of Unsprung Media and Music Xray has suggested two on Music Think Tank that I agree with wholeheartedly:

1. "If previously signed to a major label (or an affiliate of a major)...disclose this."
2. "Success to me = each band member (or the artist) is consistently generating over $50,000 USD a year after all expenses..."  (more)

As the list grows, I'll re-post it in list form and maybe we'll vote some acts on or off the island as meeting the criteria.  For now, share your thoughts and add to the list here. And please Digg, Stumble, Tweet and blog about the list.  The more complete the list, the more value it has.

P.S. - If you do post something about the list of music 2.0 powered artists with a link, please come back here and tell us about it (including the link) so I can thank-you on Hypebot for spreading the word.

10 Most Creative People In Music Business According To Fast Company

As part of an issue on creativity, business magazine Fast Company has named the "The 100 Most Creative People In Business" and it's "10 Most Creative People In The Music Business" are:

1. DeAndre "Soulja Boy Tell'em" Way, 18 year old rapper/producer
2. Tim Westergren, Chief Strategy Officer & Founder, Pandora
3. Alexandra Patsavas, Owner, Chop Shop Music Supervision
4. Gregg Gillis, aka mashup artist Girl Talk
5. Pharrell Williams, Musician, producer (Neptunes)
6. A.R. Rahman, Composer "Slumdog Millionaire"
7. Jimmy Iovine, Chairman, Interscope Geffen A&M Records
8. Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous
9. Dave Stewart, Musician, record producer and entrepeneuer
10. Brian Eno, Musician and producer

Who do you think are the most creative people in the music business?

Read The Digital Britain Report & Reaction

The Digital Britain report is the UK government's strategic vision for "ensuring that the UK is at the leading edge of the global digital economy" including how it will deal with unauthorized file-sharing. The report also contains recommendations to ensure a "first rate" digital and communications infrastructure and to "protect talent and innovation in the creative industries". Also published today are the Digital Britain Impact Assessments. Download a pdf of Digital Britain here.

(UPDATED) Reaction:

• ISPs will have to cut filesharing by 70% under new proposals. (Guardian)
• Music Ally live blogged the presentation.
• Britain seeks to be world's 'digital capital' (AFP)
• Opening up broadband comes with responbilities (Guardian)
• The official forum
• More via Pageflakes here
• BPI slams government’s “digital dithering” (Music Ally)
• Every household in Britain hit with new £6 'broadband tax' to fund national rollout of superfast internet (Daily Mail)

50% of Core Country Music Fans Can't File-Share

Kyle Bylin, Associate Editor

Here at Hypebot, with how immersed Bruce and I seem to keep ourselves in the blogosphere and technology trends in general, it can be almost a shock to learn that only 50% of core country music fans have access to the Internet.  I mean, honestly, without blogs, I wouldn’t know how to start my day.

Furthermore, 42% of those surveyed also said that they have no desire to remedy the situation, citing cost and concerns over content as reasons they decided to stay offline.  Leaving Nashville in a rather awkward situation, wherein, for now, they simply couldn’t sustain business through only digital sales.

While these percentages paint an interesting portrait of the country music scene, what would make an even more intriguing proposition is if you took the market segment that remained without Internet and tracked their spending on music over the last five years to see how closely it related to those whom had access. 

Such data could be helpful in finding out whether or not file-sharers within country music actually spend more money on music or less.  As well as, if over that five year period, those whom were without Internet had gradually decreased their spending on music due to other, unrelated circumstances.

Resources For Music & The Creative Class

Our 3 Part Series On Music & The Creative Class:

• Part 1 - Music: A Fruit Fly Industry
• Part 2 - How Music Can Transform America's Cities
• Part 3 - Why Place Matters To Music & Music Matters To Place

Music & The Creative Class Resources:

•  The book that started it all: The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life
• Richard Florida's latest book: Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life  
• The Creative Class blog.
• Flatteringly, Richard Florida has re-posted all three parts of Hypebot's Music & The Creative Class series on his blog. (Thank-you!) The comments are worth reading, as well.
• Music & the Entertainment Economy - A new project by Richard Florida and The Martin Prosperity Institute of The Rothman School Of Management at the University Of Toronto. Here is how they describe the project:

The 10 Commandments Of Music 2.0

1. Thou Shalt Not Worship False Prophets - Neither a record deal or auto-tune are your saviors.
2. Thou Shalt Worship Only One God - He (or she) is called The Fan.
   
3. Thou Shalt Giveaway Free Music - Like Jesus and the loaf of bread, give your flock a gift that multiplies as they pass it around.
4. Thou Shalt Not Steal - Borrowing a beat is one thing, but stealing...
   
5. Thou Shalt Blog - Your flock wants to know what you're doing.
   
6. Thou Shalt Create Profiles - Wherever your flock may go, you must be there.
   
7. Thou Shalt Upload Photos -  Staged, unstaged, backstage, from the stage and at every stage of a project.
   
8. Thou Shalt Upload Videos - Longs Ones. Shorts Ones. Tall ones...you get the idea.
   
9. Thou Shalt Share Thy Bounty. Share gigs. Share ideas. Share with your fans.
   
10. Do Unto Others As You Would Have Others Do Unto You - You meet the same people on the way down that you did on the way up.

Do you have an 11th Commandment?

Music & The Creative Class: Why Place Matters To Music & Music Matters To Place

(Part 3) In previous installments of Music & The Creative Class, I explored the importance that musicians and the business that follow them play in the growing Creative Class that is reshaping America and much of the developed world.  Not only does music add flavor to a neighborhood or city, as they have in Nashville, Memphis or New Orleans; but musicians are also often "fruit fly indicators" or harbingers of future growth as they have been from Austin, Texas and Brooklyn Heights, New York.

But if musicians mater to place, how much does place matter to musicians. In an era of net based social networking and online collaboration combined with fast and easy travel, it is tempting to say that where musicians live matters far less than it once did.  But in Who's Your City?, the follow up to Richard Florida's groundbreaking The Rise of the Creative Class, the author argues that for most "creatives", where to live is the most important decision of their lives. 

Music is most often a collaborative art form and it would be easy to answer...

Overheard @ NARM

• "...the publishing/rights issues are definitely going to get worse before they get better." 
• NARM & The RIAA released their sustainable packaging report. (more)
• "No official figures have been released yet, but attendance is definitely down...350 companies represented this year, with 70 of them being new the convention."
• John Lenac (Yahoo! Music) on Social Networks..."Social media is more a function than a destination..."
• TwoTweet is pitching a storefront and shopping cart that they are building that interfaces with Twitter.
• "music biz is like others: smaller than last year but survivors are reinventors."
• Virgil promises me the first of his NARM videos today.  Seems like he's having big fun...I mean being really productive.
• Until Virgil's digital package arrives here's a short video from the NARM A2IM Crash Course after the jump.

Midem & MidemNet Unite With Expanded Program

International music industry conference MIDEM ,held each January in Cannes is expanding its MidemNet digital music gathering and merging it into the main MIDEM event. For the first time, registration to MIDEM will also include access to MidemNet

In 2010, MidemNet will continue special digital music programming January 23-24 and then extend the digital conference theme throughout the larger MIDEM gaterthing January 24-27.

A new dedicated MidemNet area is being created on the main MIDEM exhibition floor. There a new MidemNet Lab will showcase 15 innovative companies operating in the digital music sector chosen by a network of industry insiders. Throughout the week, these companies will offer presentations of their activities and business models, as well as, one-on-one meetings with potential partners. The new area will also host  MidemNet Academy, a series of digital education workshops covering a broad range of subjects from “An introduction to digital marketing” to “How to market your artist on Twitter?”

Microsoft's Bing Seach Engine & The Music Industry: How Does Your Band Bing?

No, that's not a typo (for once). I didn't mean bling. I'm referring to Bing, the new Microsoft search engine. It's the computer giant's latest attempt to grab search market share from Google (65%) and Yahoo (21%), and they're backing it with a $100 million marketing campaign.

Why should artists, labels and the music industry care?  Bing searches for and delivers results in a slightly different way than Google and Yahoo; and since the most people look for information about a band, concert or album via their search engine,  how results about you and your projects are delivered matters.  Lower search rankings means less discovery.  It's a simple and important as that.

I'll leave how Bing works (video after the jump) to people far smarter than I am, but a few sample searches of things like White Stripes" and "Roger McGuinn"...

What If You Owned Hypebot?

Hypebot is an ever evolving idea: part news, part opinion and part open forum for all aspects of the new music industry.  And as the August fourth year anniversary of the blog approaches, I've been thinking about making some changes and adding new features to make it Hypebot an even more useful resource. So, I'm asking you, my brilliant, creative and cutting edge readers:

 If you owned Hypebot,
what would you do differently?

For example, would you:

• Add a page of charts from 2.0 sources like top music blogs, music on Twitter?
• Add a forum or social networking component?
• Share more D.I.Y. tips?
• Cover more indie label news?
• Publish more or less major label news?
• (Your brilliant idea here.)

How The Orchard Staff Start Their Day

Greg and The Orchard gang may have preferred that I not share this; but since it is a public (though admittedly unpublicized) web page that I stumbled across, I figured  that I might as well tell Hypebot readers about this before someone else does.

  NEWS

Someone at music distributor and marketer The Orchard has created a comprehensive multi-tabbed start page using Netvibes that aggregates music industry news from a wide variety of web sources in an easy to scan format.

I was happy to see Hypebot in a top position under the Music Industry news tab.  But more revealing was a "Competition" tab where alongside news from the competitors you'd expect like IODA, INgrooves and Sony/Red, you'll also find Topspin and TuneCore. Tabs include Technology, Mobile, Marketing, Distribution and Music News among others.
 
It's probably not fair to read too much into the web intelligence sources chosen, but The Orchard News provides an interesting glimpse into how the staff of a company finding success in a difficult sector start their day. So, grab a cup of coffee, put your feet up and enjoy. Oh, and don't forget to check your stock options. Enjoy.

Video: Irving Azoff On Ticketing, Live Nation & The State Of Record Business

Video from the recent All Things Digital D7 Conference of super- manager and new Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff on the the future of recorded music, ticketing, the proposed merger with Live Nation and more.

Protecting Cultural Norms: How We Project the Present onto the Future

Kyle Bylin, Associate Editor

Let’s be clear…  In our discussions regarding the traditional album and its future, one might come to the conclusion that some of us think that there will no longer be albums or, at the very least, if you were actually reading, that it’s not apparent to some of us that the album can continue on forever as it is now.

The problem, as Harvard Psychologist Dan Gilbert explains in his release Stumbling on Happiness, is that, “[Humans] almost always err by predicting that the future will look too much like the present.”  In other words, we tend to project the present cultural norms of the Recording Industry onto the future.

In the minds those whom built big businesses around albums, they don’t almost always err by predicting that the future will look too much like the present. However, they do almost always fail at trying to demand that the future should be like the present, just because that’s the way things have always been.