Mother of All Music and Tech Recaps - December 2009 Edition

Mother of All Music and Tech Recaps – December 2009 Edition

Posted on 17. Jan, 2010 by Gabriel Nijmeh in NEWS, TECHNOLOGY

Where is music technology headed in 2010

Another year has passed and we can only hope – and more importantly work – towards making the new year and new decade in the music business less tumultuous and one where the the disruptive forces of change are embraced for the sake of the artists and fans. Because it’s about the music, isn’t?

Now more than ever we need to keep the focus on two important groups: artists and fans. It’s about creative innovation, not exploitation. We still have a way to go but signs are pointing up as more people focus their energy on solutions-based thinking and building.

Before we look too far ahead to 2010 and usual set of predictions, let’s take some time to reflect on what transpired not just in 2009 but over the past ten years. Has anything been learned? Are we headed in the right direction? Will we be spinning the same wheels bare?

Did anyone imagine that in just a few short years the industry would face such swift, radical change leaving some still spinning? Disruption for one group is innovation and opportunity for another and the battle will continue to rage between these two camps.

A review of 2009 on back…

CMU has put together their review for 2009 covering the media and the internet, the music business and artists and the music.

The A to Z of digital music startups in 2009 is an impressive list of digital music startups.

11 Interesting Moments For The Music Industry In 2009- Twitter, Social Media, Music Games, drop in concert attendance.

Bruce Houghton: 3 Trends, 13 Companies & 1 Wild Card To Watch In 2009 and How Did I Do With My 2009 Predictions?

The decade in music: Sales slide, pirates, digital rise – “Nothing defines pop’s past decade as much as the Internet and its evolving powers to alter the way music is created, marketed, shared and consumed. And, some would say, devalued and plundered.”

All the Rules of the Music Business Have Been Remade – From creation, distribution, consumption, it is utterly amazing how technology has flipped the business on it’s head and blown the gates right off.

What has the digital decade meant for music? – “The way in which we consume music has been revolutionised, but rumours of the death of major labels have been greatly exaggerated.”

2010 Music Predictions, Wishes and Guesses

Here’s a recap of some predictions written about for 2010. It’s a fun, year-end exercise and it might be a better idea for those making them to review them monthly, or at least quarterly. And better yet turning these predictions into actionable goals.

All the predictions in the world won’t matter unless the music fan is looked at like a valuable consumer and not some menacing threat.

Bruce Houghton has one prediction for 2010 and honestly, it’s less a prediction but good old common business sense: Those that serve the fan will thrive. Those that do not will whither.

Here are a few that are worth bookmarking and revisiting over the next couple of months:

And as for my thoughts for 2010 and beyond?

Service Agnostic Playlists:
I believe that in 2010 we will start seeing more service agnostic, portable and shareable playlists. You just enter the name of a band or song, and a new service like Playdar (hooked in with the XSPF format) will help you find the song either on your local drive or any music service(s) you might subscribe to. Playlistnow.fm, Stereomood.com and Playlist are examples of the shift from MP3s to playlists, and as an end user you aren’t as concerned about where the music is located.

Music in the Cloud Goes Mainstream:
Sure, anyone with the time and inclination can use Simplify Media, Subsonic, Tunesbag, MP3Tunes to create their own streaming music service but only the biggest, most meticulous music geeks are doing so. 2010 we will see, directly or indirectly, Apple, Google, Amazon making moves towards cloud based music service offerings.

Apple and Others Finally Get Social Music:
For most of us, music has always been a social activity and we are already enjoying the social nature of music online using sites like Twitter, Blip.FM and other third-party, independent services. Apple, Google and other big players will finally start taking it seriously and will build social networking functionality into their core service offerings.

Music Tech Investments
Duncan Freeman of Band Metrics has just posted his list of music tech investments and M&As for 2009. There was certainly quite a bit of activity and will we see more investment activity in 2010? GigaOM recently posted a piece: After Weak Exits In Digital Music, VCs Start Smaller offering some additional perspective. Investors may be stepping back a bit but are not stepping away completely from investing in the digital music sector. Investment returns in music streaming services haven’t been as hoped for but there are other (not as sexy as Spotify) digital music opportunities that don’t face the same, out of the gate, licensing hurdles. With $154 billion of venture money still sitting on the sidelines, that money will have to be invested somewhere, right?
December funding news:

App Store Champ Smule Raises Another $8 Million
Podcasting company Lexy raises $458k in debt financing
ZumoDrive Raises $1.5 Million For Cloud-Based Mobile Music, Media Access

Music Services and Mobile Apps

New iPhone apps like Flypt (music remixer), PRS Jam App (for guitarists), Muppets Animal Drummer (music rhythm game), Beaterator (music mixer) being released are becoming much more interactive. Instead of just being passive listeners, music lovers can now try their hand at being creators, producers and remixers.

Soundtrkr is another interesting app I played around with this month. It’s a geo-tagging music app that lets you connect with other music fans in your area. It’s like Foursquare for music. It will probably be just a matter of time before Pandora or LastFM add this functionality which I think would be brilliant move. Myxer launches MobileStage, a mobile marketing platform for artists and brands/advertisers.

Nowplaying.FM – With so much music/bands being discussed on Twitter, there isn’t always a link provided to the music. With Nowplaying.fm, they are a music search-and-play service in the style of GrooveShark which searches various services and finds the song you want to hear. As I already noted, this is where Playdar can really shine as a music content resolver.

PlaylistnowFM – Similar to Stereomood, you can listen to preselected playlists based on mood/what you are doing. Clean interface (combines elements of Blip.FM and Twitter) and a decent selection of tunes.

Playdar – I’m going to keep an eye on this one in 2010. It’s a bit of “geeky” but very promising tool. Some smart developers will create amazing apps/services that will make it even easier for the music fan’s to discover and listen to music. For early adopters getting their heads around it and Playdar powered services like Playgrub and Playlick, the focus will be building playlists and less on where the music is located. I really hope to see Playdar underpin a lot of future music services which ties well into my thoughts about service agnostic playlists. Read this write-up for a really good description of how Playdar works.

Amazon Adds Audio and Video Streaming to CloudFront – This announcement slipped through quietly. For no additional cost, Amazon will let developers/companies stream delivery of audio and video content. Keep an eye out for new and upcoming service launches now that this type of technology is easily accessible and affordable.

Best of 2009: 10 iPhone/iPod Touch Music/Sound Apps – Suzanne Lainson has recently posted a very thorough article detailing the potential iPhone music revolution where many free and/or cheap tools are allowing music fans with little or no musical talent to create music. It may not be all that good but at the very least, fans will garner a better appreciation of the time and effort that goes into the creative process.

Opinions, Insights and Analysis

In 2009, the hot talk was about Spotify (will they or won’t they launch in the US?) and in 2010 music in the cloud will be on everyone’s lips. There is still a way to go before we see commercial offerings and mainstream adoption but a lot of the hurdles are being knocked down including: technological, costs and cultural.

Music in the Cloud: Heavenly or Pipe Dream? – There are enough open-source tools and software that lets you share and stream music from your computer anyway, so streaming music from your “personal cloud” is already here. It’s just that many people can’t be bothered with setting up, maintaining and backing up their libraries. Once Apple flips the switch, it’s game on. See next article.

How Apple’s New Music Strategy Reflects a Paradigm Shift – This is a great piece with two key points: 1) the transition toward streaming rather than owning is slow, but real. and 2) Apple is still betting on owning music in a new way, rather than subscribing to it.

In the legal download world, someone has to pay for the music, so will 2010 be the year that “brandvertising” finally proves that ad-supported music downloads work? Free for All and Guevara are going to try hard to prove so. And with so much activity on the mobile front, it will be interesting to see if 2010 “will be the year mobile begins to realize its potential for marketers.”

Here is a great article that describes the The Problem With Free. It is summed up best: “When you pay for something, you appreciate it more than when you get it for free.”

APIs Can Set You Free — “Music — or any kind of information, for that matter — no longer emanates from a centralized source. Instead, it reaches listeners’ ears through a plethora of tweets, blogs, widgets, apps, social nets, search services, recommendation engines and the personal messages from the artists themselves.”

Formula That Can ID Music Industry Payola Developed — “A University at Buffalo researcher has invented a statistical method that can detect payola-like corruption in the music industry, a system that gives law enforcement an inexpensive statistical guide to identify potential music corruption and to better target more traditional and much more costly hands-on evidence-gathering.”

4 Ways One Big Database Would Help Music Fans, Industry — Great idea but very challenging to implement and maintain. We already have MusicBrainz and FreeDB plus other proprietary music industry databases. Trying to reconciliation and bridge commercial and open source interests won’t be easy. And I hate saying it but it will be impossible to reach any consensus or standards to satisfy all parties.

What was once thought will be a music business saviour, music video games sales peaked in 2009 and sales forecasts missed . Are consumers bored? Will 2010 be any better?

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And that caps another year in the business! Where do you think we are headed in 2010? What do you hope to see happen? What are you working on that you feel will make a long-term difference?

Gabriel Nijmeh is a software business analyst, passionate music lover and guitar player. He currently advises a couple of music startups, including Mediazoic, a real-time social DJ platform and co-founded the Toronto edition of OpenMusicMedia which brings people together to openly discuss the intersection of digital music, media and culture.

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