"Have fun, make art."

Art For Art’s Sake

The constant talk of the need to monetise music is somewhat confusing to me. Just because you make art, doesn’t mean that you deserve to make money out of it.

art –noun

1. the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. (Dictionary.com)

Re-read that again then just for yourself “… what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance”. That’s what should be both the motivation and the payoff for musicians, to make something beautiful and significant.

Whats more, great art is rarely spawned by the singular desire to make money. (I’m sure many would argue that the two things are mutually exclusive) why did Bowie make “Changes”? Why did Lennon and McCartney write “A Day In The Life”? For me, if you want to make money, become an accountant. If you want to make art and make music, then get on with it. Making art is not the precursor to making money from your art (if you make an axe, it doesn’t mean someone should by rights buy that axe from you).

Do you make and perform music? Why did you start to play? Why did you join a band or do your first performance? Think back, what was your motivation?

For me, I can trace my lineage directly back to seeing my Dad playing rock ‘n’ roll to friends and strangers at locked door/closed curtains drinking sessions held outside of licensed pub hours. He performing for the entertainment of others, for no charge. His payment; the lit up faces and smiles of people sharing in the experience. In essence, my Dad is a Fun-Pusher.

This is why I’m proud to say, “I’m in Hope and Social, and I sell fun“. Now while it may not be the trendiest or coolest product (it’s not sex, it’s not good looks, the right hair or skinny jeans), it is a currency all of our own. We have our own particular brand of fun – it involves fans and new friends alike, and it goes with us to every show. We create an experience and something different happens at each and every show. What’s more, unlike a CD/a record/an mp3, it’s not copyable; you can’t put it on a disc or a hard-drive and play it on your mp3 player.

Why we don’t deserve to earn from music

Firstly, your art may not be to the liking of many people; hell, it could be rubbish. Furthermore, people may not want to give their money to you. That’s right, people may be making their decisions based not on how good your stuff/product/music/package is, but on how much they want you to have their money. There are many and varied reasons why people may choose not to buy your wares, what we can do however is give people good reasons to buy (On a similar subject and for some further reading, here’s a great post by John Sheldrick on Music Think Tank about the many reasons Why You Should Pay For Music).

While I don’t think anyone deserves to make money from their music by right, I do believe that artists deserve the opportunity to make their music making sustainable, and then hopefully profitable. Part of that is minimising costs; making sure it’s not costing you to say put on a show , or perhaps press your CDs, taking advantage of social media, digital distribution and the new, free ways of connecting with people. This is why I urge people daily to sell their music as a PayWhatYouWant download (and physical CD if you’ve got the stones to do so). PWYW gives people the opportunity to not only pay what they want, but also who they want. It is with this in mind that musicians need to push forward now, with a desire to make art, to do great things and to move people to want to part with their money, and put it into your bank account.

So, Why Make Music? Why Make Art?

I am driven to make music, I’m in part defined by it. I must do this, I cannot function without music being a central and vital part of my life. If you don’t feel that way, then maybe its’ worth thinking about other ways of making your living? Music is such a powerful and attractive force that non-musicians also seek to work in music; PR’s for example will work, often for far less money than they would in say retail PR just because they want top work in music, the same must surely go double for the musician.

I remember when I first started writing music, it was my hope that one day someone would come up to me and tell me that something I’d made had moved them, in the same way that music has moved me. If someone tells you that your music is the soundtrack to their getting ready for a Friday night, that it helped them through a difficult time, or that it’s inspired them to make art, then there’s your musician’s wage right there. I believe, should be the pre-cursor to your musical career; this has to be the drive that makes you write, rehearse and perform.

The “hopefully inspirational”, but probably actually just a little bit self congratulatory bit

Through PWYW, through special events and through peddling fun like I saw my Dad do for free twenty years ago I’m now in the band I’ve always wanted to be in. Hope and Social have grown into an old-style, good-time show band. Like a Yorkshire E-Street Band, we’re a spectacle, an event. We’re certainly not just a gig (though if that was the case, we’d be a damn good gig). What we do is economically sustainable, it pays for itself and sometimes a bit extra for us all to live on, but mostly, it is the reward in itself. Furthermore, by adopting and embracing new opportunities to connect and share with people, we’re now at a point when we’re far more viable than anytime when we’ve invested thousands of pounds on advertising, PR, pluggers. Sustainability first, then profitability.

Just as important as taking advantage of all the new opportunities we have today though, let’s not waste our lives, time and energy complaining that everyone gets their music for free and start giving people damn good reasons to put their money where your singer’s mouth is.

Hope and Social at the 'Come Dine with Us' event.

The new music industries work in a very different way than the record business of the ’60′s. The precious 7 inch of plastic discs of that decade (when music demand far outstripped supply) were rare; clamoured for. Music lovers saved their pennies and tens of them would gather round a single radio to hear the charts. People flocked in droves to record shops to hear the latest discs and treated their vinyl with the cotton glove respect that’s reserved for the finest of diamonds. People Treasured Music.

Today’s music environment is very different. With 13 million bands on [cough - spit] Myspace alone, a growing live scene, thousands of pieces of music becoming available free online daily, and most all forms of recorded music being easily copy and shareable, we can’t consider Music itself to be the carrier of our currency. The Democratisation of Music means more supply of music, and that means that the expectation is that it sells for less. What’s more, music is copyable, shareable, reproducable and even if only say 4% of the bands on Myspace are any good, that’s over half a million bands to compete with.

So, what can we sell?

If we can all now make, distribute and sell music, to succeed we’ve got to differentiate ourselves from the crowd & give people something they can’t get elsewhere. If we can give people something that isn’t repeatable and isn’t copyable then all the better. So, what’s unique and not copyable? A feeling, or an experience. We have a saying in Hope and Social. Have Fun, Make Art. It’s become part of our ethos. If it’s not fun we don’t do it; and if it sounds fun we should probably ask others to get involved. It may not be the same for your tribe, but for Hope and Social the currency we deal in is “Fun”.

3 Course Meal in a Crypt

Come Dine With Us

With the “Make Art, Have Fun” mantra resounding in our communal larynx, we took a demo of a song that sounds vaguely like French supermarket music, added the germ of an idea that a cheese and wine night could be fun and multiplied that by the effervescent mind of the brilliant Ben Denison‘s.

What we we came up with was a great way to galvanise our close fans, to get them involved in making art with us, to have a lot of fun and to raise money to fund our music making. We invited our fans to our home, the studio we’ve recorded all our albums to date in (and the venue for the Crypt Gig last year). We promised to cook great food, to have the band wait on, and play at our guests tables and finally, once everyone was suitably relaxed drunk, record a song together. We named it “Come Dine With Us” and we invited people by song.

The Event

We’ve already blogged about the amazing people who helped us pull all this together, but to see them in action is something else. A picture says a thousand words and all that:

Hope & Social • Come Dine With Us [Behind-the-scenes] from 3B Media on Vimeo.

We turned our studio into a French Bistro for the evening, we served a 3 course gourmet French meal to 70 people, the band waited tables, played at people’s tables, silent auctioned one-off items and recorded a song with our good people.

Offer Value

Our (initially flummoxed) drummer Gary Stewart (who joined us this past year) said, “I don’t understand… so you just think stuff up that you want to do, and people pay for you to do it?” and quite simply the answer is yes. When we do special events, we do our best to ensure that we give value to those who care enough to attend. We price it as something we could afford to do. Through this we’ve built relationships with our fans which enables us to sell unique events such as our Crypt gig last year and Come Dine With Us as far more than a standard gig.

People buy into our events because they know it will not only be a good time, but also that we’re not trying to bleed as much profit out of them as maybe we could. All our standard releases are Pay What You Want. People know we’re not in the game of ripping people off. Most importantly though, people know we’ll include them in the night and as in the case of our recent Come Dine With Us event, we might well make a song with ‘em for our album.

The Wine Bottle Orchestra

The Song

James Hamilton wrote a wine bottle orchestra part, we tuned 50 wine bottles, asked guests to bring an instrument of their choice and we made art. We recorded the song live along with our fans singing, blowing, clanking, banging and singing along. As Ed Waring said in his recent blog:

“Eurospin is not my favourite song on the album but it’s kinda my favourite bit on the album. Watch the amazing video below. You got to love the amazement on our faces that it’s working and the fact that the crowd just make it look so easy…”

Hope & Social • Eurospin from 3B Media on Vimeo.

… additionally however, the story of how we made this song has helped us reach many new fans.

The Footprint

More from 'Come Dine with Us'

The response to the event and the concept of the event has been amazing. In advance the twitter and facebook communities were rife with activity around the event, and by turning our guests into band members on the record itself, they became the evangelists for our record.

It’s not by accident that the tools we use to sell and promote our work online include the option to share. There’s the 3B Media videos, and the bandcamp music which can be easily embedded on most websites. Bandcamp also has the transformative “Post to twitter” and “Post to Facebook” direct links and through the stats package we can see this appearing daily in people’s posts. There are new blogs sprouting up about the event, and through selling more Fun we can reach out to even more new people.

The music industry has changed, however if you know your band and if you know your tribe you can give them something they can’t get anywhere else. Find that thing and that‘s your currency!

'Starving Artist' is not a job description.

This is a guest post by entertainment business consultant Kevin English.

Back in 1992, I told myself that I was going to make it in the music business no matter what. The thought of being a starving artist was romantic to me in many ways, because it looked glamorous on TV and the singer always seemed to get the girl in the end. But as I got older I started to feel like I was on a blind date. I was broke, sleeping on a twin box spring without a mattress, and spending what little money I had on fast food and Mary Jane. I was a lower class musician.

I was not a lower class musician for lack of musical ability — after all, I was one of five singers accepted into Mason Gross for Classical Voice that year. Rather, I was a lower class musician because I couldn’t buy my way into the music business. My first label job in the A&R department of Universal Records paid a whopping $14k per year and did little to advance my career. I learned the hard way that there is a difference between what I wanted to do and what I had to do.

Over time, I found that cash flow is the amount of money you need to pay your bills before your next paycheck. It’s also one of the best indicators of which financial class one belongs to. Many people don’t even know how much they are spending month to month, let alone when they will see their next music industry check.

Below are four things you can do to stop living like a pauper today and raise your stake in life tomorrow.

Lower Your Overhead

Ian Rogers and Shamal Ranasinghe of Topspin refer to the middle class musician as “one that can operate on a lower volume, at a lower risk, but with higher profit margins”. I happen to agree that Rogers and Ranasinghe may have figured out that much. However, in order for you to gain access to the Topspin platform you must first take a college course [over $1K] and then split 60% of your overall profit between selected marketing and fulfillment companies. That sounds too much like a traditional record deal to me.

Instead, there are tons of low cost alternatives that can help you put the pieces of the puzzle together once you can see the bigger picture. I am an advocate of Live Music Machine for booking, Bandcamp for direct-to-fan sales and data capture, Fairtilizer for digital promos and Google Analytics to see who is clicking through your WordPress blog.

Learn to structure yourself like any other startup and formulate a strategy on paper that will sustain you for three to five years. You’ll soon find out that overspending on manufacturing, marketing, promotion and distribution is very difficult to recoup.

Adjust Your Expectations

For some of us, music is a hobby and that is okay. However, if you plan on feeding your children by touring the Chitlin’ circuit, that’s another thing entirely. When I realized that writing songs for Columbia Records and recording demos with The Fugees wasn’t going to sustain me forever, I had to adjust my expectations. These gigs were few and far in between and often times didn’t pay half as much as you would expect them to.

I studied profitable ideas, people, and businesses to find a common denominator. I learned that nine out of ten successful startups had a business plan. Not just any old plan, but one that was standard across all industries. Financial planning, marketing, and the management of people and products/services cannot be done on the fly. If all you want is for people to hear your music that is fine. But again, you can’t necessarily expect to make a decent living.

Accelerate Your Learning

Hundreds of books have been written on the subject of business plans, yet no one in the music business seems to think they need one — until, of course, they run out of cash. I spent years in my local SBA in Newark, NJ looking at sample plans, meeting with retired CEOs of successful companies, and learning how basic businesses operate.

If you do the same you’ll realize that most startups have more similarities than you’d expect. However, it is important to point out that no two plans are alike. You will still need to write a plan specifically based around your music-related products and services. My first plan was a disaster. I asked my uncle for $75K with a promise to return 20% of the loan over the next five years. He had a good laugh over that one, but at least he knew I was serious about my dreams.

Diversify Your Product Offering

If you’re anything like me you already know what you are passionate about. You may already have a substantial amount of music-related product at your disposal, and you may even know a thing or two about the industry. But remember, just because you are musician doesn’t mean that CDs and digital downloads are the only thing you are allowed to sell. Don’t believe me? Ask music industry vet, David Sherbow. He’s fleshed out a long list of potential revenue streams for musicians at various levels. The concept of bundling CDs with digital downloads and merchandise is great, but will only work if you can sell enough of these things to stay afloat until your next release.

If you know now that you are in need of a middle class stimulus package, you need to start working on these four things early. Don’t wait until your album is finished before you begin to look for marketing dollars, or you’ll never find them. We have plenty more options then we had back in the 90′s so take advantage of this opportunity before it’s too late.

Kevin English

Kevin English is a product manager, business plan writer and consultant for various entertainment and technology companies. He blogs about the skills and strategies necessary to get the most of your musical career at http://eleetmusic.com or on Twitter @eleetmusic.

Theremins used to be innovative.

Innovation is important. It elevates a product beyond simple retail and causes it to become a catalyst for change in the marketplace and culture. Innovation is also notoriously elusive. Today’s stroke of genius could be tomorrow’s old news. Worse, that first-to-market concept you’ve been hustling to get out the door could be short-circuited by the company down the street. The brief shelf-life of an innovative product is simply not enough to build a business on.

Music is no different. Breaking a “brand new sound” is not easy to do. Most listeners find anything too far outside the norm to be at best challenging, or at worst offensive to their ear. New sounds usually take time to bleed into the mainstream. The listening public gradually becomes accustomed to them as they buzz around their periphery, like messages quietly played on a loop while they sleep.

Sometimes a band is good enough, and lasts long enough, to cash in on this build-up of auditory equity. More often it’s another act that happens to enter the scene at the just the right time. They may seem to come out of nowhere, but if you look closely you’ll probably find the forerunners whose shoulders these new radio (internet?) darlings are standing on.

Is that a bad thing? Maybe for the pretentious scenesters who know the truth. My band-mates and I always shunned those tipping-point bands that stumbled serendipitously into the breakthrough. They got all the glory, but we knew they were reaping what others had sown.

For everyone else, no. It’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a good thing because it’s necessary for the introduction of new music into the mainstream. The mainstream and the underground have a symbiotic relationship. One feeds off the other.

Counting on Innovation to Cut Through the Noise

When a new band forms and gathers for the first time in their drummer’s basement they may talk about how they’ll rise above the sea of new music and make their mark. Inevitably one of the members will suggest that all they have to do is “write something totally new that no one’s ever heard before.” Then people will have to notice them. It’ll probably be the guitarist. And while his speech may be compelling, that band will be making a serious mistake if they take his word for it.

I already laid out the challenges of innovation-as-a-business-model in the paragraphs above. The way I see it, they leave our imaginary example band with two primary options. They can adopt innovation as their ‘signature’ and strive to reinvent the wheel with each new project. Or, they can try to make a big splash with something way out there and ride that wave as far as it will take them. If you take each of these paths you’ll see that neither is a great option.

1. Innovation as a Signature

Do you really think you can put out album after album, song after song and keep breaking the mold? I’m not saying that it hasn’t happened, but I think we can all agree that this is a tall order. Take for example some of the most well known musical innovators of the past decades: Radiohead. Radiohead released Kid A, then gradually drifted back toward their earlier rock focused writing. They haven’t lost what they gained with Kid A, but they haven’t repeated the feat either.

2. Innovation as Conversation Starter

Gaining exposure through the release of something new and out there is a little like getting struck by lightening. You never really know when it’s going to happen, and while there are things that you can do to greatly increase your chances, there still has to be a storm already brewing overhead.

For those who do make waves with something innovative are usually prime candidates for the classic ‘sophomore slump.’ If you can’t get lightening to strike twice you’d better put out something that doesn’t stray too far from the once-revolutionary formula you pioneered the first time or you’ll have some disappointed fans. Not to mention the Pitchforks of the world who live for those moments when promising new bands fall from grace.

And did I mention that just about every new band out there is trying to do the exact same thing?

What Role Should Innovation Play?

I’m not suggesting that innovation is not important to an artist or business. Nothing could be further from the truth. Art in particular is revitalized by innovative works. Innovation is what keeps art forms alive. However, what keeps artists alive is longevity. Longevity is built from many disciplines, innovation being only one of them.  It requires insight into promotion and public relations. A solid business model that creates opportunities for consistent revenue and has room to change with shortening market cycles. A well-defined vision and a plan to see it through.

Most of all what long-lasting success demands is authenticity. The greatest skill an artist can learn is to create in their own voice. When innovation is given a disproportionate focus the most common casualty is authenticity. Some of the greatest songs ever written have been simple and traditional. Even in rock and roll. Write music that you’re passionate about and listeners will get it. You will succeed or fail based on your own merits and your own personality. And best of all, you’ll never run out of material.

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:

• Five Music Predictions for 2010 (and Five Reasons Why 2009 was a Flop)
• 8 Key Trends for the Next 5 Years
• Bob Lefsetz’s Predictions
• The Year in Digital Music and Predictions for 2010
• Bobby Owsinski’s 7 Music Business Predictions For 2010
• 2010: 5 Music Business Predictions (And A Football One)
• 10 music-tech trends that will shape the next decade

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?

—-

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.

The latest music business report from the Forrester Research Group hasn’t produced the kind of buzz that the last one did. That’s likely because while the previous report did have some solid ideas, it wasn’t the answer people were looking for.

The report is called Music Product Manifesto: The Product Features That Will Save Recorded Music. (I know – I hate titles like that too.) This time around researcher Mark Mulligan focus on music product innovation. “In 2009, the album celebrates it’s 100th birthday and yet remains the centerpiece of the recorded music product portfolio,” Mulligan writes. “The time has come for a radical overhaul of the recorded music product range.”

Consumer needs, not business needs.

Mulligan introduces his recommendations with “six fundamental consumer ‘rights’” that he believes should be the foundation of all future music product innovations. I’ll give you the six bullet points and focus in on a couple of them that I think are worth examining further.

1. The right to great customer experiences first (and business models second).
2. The right to unique music experiences.
3. The right to share in the creation process.
4. The right to share [music].
5. The right to fair use of technology.
6. The right to be social.

The first one may seem like kind of a ‘duh,’ but in Mulligan’s defense this point has been largely missed by most of the record industry. I appreciate that he took the time to spell it out because he is exactly right. A business model is useless without costumer buy in. Figure out what your customers want and give it to them – that’s the model the industry needs to embrace.

Number three is huge. I’ve written before about how important I believe it is for fans to have the freedom to remix and mash up the music they love. The promotional value and increased fan engagement that can result from allowing your fans to share in the creation process are opportunities that should not be missed. More on this point later.

Four, five and six are somewhat related. The report makes the argument that friends and family are “one of the most important sources of music recommendations.” Music products should leverage this, not attempt to squash it. “We’re looking for cross-service sharing to become the glue that holds the digital music marketplace together,” the report states.

This is something that the blogosphere has been preaching for years, so it’s nice to see an ‘official’ report in agreement. However, Mulligan is unwilling to to all the way. “This doesn’t mean full interoperability,” he writes in the very next sentence. “But it does entail creative solutions, such as one-play-only streams and downloads. In other words you can share a track with your friend, but as soon as you listen to it the file self-destructs like a new assignment from the Impossible Mission Force. People are going to LOVE that.

Future Music Products

The remainder of the report lays out a series of predictions and recommendations regarding what future music products should look like. The big theme that runs through each of the nine or so items is interactivity. Consumers need to be given stuff to do while they listen to music. Videos to watch, games to play, social media to update and tools to remix and mash up. “Music’s ‘lean back’ nature has allowed it to be shunted into the background by more interactive entertainment,” writes Mulligan. “Next generation music products need to thrust music into the interactive age, delivering multiple interactive music experiences that demand listener’s attention!”

Instead of simply purchasing music files, listeners would download something more like an application that contained all the functionality laid out in the above diagram.

I think this is a big step in the right direction. It takes advantage of a wide range of technologies to create a more immersing experience for the listener. The center of this experience is still music, but not necessarily recorded music. All of the different mediums are represented: live performance, studio recordings, written lyrics, music videos, etc. Extras that aren’t strictly musical would be included as well, such as interviews, photos, and games.

All of this would be integrated with social media allowing real-time sharing. One significant benefit would be that the ability to share and communicate around an artist’s music could potentially strengthen the fan community. That sense of community is so important to building a solid fan base.

Here’s a close-up of the proposed remix function:

Adding value or diluting music?

One question that this report raised for me is whether this additional functionality might add value to music as a product at the expense of the integrity of music as an art form.

It was hard at times not to read this report as if it were saying that the industry needs to recognize that music has been relegated to background ambiance and borrow from other forms of media to get people to care about it again. Yet, in a lot of ways that may be true. It’s easy to blame file sharing and piracy for music’s waning cultural influence. But in today’s interactive, multitasking world it is getting harder for music to compete. Mono-sensory art is so last century!

“Music companies must remember who their competing against,” writes Mulligan. “This isn’t a fight to be the ‘iTunes killer’ – rather, it’s to be the ‘P2P killer’ and an ‘apathy killer.’” He goes on, “To compete against this ‘axis of digital music evil’ and truly differentiate themselves, new music products must offer excitement and uniqueness.” In other words, future music products can’t just be about the music anymore.

Conclusion

Philosophical concerns aside, Mulligan is absolutely right that the recording industry needs to start delivering what fans want if it hopes to find a sustainable business model. I think the example he presents does go a long way toward responding to the way fans have shown they want to engage with music. Mulligan doesn’t really address how he would monetize these products – subscriptions? Maybe the app is free and the content is pay per download? Or the other way around? Yes, I know I just said that giving fans what they want should come first. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to generate revenue. Maybe that will come in a future report.

ARIA Chairman Ed St. John

The new music industry could be effectively broken down into two different camps, with the traditional recording industry on one side and the proponents of the emerging independent DIY models on the other. The two camps rarely see eye to eye, but in many ways the debate between them is quite balanced. The traditional recording industry has all of the money and political clout, while the independents have the blogosphere and a compelling David vs. Goliath story.

It’s no secret which side of the fence I’m on. I write primarily to independent musicians and those who are building their careers around them. And while I try to focus more on highlighting innovation and finding solutions, I’ve certainly done my fair share of major label criticism.

Today I want to point to an interesting interview conducted by Andrew McMillen on the OneMovementWord.com blog. Andrew has contributed to Creative Deconstruction in the past, and when he sent me this interview I realized that it provides a great opportunity to present a different perspective on the changing music industry.

The subject is Ed St. John, head of the Australian Recording Industry Association (the RIAA of the land down under.) This guy’s basically in charge of the traditional recording industry for the continent. The interview is an interesting change of pace because Andrew is actually quite sympathetic toward St. John and the recording industry in general.

St. John spends the bulk of the interview defending the recording industry against its critics. ”I’m all for discussing issues in a productive way, in a positive way,” he says. ”I love talking about new ideas, new business models, new ways of marketing music. But I just think you have to steer clear of people who are in the business of criticising major record labels for their own gain.”

Of course, the same warning could be given against those who are in the business of defending the major record labels for their own gain, but the point is valid and well taken. It’s good to see the man at the top getting excited about innovation.

St. John also addresses the growing chorus of voices online speaking out against the major label system. “Everyone is entitled to say whatever the hell they like, which is fine, of course.” He goes on, “But I don’t think many people really understand what record companies do; they’re very quick to judge the way the business works, or the way it has worked, without really understanding it.”

I agree that the democratic nature of the internet is both a blessing and a curse. With such a low threshold of entry there are of course many speaking up online who just don’t have all the facts. These are in many cases some of the loudest voices. However, there are also many bloggers and commentators who do have quite a bit of knowledge of the music industry. These individuals provide an important service as they represent an alternative to the established system.

Toward the end of the interview St. John gives what I found to be his most compelling defense of his industry. It’s a bit long, but well worth a read:

I think there has been a lot of demonisation of the music industry in general, and major record labels in particular. It’s sort of easy to do. It’s like saying the big Hollywood studios are evil. It’s an easy position to take, because you don’t really have to explain how they’re evil. It’s generalised evil, but if you actually break it down; if anyone bothered to come look at the people that work at a record label, and the work they actually do, they’d realize that there is actually a group of quite dedicated people trying to make their artists successful, which is pretty much the same as in a lot of other businesses. It’s not like we’re sitting here plotting how to destroy the world, or anything.

A lot of things have changed in the last few years. We, like any business, need to accommodate those changes in consumer behavior and the way that people share, experience and discover music. It’s quite easy to set up an illegal business model that is based around stealing someone else’s property. It’s quite a lot harder to run a legitimate business, and our challenge is that we run a legal, legitimate business. We have actual agreements with artists that we can’t just change on a whim.

If we want to do something new, we often need to get the artist’s consent. Call us old-fashioned, but we have a business that’s based around observing people’s rights and paying people royalties.

When circumstances change in the way people experience music and interact with it, it’s our job to understand that and respond to it. It’s not as if we’re pretending it hasn’t changed, because obviously it has. Our challenge is to evolve with these different media whilst still running a legitimate business, adhering to those contracts, and paying our artists.

It’s quite challenging to evolve quickly in a rapidly changing market. The music industry today is a very different beast to what it was 10 years ago. There has been a huge shift in focus. I think we all understand how much has changed. We’re just learning to have a different role and provide a different range of services for our artists, and a different offer for a consumer that fits the way people experience music now. That’s obviously a constantly moving target. It evolves all the time.

That last paragraph is an important one. The recording industry is steering a big ship with a small rudder. They don’t have the agility of independent artists and the teams that support them. That’s not necessarily a defense – if your organization isn’t scaled to meet the needs of the business then it needs to adapt. It is valuable, however, to understand the challenges they have and that they are actively looking for ways to meet them.

Now if only we could find away to bring the traditional industry and the independents together to attack the issues they both face with a united front… Unfortunately that doesn’t seem too likely, at least not for now.

Read the entire interview at OneMovementWord.com.

Here’s a recap of what went on in the music industry this week. Make sure to check out anything you might have missed and leave your comments. Know something we don’t? Submit a story.

Also check out my guest post over at www.OneMovementWord.com, the official blog of Australian music industry conference One Movement for Music Perth. One I was asked to write on the topic ‘What will it take for artist, industry and fan unite?’ That’s a rather loaded question and I’m not sure how qualified I am to answer it, but I did my best. I’ll be re-posting it here on Creative Deconstruction early next week, but I’m sure my Australian friends would appreciate it if you stopped by to check it out. Let me know what you think.

Most Popular:

Is ‘Joel Fights Back’ really the David to the RIAA’s Goliath? – Many, many people want to see the RIAA knocked down a peg, but was this the right case to try and make that happen?

Sufjan Stevens to release BQE Multi-media set in October – It seems quite a few people are anticipating new material from Sufjan.

This Week:

What the music industry and the credit crisis have in common – Some interesting and worrisome parallels I have observed…

New music releases for August 11th 2009 – Modest Mouse, Japandroids, Fruit Bats, and more.

The return of the Supergroup – Surely declining record sales have nothing to do with this, right?

Imogen Heap shows us that DIY pays off – and takes a lot of work - Some great discussion happening here over the past few days. Check it out and add your thoughts.

Music Video Picks:

Coldplay Strawberry Swing – Stunning new video. You’ll never look at sidewalk chalk the same way again.

This Week in Music History:

1977 – Elvis Presley was found dead lying on the floor in his bathroom by his girlfriend Ginger Alden, he had been seated on the toilet reading ‘The Scientific Search For Jesus’. He died of heart failure at the age of 42. His first record for RCA, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, was also his first US No.1. He starred in 31 films. Elvis holds the record for the most entries on the US Hot 100 chart with 154. (This Day in Music)

Spend enough time online and you might begin to suspect that some media folks want you to think that the DIY approach will somehow be less work than then a traditional career in music. Strange, given that the term itself implies the opposite. ‘DIY’ does, after all, stand for ‘Do It Yourself.’ More rewarding? Less artistically limiting? More fun? Yes, yes, and probably. But less work? No.

Better does not always equal easier. Creating quality music and running a business are both challenging tasks on their own. Put them together and you’ve got your work cut out for you. The artist/fan relationship is the lynch-pin in today’s music marketplace and that relationship also takes a lot of time and energy to maintain, let alone grow. As much as you might want it to be ‘all about the music’ there are many other responsibilities vying for your attention. One artist who has learned this lesson – and who has experienced its sacrifices and rewards – is Imogen Heap.

An article called The New Music Business Model: Imogen Heap has been getting a lot of attention lately. Any article with a headline like ‘The New Music Business Model’ is likely to get a lot of attention these days, but this one is worth reading. The author, Colette Weintraub of Deep Dive Marketing, describes the sometimes novel ways Heap utilized technology and fan engagement in the making and marketing of her upcoming album Ellipse.

Imogen Heap wasn’t starting at square one when she began promoting Ellipse – she already had a committed fan base thanks to a host of films and TV shows featuring her music. But with Ellipse Heap has expanded her reach exponentially, and has truly done the bulk of the work herself. She refinanced her house to fund recording, she communicates constantly with her fans, even crowd-sourcing song titles and album artwork, etc.

She does SO much, in fact, that it’s hard to see how she has any time left to create music.

I didn’t really think of it that way until I read a recent Lefsetz post about his reaction to the Weintraub article. Here it is:

I uncovered the essay … delineating everything Imogen had done to sell her new album.

And my first reaction was, is it worth it?

Now the activities took two years to unfold.  But suddenly, you’re no longer a musician, but a personality.  And so much of what Imogen was doing was generating no revenue.  It was all leading up to a single sales event, the ultimate release of an album.  Huh?

He goes on:

Do you have to be a newfangled self-marketer to have success in today’s world?  If that’s what it takes, if you’ve got to do everything Imogen did, how many will say no?  What about practicing, gigging, getting good? … Just about everything Imogen has done here has nothing to do with music … There’s got to be a better way to reach fans.

It was refreshing to see a different perspective on the ‘New Music Business Model’ buzz, and it got me thinking about something I had seen from Heap herself a few days before the Lefsetz post. In responding to one of her followers on Twitter, Heap indicated that she was feeling the strain the process was putting on her. The DIY model that she had embraced was leaving precious little time for what she loves most: music. You can read her updates in the screenshots below.

Building a successful career in music on your own terms and with your own two hands is a difficult task, more akin to the life of an entrepreneur than to the iconic lifestyle of a rockstar. You’re the CEO, the content creator and PR coordinator all rolled into one overworked and (usually very) underpaid package. It’s not for everybody. Not everyone is going to enjoy that kind of lifestyle, and let’s not kid ourselves – not everyone is cut out for it.

I appreciate all of the excitement Imogen Heap’s story has been generating recently, and I hope that her new album launches to enormous returns. It’s great to have such a compelling example of DIY success. Those who do choose to go for it would be wise to study her experiences.

That, and after following Imogen for while now on Twitter and in the media I can’t help but root for her. I suppose that means that what she’s been doing for the past two years is working.

Photo by Jeremy Cowart.

I stumbled on an interesting animation that attempts to explain the United States’ ongoing credit crisis in easily understood terms. It’s a great video, which you can see in its entirety here.

At a certain point in the video the narrator begins to explain the problem of sub-prime mortgages. Basically, the banks and investors were getting so rich buying and selling huge groups of mortgages that they began running out of qualified home buyers. But the scheme was working so well that they weren’t willing to give it up. Banks began giving out mortgages to unqualified buyers without any of the safeguards they used to require – down payments, good credit, etc. Meanwhile, house prices continued to rise. Eventually, these unqualified home buyers ended up getting in way over their heads and couldn’t repay their loans which resulted in a huge number of foreclosures. The bank’s revenue dried up, investors weren’t paid back and eventually everybody was so broke that no one could get a loan. A vicious cycle was born.

The video explains the situation much better than I, but you get the idea. As I listened to all of this I was struck by the parallels that can be found with the current state of the music industry.

Think about it:

For years the recording industry was getting rich selling vinyl and later CD’s. The business was so lucrative that eventually they began to run out of quality acts, but CD sales had to keep rising. So they begin to take middle of the road talent (or simply manufacture their own) and hype it so big that it had to sell. Eventually these acts fizzled out or listeners simply moved on and more and more acts had to replace them. Meanwhile, the price of CD’s kept on climbing higher and higher. Before long the listeners realized that they were paying way too much for way too little and began searching for cheaper ways to get better music. File sharing takes off and CD sales plummet.

Of course, instead of recognizing the root issues at the heart of the new ‘crisis,’ the industry retreats deeper into the safe-but-mediocre product it had been pushing for years, and spent the remainder of its resources fighting to bring back the status quo.

Kind of eerie, isn’t it?

Fortunately, this crisis has left a gaping hole for independent artists and entrepreneurs to fill. The same innovations that sent the old guard into a tailspin have given resourceful indies a powerful boost to find an audience on their own. There are likely similar potential opportunities waiting to be seized as a result of the nation’s credit crunch. That’s the great thing about crises – whether credit, music or whatever else – they have a way of deconstructing old boundaries and setting the stage for incredible progress.