Before I get to naming the winners of the first-ever Hypebot Hit Song Contest, I wanted to thank everyone who took the time to participate in the competition. Even those who clearly didn't read the rules or follow them. The rest of you though had some great entries and insightful takes on the song.

Bruce and I, in collaboration with the sponsors of the contest, have chosen the winners. Based on my personal experience with trying to narrow down the contest finalists, I have to say that it was a tough call. Being that I expressed from the start that we were hoping to cultivate the most stereotypical hit song possible, I tried to use that mantra to guide my voting decisions.

Yet, there were a number of entries that went completely outside of that mold. Therefore, I tried to take them into consideration too for their innovativeness.

Overall, as I'm sure Bruce could relate, choosing between the top four songs and granting one the grand prize took some time. However, after several listens and sessions of pondering, I'm confident that the right winners have been picked. So, without further delay, here is a look at the winners of the contest:  

The Grand Prize Winner:

Love Gonna Stop by mattodowd

The Three Runner-Ups:

Break the love by Grizla Stephen Frost - My Hands Gonna Touch This by stephenfrost Had Enough Tonight by Triangle Exception

The runner-ups are in no particular order. To claim your prizes, please get in touch at this address: kyle.bylinATgmail.com. As well, I will be reaching out to the winners who don't touch base. Late entries into the contest did get last minute consideration, but ending up not affecting the final results.

A Final Thank You To Our Amazing Sponsors:

• Berkleemusic: leading music and record industry education.
  
• ReverbNation: an online indie music marketing hub.
• Jay Frank: author of FutureHit DNA. 
  
• SoundCloud: an online audio platform.
  
• Sonicbids: digital press kit provider.
  
• Music Power Network: an online community and industry network.
• Berklee Press: the publishing company behind Berklee.
  
• Bandzoogle: an online website management platform.
• Tunecore: a digital music distributor.

Yesterday Google announced Instant which speeds up its already fast results by predicting your search as you type. To demonstrate the new feature, which will roll out in the coming weeks, Googles used the famous video for Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," combining his flash cards with phrases from the song with Instant search results of the lyrics.

Watch Google Instant Take On Bob Dylan

At age 35, Stone Sour and Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor is old enough to long for the days when the liner notes of an album where like the holy grail to music fans. Like him, I remember studying their contents for hours and reading through the acknowledgements section. It’s interesting to me though, because I recall always having an affinity for those that contained the song lyrics and being frustrated when artists chose not to include them.

I mean, this really wasn’t all that long ago when the only place, beyond tablature books, to find the words to your favorite songs was in that little booklet. To gain access to them, you had to buy the album and hope that they were included.

Now, lyrics are ubiquitous. Rather being connected to the artist and the artwork supplied with the album—that you held in your hand and looked though as you listened to the album—lyrics are now freed from the constraints of yesteryear.

This is, of course, a great thing. But lyrics, much like many of the other aspects surrounding the mythology and identity systems of artists have become disconnected from their origins and fragmented throughout the social web.

Though Corey is right to be optimistic about the future of the record industry, he probably won’t be signing ten million copies of his latest album anytime soon.

As well, it would be interesting to get his perspective on the whole “rock is dead” debate and hear him adamantly say that it may not matter what the rock charts say, because his tribe and subsequent culture is still thriving. Here's what he had to say about albums and the future of the record industry:

The way we (Stone Sour) looked at Audio Secrecy was, "What if this is the last album to ever get released by a band? What would you want to do with it?" Because in this era of zip drives and memory sticks, there's no guarantee you'll be able to release another physical album... 

I can remember waiting in line to buy Iron Maiden and Metallica tapes and I would study the liner notes. I would read the names of the people they thanked or the little anecdotes and just wonder what they were thinking when they added that. I want to keep that going. I refuse to think that the record industry is dead because I've signed enough copies of my albums to know that people still buy them. (Read the rest.)

Lost in the media coverage that AimeStreet was being been bought and shut down by investor Amazon and that the AmieStreet team's focus was shifting to Songza, was that a slick new version of Songza.com also launched. The new ad supported Songza enables groups to collaborate to create a shared online radio station from a library of 8 million tracks.

The new Songza.com consolidates three streaming services, Songza Sets, Songza Radio, and the original Songza.com incorporating many of their features and members.  The service is currently in beta with mobile and other features to be added in the coming months.

“Much of the joy we get from music comes from how it connects us to the people around us,” said Elias Roman, CEO of Songza. “Songza is unique in making it easy for people to connect using shared, collaborative radio stations. We believe this makes for a far more social and relevant experience than radio based on 'experts' or algorithms analyzing tone and timbre.”

As has been the case for months, Apple, Google and EMI continue to dominate the music industry news and the only common thread seems to be change, change and more change. We're working hard to help you keep on top of it all, but that didn't stop us from having a little fun and naming the winner's in the Hypebot Hit Song Contest.

• MTV may not play that many music videos anymore, but online its still the #1 most visited music destination according to comScore data. It's MTV Music Group family of sites garnered more than 53 million unique visitors in August alone.
• OurStage has raised another $6.2 million in funding according to an SEC filing.
• A roundup of reviews of the new iPod line. (NY Times)

More Music Industry News & Commentary

• Apple says it's relaxing some of its app developer guidelines.
• MTV's 2010 Video Music Awards will utilize Yangaroo's Digital Media Distribution System to distribute nominated music videos submitted for VMA consideration to the voting members throughout the U.S. The VMAs will then use the system to securely distribute the nominated music videos to voting members, allowing them to stream the videos online for review, and vote electronically.
• Klaxons Create The Best Album Cover EVER. (Yahoo!)
• What the launch of Apple's PING means to marketers. (UTalkMarketing)
• Gracenote reaches milestone with 200 billion queries.
• Why albums are released on Tuesday's in the U.S. ? (The Record)
• Even 'Free' Culture Supporters Sometimes Have Difficulty Living Up To Their Own Principles. (TechDirt)
• Quincy Jones: 'I knew how to handle Michael'. An interview with a legend. (Guardian)
• Special Interview with Pete Ganbarg, Executive Vice President of A&R at Atlantic Records. (SU) 
• TuneCore: Apple Does Not Hate Indie Bands, It Just Digs Quality Control. (Mashable)
• A Reprise for Jingles on Madison Avenue: Brands, Agencies Rediscovering Power of Original Tunes in Ad Campaigns. (Adage)
• Music industry lobbyist calls for death penalty for piracy. (BB) 
• 'Cause this is thriller: Left for dead by MTV, music videos rebound on Web. (CanadianPress) 
• Is the music industry broken? An Interview With Scott Cohen of The Orchard. (Music4.5) 

(UPDATED) The Top 20 Concert Tours ranks artists by average box office gross per city and includes the average ticket price for shows in North America. The previous week’s ranking is in parentheses. The list is based on data provided to the trade publication Pollstar by concert promoters and venue managers.

1. (New) Paul McCartney; $4,429,272; $135.18.
2. (1) Eagles; $1,773,932; $104.84.
3. (2) James Taylor / Carole King; $1,378,636; $79.31.
4. (3) Dave Matthews Band; $1,348,430; $53.79.
5. (4) Phish; $1,253,682; $49.82.

6. (5) Michael Buble; $1,094,514; $85.76.
7. (6) Walking With Dinosaurs; $1,005,303; $42.58.
8. (7) Nickelback; $858,957; $61.27.
9. (9) Maxwell / Jill Scott; $680,358; $85.29.
10. (8) Jack Johnson; $663,040; $40.51.
11. (10) Brad Paisley; $638,471; $39.88.
12. (11) Iron Maiden; $636,588; $53.38.
13. (12) Tool; $621,028; $57.86.
14. (13) Tim McGraw; $608,033; $44.23.
15. (14) Brooks & Dunn; $567,142; $43.61.
16. (New) Chayanne; $566,134; $73.26.
17. (15) Justin Bieber; $556,430; $45.99.
18. (16) Star Wars: In Concert; $397,949; $49.95.
19. (17) Sugarland; $372,392; $41.42.
20. (18) Neil Young; $360,477; $126.00.

MySpace has just added a new feature that enables the creation of shared video channel based on vdieo content they’ve created individually or through their network of friends. Powered by Redux, the channel is viewed from the MySpace activity stream and plays videos that the user or a friend has shared, selected as a favorite, uploaded, and rated.

The player shows a real-time stream of MySpace videos based on what their friends are sharing and what’s trending on MySpace. Artists could, for example. share exclusive MySpace Music video content with other MySpace users. 

The new video channel feature also encourages social activity by highlighting next videos coming up, along with comments from friends that scroll. 

And Incorporates Time Into Music Recommendations.

Music recommendation is fairly straightforward, at a time, when our consumption habits clearly aren’t. The general, algorithmic approach takes the stance that users who played a song in accordance with another in high volume will likely enjoy a song that other users have voted as being most-relevant in the progression of the playlist.

Others take song structure and cadence into consideration, while several services attempt to tap the social and human elements of the process, seeking to make their suggestions a little less soulless.  The result is similar, yet gradually diverse evolutions of taste in music. However, we all know that the music that we like isn’t that simple and numbers-orientated.

Adding another facet to music recommendations, the online radio service Last.fm has launched a new data visualization called Listening Clock, which takes into account the quantity and different types of music that you listen to throughout your day. The theory is that certain listeners consume a distinctive variety of music, at different times of the day. Thus, these temporal listening patterns can be used to create a better music recommendation algorithm, one that takes the time of day into consideration. The ultimate goal being to not just suggest the right song, but to be able to queue it up at precisely the right time too.

To make sense of the graphic, the red indicates weekday listening and the green is weekends. The arms on the clock represent the average duration of time that you listen and their length coordinates with how focused your listening is around that time. This is one of many moves among social music discovery services that aim to map songs to how humans actually experience them; it will be interesting to see what’s to come. What other elements, beyond time, do you think should incorporated into music recommendation?

Amazon was an early investor in AmieStreet, Inc. which until today owned AmieStreet.com and still controls Songza.com. That it was decided to shut down AimeStreet, abandon its dynamic pricing model and concentrate on Songza, may say more about the internet giant's music strategy than it does about AmieStreet's business model.

In fact, Amazon's purchase of AmieStreet.com "doesn't change their ownership level of Amie Street, Inc. and therefore of Songza.com," according to AmieStreet Inc.spokesperson Joshua Boltuch. So was AmieStreet a bad idea or did the music industry change directions before it gained traction? "To the extent people are buying music a la carte, variable pricing is a great way to price digital music because it empowers listeners while maximizing sales for artists," replied Boultuch when asked if dynamic pricing of music had a future.

Why concentrate on Songza? 

Because as Boutuch implied, "the extent people are buying music a la carte" is not growing rapidly enough and Songza, at its core, is a social music streaming application. Many believe this is where the music industry is headed and so it's where Apple, Google, Sony and now it appears Amazon are placing their new bets.

In this interview with Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO, he declares that this is “the best time to be in music.” Due to the expansive cultural diversity and explosion of choice, Mothersbaugh relishes in the new media landscape; he thinks that it’s great that artists no longer need the record industry to tell them whether or not they can make music.

Hypebot corespondent Hilke Ros (@hilkeros) had the opportunity to attend Music Hack Day in London this weekend (see his overview here) and sit down with David Haynes of SoundCloud and Paul Lamere of Echonest. In this set of interviews, Haynes and Lamere go over some of the background behind Music Hack Day, their roles in it, and how their companies are affiliated with the event.

Paul Lamere:

Amazon has moved from investor in AmieStreet to owner with an acquisition made public today. But don't expect Amazon to embrace dynamic pricing anytime soon, as the internet giant appears to be shutting the store down. The team will now shift focus to Songza, says Joshua Blotuch of AmieStreet. 

"As of September 22, 2010, all AmieStreet.com pages will be forwarded to Amazon.com and you will no longer be able to use AmieStreet.com or any of its services," read an email sent to users this morning. All active AmieStreet.com customers will receive a $5 credit to the Amazon MP3 store.

The move can only be seen as a failure for dynamic pricing in music.  Under AmieStreet's model, download prices were determined by fan interest rewarding those that discover new music early.  Now the Amie Street, Inc. team will concentrate its efforts on ramping up their social music streaming service, Songza.

Currently in beta, the new Songza.com service gives users the ability to create their own internet radio stations from a library of over 8 million songs and to collaborate on group stations around shared interests. Examples include a Mad Men Tribute station, a Georgia Southern University station, and Yelp's Miami Office station.

Perhaps I'm putting to much on these stats, but what does it say about the hopes for the music industry selling more downloads via its #1 retailer when months from now the number of apps downloaded on iTunes will surpass music downloads?  At the very least, it's a reminder that the inustry needs to more aggressivly embrace alternatives from Google Music to subscritption services like MOG, Spotify and Rdio. But does it say more?

Chart: iTunes Music vs. App Downloads

via Asymco

Last week, TechDirt highlighted this great quote from comic book writer Mark Waid and I hadn't gotten a chance to post about it till now. Waid recently spoke at the Harvey Awards and gave a semi-controversial talk about copyright, the public domain and learning to embrace file sharing. Wanting to further clarify his points and clear up some of the confusion that arose from his statements, Waid took the time to publish a written version of his talk.

Of interest and perhaps one of the most important point he makes is that "culture is more important than copyright." This a stance quite similar to the one that music industry pundit Andrew Dubber has been advocating for quite some time now; a perspective I agree with. Here's Waid at his best:

"Like it or not, downloading is here. Torrents and filesharing are here. That's not going away. I'm not here to attack it or defend it--I'm not going to change anyone's mind either way, and everyone in America at this point has anecdotal evidence "proving" how it hurts or helps the medium--but I am here to say it isn't going away--and fear of it, fear of filesharing, fear of illegal downloading, fear of how the internet changes publishing in the 21st century, that's a legitimate fear, because we're all worried about putting food on the table and leaving a legacy for our children, but we're using our energy on something we can't stop, because filesharing is not going away.

And I'll tell you why. It's not because people "like stealing." It's because the greatest societal change in the last five years is that we are entering an era of sharing. Twitter and YouTube and Facebook--they're all about sharing. Sharing links, sharing photographs, sending some video of some cat doing something stupid--that's the era we're entering. And whether or not you're sharing things that technically aren't yours to share, whether or not you're angry because you see this as a "generation of entitlement," that's not the issue--the issue is, it's happening, and the internet's ability to reward sharing has reignited this concept that the public domain has cultural value. And I understand if you are morally outraged about it and you believe to your core that an entire generation is criminal and they're taking food off your table, I respect that.

But moral outrage is often how we deal with fear. It's a false sense of empowerment in the face of fear." (Read the rest.)

Recently, I spoke with Jared Moya, who describes himself not as a "tech geek," but rather as an "avid fan of the digital revolution and what it's meant for the instant communication of thoughts, information, and culture unencumbered by longtime geographic restraints." He is currently the Chief Editor of ZeroPaid.com.

From your perspective, how would you characterize this dichotomy between the traditional record industry and that of the next music business and their perspectives on embracing new technology? 

Jared Moya: Well, I think the traditional record industry has a great deal at stake in maintaining the sort of physical distribution model that has always been its mainstay. It's long been an industry like any other, producing a product that it counts in units sold much as cereal makers or car manufacturers do, and that's precisely why it's in its current predicament.

I liken the new paradigm in music distribution to what we currently see with Blockbuster Inc. vs Redbox and Netflix. Blockbuster can't fully embrace digital content streaming or other ease of access delivery systems because it then makes its core business model - physical retail - irrelevant.

The same is true with the music business. If the traditional record industry fully embraced digital distribution then its core business model - selling physical units - would slowly become irrelevant. It has an inherent economic stake in slowing the hands of time. That's why it fought, and continues to fight, the creation of new digital delivery services by demanding huge upfront fees from those trying to innovate.

In contrast, the "next" music business, or the "new thing" that will eventually replace the current business model, sees digital distribution as an opportunity to take advantage of rather than a threat. It only sees limitless possibilities.

How great of an impact will the record industry's attitude toward technology have on the new digital ecology? Are they hindering the development of the culture that at this point, may be their only savior?

Jared Moya: It has a tremendous impact. Instead of being the one leading or guiding the industry towards a technology that it would stand most to benefit from, it's instead trying to retard its development or artificially mold it through legislation or ISP-level cooperation, something we've seen take place around the globe in places like South Korea, France, the UK, and currently in New Zealand.

In the meantime others are being allowed to define its transformation, be it via P2P, new ad-supported music services like the Sweden-based Spotify or the UK-based We7, or causal streaming outlets like Pandora or Last.fm, the latter option having grown increasingly popular among teens with tight budgets, especially in the UK.

Why? It fears losing relevancy. It can't bear the thought of encouraging a new digital ecology that could very well spell the end of an industry that still centers around a physical ecology mindset. 

Kyle Bylin: The great paradox, as Shirky views it, is that, "people committed to solving a particular problem also commit themselves to maintaining that problem in order to keep their solution viable." Thus, he argues that we "can't ask people running traditional systems to evaluate a new technology for its radical benefits; people committed to keeping the current system will tend, as a group, to have trouble seeing any value in anything disruptive."

What ways does this paradox factor into the traditional record industry's attitude toward new technology and have they had trouble seeing value in anything that potentially disrupts their core-business model?

It's as I said before, its reminiscent of Blockbuster Inc. vs Redbox and Netflix. The traditional record industry knows that if it sheds the physical distribution model that its spent decades worth of time and money perfecting it will be no match for its better positioned rivals in the digital distribution business. It certainly can't rival Apple's iTunes (i.e. Netflix in the case of Blockbuster Inc.) with one exception - the catalog of music it owns.

This inability to see anything of value in digital distribution is why we've seen very little, if any, innovative new digital services produced by the the traditional record industry.

How might the traditional record industry be better off if they let any would be revolutionary try anything they like with new technology? Are there other ways in which the industry might actually be worse off?

 

Jared Moya: I think that allowing "any would be revolutionary" to take copyrighted music and meld it with new technology, be it with delivery systems or with creative output forms like mashups, will by in large always be a good thing. It encourages people to be excited about music, and to become more frequent and larger consumers of music in an increasingly crowded entertainment marketplace.

The only way I could think of the industry being worse off is if this experimentation leads to a new form of music consumption that it refuses to embrace. The movie industry fought DVDs early on, but later came to count on them for providing as much as 68% of its global film profits.

For the week ending Sept. 6, 2010:

Top 10 Singles:
1. "Teenage Dream," Katy Perry
2. "Just the Way You Are," Bruno Mars
3. "Dynamite," Taio Cruz
4. "Love the Way You Lie," Eminem
5. "DJ Got Us Fallin' In Love," Usher
6. "I Like It," Enrique Iglesias
7. "Just a Dream," Nelly
8. "Take It Off," Ke$ha
9. "Mine," Taylor Swift
10. "Magic (feat. Rivers Cuomo)," B.o.B

Top 10 Albums:

1. "Asylum," Disturbed
2. "Teenage Dream," Katy Perry
3. "Recovery," Eminem
4. "Something for the Rest of Us," Goo Goo Dolls
5. "The Suburbs," Arcade Fire
6. "Sigh No More," Mumford & Sons
7. "Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam (Soundtrack)
8. "Be My Thrill," The Weepies
9. "God Willin' & the Creek Don't Rise," Ray LaMontagne
10. "Junky Star," Ryan Bingham

As you can see, we fixed our problem with half the text on the blog displaying in bold. Oh the joys of HTML...  Today's top story is about AmieStreet shutting down, but the real story may be what it says about where investor Amazon thinks music is headed.

• 3% of all Twitter traffic is about Justin Beiber according to one source. (Gizmodo)
• Web Faceoff: Ping vs. MySpace (Mashable) Do you think Ping is a MySpace killer?
• Inside this week's massive European Warez Piracy Raids. (TorrentFreak)

More Music Industry news & Commentary

• AOL Names Ex-William Morris Head Wiatt As Strategic Consultant (PaidContet)
• Citigroup tricked us into buying EMI, claims Terra Firma - Guy Hands's private equity firm alleges fraud over purchase of the debt-laden label. (Guardian)
• Unhappy iTunes 10 Users Fix The Interface Themselves. (NPR)
• OK Go has partnered with Indaba Music and the Rock Band Network to launch a remix contest for their new single, "White Knuckles."
• New web-based application, Beatlab, enables users to create music with just an internet connection and a mouse. Original beats can be made with just a few clicks of the mouse on the grid and shared  via Facebook.
• Vivendi Universal CEO Jean-Bernard Levy will be the opening day keynote at MidemNet 2011.
• Glee Cast Members Claim They're Being Stiffed On Royalties From Glee CD. (Techdirt)
• Rock anthems vanishing from chart: The number of rock hits appearing in the UK singles chart has shrunk this year, according to figures from the Official Charts Company. (BBC)
• Ping: why all the fuss? No one I know uses iTunes any more. (Telegraph)
• The importance of David Bowie. (FT)
• The Reconfigurable Culture of Contemporary Music: An Interview with Aram Sinnreich (Part One)
• Copyright Is Complicated. (HuffPost)
• Why does Steve Jobs play fast and loose with iPod touch sales numbers? (CNN)
• 4 Strategies To Kickstart The Music Biz. (Billboard)

Chances are, blank media costs less than your album. What now?

Rarely, do I get a chance to listen to an album all the way through. Writing requires different type of background ambiance; almost familiar, yet not too overwhelming. Therefore, most of the time, when I write, I either listen to streams or non-disruptive titles. Some whole albums are my writing albums, but not many can fill that role; it calls for a certain group of songs and they are always changing. This weekend was different. I had planned to make a trip across state over the holiday and thought this would be the perfect time to catch up on my listening.

Since I’ve  decided to go without an iPod, for now, this meant that I would need to burn a number of my digital files onto discs. To my memory, I haven’t bought blank media since high-school. So, I meandered into Wal-Mart and went looking for a small packet of discs that would suffice for the task at hand. Back in electronics, I found what I came for and proceeded to the checkout. As the clerk rang up my thirty-pack of discs, I confessed that I was slightly confused about the price that came out: $10.18. That seemed about right, but I told him that I had come across a pack of fifty discs that were about $2 cheaper than that. I asked what the difference was between the two sets. Unsure, he and I walked back to the aisle. After a quick glance, he told me that the pack of fifty discs, same brand and everything, had been marked down. I swapped out for higher quantity set—that I didn’t need—and now my total dropped to $7.84. Perplexed as I walked towards the exit, I started to wonder as to what message this would send to someone else and how such a relatively cheap resource could be exploited.

What message do you think this sends fans?
Your CD=$10-15 VS. A 50 Pack Of Blank Media=$8

Now, I understand that artists have used this strategy in the past and uploaded cheeky YouTube videos that encouraged their fans to become small-time music distribution centers for their albums. However, I’m curious to hear your ideas on how artists have and can use the falling costs of blank media to their advantage.

How could you encourage your fans to put the love and energy they have for your music and creatively convince them to burn upwards of fifty copies of your album and personally hand them to their friends?

-Kyle Bylin

(That You Didn’t Want To Know)

With Apple’s big announcement last week that iTunes will now be integrated with a social network -- based around music discovery -- called Ping, its worth reflecting on why, as cool as it sounds, that it may not be the best thing that ever happened to your life.

To review, Ping is like Twitter for music but with a Facebook-style newsfeed. Basically, you can follow and be followed by your friends and Ping will record the latest activity in your buying and listening habits, as well as, what events your attending and the artists that you have decided to follow, comment on, and do status updates about.

Music is a large part of the human experience and psychologists have been saying for years that our taste in music reveals quite a bit about who we are and how we want the world to perceive us. Much more than we would often think we are disclosing when we do something as simple as listing our favorite bands on Facebook or MySpace.

On that note, here’s a quick look at five traits and things that Ping could reveal about friends or yourself—that everyone may wish that they hadn’t made public.

1. Awful Taste In Music: Let’s be honest here. Maybe when it comes to looks you’re not that shallow, but if your girlfriend-to-be starts going on a Backstreet Boy or Spice Girls downloading spree. You might just consider running for your life and never talk to them again. Her looks, if you’re a Wall Street trader, those can be adjusted. But you’re stuck with her affinity for Justin Timberlake for the rest of your life. Imagine, the respect you have for your friends now verses the kind of respect that you won’t have for them ever again once you encounter their week-long, cringe-worthy listening marathon through Top 40’s finest. As the songs parade through your Ping newsfeed like a angry moms looking for Zhu Zhu Pets in Target, suddenly you find yourself rampantly deleting the friends in question or blocking the girlfriend of your dreams—forever.
   
   
2. Break-Up Music Blues: It’s a fact of life, one day a friend of yours, or more likely: yourself,  is going to get broken up with and you’re going to have to help pick up the shattered pieces of their heart and listen on and on about how they lost “the one.”  After awhile though, you would much rather strangle them to death than hear another word about this self-inflicted tragedy. Couple weeks go by and you have been missing their calls, keeping yourself busy, and suddenly you miss your bloody-murder-screaming, I-hate-her-more-than-I’ve-hated-another-human-being friend; so you reach out and meet up. To your surprise, they claim to be happier than they’ve ever been and that things have never been better. Crazy how much three months can blunt the blow of a personal crisis. Later that night, you log onto Ping and see what music they have been listening to and it looks like they’re on suicide watch. Nine Inch Nails “Hurt”, Eminem “Superman”, and Metallica “One” are the only songs they have been listening to—for the last fifteen days. They lied.
   
   
3. Songs Speak Louder Than Words: In your early-twenties especially, friends are getting hitched left and right, and  bachelorette parties happen. But maybe, just maybe girls, your husband or mom don’t want to see your 2am Facebook drunk updates in sequence with your 4am purchase of “I Kissed A Girl” by Katy Perry. We get that you liked it, but they didn’t need to know. Another version of this might be that really nice, but slightly misunderstood guy from school or work that you just made friends with, who ‘Pinged’ you and has had Rage Against The Machine’s cover of “How I Could Just Kill A Man” and Limp Bizkit’s “Break Stuff” on blast for the last week. Day or two later, you notice that they’ve listed a number of their things—meaning all of them—for sale on Facebook Marketplace. Awesome. Either way, you’re going to be really, really nice to them or you’re just going to call in sick and let things work themselves out naturally.
   
   
4. The Guilty Pleasure: Back in the day, you could go to the record store half-way across town, where no one was likely to run into you or spot you as a regular and indulge your music sweet tooth. Whether that was German Techno for the Death Metal Head or some Garth Brooks “Friends In Low Places” for the Hip-hop aficionado, your secret was safe with the stone-cold stoned clerk who smirked as you walked out the front. HardcoreInsaneClownPosseFan69 is going to have a hard time explaining to his fellow “Juggalos” and “Juggalettes” why thirty-five minutes ago he purchased Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream and Lady Gaga’s Fame Monster in one fell swoop. Likewise, the next time that Nickelback is in town maybe you shouldn't instantly mark your attendance and comment OMG! OMG! on the event wall; your punk friends will disown you and go back to their Bad Religion listening selves before you can explain your moment of weakness.
   
   
5. The Copycat and The Snob: Everyone has that friend that likes everything that you like and wears the exact same band shirts and listens to the same songs that you've been pumping on your social networks. Okay, maybe they're not your friend anymore once you went to court and got a restraining order on them. But, not all of those friends can be dealt with in the same way that America deals with bad marriages. You thought it was crossing the line when they copied your favorite tie at work and bought the exact same shoes as you. Wait till they follow you on Ping and buy every single song that you buy. Creeper. Worse yet, there's the never helpful and always nose-in-the-air-at-your-latest-favorite-band music snob. Ping will be an opportunity to see their fickleness in action. If two of your friends start listening to their newest obscure man-crush, you better believe they will consider that band to have gone mainstream and ditch them in an instant. Never one to be loyal, the music snob embraces ambiguous music and then trashes it the next day.

This post is part of the How To Launch a Music Startup series by Brenden Mulligan, which focuses on building a company that creates online products for musicians. Mulligan founded ArtistData, which was recently acquired by Sonicbids, and can be found on Twitter at @bmull.

As mentioned in the previous post, I'm going to start out this series establishing key metrics to think about when building a music startup. The first of our three integral metrics is market size.

  The question "how many artists are there" is often debated. I've gone over it time and time again over the past few years and the truth is, there's no exact way to tell. People are starting to play music every day. Bands are forming. Bands are breaking up. It's an ever fluctuating number, so my strategy was to make a logical guess that I felt like I could back up.

Before picking a number, I thought "what type of musicians am I defining?" Am I looking at any human who is playing an instrument? Or just people who want to make it their career? Or just musicians who tour? This is where the subtleties of your product's vision can come in, but I generally define my target market as musicians who are serious enough about music to consider paying for a service that will help them build a music-focused career.

Then I moved to looking at numbers claimed by services and products that serve the needs of the artist market. This was tricky because each service I looked at had to be weighed:

• MySpace claims something like 13 million artists, but we all have seen "artist" pages for restaurant, companies, etc... And it's free. So that number is way out of proportion with reality.
• Reverbnation claims 810,000+ bands. That sounds a lot more reasonable. But again, this is a free service that no one needs to cancel if their band breaks up. So it's probably a bit high as well. Plus, they might consider every member of the band an artist, so if a band has 4 members, that's 4 artists.
• Sonicbids has around 250,000 registered artists. It's typical that Sonicbids would have a smaller number because they don't offer a free service. So Sonicbids' number is lower than the real market size.
• Yahoo Music has about 500,000 artist pages, but that number is low because indie artists can't create their own profiles there. At the same time, it's high because they list a lot of legacy acts that aren't still active.
• CD Baby claims 230,000 artists, which is a great metric because these are bands selling albums through their service, so you know they are motivated to pay for a service to move their career forward. But these are only indie artists, so they're missing a big chunk.
• Next Big Sound tracks 720,000+ artist profiles. They key word here is "profiles", so if an artist has 10 profiles, they count 10, not 1. Plus, they are most definitely grabbing band pages of acts that are no longer active.
• Bandcamp's full artist index lists about 484 bands per page and has 109 pages, which puts their community above 50,000 bands.
• Services similar to ArtistData and Bandzoogle are all in the 5,000 - 35,000 range. These are just smaller companies, and I didn't think were relevant for this number.

In the end, it's a judgement call. The way I've always described it is a lot less than MySpace but plenty more than Sonicbids and CD Baby. So the number I chose, and have always used for this, is 500,000. I believe that there are at most, 500,000 relevant artists who could potentially find a internet service valuable enough to pay for. And since these services generally don't geographically discriminate, that's the worldwide market potential.

I know, some might think that's really low, and others may think it's way too high. Well, you might be right, but this is where I ended up and I think it's both reasonable and justifiable. And to be honest, I ran this number by people doing similar analysis at much larger companies, including MySpace and Yahoo Music. We all thought it was reasonable when we discussed it.

The problem with this number is that in the grand scheme, it's tiny. Even if you double it, it's still a very small total available market (TAM). When investors want to see market sizes, most want to see the TAM in the tens to hundreds of millions. They want to know there are tons and tons of potential customers and as the product improves and the footprint widens, the site will grow exponentially to millions of people. The artist market isn't attractive to most investors.

Unless, of course, that small niche market has a high willingness to pay.

We will cover that in the next post. Until then, I'd love to know your comments about the reasonability of this market size analysis. Pass this around to people, and let's get some good conversation going around this number. Tear it apart, only if you build it back up.

Previous Post In Series: Establishing Key Metrics.

Along with the iTunes 10 upgrade came a new logo. Perhaps it was time to replace a logo that channeled the  CD format that it was making obsolete. But many believe that Apple should have found a more creative replacement. Joshua Kopac, a designer for ad firm ValuLeads actually sent Steve Jobs a message: "Enjoyed the presentation today. But … this new iTunes logo really sucks. You’re taking 10+ years of instant product recognition and replacing it with an unknown. Let’s both cross our fingers on this….". To which Jobs, in typical fashion, replied "We disagree."

  VOTE: What Do You Think Of The New iTune's Logo?

 

Online Surveys & Market Research

 

(UPDATE)  In this TED talk, Dan Colbey, appointed director of marketing at Google for central and northern Europe, instructs us, and musicians included, what physics can teach us about marketing. His first point highlights the connection between Newton’s Law and branding. To which he explains that, “The more massive a brand, the more baggage it has, the more force is needed to change its positioning.”

This post is from Hilke Ros (@hilkeros) at Motion Music Manager.

Last Saturday, the 8th Music Hack Day kicked off in London. Music Hack Day is a gathering of software developers and coders working on music related projects. Since July 2009 all the smartest minds in music technology come together to hack on small projects that might determine the future of music on the internet. They tap into the API platforms of services such as Last.fm, Soundcloud and The Echonest to make new interesting mash-ups.

The meeting started with presentations of the services and APIs of some of the biggest players in the field. Among them were representatives of Soundcloud, Songkick, 7digital, Last.fm, The Echo Nest, the BBC and British telecom operator O2.

One of the major announcements was the availability of playlists in The Echo Nest API. This basically means that you can create playlists based upon all Echo Nest data, both on the artist and on the song level.

The Echo Nest gathers all sort of data about music. They crawl the web for blog posts, reviews, biographies etc. on artists and songs. They also analyze the music with regard to tempo, key, time signature, etc. With the recently added playlist features you can now create very specific playlist, such as a radio playlist for Weezer, with tracks similar to Weezer but which never plays tracks by Muse, or a 20 song playlist of popular music from diva's in he 70s sorted by increasing tempo.

Earlier this week The Echo Nest announced the integration of their platform with the API from digital distributor 7Digital. This means that 7digital song IDs are now integrated into The Echo Nest's API and that you can retrieve an Echo Nest audio analysis of any 7digital track.

The Echo Nest does't offer any consumer oriented services. Their enormous database can be retrieved by companies and developers to create their own consumer apps.

At the end of the weekend about 60 hacker teams demoed their 24 hour creation. Speakatron and Earthdistroyers won the prizes of main sponsor O2. The hilarious Speakatron is a program that looks at you through your web cam and plays a sound when you open your mouth. Earth Destroyers will show you the eco-friendliness of a band's touring schedule. Other promising hacks were Gowalla for Soundcloud (check in with Gowalla to a particular venue and get a free SoundCloud stream/download), I was there (make a custom t-shirt with all the gigs that you went to) and Auto Score Tubing (find a great musical performance on YouTube and synchronize it automatically with  a music score).

There is a nice overview of all the hacks on Indie Music Tech or you can go directly to the wiki of the Music Hack Day.

Two trailers for the new "Rock Band" featuring the new keyboard is out, and it includes the east from Tears For Fears, Ida Maria, Them Crooked Vultures and Huey Lewis & The News.

Watch 2 New "Rock Band" Trailers

 

 

 

First, we apologize for all of the bold articles and headlines on the site. Things went wacky this morning; and while its still all very readable, we're working to fix it. Over the long holiday weekend, there were a couple of stories worth catching up on: Apple says 1 million people signed up for Ping in 24 hours and Eminem's camp one a court battle vs. UMG over download royalties that could, if it stands up to appeal, have a lasting impact on the industry. And REWIND will give you a quick look at last week's top stories.

• The People's Music Store to shut down this Friday. (Music Ally)
• It's time to vote for the annual BT Digital Music Awards.
• Social Networking Goes International - A look at the top social networks in each of the top five countries as measured by internet usage. (Brent C Sutorus)

More Music Industry News & Commentary:

• Google to simplify it's privacy policies. (NYT Bits)
• The "Sound Opinions" Guys on Why Artists Should Make Money off Plumbing, Not Recorded Music. (SeattleWeekly)
• Die-Hard Fans Follow Iron Maiden Into the Digital Age. (NYT) 
• 25 Essential Social Media Resources You May Have Missed. (Mashable)
• Contest Alert: Sonicbids Gets Stupid with Diesel:U:Music
• Three start-ups that are changing the music industry. (Telegraph)
• Could put.io, a new cloud storage system, spark off a showdown between Hollywood and online pirates? (Telegraph)
• Investors Squeamish About Third-Party Twitter Apps including stats. (Mashable)
• ISP Hits Back At U2 Manager’s Billion Dollar Piracy Bonanza Claims (TorrentFreak)

"I don't want to hear some guy chomping on a cigar in Beverly Hills telling me it's all gone pear-shaped. The people who invented the paradigm and were trusted to run it let it run afoul. We have to fix it...There are going to be far fewer skyscrapers in the music business and many, many more squat buildings that are filled with purpose."

- Jeff Castalez, co-owner Dangerbird Records

iTune's new social network Ping is drawing a lot of criticism for its lack of connectivity to other networks (Facebook shut Ping out) and a profile system that limits access for many indie artists. Still, less than 48 hours since its launch on Wednesday, more than one million users had joined Ping, according to Apple.

“One-third of the people who have downloaded iTunes 10 have joined Ping,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of Internet Services. “As many more people download iTunes 10 in the coming weeks, we expect the Ping community to continue growing.”

A Federal Appeals court in San Francisco has ruled that songs downloaded from iTunes and other digital retailers are not actually purchased, but instead licensed by the buyer.  The decision involving rapper Eminem's earlier recordings is a blow to labels and could mean a jump in revenue for older artists.

Under most older recording contracts, artists get 50% of revenue from licensed uses of their music which was originally intended to include movies, TV and advertising.  Full music sales, on the other hand, reap just 8-18% for most artists. According to the Ninth Circuit court, even DRM free downloads are encumbered by enough restrictions that they should not be considered sales. Most newer contracts address the issue differently.

But Universal will fight the ruling. “We will be filing a petition for a rehearing,” UMG told the WSJ. “In the meantime, it should be noted that this ruling sets no legal precedent as it only concerns the language of one specific recording agreement. Any assertion to the contrary is simply not true.”