Decibel: Music Metadata On Steroids

Could More Info Mean More Music Discovery?

Remember pouring over album liner notes to learn who played that great sax solo on the new Stones album?  OK maybe you're too young for that, but there have probably been times when you wanted to learn more about the track you were listening to.

New startup Decibel trys to solve that problem by replacing the usual title, album cover art, artist name, and track length with 150 fields of metadata including things like bacgkorund singers, genre, and production assistants.  With the data Decibel can also offer sophisticated music discovery service that relating tracks "three dimensionally" rather than  just by artist, genre or beats.

How to Turn Your Songs into Opportunity Magnets – For Free

by Mike McCready

Those of you who know me probably know I’ve been working for years trying to solve the quality music filtering problem. There is just so much talent and so many songs already out there (and millions more being created each year) that it can’t all be evaluated for commercial deals the way it should be.

What I’ve learned is that nothing replaces the expert human ear when it comes to A&R. However, technology has emerged that can enhance the music industry’s human skills in much the same way a medical doctor’s skills are enhanced by the X-ray machine and other modernities. The X-ray machine doesn’t do the job of the doctor. It just gives the doctor additional information upon which better decisions can be made. Today, no one would consider seeing a doctor who doesn’t use state of the art technology.

So whether it has been using computers to help predict hit songs or developing an A&R platform that harnesses state-of-the-art technology to help the industry perform better, solving the music filtering problem has been my passion for a long time.

I’ve been thinking about a clever way to describe Music Xray’s new Song to Opportunity (S₂O) Matching system and the best way I’ve come up with (so far) is that:

It turns your songs into opportunity magnets.

Or maybe it’s the match.com for songs and opportunities to find each other.

Maybe it’s the Pandora for A&R…

However we describe it, I think it’s pretty cool. You upload your songs for free and then sit back and wait to be alerted when an industry professional is seeking a song like yours. Give it a shot. The more songs you upload the more alerts you will get.

Here’s how it works:

1. Some of the hundreds of music industry professionals who use Music Xray to find songs and acts have given us a few “seed” songs. That is, songs that have a musical style and sound similar to what they would like to have submitted to them. For example, if they are seeking a new single for Britney Spears they might give us a few of her songs plus an additional song in the style and sound they are seeking.

2. Music Xray uses software to analyze the acoustic properties and underlying mathematical patterns of the “seed” songs and compares them to those in songs that have been uploaded for free into the company’s system by artists and rights holders.

3. Music Xray notifies the artists when there is a match between what professionals are seeking and the artists’ songs.

We’re not making any formal announcements nor really talking much about this while the service is in beta. Nevertheless, we’re thrilled that Music Xray is pushing the envelope. It’s the first enhanced A&R platform in the world. It harnesses cutting edge technology to enable the industry to filter through large quantities of music to find the most appropriate songs for each opportunity.

This is A&R on steroids.

Collecting In The Age Of Streaming Music

Pandora Presents Emerging Problem for Broadcast Radio

Of streamies -- those who listen to Internet radio -- nearly four in 10 (37 percent) tune in Pandora. Among the long list of streaming radio stations that respondents could choose from, Pandora is the clear favorite, showing a strong four-year listening trend.

Pandora also has momentum. Of those who listen, 43 percent say they are tuning in more often, while 15 percent already listen frequently. Owners of iPhones, Androids and BlackBerry devices are listening to Pandora more frequently.

Pandora compares very well to terrestrial music stations. More than half of those who listen to Pandora (55 percent) say that it is better than most commercial radio music stations, while only 5 percent say it is worse. Of those who listen, 37 percent have no complaints, but 25 percent say the service does not allow them to skip enough songs.

Jacobs Media's Technology Web Survey VI was conducted mid-February/early March 2010.

Pandora and Facebook get social music right

by David Harrell

The fact that Pandora (along with other Internet radio stations) pays out a large percentage of its revenues for royalties to BMI, ASCAP, and Soundexchange isn't news. But something really struck me about this bit in the Wall Street Journal's weekend magazine piece on Pandora founder Tim Westergren:

      Almost 70 percent of our revenue is paid to royalties. In most businesses, as you get bigger, you get advantages of        scale. Things get cheaper by the pound, cheaper by the minute. But that's not true in our case. It's the same price

"Almost 70 percent" is nearly the same amount as the 70 cents that Apple pays labels for 99-cent downloads from the iTunes store. Which, as Apple has long claimed, is pretty much run on a breakeven basis. While some have questioned that assertion, because Apple makes such a healthy margin on iPods and iPhones, it could certainly afford to run the iTunes store for minimal profit. Or even, perhaps, at a small loss. Ditto for Amazon and its mp3 store, which pays a similar percentage to labels for the digital downloads it sells. Amazon has long been willing to sell content at a loss to establish itself as a market leader, as shown by the $9.99 pricing of digital books for its Kindle reader.

Despite not having a high-margin physical product, Pandora has been in the news because of its first-ever profitable quarter -- and rumors that it will purse an IPO. It's certainly possible, of course, that with new products, services, or tweaks to its business model, that Pandora will grow its profit margin. But without changes to how content providers (labels, artists, and publishing firms) are compensated, there are definite limits to the ultimate profitability of any music streaming business.

Zimbalam’s Digital Music Distribution Service Launches in North America

March 15th, 2010

Zimbalam, the largest digital music distribution and marketing network, today announced the launch of the US version of its distribution network. Zimbalam, owned by independent music distributor and service provider Believe Digital, provides artists with access to 25 of the most popular music stores such as iTunes and Spotify and unprecedented global reach through several hundred additional stores worldwide.

Zimbalam delivers transparency and marketing control to artists with real-time daily sales data, CRM tools such as email newsletters and social networking promotional widgets. Zimbalam’s widgets make global marketing easy by automatically detecting a person’s location and then promoting to the most popular music stores for that region.

To maximize artist revenues, Zimbalam simply charges an industry-low annual fee so artists can keep 100% of royalties. Zimbalam’s nominal fee is $29.99 in year one then $19.98 per year after for an EP or album. Once the fee is recouped, artists keep 100% of royalties generated from sales. After the initial year, artists are only charged if they have sold enough music to cover the low fees, essentially eliminating financial risk.

To celebrate the South by Southwest (SXSW.com) festival, Zimbalam is offering a special rate through the end of March, with distribution of the first album at a reduced rate of $5.99. Artists taking advantage of the special rate can effectively start making money after only one album is sold. Artists can take advantage of this offer by using the code SXSW when signing up at www.zimbalam.com.

“With Zimbalam, our goal is to bring the largest distribution network, the strongest marketing tool set and the greatest revenue potential, all at the lowest price point, to the US independent music community,” said Believe Digital and Zimbalam CEO Denis Ladegaillerie. “We want to make sure that independent artists have the chance to not just realize the best business opportunities, but also to realize the opportunity to break through on a global basis.”

Bridging the gap between the independent music community and major labels, Zimbalam also gives artists with breakout potential the opportunity to benefit from the A&R team of parent company Believe Digital (www.believedigital.com). Artists with strong performance on the Zimbalam network are assigned a personal A&R manager to provide valuable advice and support on release strategy, marketing and promotion investment and to ensure they are receiving the greatest exposure while maximizing monetization opportunities.

Believe Digital is the largest distributor for independent music community, based on both geographic reach and number of distribution outlets. Founded by top music executives from companies including Vivendi Universal, MP3.com, eMusic, BMG Entertainment and Sony, the company has received support from top VCs XAnge and Ventech. Internationally, Believe is supported by a staff of 70 dedicated employees in six countries across Europe (the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal) and the United States.

Slacker adds stations curated by artists, experts

March 09, 2010 - by Matt Rosoff

I usually think of online radio service Slacker as a direct competitor to Pandora: both offer user-customizable radio stations based around individual tastes, both are available for the iPhone and other mobile platforms, and most important, both are available for free, with optional subscription versions--Slacker Radio Plus and Pandora One--offering additional benefits.

But unlike Pandora, Slacker also has a big investment in more traditional one-to-many Internet radio, with actual humans programming stations or playlists based on particular genres. This is nice if you really don't know what you want, or simply want to be surprised. This week, the company took this programmed radio model another step and introduced stations curated by alternative rock band AFI and hip-hop magazine The Source. In each case, the curators not only pick songs, but record introductory spots or between-song banter. Slacker automatically inserts this material between songs the first time you play a particular track on that radio station, then makes sure you don't hear that same banter again. It's sort of like a podcast, but constantly changing, and with no fixed length.

If neither of these stations appeal to you, stay tuned: Slacker expects to add more stations curated by artists and music publications in the next few months.

The Echo Nest Gets $500,000 Grant From National Science Foundation

The Phase IIB SBIR grants are the result of a  peer review by leading scientists, entrepreneurs and investors, with a focus on the commercial potential of the proposed technology. "With the NSF's help, we are excited to be able to approach  next generation analytics, machine learning and data mining problems that are crucial to understanding music fans and to helping artists find their audience online.” says Dr. Brian Whitman, co-founder of The Echo Nest.

RIAA Tells Fans To Stop Nibbling

March 04, 3020 - Hypebot

In a post on the RIAA blog, VP of Reaserach Joshua P. Friedlander titled "Nobody Stole The Pie" argues that the decline in music sales is like the story of the same name by Sonia Levitin. In it the town of Little Digby annually bakes a giant lollyberry pie.  When one year the celebrated pie is gone, all the townsfolk who had picked away at it bit by bit claim it was “Not I who stole the pie".

"... the top 10 albums in 2009 sold a total of 21 million copies, and the top 10 tracks totaled 36 million paid downloads.  But the top 10 albums in 1999 totaled 55 million in sales ..top sellers fell by more than 50%. 

In the last 10 years, the major record labels’ direct employment in the United States fell from about 25,000 people in 1999 to less than 10,000 today – a drastic reduction of over 60% in people who enable the creation and development of new music."

...So if the investments dry up, and fewer new artists are able to be developed, will filesharers who stole bit by bit look at each other and say it was “Not I” who stole the pie?"

 

The Fate of a Format: Will MusicDNA Catch On?

In contrast, the record tended to resonate more deeply with music fans for the reason that it offered a considerably higher degree of fidelity.  It has been passionately argued that the record contained more natural sounding music — where the warmness of the instruments and voices hadn’t been lost.  Nor had the much finer nuances — such as background noise, minor mistakes, or even the slightest cough — been removed, adding an essence of human touch and imperfection to the format.  There was this distinctive, yet intangible quality surrounding records — that seemed representative of the culmination of artistry and musicianship that bleed into their production.  Their artwork and liner notes garnered identity not only to the music, but to the music fans themselves who preeminently displayed their vast collections.

Despite the presence of these two subtle components: aura and identity, records were replaced by CDs because their inconvenience trumped their fidelity.  This trade-off would happen again once MP3s became widely available, as their ease of use, in the minds of many people, made up for their sheer lack of quality.  Not to mention the fact that for several critical years they could be downloaded for free at a time when most CDs, regardless of the pricing war that occurred, were still considered a relatively expensive commitment for the fans who only wanted access to a couple radio singles.  Then, iTunes and the social phenomenon of the iPod ignited the penchant for the MP3 over the CD among fans and pushed the format back into what technology writer Kevin Manley calls the fidelity belly.

Almost always, he argues, new technologies start out there, and, at the end of their lifecycle, old ones inevitably fall below this threshold.  Once a product or service possesses so little of either convenience or fidelity that consumers are no longer motivated to act, they have fallen into the fidelity belly — where people are no longer excited about them, because, like CDs, they are no longer perceived as needed nor are they deeply loved by fans.  This is the place that Manley, after nearly two decades of writing about the technology sector, named “the no-man’s-land of consumer experience,” once he observed that products or services that only offered so-so fidelity, and were only somewhat convenient, didn’t catch on.  It’s this problem, he argues, that’s drastically hurting CD sales.

MusicDNA, said to be “the successor to the MP3,” is hoped to amend this disconnect between the desires of fans and the record industry’s current offerings by granting owners of the format access to “additional updated content, including lyrics, artwork, tour dates, blog posts, videos, and Twitter feeds.”  Much like the format advancements made by the CD and MP3, the appeal of MusicDNA is based entirely on higher convenience, seeing as all the content that it seeks to make available to fans already exists online, elsewhere.  The idea is that by only allowing purchased versions of the format to be updated, while pirated versions remain static, fans will feel more encouraged to purchase these songs and curb their file-sharing habits.  But, is locking out “pirates” the right strategy to adopt?

II.

Currently, the record industry is structured around a top-down, highly centralized “push” marketing model — where a few key gatekeepers anticipate the demand for their product in the marketplace and finance the production of music from a small number of artists — based upon what they want to sell to music fans, not on what music fans want to buy.  The problem that arises here — if music fans become unsatisfied not only with the product being distributed, but the means through which it is distributed — is that, in times of change, the highly specified, centralized, and restrictive nature of the record industry, and their push systems, prevent them from adapting.  It prevents them from experimenting, improvising, and learning as quickly as possible about the changes in consumer behavior.

In From Push to Pull, John Seely Brown argues that, “Push systems not only inhibit product innovation but — even more important — make it much harder to implement incremental process innovations rapidly.”  He believes, “The next frontier of innovation will require the broader adoption of pull capabilities as well as less reliance on traditional push systems, which, as demand becomes more and more difficult to forecast, increasingly fail to even deliver the efficiency they were designed to promote.”  Over the course of a decade, the record industry’s “push” marketing model, the CD-Release Complex, has severely weakened.  Once fans migrated to the Internet and began discovering music outside of the mediums that major labels used to promote new music, the record industry began to decline.

“For as long as anybody in the business could remember, labels relied on MTV, radio, and record stores for exposure,” Steve Knopper writes in Appetite for Self-Destruction.  “Push the gatekeepers at those place aggressively enough — in some cases, bribe them — and you’ve got a hit.”  But, the “push” mentality of the record industry could not be extended into the digital realm, because all three of these institutions — that they built themselves on the back of — deteriorated in the face of the societal and technological shifts that the Internet brought forth.  With that, the media landscape fractured into niches and it rendered push marketing nearly impossible.  In its place, what the web, the proliferation of digital technologies, and the rise of the networked audience leads to is "pull" marketing.

“Rather than treating producers as passive consumers whose needs can be anticipated and shaped by centralized decision makers, pull models treat people as networked creators even when they actually are customers purchasing goods and services,” Brown explains.  “Pull platforms harness their participants’ passion, commitment, and desire to learn, thereby creating communities that improvise and innovate rapidly.”  Prior to the Internet, music was pushed out through specific delivery mechanisms like radio and MTV wherein the fans on the other end were regarded as passive participants in the process.  Push marketing was something that you did to fans, but it didn’t involve them.  Today, music fans are actively engaged, have the choice to participate, and are “pulled” in directly.

What’s unique about MusicDNA in this respect and the true opportunity that it embodies is that the format’s updatable nature enables “pull mechanisms” to be built within the music itself, rather than existing outside of it.  All of the media surrounding an artist can be leveraged at the point of interaction with the music to encourage the participation of audiences.  It is in this instance that a commercial culture defined by passivity converges with a participatory culture that promotes activity — where all of the conversations that once occurred in the absence of the music become a vital part of its identity and further evolve it as a social object.  In theory, then, the record industry should want to have as many MusicDNA tracks in circulation as possible, to ensure engaged and well-informed fan bases.

So, by only allowing legitimately purchased MusicDNA tracks to be dynamically updated, while unauthorized versions remain static files, what the  record industry is denying itself the is ability to engage with “pirates,” to use these songs as “pull mechanisms,” and to leverage this additional media as marketing designed to convert them into paying customers.  In denying “pirates” convenient access points to their artists marketing efforts all the record industry ensures by doing this is that these fans will remain as passive consumers of music. When instead they could be cultivated into active participants – those more deeply involved in the career of an artist — who are the most likely to want to buy stuff from them.  Even if in the end what they buy is not digital files, but higher priced rarities.

III.

 Making the MusicDNA format widely accessible, low-cost, and dynamically updateable by anyone, of course, is not likely the approach that the record industry will take.  It is intended to be a scarcity in the face of radical abundance – one that is “hoped” to deter piracy and get fans excited about buying music again.  The problem with those claims, though, as author Pip Coburn pointed out in The Change Function, is that, “Sometimes technologists forget just how vast the chasm is between them and real people.”  Further arguing that, “it is real people and not technologists who determine the fate of technologies.”  In that case, what will be a more realistic fate of MusicDNA?  There’s no doubt that it offers convenience, but whether or not is high enough is the big question looming.

Since the MP3 file by default already offers relatively low-fidelity, MusicDNA’s only shot is to be super-convenient, of which digital distribution takes care of in terms of ease of use, but another huge aspect of convenience happens to be cost.  If MusicDNA is more expensive than the standard MP3 by too much than the labels risk putting up a barrier that may leave fans thinking that the added value just isn’t worth the extra cost.  Seeing as most savvy and diehard fans will have taken the effort to seek out the additional content that’s being tied in with MusicDNA, how the format rates in the eyes of casual fans is what matters.  If the appeal isn’t there, it may never leave the fidelity belly, “where neither the convenience nor fidelity is good enough to attract a mass-market audience.”

If that’s the result, a huge opportunity will be lost, and unfortunately, MusicDNA would only serve as an example of how out of touch the record industry is in terms of knowing who their listeners are, let alone knowing what they want.  For far too long, fans have been regarded as passive participants and denied access to the experiences they want, and file-sharers have been ignored and litigated.  When in fact, as William Patry argues, “Copyright owner’s problems are market problems, and they can only be solved by responding to market demands: strong copyright protection cannot make consumers buy things they do not want to buy and, as the RIAA’s ill-conceived, ill-executed, and ill-fated campaign of suing individuals demonstrates, laws cannot stop individuals from file-sharing.”      

This is where the record industry went wrong, in thinking that all “pirates” are created equal and are solely motivated to file-share music because it’s free, not because they are in some way, shape, or form left unsatisfied by the current system.  The means through which fans discover, acquire, and consume have evolved so prominently over the course of the last decade; to the point where it’s hard to imagine that our largely unchanged ecosystem still reflects upon the needs of the fans whose obligation it is to service.  What MusicDNA presents is the chance for the record industry to reach out to file-sharers, engage them with the content surrounding their artists, acquire their e-mails and permission to market, and to finally propose unique propositions and monetize “pirates” as fans.

At present, though, there is no sober reason to think that fans and file-sharers will be motivated to adopt MusicDNA outright, unless the offering is realistically positioned in terms of price and ease of use.  Otherwise, in the fidelity belly it will stay.  In order to avoid this fate, an alternate strategy should be considered: flood the networks.  Make it so file-sharers ought to want MusicDNA — that they go out of their way to ensure they replace their MP3s with it.  Then, activate these files and begin dynamically updating them.  From there on out, connect with pirates and give them reasons to buy.  In 2008 alone, there were 40 billion chances to do just that.  This approach may not ‘save’ the record industry per se, but at least it's better than what they've been doing since the rise of file-sharing.

Home Cooking Is Killing The Restaurant Industry!

February 25, 2010 - by Mike Masnick

For many years, whenever people insisted that the ability to download movies would kill the movie business -- including the box office revenues -- we've made the analogy that just because people can prepare food at home (for much lower cost!) it hasn't changed the fact that sometimes people still go out to dinner. It's an apt analogy. People go out to dinner for a variety of reasons, despite cheaper (and potentially healthier) fare at home. Basically the overall experience makes it worthwhile as a social experience. That applies equally to movies and eating out. I was reminded of this recently. A whole bunch of you sent over Gizmodo's post about the old Dead Kennedys cassette tape mocking "Home Taping is Killing Music" by leaving the second side blank so "you can help":

This image (or a similar one) shows up every couple of years and makes the blog rounds. So, at first I wasn't going to bother posting it, but then the Freakbits guys pointed me to various "offshoot" slogans and images, including the following one that's so good it needs to be shared widely: Yes, folks, home cooking is killing the restaurant industry. Why won't Congress and the USTR deal with this pernicious problem?

ReverbNation & Audiolife Partner For Reverb Store

February 24, 2010 - hypebot.com