Everything fast shortens the length of your ultimate time on stage. Every endorsement, every sponsorship, takes years off your career, just like smoking takes years off your life. Your audience needs to believe that THEY own you, not the man. That if you’re beholden to ANYBODY, it’s them!

Metallica == Microsoft (closed, proprietary systems, active disdain for customers)
Radiohead == Apple (just works, listens to customers)
Trent Reznor == Linux (totally hackable, but can be tricky to configure)

Of particular interest to me is “issue number 11“, as is suggested in the comments section of the post: Patronage.

Music patronage is an idea that I’ve been thinking quite a lot about for a number of years, and perhaps its time is coming. There’s certainly a few startups taking a crowdfunding or micro-financing approach to creating music: Sell A Band, Artist Share, and the slightly mysterious, stealth project from Throwing Muses singer, CASH Music, to name a few. An informative round up on these, and other similar services can be found in this great post by Peter Spellman.

As a tangent, I can’t help but contrast historical music patronage (wealthy lords and land owners in a Feudal society hiring court musicians), with modern day licensing deals (Britteny Spears singing for Pepsi). Many individuals have suggested an analogy between the Corporation and the Feudal Estate. Perhaps then, massive, contemporary music licensing deals are simply the inflated version of a very old practice.

The panel I moderated was great fun, and we looked at all sorts of technical issues one faces when developing a “music2.0″ site. Tom Conrad had all kinds of great stories about scaling Pandora. Shaun Haber from Warner Bros. did an admirable job filling in for Ethan Kaplan , earning him the dubious nick name “Virtual Ethan”. In the audience, personal hero Derek Sivers told the story of his journey from php to rails, and back again. Paul Lamere took some notes as well, for those interested. All in all, very enjoyable time spent.

There were many great comments floating around throughout the day, but a one that stuck out in my mind was Michael Petricone stating that:

“IP is like chocolate cake. A little can be good, but too much… look out.”

I’ve also been thinking about Tim Westergren from Pandora who suggests that every four piece rock band should get a 5th member whose primary role is to act as blogger, videographer, and online marketing ace, working all the social media sites. Truly good advice, in my opinion.

Corey Denis had an interesting panel on the new music economy, in which part of the panel was devoted to coming up with a new wikipedia entry for the term “new music economy”. Nothing like some panel participation to get things going.

I also had a few good conversations about Microsoft’s “Plays For Sure” fiasco with conference attendees, but the best description of the whole ugly mess is written by Mark Pilgram in a post entitled “the day the music died“. It’s a spectacular story of a truly epic fail. There’s many lessons in there - of what *not* to do.

Thanks Brian! Looking forward to next time.

I have the pleasure to moderate a “tech talk” panel at 1:00pm on building music related web apps with:

• Tom Conrad - Pandora
• Marc Urbaitel - In Ticketing
• Ethan Kaplan - Warner Bros.
• Jack Moffitt - Chesspark / Xiph
• Jeremy Riney - Playlist.com

Lessons learned from last SF Music Summit: Easy on the soju cocktails…

Should be a blast, and I hope to see you all there.

If you follow the clear and straight forward instructions in his example, what you end up with is an automated way to post mp3s to your music blog, based on what you’re playing on your local computer. With the inclusion of the Yahoo Media player on the page, it’s easy to listen to the whole lot through a browser. Pretty neat, for 10 minutes of work!

It’s genius is how it turns the (mostly) passive activity of listening to music into a content creating endeavor (albeit, an automated endeavor). The newest version of the Yahoo player even has a ‘buy’ button, that lets you link in your own Amazon affiliate code. On the Yahoo! Media Player wiki, Lucas Gonze points out:

What’s interesting about this button is that it automates a crucial but neglected part of the ecosystem for net media. Monetization shouldn’t be a manual operation. Music bloggers, for example, usually have a little blurb in their sidebar encouraging visitors to buy recordings associated with the songs they post. They do this out of a kind of musical environmentalism concerned with ensuring a flow of recordings to discover, keep, love, and post. However, it’s a lot of labor for a blogger to set up a purchase link for every track. An upsell link needs to be part of their infrastructure along with comments, RSS, and other basics. With this feature we’re making purchase flows a standard part of the tools for web media.

So every time someone buys a track after listening to it on my Tumblr blog, I get something like a nice shiny nickle. In theory, this means one could get paid to listen to music - truly my dream job. All I need is more traffic, and better taste in music ;)

Thanks Joe!

Check out the end result (still in desperate need of some themeing)
http://music.mixedcontent.com/

http://sxsw.mixedcontent.com/

I screen scraped the SXSW site, plotted the venue data on a map and then scrapped artist MP3s from the SXSW site, and hooked those into the new Yahoo Media Player. The end result is you can click on a venue marker, and then listen to the bands that are playing there that evening.

It was also interesting in how long each part of this app took to build:

• Using Ruby and the totally awesome hpricot HTML parser to write the screen scraper to grab HTML from sxsw.com and convert data to JSON - 20 minutes
• Writing the JS to show the JSON data on the map - 1 hour
• Fussing with CSS and HTML layout (which is still broken!) - 3+ hours!

Moral of the story - Either learn more CSS, or surround myself with talented developers and designers so I don’t have to. I’m inclined to do the later…

Next up is to incorporate this data into Rilli so it’s possible to build your own calendar and see where your friends are going.

Thanks to Jeremy Keith for inspiration, and Mike Purvis for some Map code.

UPDATE: Now working in IE7. Thanks to Lucas for the bug report.

UPDATE 2: A few folks have asked for the data I’ve scraped from the SXSW site. The (huge) JSON file can be found here. Go nuts…

URL’s are a really powerful concept, and I’m going to make the bold claim that if something is not addressable with a URL, it might as well not exist. To this end, Spotify have rolled out a cool feature where one can now link to a specific point in time in a song. This link for example, points to Jimi Hendrix’s solo in Little Wing (but you have to have the Spotify beta client installed for it to work). I believe that it’s currently only possible to point to a particular starting time in a track, but once you are also able to specify a duration for the url, this will be golden. Some work could go in to making the URL’s look nicer to humans, but the hard part is certainly done. When Thomas Edison released the first phonograph player in 1877, he proclaimed that it possessed the ability to annihilate the significance of time and space. Now 125 years later, it’s the URL’s turn…

I also heard about how Spotify is in the process of building a brand new metadata store. They have licensed information from familiar places like Gracenote, AMG and MusicBrainz as well as added in some of their own data including song recommendations and indexing of song lyrics. Apparently, they even have detailed metadata about the individual musicians performing on a given track, so one could find all the songs where Eric Clapton plays guitar, but does not sing, for example. If this isn’t cool enough, the even bigger deal is that they’re releasing it through an open API. For free…

Now imagine combing all this music RDF data with other distributed data stores. One could write a SPARQL query that looks up artists who have released albums before 1970, that then references Upcoming.org (or another new event site) to see which of those artists are now on tour. Or… as a musician, I could write a query to check a list of my musician friends, marked up in FOAF on my blog, and alert me if any of my friends have a new album.

Keep in mind that this is all supposed to be paid for by advertising, so keep clicking on those ads everyone, because I want at this API…

Thanks again to Daniel and Niklas from Spotify for the morning chat!

I also (deservedly) received some flack for not blogging for a long time. That is changing now ;)

See you all at sxsw!

Here’s how DeepRockDrive works

It starts off with a fan going to the site and creating a “petition” to get their favorite artist to perform on DeepRockDrive. They can then take this digital petition and embed it on myspace, facebook, their blog, etc…, the goal being to get as many people as possible vote on this petition. Once a petition gets over 1000 votes, DeepRockDrive will contact the artists management and book the band for an in studio performance at DeepRockDrives headquarters in Las Vegas. Fans pay $6.99 to watch the show live in quality HD video, and the money is split 50/50 with the artist. You can find out more about the site here.

One interesting aspect about crowd sourcing the “concert promoter” role of the site, is that DRD is able to mitigate the risk typically associated with booking an artist at a traditional venue. Since DRD is able to (almost) perfectly match supply to demand there’s minimal exposure to some of the large gambles that concert promoters face.

We also thought long and hard about the user experience of attending the actual show itself. One of the greatest things about live music is the cycles of feedback that exist between an artist and audience. A (good) artist is constantly gauging the audience and incorporating this information back into their performance, and while this is tricky to recreate in an online environment, we’ve certainly given it our best. For example, when you go to a show on DeepRockDrive, you can blast messages out to the band, which are displayed on huge monitors in the studio. Often at DRD shows, artists will reference messages that have been sent, responding to viewers comments. Fans can also vote on the artists set list (the digital equivalent of shouting out “Freebird” at a show) - and my favorite - A fan is able to show their appreciation for an artist by hammering their space bar on their computer, sending a ‘digital applause’ needle moving in the studio. One can also choose between 1 of 5 HD camera angles to watch at any given time. Perhaps if you play drums, you might be inclined to view the overhead cam of the drummer, in order to pick up a few tips.

I remember Danny, one of the founders, explaining that if the experience at any point felt like watching a clip on youtube, we will have failed. This is designed to be “lean forward” entertainment, rather then sit back, and while there is still room for improvement, I think it’s well on it’s way.

Big implications

I like DeepRockDrive because it’s a big idea. In a day and age of declining record sales, and doom & gloom stories of major labels, it’s refreshing to know that there are people building real businesses predicated on the question of “What is next?”. While entities like the RIAA are busily obsessed with suing their best customers, DRD founders Danny Socolof and Jeff Henshaw, have shown a great example of how it’s possible to use the internet to provide a convincing value proposition for music fans and artists alike. Live music is one of the few areas in the music business that has been on fire lately, perhaps due to the publics increased awareness of (and access to) music. Imagine a relatively unknown artist being able to perform a live show for a truly global audience (and get paid). It’s the democratizing nature of the internet applied to live music, it’s a huge leveling of the playing field, and I love it.

This weekend I read an interesting article about artists and music piracy in China and if you want any further proof about the demise of the current recording industry, one has to look no further then to this story and the rest of the developing world. I remember when I was traveling in South America, I came across a local music shop in a small town where the shop was no more then a guy with a computer hooked up to the internet, with a bittorrent client running. He had a list of albums you could purchase, and after you selected the album, he burned a copy for you, and then printed off a cover on a laser printer. Since an internet connection was far from ubiquitous in this town, a lot of people purchased music through his store. My point is the days of selling a physical disc with music are done. It was a nice hundred years, but it’s time to move on and build what’s next, and I’m confident that DeepRockDrive will be part of that.