heute:pop:blog.  

This reminds me of going to conferences sometimes. I’m sure it will be different this week at Transmission.

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A lot of people have asked us if we will organize another OpenMusicMedia Meet this year and Dave and I felt that we can’t let 2008 end without without getting together one more time. Join us next Tuesday (2nd December) in London at the Williams IV - we won’t be having a guest speaker this time so we’ll be sticking to good conversation in addition to food and drinks.

We’ll be meeting at the usual place, usual time, which means upstairs at the William IV pub after work from 6pm till kicking out time. For those who haven’t been already the William IV is just round the corner from Old St. Hope to see you all down there!

More info on times, venues, etc here and please RSVP if you can.

1. Fleet Foxes ‘He Doesn’t Know Why’
2. Cat Power ‘Sea Of Love’
3. Honey is Cool ‘Then He Kissed Me’
4. Tvärvägen ’September’
5. Jacob Borshard ‘Hello Piero’
6. Ryan Adams ‘Times Like These’
7. Frontier Ruckus ‘Orion Town 2.
8. Psapp ‘Fix It’
9. Peter Bjorn & John ‘Young Folks’ (Diplo Youngest Folks Remix)
10. Who Made Who ‘TV Friend’ (Hot Chip Remix)
11. Daft Punk ‘Human After All’ (SebastiAn Remix)
12. Three Trapped Tigers ‘Untitled 5′
13. The Shins ‘Black Wave’
14. Sea Wolf ‘Middle Distance Runner’

You can listen to all this here.

This is a my recent contribution to the Music Think Tank where you can join the discussion:

Digital distribution as well as promotion has undoubtedly been the best thing that could have happened to music fans as well as musicians. Even bigger content owners are finally seeing the opportunities (instead of the threats) that come  with the technical change of delivering ‘media’ over the last ten years. It is now easier than ever for artists to connect to their fans and delivering the music to them, gatekeepers have been eliminated and (in theory) artists can reach out to millions of music fans out there through the internet. So far, so good.

picture by fabbriciuse

Everyone who works in music knows that there are various new challenges that have developed through new digital delivery methods and those challenges can make it difficult to monetize digital music. I won’t be going into the issue of file sharing (there are enough people out there who have something to say about that) but I want to explore a common misunderstanding about digital media: “digital distribution is free” (or at least very cheap). It is not at the moment.

Chris Anderson’s ‘The Long Tail’ discusses how we can monetize niche genres through very cheap distribution and how one can successfully make a business outside of the ‘blockbusters’ through scalable distribution methods as well as recommendations, which are enabled through digital technology. For the music industry this means that it should be easier for artists (or labels) outside the Top 100 to find their audience and sell products (downloads, CD, tickets, etc) to them by using those new technologies. This sounds all great on paper until you look at the actual cost of digital distribution. It is actually quite high.

Lets look at a simple example. I’m an artist and I want my album to be available through various download shops. My music has a niche audience but with my distinct sound and existing online following I should be able sell more music by having my album available at more retailers. If I want to do all the work myself I will have to go through the following steps:

• Identify online retailers I want my album to be available at. And there are plenty all over the world.
• Negotiate deals with those retailers.
• Deliver my album in the correct specification. Those will vary from retailer to retailer.
• Make sure I receive regular royalty reports.
• Check those and send invoices. This will have to be repeated every month or quarter, depending on the reporting period of the retailer, and of course it has to be done for each retailer.
• There might be some additional unexpected tasks when things go wrong: wrong meta data displayed, you never receive reports from certain retailers, some retailers might not perform well and I would like to withdraw my content, etc.

If I add up all the time I invest in the above and associate a cost to that I will quickly find out that the distribution of my album was not cheap after all. Yes, I didn’t have to manufacture any CDs and there are no actual shipping costs but this does not mean it’s practically free to make sure my album is available to download.

Where does this leave us? All the above makes be think of two things: a) the above doesn’t always have to be like this and b) companies that control a lot of content (labels and digital aggregators) are important in the digital music ecosystem for now.

We have to make sure that digital delivery methods as well as reporting formats are standardized. Those currently create a huge workload for content owners as well as DSPs. Deals to get your music on the different platforms can also be difficult to negotiate and standard rates would make this easier for everyone. I could also go into the topic of blanket licensing for all digital music usage but this is probably something for another blog post.

In short: systems and processes will have to be built to really bring down the cost of digital distribution. Some companies already have great internal systems but we will have to work on open standards and make sure all the systems can talk to each other. The more we take out human interaction the cheaper this can become.

I give you one example of a company that has managed to build systems like the above: OnTunecore you can get your music on various retailers by paying a small flat fee. They built the infrastructure to deliver music to iTunes and get reports back without having to add much human interaction. However they cannot deliver to all DSPs but only a selection of digital download shops as well as streaming services.

There are plenty of other companies out there who are working on similar technology and it will be good to see more development in that field. If you are musician or a label today: make sure you find someone to distribute your content for you if you want your music to be available in a range of places.

1. Frontier Ruckus ‘Orion Town 2′
2. Tvärvägen ‘September’
3. Sigur Ros ‘Íllgresi’
4. Doi ‘Missing’
5. Jacob Borshard ‘Hello Piero’
6. Antony & The Johnsons ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’
7. Ida Maria ‘Sweet About Me’
8. M83 ‘Kim & Jessie’
9. The Decemberists ‘Shiny’
10. The Antlers ‘Two’
11. Willy Mason ‘Oxygen’
12. Kimya Dawson ‘Tire Swing’
13. Manchester Orchestra ‘I Can Feel A Hot One’

You can listen to all this here.

I would love to play this song on my show but I can find the mp3 so I just post it here instead: be sure to check out the video below - the song is called ‘September’ by Tvärvägen, a “one-man-orchestra, consisting of Henrik Öhberg”.

Just beautiful stuff. You’re suppose to be able to download this track here but it didn’t work for me today.

Tvärvägen - September from Henrik Ohberg on Vimeo.

Even though it’s not my area of expertise, I always follow news from the digital movie industry. I’m very interested in how it is dealing with the change in distribution technologies and viewer habits as they can (hopefully) learn a few things from the digital music industry.

I think it’s safe to say that the movie industry has always been a little bit behind the music industry in regards to digitalization just because the speed of people’s internet connections is still improving with time. When I first downloaded an mp3 on Napster it would have been impossible to download a 600mb movie, it would have taken a week to download.

So I thought this was good news: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is the latest content owners that licensing they catalogue (or parts of it) to YouTube for full length advertising supported streaming.

With advertising funded music streaming being big news in 2008 it just makes sense that the movie owners do deals that allow viewers to watch full length movies online and be exposed to advertising on sites like YouTube.

There is the big difference though between full length audio and video streaming: watching a movie on the computer seems to be much more ‘natural’ than listening to a track in front of the screen. The fact that you sit in front of a monitor to watch a piece of audio/visual content is something you are of course used to; you do the same in front of the TV. So going to YouTube and watch something is in a way like watching a DVD (turn on the machine and press a few buttons).

Listening to music online does not come as natural: it has only been in recent years that you would sit in front of a screen to then listen to a piece of music. There is a disconnect there, why would you want to look at something if you want to listen to a piece of audio?

We are of course all being ‘re-educated’ in regards to how we consume media and the difference mentioned above might not be relevant in a few years but it makes me very optimistic in how advertising supported movie streaming will perform over the next few years. Hang on, ‘ad supported movie streaming’? Sounds like plain old TV…

1. The Decemberists ‘Shiny’
2. The Miserable Rich ‘Over And Over’
3. The Antlers ‘Two‘
4. Blackbird Harmony ‘Hello’
5. Wild Sweet Orange ‘Ten Dead Dogs’
6. Bat For Lashes ‘Sweet Dreams’
7. The Faint ‘The Conductor’ (Thin White Duke Remix)
8. Seelenluft ‘Manila’
9. Dani Siciliano ‘Come As You Are’
10. Guru ‘Trust Me’
11. Manchester Orchestra ‘I Can Feel A Hot One’
12. Daniel Martin Moore ‘By Dream’

You can listen to all this here.

Found this on hypebot and just love it: With Smule you can turn your iPhone into a wind instrument. I don’t have an iPhone (not compatible with our work emails) but things like this will probably not be available for my Blackberry any time soon. The new Storm looks like a great phone but Blackberrys just don’t have that fun element to it - whenever I have the Blackberry Curve in my hand it feels like work.

EDIT: I was just reminded by Muz that this is an ocarina and not a flute. Thanks.

This is a blog post I wrote for the Last.fm blog, head over there if you want to join the discussion:

With the Artist Royalty Program we wanted to solve a crucial problem. Since we started in 2002 we had licensed music from various ‘content owners’ (major and indie labels as well as digital music distribution companies), and we also paid money to collections societies all over the world. But there were certain artists and labels losing out: those who do not have access to all the above, or chose not to be part of this traditional music industry network.

The process to solve this started with two goals. First, we wanted to continue to be an effective promotional platform for all artists, a place where we could connect music makers with new fans. (Our recommendations are key to achieving this: an artist on Last.fm doesn’t have to keep reaching out to people, as our system will automatically find new music for everyone based on their existing music taste.) Secondly, we wanted to build a fair system that shared Last.fm’s revenue with those artists. In this way, as Last.fm grows, the commercial success that comes with that will be shared with all music makers, of whatever stripe.

After months of research, discussion and technical development, we launched our Artist Royalty Program at the beginning of July. From then on, artists and labels that opted into the program started accruing royalties (if their music was being played on the site, of course). Last Friday we finished the final part of this work, and have published royalty reports to all artists, and will now automatically do so every three months. And for the first time we could actually see ourselves how our royalties were being distributed between all artists and labels.

First of all, I saw something that was not surprising: there are many labels that will collect a small amount of royalties and some who collect a lot. The Long Tail never fails. Then I was looking through the labels that were the top earners and I made some interesting discoveries: there were plenty of labels in there that I had never heard of. I was surprised but equally pleased that some (what I would call niche) content owners used Last.fm to find their audience through our recommendation system, and were able to do this successfully. We have been saying for years that Last.fm can work very well for less well-known artists – since our recommendation system will find fans even for the most obscure artist – and now we have some very hard proof for that.

There are now 85,000 artists and labels collecting royalties from us directly and this number is rising steadily. And of course I want to mention: if you make music too you can join right now.