As part of our Super Fan series, we interview Tim Westergren, founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Pandora, about how Pandora works and what they are doing to engage and activate their community.

Pandora is a popular music recommendation service built on the Music Genome Project. It’s a fantastic service for discovering music and well worth a try if you have not experienced Pandora.

We discuss the importance of having a good product and connecting with fans. Tim speaks about how he has traveled the country to learn from Pandora’s fans and how he uses Town Hall meetings to get feedback directly from the fans. They started small with just six people in these Town Hall meetings and now have meetings where as many as 400 people show up to meet with Tim.

The lesson learned is that the effect of proactively communicating personally and sincerely with people is an incredibly powerful force in turning people into evangelists.

 

 Digital Podcast 35 [32:09m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (442)

Technorati Tags: Tim Westergren, Pandora, Super Fans

Kina Grannis, a big Digg fan, used social media and some great content to win Dorito’s Crash the Super Bowl Contest. She just appeared on the Super Bowl in a 60 second music video and has won a recording contract with Interscope Records.

If you want to see more you can go to SnackStrongProductions.com to watch behind the scenes footage and download Kina’s winning song. And you can buy her winning single on iTunes.

Congratulations to Kina!

Here’s her video

Technorati Tags: Kina Grannis, Super Bowl, social media

Kina Grannis, who I interviewed just before the New Year, has advanced to the final three contestants in the Crash the Super Bowl contest. On the line is a record deal and a 60 second video promotion of the winner during this year’s Super Bowl. I was looking into what was going on around the web when I ran into a post about Kina. Kina sprang to fame at Digital Podcast after a post at Digg for a song called Gotta Digg skyrocketed her to the top of Digg and generated over 289,000 views on YouTube.

Here’s a new video from Kina. Do what you should VOTE FOR KINA to Crash the Super Bowl.

Technorati Tags: Kina Grannis, Crash the Super Bowl, music, social media

As part of our ongoing quest to examine the intersection of media and monetization, I met with Trey Shelton, Founder and CEO of Music Interactive, to discuss the company’s new service that allows viewers/listeners to trade their time and attention for free content.

 

 Digital Podcast 30 [19:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1709)

Trey founded Music Interactive in 2005 with the express purpose of creating new opportunities to bring together the advertising and music worlds and I think he’s found a nice way to mix the revenue opportunity of advertising with the rich media of music.

The service works like this. A major site, like MySpace, and a major advertiser, like Microsoft, want to run a promotion involving music. They line up an artist who also wants a lot of promotion and Music Interactive to provide the infrastructure for offering fans a free download in exchange for their watching a short video about the Zune.

Now we have a five way win. The consumer gets free music, MySpace gets some advertising money, Microsoft gets lots of attention, the artist gets huge promotion and Music Interactive gets a share of the ad spend.

Here are some screen shots of the service in action. In the first, I’ve added a big red arrow pointing at the ad for a free Jon Forman mp3 in exchange for “checking out the Zune”. The next two shots show the pop-up that plays the video and the download of the mp3.

It’s great to see this kind of innovation that creates win-win solutions for everyone involved.

In addition to MySpace, Music Interactive is working with Dodge, Hyundai and Ray-Ban on interactive music promotions.

Technorati Tags: Music Interactive, Trey Shelton, monetization, music

Kina Grannis, an aspiring singer songwriter, caught my attention along with a lot of the tech community with a post over at Digg. The post linked to Kina’s YouTube page and had a song called “Gotta Digg”. The Digg fans went crazy for Kina and voted over 10,000 times for collection of posts linking to her blog and to the video at YouTube. Kina’s YouTube traffic skyrocketed up and “Gotta Digg” has gone over 180,000 views.

Kina is trying to win a contest and NEEDS YOUR VOTE. The contest is called Crash the Superbowl and the winner gets a recording contract and their video played on the Super Bowl broadcast. Kina was kind enough to spend some time with me on the phone discussing her career, the contest and the impact of her most recent experience with social media.

 

 Digital Podcast 28 [9:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1528)

If you want to hear more of Kina’s music you can visit her YouTube page, KinaGrannis.com or sign up for voting reminders at a site she set up for video blogging about the contest called Two Weeks for Kina.

Kina also has some CDs for sale on iTunes including One More in the Attic, sincerely, me and In Memory of the Singing Bridge

Gotta Digg Video

The Myspace Video

So GO VOTE FOR KINA.

Technorati Tags: Crash the Super Bowl, Kina Grannis, MySpace, Digg, YouTube, social media, social media marketing

Wired is reporting that Warner Music Group began selling music on Amazon in the MP3 format without digital rights management protection. Amazon has added all of WMG’s digitized music catalog to the store.

Amazon’s store now contains over 2.9 million tracks, all in the unprotected MP3 format and including music from three of the world’s four major labels. EMI and Universal are already providing music to the DRM free store.

This should be a great benefit to consumers who are confused about DRM and frankly don’t want to know about it. Hopefully it will also help Amazon build a stronger competitor to iTunes and drive innovation.

Technorati Tags: Amazon mp3, music, Warner Music Group, DRM

I just checked Google analytics for the daily stats at Digital Podcast and I saw the biggest one time increase in daily visitors and page views. Digital Podcast’s traffic jumped up by 80% on Christmas day. I looked at the distribution of search terms for some anomaly, but it wasn’t there. Search terms remained consistent in their distribution.

I think that people got lots of iPods, Zunes and the like for Christmas and went looking for content.

I also think that Christmas day has probably become the biggest day ever for the music industry thanks to iTunes cards. I know for sure that’s the case in my home as my daughter spent her $30 iTunes gift cards before noon and my son spent his by 4pm. That’s the first time either of them has bought music online and it didn’t take long.

No wonder Apple’s stock almost hit $200 per share.

Technorati Tags: ipod, Apple, iTunes, Zune, Microsoft

There’s a contest over at MySpace. It’s called Crash the Super Bowl and it’s a contest to win a record contract and a 60 second video to be played at the next Super Bowl. The contest is down to 10 artists and the clock is ticking down in this round of voting.

Kina Grannis, one of the 10 artists still in the running, is working hard to win. She has her blog, Two Weeks for Kina, going full steam and she has made a play to get out the tech vote using social media marketing. With the help of Digg, TechCrunch and Robert Scoble she seems to be breaking out with the tech fans. The Cute Girls Sing Awesome Song About Digg post at Digg has over 4000 votes as I write this and is the top post of the day. TechCrunch has picked up the story, Scoble has added the post to his shared feeds and Kina should get a lot more support from the tech fans. In the time it took to write these few lines the post at Digg has climbed to 4,185. The views at YouTube have climbed to over 36,000.

Here’s the video Gotta Digg

And the lyrics:

When I’m feeling lazy, at school or when I work
I sneak to my computer, and then I like to shirk
I don’t go online shopping, I don’t email with my mom
I open up my browser, and go to digg-dot-com

Chorus: Gotta digg, gotta digg, gotta digg
Gotta make this story big!
Did you hear that awful sound?
Another server’s down!

I always dig up Apple, and I bury Microsoft
But when I said I was a girl, all the diggers scoffed
And when I see those stories about Senator Ron Paul
I don’t even RTFA; I just digg them all!

Chorus: Gotta digg, gotta digg, gotta digg
Gotta make this story big!
Did you hear that awful sound?
Another server’s down!

The fanboys can be tiresome, they always are outspoken
And if you’re listening Kevin Rose, the comment system’s broken!
I know digg isn’t perfect, but be thankful for what we’ve got
It’s just like daddy always says: “At least it’s not Slashdot!!!”

Chorus: Gotta digg, gotta digg, gotta digg
Gotta make this story big!
Did you hear that awful sound?
Another server’s down!

So why not, vote for Kina.

Technorati Tags: Kina Grannis, social media, digg, social media marketing, crash the super bowl, discovery, music

Nokia announced Comes with Music that will provide for free music on Nokia’s music phones for up to one year. The company said that it has agreed with the Universal Music Group to offer free 12-month access to Universal artists’ music for buyers of Nokia’s music phones.

Once the year is complete, customers can keep all their music without having to worry about it disappearing when their subscription is over.

“We set out to create the music experience that people are telling us they are looking for - all the music they want in the form of unlimited downloads to their mobile device and PC,” said Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Multimedia, Nokia. “Even if you listened to music 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you would still only scratch the surface of the music that we’re making available. Comes with Music fulfils our dream to give consumers all the music they want, wherever they want it, while rewarding the artists who create it.”

The company is eyeing similar deals with other labels before the offer starts in the second half of 2008.

“We are in talks with all major labels. The response from labels has been very, very positive,” said Nokia spokesman Damian Stathonikos.

To my knowledge, there has been no announcement of cost or what limitations there will be on how much music you can hold on to.

This deal sounds like Total Music but rebranded and announced by Nokia. Under Total Music, Universal Music was working to allow people to use unlimited music bundled with devices. Speculation at the time was that the cost would be $90 added on to the device.

While Total Music was met with skepticism, Comes with Music seems like it’s getting a warmer reception. Maybe the outcry will come when we know how much it will cost.

Technorati Tags: Comes with Music, Music, Nokia, Universal, Total Music

I came across RCRD LBL today on my stroll around the net today. RCRD LBL is a network of ad supported online record labels and blogs offering completely free music and multimedia content from emerging and established artists.

All the music is released in DRM-free MP3 format and will work on any personal computer or portable digital music player.

They support the site by selling sponsorships to advertisers that want to help hook you up with good music.

They even have a podcast that shows off some of their favorites of the week.

Technorati Tags: music, free music, ad support music, rcrd lbl, rcrd-lbl