Music monetisation was one of my top technology segments ripe for innovation in 2008. Whilst there have been some signs of change in this space recently, it surprises me that no one appears to be doing what I am proposing here – at least not that I k…

“Amazon may be doing more than anyone else to change the way music is discovered, promoted and sold…” Come on Michael you must be running out of gas. DRM-Free and lower prices big deal. Amie Street’s pricing model – who cares. You said it yourself, the puck is moving away from paid to free anyways.

So, what’s important to artists and the music industry now? Discovery and promotion is going to be driven by data. It all starts with a great song (albums not required). If a song is great it is repeatedly processed (played and counted) by the iTunes desktop client (it dominates music management clients). That data finds its’ way to iLike & Last.FM & a few other places, including Apple. Songs are tagged, recommendations are made, music is discovered.

Every link on the retail value chain to the left of music acquisition (traditional A&R, distribution, radio, fake-friending, point of sale) – except for music creation is becoming irrelevant and trivial.

Value creation is happening to the right of music acquisition. Data acquisition, data mining, statistical analysis, social tagging, automated tagging, fingerprinting, etc, etc. This is the stuff that will enable every artist with a great song to be heard someday. It’s also the basis for funneling songs into the millions of (paid and ad-supported) streams that consumers will tap into – from any place, on every device, at any time…

Sorry, but $50,000 albums are foolish and Amazon’s music play is so 2006. If you are an artists reading this – give away your product (MP3s) to sell content. Huh? Explained elsewhere…

One thing not mentioned is that EVERY ARTIST on SAB has 3 FREE MP3’s, drm-free, 256kbps to download. Every recorded artist does that, so there will also be free mp3’s from Mandyleigh. I think four more albums are being released in January, so even more free songs then. You can buy the other songs as downloads for 50c each or order the cd.

When she first discovered Sellaband, we were of course a little suspicious and sceptical… but after doing research on them she uploaded her songs in November 2006. In June 2007 she hit the 50k (the 7th artist to do so and the first from Australia). There have now been 11 artists reaching the target (and a 12th will be there very soon). It takes alot of hard work and talent, and trust from the investors (who get a Limited Edition CD for every $10 they invest in an artist who makes the $50k. These cd’s can then be sold for them online and in stores if they wish).

Sellaband is totally unique imho as it offers advice to the artists, but leaves ALL the choices up to them. That is unheard of in a record label. PLUS the masters of the album are owned by the artist after 12 months…. something else which is unheard of.

Sellaband is all about being fair, so profits from the cd sales and downloads are split equally (1/3) between artist/investor/label.

As for piracy…. hey, artists (and our little girls) need to eat too.

Thanks Michael for outlining the great new initiatives in music out there

Glad Brian mentioned that Amazon don’t force RealPlayer on you… I got scared for a minute.

1) Music from Amazon is sold in MP3 format, which means it can be used on as many different devices as you like. Music from iTunes can only be played in the subset of devices that support Apple’s AAC file formats. I believe iTunes itself will limit you to loading an AAC tune into 5 or fewer iPods. Bottom line: Buy from iTunes mainly if you’re sure you’ll only ever listen at your computer or from an Apple player. Buy from Amazon if you want to be sure that your music will play on your choice of player, and if you want to send a track or two to friends once in a while.

2) Amazon and iTunes will have somewhat different music catalogs. Amazon is missing some labels now, may have more indie stuff (as described above). But Amazon will probably catch up on the mainstream labels in a month or so.

Secondly, the Amazon MP3 store will *optionally* install a tiny helper app that will install your downloaded MP3 in the music player of your choice, such as iTunes or Windows Media Player.

If you don’t want the helper app, you don’t have to install it. You can download tracks without it (it is required, however, to download full albums.)

What I’m saying is that the way it works now, with influencers or sneezers or mavens or whatever word you want to use from a recent applicable book, there are a finite number of people who are willing to spend time sorting through the noise. What music discovery services are doing is trying to get MORE people to do that sorting, and I’m saying that it won’t work. Not only that, but the influencers have never needed music discovery services to do what they do – they’ll find the good stuff no matter what, and they want to find it badly enough that they’ll download full albums, free, without DRM or advertisements.

As a side note, to go back to the example of my friend who does that and then suggests bands to friends – he’s probably made bands more money by suggesting that other people listen to them or go see them live than he has ’stolen’ by not buying their albums.

Yesterday, Amazon let known its establishment of a partnership between itself and the European startup SellABand. The association it will have with SellABand is simple: it will sell music released by artists developed through the independent service….

To build on what Aaron said before (and give a real life example), I’m up in Nashville at the moment in a studio with a band that I’ve been assisting in recent times. I know they have talent, but it’s a matter of making sure everybody else out there knows that (click my name to check out “The Minor Kings”). They’ve waited over four years to record their full-length debut, and hopefully it’s worth the wait as they’ve gotten a big time producer on board, Brian Virtue (Audioslave, Jane’s Addiction, etc). They’ve had demos floated around for quite some time, but it absolutely takes SERIOUS commitment to make things happen as they have very recently. I’m interested to see how SellABand works, but I have a question off the bat: If they were to get excess of 20,000 bands in the next year, how are enough people going to find and support each band?

Amie Street is a great concept that I have not devoted enough of my time to yet. It’s a little complicated for the passive music fan, but i have the utmost respect for the creators because they share the same mentality as I do: get the music that deserves to be heard into the ears of those who deserve to listen.

-Adam

P.S. I have not taken the time to process the differences between buying music from Amazon vs. Itunes. I’m a record store or Itunes guy, but only because it’s the “norm” around here. Can somebody fill me in?

The single should be free. The album needs to be a lot shorter, like about 6 songs, as let’s face it most of the other stuff is just filler to justify the inflated cover price. The cost of reproduction is zero, digital transmission, so where’s the money? Yup it’s live gigs and merchandise, not everyone can do a Radiohead, not everyone has that following, but getting your stuff heard (ie make it free) is going to help you get there, get people talking about it (music blogs, social networks) and then book the O2 (if you’re in London) pretend your the Zep et al and generally rock it.

p2p distribution was made for this now evolving model, the pirates are the new record labels and I have singularly failed to make a Kylie Minogue song the Xmas number 1. Pah! there’s always next year.

@technology slice – re: piracy – foster the obligation of reciprocity – music first, and if you liked payment second – and make paying much easier. When was the last time you could donate to a band simply because you ’stole’ their music and liked it?

@andrew – as long as large money is involved, enterprises – labels mainly – will exchange money for the ownership of copyrights. Having enforceable copyrights is virtually necessary in order to finance the production of new music.

@Ikratz – if I gave you a song, and you liked it, that gift isn’t free. You would feel some obligation to me. You might do nothing about that feeling. At the core is undeniable reciprocity.

@Aaron – Signal to noise ratio. There has always been way to much noise when examining art. Part of it is taste. And part of it is a problem as old as dirt.

Amazon should know better.

– SellAband – looks great though – I hope they succeed and in the process cripple the record labels.

Second, before anybody jumps on me about it, that should be IRC *channels* and not *rooms.*

The reason none of these music discovery sites have been particularly successful at breaking new bands (with a few exceptions) is that they’re trying to short-circuit a process that is completely ingrained in our culture: The tastemakers discover music and tell their friends. Statistically, there are always going to be very few tastemakers and lots of casual listeners who only listen to what they are told is worth listening to. Of course, the goal of any music discovery service is to try to turn everybody into a tastemaker, but simply put most people don’t have enough room in their heads to keep track of lots of new bands and artists. If they did they’d already be doing it, like my friend who skims IRC rooms for links to music torrent sites, downloads every album he can find, listens to all of them, and then alerts everyone he knows when he finds his new ‘favorite’ band of the moment.

I’ve never – literally never – discovered a band I really liked through one of these services, and I listen to A LOT of music. However, I don’t have time to wade through thousands of crappy bands just to find one good one. And I say that not only as a music fan, but also as someone who has written, recorded, and produced music that has been on Myspace and Purevolume.

That being said, if someone figures out a magic algorithm that will look at my taste in bands and give me something new and amazing (instead of suggesting Tool because I like the Mars Volta, for instance), I will be the first to sign up and sing its praises.

@8 (Andrew):

I would argue that it is a good thing that it is so difficult to get a recording made. It’s a lot cheaper than it used to be and everyone has access to decent gear, but there’s still a huge barrier to creating something really good.

I’ll put it this way: Most of the bands who are good enough to deserve a great recording will be approached by a producer or a label. If they’re not, they’ll scrape and save and self-fund the project.

If NEITHER of those things happen, then you need to question the quality of the band. If they’re not willing to work their asses off, then why should the mass market care that they can’t get a recording? Compared to the most popular bands, they’re lazy. And if nobody’s offering to record them for free or a discount, then they’re not very good. To make it, either you either have to work your ass off, be amazing enough for someone to want to work with you for free.

Anybody else is just fooling around.

Nhick
http://www.itrush.com

http://livelymo...-in-ghetto.html

http://eleven21...in-firefox-ie7/

Do love Amie Street, though….