heute:pop:blog.  

This year I have again submitted an idea for a talk at SXSW and the public voting process has now started. This time I have decided not to submit a panel idea like in previous years but I want to try something different: Ben Perreau and I will debate on the influence of Public Broadcasters on digital music innovation and its positive and negative effects, you can find the whole description below.

As always we appreciate your votes in the SXSW PanelPicker and feel free to leave comments about what we should cover in our debate.

This is the idea we suggested:

Public media & digital music innovation: a debate

This debate will consider digital innovation in an environment with public broadcasters. Jonas Woost (Executive producer for Radio 3 at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) will defend their role and Ben Perreau (Director of digital content at Global Radio / previously an entrepreneur) will consider the negative effects.

Public broadcasters have long played a vital role in media, not only by providing citizens with independent information but also through universal entertainment. Publicly-funded organizations like CBC and NPR have tirelessly championed new music, supported artists that struggle to find audiences on commercial outlets and helped provide a test-bed for innovation. On the other hand public broadcasters, free from the constraints of commerce, have strayed into areas where private enterprise might. As a result, countless innovations from the likes of startups and commercial businesses may never have come to light. To what extent does this inhibit plurality and the economies of places where public broadcasters operate?

Questions answered

• Should/shouldn’t public broadcasters develop digital music products such as streaming services, social music etc?
• How do public broadcasters compete with digital music services from commercial providers?
• With the difficulty in finding investment for digital music services should public broadcasters consider investing in this sector?
• With VCs and advertising clients looking for a quick return when dealing with digital music services, do public broadcasters and their ‘long view’ provide a useful alternative?
• How can public broadcasters continue to support niche or emerging music in a digital context that might not find exposure on commercial outlets?

This is a re-post of a contribution I recently wrote for the Bandzoogle blog. Bandzoogle is a great platform to build sophisticated websites for bands. While writing the below I realized how confusing streaming services music be for DIY musicians and how hard it can be to get their music onto those services.

Music streaming services are a great way for fans to access, consume and discover music on the Internet. They also offer bands and labels great ways to get discovered, build a fan-base, and, for some, there is even some money to be made. Unfortunately there are many misunderstandings about the different services on the Internet and this post will (hopefully) clear up some of the questions that Bandzoogle members, and other DIY musicians and indie labels might have.

So, what exactly are “streaming services”?

The “ownership” of music has become less relevant over the last years. Many people (myself included) don’t feel they need to own any CDs, vinyl records and mp3s if most music is available on the Internet to listen to. Ownership results in maintenance and responsibilities: we have to clean records and make sure they don’t get damaged. We have to back up our mp3 collection and make sure we keep the format up to date (who knows if mp3 as a format will still be relevant in five years ?).

A great alternative to the above is using a music streaming service to access music. The files are stored “in the cloud” and we only access them through the Internet as opposed to owning them. Typically, you will not pay every time you listen to a track but you will pay a subscription fee, or there will be advertising that you will be exposed to in order to listen to the music for free.

What is important to understand (and this is where it gets tricky) is that there are basically two types of services: “radio” and “on-demand” streaming. (more…)

Since I started working as a contractor (I prefer this term to ‘consultant’) I have been making an effort to spend more time on observing, analysing and understanding all the digital music services out there. I really want find those websites and applications that are not only exciting and disrupting but also user-friendly and actually useful.

One area that is highly interesting from my point of view are ‘music delivery services’. That’s what I call sites and services that can deliver recorded music to me, may as be as a permanent download or as a stream. Also, looking from it from an North American angle, I wanted to see what is happening on this side of the world. As I posted before, unfortunately most of the excitement in terms of digital music is not happening in Canada so my Ace VPN account came in very handy when I needed to pretend to the in the US to access the American services.

Even though there are a lot of new on-demand streaming services starting right now it seems like almost none of them are actually doing anything differently: many of them are web-based and offer mobile apps, cost $10 per months with a three day free trial, and you can stream as many tracks as you want on-demand. I understand that most of those features and mechanisms are actually dictated by the record labels which is a sad development: having ‘suppliers’ decide on business models will never encourage innovation and creativity which is what the industry needs more than anything.

If exciting, disrupting, user-friendly and useful are the criteria then I really want to mention three ‘music delivery services’ in this post:

1. Playdar

I’m not going to pretent that I fully understand what Playdar could do but I love what I can see so far. They call it a ‘Music Content Resolver’ which means that Playdar is a technology that can find music for you, may it be on your computer, your local network or on other music services.

The key is that Playdar is an open-source technology and anyone can either use Playdar to find and stream music within their application or build plug-ins so Playdar can find music in new places. Playdar is neither useful or user-friendly at this point but Richard Jones (Last.fm co-founder and one of the guys who started Playdar) told me that there should be a desktop application soon.

2. ExtensionFM

I love mp3 blogs and there are a quite a few I’d like to check on a regular basis. Call me lazy but I just can’t check 20+ sites every week to see if there is anything new on there that I might like. Also, I will have to download it all and add it to my iTunes. Oh, and of course having to listen to it as well.

ExtensionFM is a great solution for this. It’s a Chrome plug-in that automatically adds mp3s that are available from websites you select to your ExtensionFM library. It then checks on a regular basis if there are new mp3s available from these sites and you can listen to then straight in your browser. Just like the HypeMachine it does not allow you to download the tracks but you can go to the actual mp3 blogs later and download the mp3 from there.

ExtensionFM does something similar to Peel which I have written about on here before. What I like about ExtensionFM is that it’s all happening in the ‘cloud’ and there is no need for me to download anything. I’m desperately trying to move away from having any files on my computer and this is another step toward my cloud based entertainment world.

ExtensionFM is certainly a disrupting concept; record labels as well as mp3 blogs will potentially not agree with the way ExtensionFM finds content and streams it.

3. Spotify

I will not write a blog post about Spotify, there are enough out there. We can’t really call Spotify exciting any more but it’s the most useful and user-friendly music services out there;  I now use it almost exclusively for my music consumption needs. A UK credit card and £10 per month make it possible. If you have access to those two things then you should subscribe to Spotify right now.

One of my first tasks when I moved to Canada was to get an overview of digital music services in this country. I also wanted to figure out which of the big international services have launched in Canada and how well they are performing. Disappointingly I realized that other than a few players such as 7digital, Slacker and of course iTunes there aren’t many local digital music companies for a country that strongly supports its music industry: grants are a common way for indie labels to stay afloat and radio stations have to play a certain amount of Canadian artists.

Just like there is no lack of music fans in Canada there is no shortage of talented programmers and entrepreneurs – other digital businesses (e.g. games, advertising, movies) seem to be quite healthy. Companies like Pandora, Spotify, MOG and Rhapsody however have never launched their service in Canada and others like Last.fm only have a limited service in the second largest country in the world. Also, looking at the new players that have seen some hype recently (such as mFlow, Thumbplay and rdio) have not announced any plans for a Canadian launch.

After speaking to a range of people about the lack of access to legal digital music in Canada there seem to be different explanations:

1. Licensing difficulties (1) – it is complex and expensive to license content from record labels for Canada

I find that hard to believe. When licensing reordings from labels or aggregators you will often strike multi-territory deals so there is not a lot of additional work needed when including Canada as a territory as part of a launch (for example) in the US. However, depending on the label, you might not be able to license content for all of North America under one deal but you have to go through two offices. There might be one department dealing with the US and one with the Rest of World.

Nevertheless, when launching an international music service it shouldn’t be too hard to include Canada as a territory from a label licensing point of view.

2. Licensing difficulties (2) – getting publishing rights is a nightmare

Yes it is. But it is everywhere. At least in Canada there is only one collection society dealing with the rights of the music composers whereby in the US you have to go to a bunch. In Europe you will (normally) still have to deal with a different organization in each country which is slowly changing so pan-European licensing should be easily possible at some point.

3. Canadian copyright law is in limbo

Whereby this is true it shouldn’t stop anyone from launching a music service in Canada. Without wanting to go in too much detail this is the deal: many people say that the Canadian copyright  law is outdated and needs modernisation. This was suppose to happen for years but whenever there is a new government the proposed changes are being put ‘on hold’ (read: ‘thrown away’).

The international music community is actually quite upset about the lack of movement in Canadian copyright law calling it a “major source of the world’s [music] piracy problem” (IFPI). Ouch.

Again, this should not stop anyone to launch a digital music company in Canada since the changes in copyright law are unlikely to affect consumer facing music delivery services.

4. Canada is too small to make an investment like starting a music service worth-while

This is probably the excuse I hear most often: It seems that companies feel their investment will not be returned because the music market in Canada is too small. And starting a music service is a rather big investment with the largest cost being music licensing.

I think this is a fair argument but doesn’t explain why services are being launched in the smaller countries in Europe (just one example here). So starting up a service in an English speaking country that has a similar music taste to its big neighbour shouldn’t be so hard then, right? After all, Canada is the seventh biggest music market in the world (2005).

‘Big neighbour’ are two very important words here. It’s a psychological issue that the US (population: 309m) is so big and suddenly makes Canada (population 34m)seem so small. Living here now for a few months I can see that Canada has a complex about being the ‘small neighbour’ and everything has to be compared with the US. And of course everyone has to agree that when it comes to starting any business, given the choice, one would have to go to the US as the market is simply larger.

But this is not what it’s about: Canada needs digital music companies that have already proven success in other big territories to launch locally or alternatively a new breed of Canadian companies that can move music fans away from unlicensed music usage.

Photo: EliB

I’m excited to be in New York for our next OpenMusicMedia night on the 7th July. We will be joined by Alex White from Next Big Sound to talk about music related metrics. This is a copy of my post on the OpenMusicMedia blog:

The recording industry has always been more obsessive about metrics than other entertainment areas: music charts have been a vital tool not only to measure success of songs and albums but also to act as a marketing tool for record sales.

Over the last few years we see a lot of new services that focus their business on collecting and aggregating more accurate and detailed music data. The internet has enabled those services to get access to richer data sets than the pre-web sales driven charts such as popularity and discussion around artists.

In the second OpenMusicMedia NYC we want to discuss how those companies can (or maybe cannot) help the music industry to make better decision. Questions we want to address include:

• How important is more detailed data for the music industry?
• Does an obsession with numbers and statistics stop companies from taking risks and therefore stop innovation?
• Collecting data from different websites and displaying those seems straight forward – but what about interpreting them?

We have invited Alex White from Next Big Sound to lead the conversation and guide us through some of the issues of music related data aggregation. As always, this will not be a presentation but an open conversation between everyone in the room with Alex leading what could almost be called a round table discussion.

Moderating for the event will be Jonas Woost, co-founder of OpenMusicMedia as well as the former Head of Music at Last.fm. Jonas joins us from from his new home in Vancouver, where he is setting up a media consultancy business. Our co-moderator is Steve Savoca, global head of digital business for Domino Records and producer of OpenMusicMedia NYC.

We will meet on the 7th July at reRun and the event is free and open to everyone. However we would appreciate if you could RSVP on our facebook page. We look forward to seeing you there!

OpenMusicMedia NYC
Wednesday, July 7
at reRun (part of reBar, 147 Front St, 2nd Fl in DUMBO, 11201, New York, NY)
7-9 PM
Map: http://bit.ly/9VqMoh

Please RSVP on our facebook group.

Assuming there will be no more ash cloud problems I will be over in Newcastle next week to speak at ‘The Know How‘ event. The panel is called Transmission and focuses on the changes in regional broadcasting and music consumption in general.

The event is organized by Generator and Evolution 2010 and I will be joined on stage by Ben Perreau (Global Radio/Gigulate) and Paul Campell (Amazing Radio) on the 24th May.

When I was on the phone today with our moderator Russ Conway I was reminded again of the gap in our terminology: we keep using the word ‘radio’ when we speak of services such as Last.fm and Pandora. The truth is that they have very little to do with the original ‘one-to-many’ broadcasting service called radio but we don’t seem to have a better term. ‘Personalized Streaming Music Service’ just doen’t sound very neat.

And something became clear today: I’ll probably have to get used to the fact that people will call me a ‘former Last.fm-er’. I noticed that’s the case with many of the guys that left Last.fm and I now often catch myself introducing myself as the former Head of Music. It just makes it easier for other people to understand what I’m all about even though we are more than the name of our old employer.

I’ve been in Vancouver just over two weeks and someone warned me that I will have to go over to Toronto before I realize it. It only took me this long.

As a co-founder of OpenMusicMedia I certainly wanted to see what the guys in Toronto are doing with the idea since I knew they had some good events last year. What I didn’t expect is that they would invited me to lead the conversation is the next OpenMusicMedia Toronto event which will take place on the 12th May.

Our conversation will focus on location based music services and we’ll discuss if those are necessary for the industry as well as music fans. The idea started with me thinking that 15 years ago a lot of the music discovery and consumption happened on a local level: we would find new music on local radio station, in the local record shops or through friends we hang out and go to gigs with. With the Internet things became very global and now we can explore music from all over the world and we are not bound to our local areas.

More recently we see the success of services and websites that are focusing on your area (Foursquare being just one example) and in our next OpenMusicMedia session in Toronto we want to discuss what this means for the music industry. Do we need more ‘local music services’? What role will local radio stations have in the future? After the closure of many local record store around the world will we they see their comeback over the next few years?

As always with OpenMusicMedia, I will not answer those questions but only act as a moderator for a big discussion in an informal setting. If you’re around it’d be great to see you there.