heute:pop:blog.  

We’re very pleased to have Spotify speak at our next OpenMusicMedia meet which happens on the 10th March, as always at the William IV in East London.

Spotify is a streaming music service that gives listeners free and legal access to millions of tracks via their desktop client.  It’s a service that has proved popular amongst early adopters and is already changing the way that many people access music.

I always want to blog while I’m going to conferences but more realistically I will give my report on Midem next week when I’m back in London. Things just get too hectic for me to be able to sit down for a moment and write a few words. I am told there are less people going this year but my schedule is now full. I know already I’m going to regret having booked too many meeting.

I will leave you with with a video from one of my favourite bands of the moment, Frightened Rabbit (found this via nomnomnom). Awesome stuff.

Frightened Rabbit “I Feel Better” from Sam Molleur on Vimeo.

If you can get your hand on the latest copy of Billboard (10th January it says on the cover) make sure you read the Opinion piece on page 4. In addition to giving a good pitch, Lala.com‘s Bill Nguyen wrote a short and well formulated article on listening to music online and business behind it. My favourite quote:

“The web is home to more new music each year than was released in many previous decades. Critics say the music is mostly junk – but the same could have been said for the Web before Google made the knowledge there accessible.”

I couldn’t agree more.

So what’s going on? A recession? A real one or just one that gets newspapers excited? I’m too cynical to get get concerned about these issues until they really effect me or I can see other people affected.

Then I looked at my schedule for the upcoming Popkomm conference in Berlin and noticed it is still strangely open. Either I am becoming less popular or the companies I normally catch up with at this conference are not attending this year. The latter seems to be the case: lots of emails from people saying that they will not make it this time. Those are often Americans and it looks like they want to safe a few dollars by not making it over to Berlin. Will be interesting to see if the American companies that brought over 30+ people and took out huge stands the last few years will do the same next week.

When I the also read about IODA laying off people maybe it’s time not to take all this seriously. It feels like the time for investment in digital music is slowly over and people are looking for the R in ROI. 

(I actually hope it’s just me getting less popular.)

I often sit together with other people working in the music industry and discuss the past, present and the future of the music industry (may it be on panel, at conferences or in the pub) and all the great opportunities artists have these days to become successful. What is interesting is that the people involved in those conversation often are not directly affected by any of those issues, they don’t write or produce music and they don’t try to sell it either. Essentially what we get is a bunch of so-called ‘experts’ (I don’t exclude myself from that) talking about how great things are actually looking for artists and labels without really feeling the pain that companies and individuals are going through in the current changing times.

An example: you often hear the idea that artists should give away their music for free to then make money from live performances. Again, most of the time the people who are saying this will not be the guys that will go on tour for months. What about if the artist doesn’t want to sit in a van for weeks and weeks? What if their music of not suitable to be performed live?

I would like to hear more from the artists in those discussions. Or maybe it is even better to hear the managers as they will have the business background as well as being able to represent the artists opinions. Sounds like this could be a good topic for a future OpenMusicMedia Meet…

I went to Midem in Cannes again this year (that was last week) and I just recovered from it now so I can write a few words about it. Feels like the first think I want to mention is the Qtrax disaster. It was all a bit of a comedy development, every time you talked to another person the story got more bizarre, the numbers of money they spent at Midem increased and less labels had actually signed a deal with them.

For everyone who is not aware what happened, Qtrax announced this p2p service which allows you to download 25m different tracks for free paid for by advertising. It then turns out that the major labels hadn’t actually signed deals with Qtrax. They spent huge amount of money at Midem to promote their service: they were one of the main sponsors, had huge billboards everywhere and sponsored parties with LL Cool J and James Blunt. Funny stuff…

Other than that the mood was fairly uplifting the number of attendees was down a little but when you went to the Carlton or Martinez late at night you would not notice that, it was rammed with people. I was thinking about that: the record industry is complaining about revenues going down every year but when you go to these hotels you see everyone drinking heavily overpriced drinks and going to the very expensive restaurants. It just shows you that there are various parts of the music industry that are doing very well (for example the publishing and live music arms of the industry).

It was no surprise but the number of people working on the digital side of the music industry seemed to have increased again which is nice to see. It is interesting how people react much more positive and open when talking to new digital businesses. Feels like in the last 12 months many people had a bit of a wake up call in regards to digital music services.

All in all I had a good time but I stayed for a bit too long (I was there for six days) so at the end I was very much worn out. Can’t really complain about being tired in the south of France having amazing food and drinking great wine.

One more thing: a bit of a highlight for me was to see Larry Lessig talking as part of MidemNet. I know his presentation was recorded but I couldn’t find it online yet. It was very similar to his presentation at the TED conference in March of last year which you can check out here, very interesting stuff:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=7Q25-S7jzgs]

I went to an interesting little conference in Brussels last Thursday. Organized by Poppunt and IASPM Benelux the whole thing took place at the Ancienne Belgique (a great music venue by the way).

We did this whole discussion about where the music industry is going in front of about 120 people who all seemed very interested in the topic. What was possibly more interesting for me (as I have done these discussions quite a few times before) was a little talk from Timothy Down about the impact on radio on the music industry in the past. It is so interesting to see that the current change in the music industry which seems to be to a large extend technology driven is just repeating itself again.

The first commercial radio station that launched in the 20s and 30s started broadcasting recorded music without paying royalties which the major labels were surly not happy with. They were of the opinion that people when they listen to the music on the radio they would not buy the records any more. Radio stations were then prohibited to broadcast that music until there was a change of attitude coming from the independent labels in the US. It was Capital Records that was the first label to encourage DJs to play their music and provided them with free copies of the music. I guess they have invented the promo record.

Because it was the indies who first embraced radio airplay as a promotional tool it enabled them to get expose of music that was neglected by the major labels, niche and new artists and especially African American artists. The sales of those artists improves and the majors of course followed the strategy of the independent music companies. Today radio still is (despite all internet promotion platforms) the biggest promotional tool for all labels and key for most big selling records.

So what is happening today? Again there is a change in technology and music can be listened to in new ways (mainly on the internet) and labels often see them as a threat to their existing business models. Selling pieces of plastic with music on it that is. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for royalty free music usage on all kind of web based music websites but at the same time labels (this is majors as well as many indies) don’t make it very easy for new music services and their business models to develop.

I can see that many music owners realize that their business model has to change to survive in the future. The piece of plastic is not a good proposition for a new generation of music consumers any more and they know that. Those companies just have to understand that the new music services out there are not a threat but will only help them for those new ways of making money out of the music.

EDIT: thanks for the picture Stijn, I’ve only realized now how my T-Shirt was matching the table cloth. Neat.